Ask Slashdot: Good Satellite Internet For Remote Locations? 175
EdIII writes "I've been looking for a decent contention service (4:1,10:1) in South America and I am not finding much. I have also heard that some frequency bands are a lot better at cutting through cloud cover. This is for a fairly remote ground station with reliable power generation, but also routinely cloudy. I would need at least 3/1Mbps with hopefully decent latency. What's your advice Slashdotters? Yes, I know that some of the solutions can cost 20K for deployment and 2-10K per month for service. Feel free to to tell me about a good commercial service. There is another ground station that might be deployed in north east Alaska."
There are none (Score:5, Informative)
Simple answer is you won't. There are no "good" satellite internet for anything. With luck you might find "adequate" or "usable" satellite internet. But don't let any one lie to you and tell you that they have "good" satellite internet. There is no such thing.
Iridium + Something Else (Score:5, Informative)
Well, if you want decent latency from a satellite network, I think the LEO Iridium constellation might be your only option: 10-20ms rtt vs. 500-600ms rtt for any geosynchronous satellite.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/49385912/Iridium-9602-Data-and-Inmarsat-C-latency [scribd.com]
Though actually, it looks like the practical rtt to another the internet can take 1800ms over Iridium, since it has to bounce the signal around other nodes until it can get to one of its ground stations :/
Of course, Iridium data rates are in dial-up territory. It seems like you might be able to get low-cost consumer grade satellite services from DirecTV or something, using Iridium as the dial-up uplink component. But it also sounds like you'll be transmitting more data than you'll be receiving, if this is for data collection :/
Given that it also sounds likely you're looking at remote sites near the poles, Iridium may be your only option, since it gets pretty difficult to hit geosynchronous satellites beyond 70 deg latitude. So you might want to be optimizing your data transfer needs to fit through a tiny pipe, augmented via occasional sneakernet.
In short: :/
As for Alaska (Score:2, Informative)
In alaska GCI (And I think ACS) are deploying a system for remote internet access via microwaves / raidowaves see: http://www.gci.com/terra you may be able to work with them to get internet at a remote location.
Re:There are none (Score:5, Informative)
I agree. You have to understand that most Internet communications satellites are in geo-stationary orbit at an altitude of 25,000 miles. With the speed of light limited to 186,000 miles per second and a round trip of 50,000 miles a quick calculations shows a minimum latency of around a 0.27 seconds and that is just signal travel time and not any processing overhead.
-- Mache
Re:There are none (Score:4, Informative)
Simple answer is you won't.
Ever heard of Exede [exede.com]? Viasat [viasat.com] has its own satellite [wikipedia.org] in orbit and offers consumer internet. Pricing starts at $50 for 12 down, 3 up. Yes, latency may ruin your Skype session, but you know that will happen with any satellite link.
Whats your budget? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Whats your budget? (Score:4, Informative)
More details please (Score:5, Informative)
First you need to mention where you are exactly. Internet service over satellite is usually sold through local providers. Furthermore, different satellites have different coverage areas.
Second, if you want high speed broadband, you will need a Ku/Ka band (small antennas) satellite terminal. The problem is that in South America, it is more common to use C band (big antennas) satellite terminals that are slower than Ku band since the spectral bandwidth is smaller and more expensive.
Third, the latency is basically the same for all Geostationary satellites and in practical terms is about 250ms from the transmission latency and 150ms for the latency of the entire transmission chain. As systems improve, this latency gets reduced but the transmission latency only depends on the relative position of the terminal to the satellite and the speed of light.
Forth, above 70C latitude it is not possible to provide Internet over satellite with geostationary orbit since there isn't enough visibility of the satellite on the horizon.
Re:There are none (Score:5, Informative)
There are none
Correct in terms of what the submitter asked for, but he/she pretty much asked for the moon and the stars (no pun intended). There are usable services out there but, to your point, they don't provide anything like what was requested.
