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Space Technology

Japan to Deploy Massive Broadband Satellite 274

Posted by samzenpus from the connect-anywhere dept.
demachina writes "Japan has announced plans to deploy a massive broadband satellite operational in 2015. It will provide 100 Mbit/sec service to mountains, remote islands and bullet trains along with comm for disaster recovery. Its giant 66 ft. diameter dish is supposed to be able to receive even weak cell phones signals. Of course, the ping times wont be so good."
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Japan to Deploy Massive Broadband Satellite More

Japan to Deploy Massive Broadband Satellite

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  • Good job (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Of course, the ping times wont be so good.

    Good job they've announced it so early then.

    • Re:Good job (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:10AM (#13293030)
      It's not really important anyway. Normal users don't use the ping command or even heard of it.
      • Because anything having to do with any sort of multiplayer game is very adversely affected by latency.

        Even the normal web surfing is a lot slower - not because of the transfer rate, but because of the response to request rate.
    • Damn! So I won't be able to enjoy a last game of counter strike in an emergency!

    • Large ping? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:48AM (#13293162) Journal
      A geosynchronous satellite orbits at a height of approximately 38,500,000m. Light travels at a speed of approximately 300,000,000m/s. It therefore takes light approximately 250ms to make a round trip. This might be sub-optimal for gaming, but its about the ping time I remember from a modem. You might run into some problems with TCP rate limiting though - it's probably best to run some non-TCP protocol over the satellite link.

      • Re:Large ping? (Score:5, Informative)

        by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @06:19AM (#13293261)
        You also have the round trip of reply packet to consider, so double that to 500ms. Then you have to add the normal internet latency, so say on average the lag will be about 550ms to 650ms. Not horrible but worse than dialup.

        • Re:Large ping? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Chaotic Spyder ( 896445 )
          hrmm you forgot to double it once again...
          you->Sat Sat->Target (There)
          Magical Internet Lag
          Target->sat Sat->you (back)


          each trip adding about 250 you say...

          useing your math ur looking at about 1000+the Internet
      • You are correct about the problems with TCP, and its one that my company has had to look at for it's new series of satellite services. If left alone TCP/IP really slows down and modifying window size and slow start parameters only helps a little bit.

        One possible solution is to fiddle with the protocol supplying fake ACKs from machines on either side of the link and relying on your own error detection/correction protocols over the satellite link. Take a look at RFC 3135 [zvon.org] - this describes different types PEP
        • This usually does not help much, because on top of the TCP connection there usually exists some application protocol that sends a request, waits for an answer, and then sends the next request.

          For example, if you would use such a link to provide a VPN between your home network and a network at your employer, and you would use this to logon to that network with a Windows system, you would need to wait at least 10 minutes for the logon to complete even with locally stored profile etc.
          This is because Windows se

      • You might run into some problems with TCP rate limiting though - it's probably best to run some non-TCP protocol over the satellite link.

        What!? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but if it's latency impacting bandwidth you're worried about, all you need is a bigger window size [linuxreviews.org], i.e. bigger send & recieve buffers. Anyways, 250ms isn't that much, I doubt you would even need to make any adjustments.

  • Laser beams (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TristanBrotherton ( 857376 )
    I wonder if it has big lasers on it too... I wish someone would just get on with makeing good cost effective global satelite internet access. One account, no roaming charges. Then i could get on with being a true digital nomad.

  • Japanese in space? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:12AM (#13293038)
    I thought Space was owned by America? I can't see George standing for this, he'll use his death star to shoot it out the sky.

  • Receive Traffic? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rimu guy ( 665008 ) *

    The only satellite based internet access I'm aware of is where the satellite brodcasts (i.e. you download from it) and your connection uploads via your phone line (typically via a slow line since if you had an adsl capable line then you would probably be the cheaper and faster ADSL connection/cable provider).

    So when they report that a cell phone can communicate with the satellite at 10Mbps, surely they are meaning the cellphone can download at that rate. And presumably it'll be doing that rate with the

    • In fact (Score:2, Insightful)

      by domipheus ( 751857 )
      The article states
      The satellite will be able to receive weak signals

      Which I am led to believe means it will be able to send and receive data. Wouldnt be much use on the train otherwise if thye would still nead a wireless ground network to send.

    • Re:Receive Traffic? (Score:5, Informative)

      by malchus842 ( 741252 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:20AM (#13293072)

      DirecWay (from DirecTV) offers satellite return service - no phone line necessary. I used it for about 6 months some time ago (when this area was total broadband hell, as opposed to only being partial broadband hell). It does work, but some major caveats:

      • When it rains hard, forget about using it until the storm passes
      • When it snows, you have to clear the dish regularly (or use a cover)
      • Latency is tremendous - basically forget online gaming and VoIP

      But, if it's your only option, it's great. Seriously - in the same situation, I'd use it again

      • My sister and her husband operate a commercial lodge on Vancouver Island (Canada). They use their satellite connection for internet access and voice for their business lines. Unless there's a heavy storm it works very well, and then they have radio phones for backup.

        Anyway, my point is that you can use your satellite service for voice as well, if you set it up right. It's certainly not as good as a landline, but where they live that's not an option. Plus, it's a lot cheaper than radio phone service.

    • Re:Receive Traffic? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:36AM (#13293118) Journal
      Over here in Sweden, we have for a rather long time now had satellite ISP's for the more remote areas where people can't get DSL and want something better than modem speed. However, it was always very costly and totally not worth the money when put against any other common broadband technology, and I doubt this new Japanese satellite will have very low subscription costs.
    • While travelling recently I saw satellite internet being used on the islands in Thailand and also in the remote bush is Australia. For more info see Telstra Satellite Broadband [bigpond.com] (notice 1-way & 2-way options) and then this more general page [satsig.net]. The only thing is that it was
    • Radio Shack used to (probably still does) sell the system you named - download from satellite, upload through phone line (which is not bad if you look at a typical users upload rate). However, in the recent few years (probably 3-4) they came out with an newer home satellite which uploads and downloads via the satellite. Radio Shack always tried to get me onto the service, and I refused. I like my Cable modem, followed by DSL.
    • Where have you been? You apear to be refering to DirecPC, which to my knowledge didn't last very long.

