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."
Re:I use Verizon FIOS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There are none (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm also looking for options for South America, and it's pretty clear from the Wikipedia description of ViaSat-1 that they have no transponders pointed anywhere other than the US and Canada. That puts it out of the running for both the OP's primary goal and mine.
Re:no matter where you are, it's gonna be laggy (Score:4, Insightful)
"Having 8,000 miles between you and the Internet is not a good idea."
It's more like 22,000+ miles up, 22,000+ miles down, and whatever the distance is between your satellite provider's earth station and wherever the server is that you're trying to reach. Even at the speed of light, it takes a little while. Real world ping times over VSAT satellite connections are more in the 1-3 second range though, not 10.