I can't speak to what's available in South America, but in the US you can find cheap satellite Internet service for around $200 upfront and $50 a month but the contention ratios are several hundred to one. For lower contention ratios like 10:1, you'll need a business class service that will run anywhere from $200 to $800/month for VSAT... a dedicated broadband SCPC connection with no contention is easily $10K or more per month and just as much or more for equipment.
If you're living in somewhere far North where the line of sight is lower and weather is worse, expect that upfront VSAT equipment will quickly run up to a couple thousand dollars since you need a bigger dish and higher-power transmitter. The "rain fade" thing the submitter refers to is particularly a problem with Ka-band services that are used on the consumer-grade services; enterprise-grade Ku-band services have much less of a problem with it. If you throw at 2-meter dish and an 8-watt transmitter at the problem, you can burn through almost any weather on either Ka or Ku, but again, that's a lot of $$$ to spend on the equipment.
BTW these are all for VSAT "broadband-ish" services using geosynchronous orbit satellites so you have a minimum real world latency of 600 ms. I saw another poster refer to using Iridium to get lower ping times (since that's Low Earth Orbit) but Iridium is just not usable for anything above 128 kbps in the best possible circumstance. It's just physics at work ... an omnidirectional transmitter looking at LEO satellites whizzing overhead can't bring to bear the right amount of power as you get with a fixed dish always pointed at one point in the sky.
Long story short: satellite Internet is something you use because you have to, not because you want to. Lower your expectations and you'll find something economically reasonable. Keep your expectations high and you just won't be able to pay for it unless you're turning around and selling some of that bandwidth to others to defray the cost... and even then it's iffy.
Re:Iridium + Something Else (Score:5, Informative)
Actuall, it looks like you might possibly be covered in the Inmarsat territory, which goes to roughly 82deg latitude with a corresponding drop in bandwidth.
http://www.roadpost.com/inmarsat_coverage.aspx [roadpost.com]
I did a little project using a 5/1Mbps Inmarsat uplink. It was basically on a little gateway device that acted as a bandwidth optimizing proxy for the LAN. You'd probably want something similar to do transparent compression / packet traffic shaping / TCP window tuning etc. to get the most out of your link, if it works at all.
Ah, yes, this brings me back to my mirroring Sunsite over a 9600k modem days...
Re:Iridium + Something Else (Score:4, Informative)
Iridium data rates are 0.0024 mbps, up and down. On the plus side,they give you that data rate everywhere in the world.
You get 10 to 20 ms to the satellite orbiting 500ish miles away. To actually talk to anything on the ground, your signal is relayed to other satellites, down to Arizona and then across the Internet. If you gang a bunch of channels together to get a dialup-grade data rate (20ish channels yields the equivalent of a 56k modem), you can probably come in at half the latency of a geostationary satellite. Still pretty high though.
Re:no matter where you are, it's gonna be laggy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There are none (Score:4, Informative)
Actually Skype (google+ etc.) video and VOIP all work pretty well over Exede as it has ample bandwidth to support HD and the delay is much lower than older solutions. You should try them out for yourself.
The problem with coverage of far N. Alaska is that any geostationary satellite appears near to or below the horizon (for the same reason that the sun is) causing scintillation and line-of-sight issues . S. Alaska is fine though. C-band is pretty much immune to rain, but there is such limited capacity available, it's expensive, there may be licensing issues, it usually uses larger antennas etc. Ku band was state of the art 10 years ago but Ka band is the new thing. Both Ku and Ka band is affected by rain, but these days the systems compensate for rain to the extent that they can by adjusting power levels, symbol rates or forward error correction, it makes them pretty robust, much more robust than older solutions.
Disclaimer: I'm in the business
Fast and cheap are mutually exclusive (Score:4, Informative)
I'm in the satellite business myself, and the reality is that satellite capacity is expensive, no matter how you you look at it. As a rough rule of thumb, satellite capacity prices roughly at $6000/MHz/Month. If you do the math, this basically works out to $6-10 per kbps per month, and that's assuming at least a 2 year contract. So if you had a 1Mbps connection with a 4:1 contention ratio, you're still looking at $1500 a month. The economics change a little if you own a whole transponder (Typically a few million dollars a year for 36Mhz), but even then it's not cheap. The only way that DirecWay and the other satellite ISPs can keep their prices within the realm of reason for the average user is by having insane contention ratios, and draconian "Fair Access Policies"
It sucks, but there's not much that will reduce these prices. There are only so many active geosynchronous satellites that can be up there, and there's only a limited amount of spectrum available. Even if SpaceX cuts the launch costs by 80%, the prices won't go down, that just means the satellite operators will be (more) profitable. The end-user pricing is demand driven, not cost driven.
Re:no matter where you are, it's gonna be laggy (Score:4, Informative)
Your options: (Score:4, Informative)
As a satellite technician, I think I can help answer some of your questions.
1. "I have also heard that some frequency bands are a lot better at cutting through cloud cover".
This is true. C-band has about 10dB less rainfade than Ku-band does, and Ku outperforms Ka-band as well (Not sure of the exact number as I don't do a lot of Ka links). C-band also requires larger dishes. You have to take into account what the acceptable availability is as well. 99% availability is quite possible and just requires a proper link budget (basically a series of calculations of gains and losses in the signal path which takes into account dish diameters/efficiencies, weather and satellite properties, among other things). Getting high reliability when taking into account weather is usually a lot easier on C-band, but if they are using an old bird with low output power or poor sensitivity, then a good Ku setup will outperform it.
2. "I would need at least 3/1Mbps with hopefully decent latency"
Latency is usually pretty fixed. The physics say it takes about 250ms for the signal to travel from your earth station to the satellite and back to the other earth station with an RTT of about 500ms. Any additional latencies are created by the FEC coders and access methods. The worst will probably be something that uses older Reed-Solomon over Viterbi (not used much anymore. Everyone has either already moved away from this 50 year old tech or is doing so right now) on a TDMA access system. I would expect an 850ms round trip time on this type of old system. The best will be a system that implements Turbo Product Coder or LDPC on an SCPC link (Dedicated link). I would expect about 600-650ms round trip. If you get on a shared network, anything modern will be using at least TPC and possibly LDPC if they're using DVB-S2 and you'll probably see an RTT of about 750ms (best guess on my part. each network is different). Additionally, using a shared access system will introduce jitter of which 50-100ms wouldn't be surprising to me. SCPC links tend to be quite good for lack of jitter. Getting the types of bandwidth you want is really a matter of contract.
3. "I've been looking for a decent contention service (4:1,10:1)"
On any shared access system, contention would be a matter of contract, and the lower the contention, the high the cost. When you start getting into 4:1 or better you're probably better off looking at a dedicated link, even if its not as fast as what the shared service is advertising. Personally, I'd actually rather pay for slower access with more generous transfer allowances than a fast connection with a really low transfer allowance. If you do go with a shared service, read their FAP carefully and calculate how much you can actually transfer taking into account transfer speed, FAP and transfer limits and compare this with your needs. It may also be to your benefit to either have multiple accounts with the same vendor or multiple vendors where you can switch between them as the month goes through. It could be cheaper than a more expensive link or cheaper than a dedicated link. Your budget will determine this.
4. Regarding "Globalstar, Iridium, Inmarsat, Thuraya and other similar systems"
These sorts of services will not provide the types of speeds you want and will cost you a small fortune in transfer fees, though they will have much lower latencies.
Unfortunately, satellite space is very expensive, as strider- indicated (and without sounding like we're colluding, I do know that he knows the industry). You really get into the "fast cheap reliable - pick two" and it should be more like "fast cheap reliable - pick one and hope for another one.... the third is right out" when you are dealing with some of the shared access satellite providers.