      The now push DirecWay, which is a fully bidirectional system. I have known people with it for at least 3 years now. It still sucks, but the upload speeds are in theory faster than dailup.

      The latency makes the connection useless for anything other than web browsing.
    • Wildblue is back in business and is 1.5 down 256k up at the highest $80/mo tier. It is 2-way on the sat. They block Voip though - boo!

      Offtopic - why would they say SSL VPNs might work faster than IpSec VPNS because of latency?

      http://www.wildblue.com/aboutWildblue/qaa.jsp#5_5 [wildblue.com]

  • Beam width? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by carndearg ( 696084 )
    Its giant 66 ft. diameter dish is supposed to be able to receive even weak cell phones signals.

    Unfortunately the article has no picture of the satellite so we cant see the antenna in question. But surely a the purpose of a dish antenna of that sort of size is to increase the gain by narrowing the beam width, isnt it? Presumably there's a small field near Osaka with an AWESOME signal!

    If this is to cover the whole of Japan then I'm guessing they'll have multiple footprints overlapping each other from mult

    • Nope. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gordonjcp ( 186804 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @06:01AM (#13293200) Homepage
      A large dish catches a large amount of signal. Think about how much rain will be caught in an empty swimming pool in 10 minutes, compared to how much rain will be caught in an empty wineglass.


      The beam width is dependant on a lot of things. You can adjust the focus of the transmitter to turn the beam into a big fuzzy spot.

      • Yes, but the beamwidth of a parabolic antenna (assuming that's what they're using) is inversely proportional to the diameter of the dish.

        Hence, a bigger dish will give you a more focused beam (and due to the nature of antennas, it will also give you increased reception from transmitters within this beamwidth).

        • Spotbeams (Score:2, Informative)

          by rbrewer123 ( 884758 )
          I suspect the term "dish" and any impression it is parabolic is an artifact of the reporting. I worked on a satellite system like this... It is geostationary and it has a gigantic antenna system composed of two umbrella-like devices. The "umbrella" was designed to create 140 "spotbeams" on the earth, for a total coverage of most of southeast Asia. Each spotbeam is the equivalent of a giant (300 Km diameter) cell in terrestrial networks. The system is called ACeS (Asia Cellular Satellite System) http://ww [acesinternational.com]
          • It's not a perfect parabola - it's like a car headlight compound reflector.

            If you look at the footprint for the Astra 2 satellite cluster, that provides the UK and EU with digital satellite TV and radio, you will see that it is far from a round spot...
    • Unfortunately the article has no picture of the satellite so we cant see the antenna in question. But surely a the purpose of a dish antenna of that sort of size is to increase the gain by narrowing the beam width, isnt it?

      The impression I'm getting is that the primary purpose of the dish is to receive weak signals --- there could well be a seperate, smaller antenna for transmitting.

      But IANARS (or SS).

    • old technologies (Score:5, Interesting)

      by freeduke ( 786783 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @06:29AM (#13293278) Journal
      If they are going to launch a single satellite, it will be geostationary. This means that latency will be awfull (around 1/4 of a second for a single paquet to reach its destination). So according to this, users will have to define huge TCP windows to be able to reach the maximum throughpup.

      The most interesting technology about satellite communications is based on low orbit satellites networks, but cernaly not on geostationary satellites!

      It must be only an attempt to capture all the radio traffic in Japan from a single dish and use credits dedicated to Research for 'national security'.

      Anyway, this technology is already experimented in the Thalys train, linking Paris to Brussels http://www.thalys.com/be/en/wi-fi/overview [thalys.com]

      • t must be only an attempt to capture all the radio traffic in Japan from a single dish and use credits dedicated to Research for 'national security'.
        Oh puhleeze. That would have been much easier to accomplish with a series of ground-based stations. And if they were planning to use a satellite, they sure as hell wouldn't be announcing it 10 years in advance.
      • 250ms lag may sound awful if you plan to join a multiplayer game, but is acceptable for many uses, like surfing the web from your mobile.

        Maintaining a fleet of LEO satellites is far more expensive and really makes not much sense when all you want to cover is the territory of Japan.
    • Antenna gain and beamwidth can be directly derived from the antenna size, when you know the frequency it operates at. For 66ft at GigaHz frequencies you will have a lot of gain and a small area.

      Normally on such a satellite there will be a lot of separate feedhorns in front of this big dish, each of them creating a separate (small) coverage area. This has two advantages: you have a lot of gain and thus a lot of signal (and not much power needed for uplink), and also the separate areas create a space-divisi
  • Is that 100Mb shared among everyone? In that case it will suck.

    If the 100Mb is for each person, what's the limit to the number of people that can use it?

    TFA is short on actual details.

  • Japan has unique opportunity (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nokilli ( 759129 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:31AM (#13293098)
    Being that it's a relatively compact island, I wonder if any consideration was given to a series of satellites in low-Earth orbit.

    Many satellites, all in one orbit that takes each satellite across the nation along the long axis (i.e., north-to-south) should provide continuous coverage with very low latency.

    Given the importance of VoIP it would seem that latency isn't something you can so easily get rid of.
    --
    Why didn't you know? [tinyurl.com]
    • In LEO, one orbit takes about 90 minutes and gives ~9 minutes of coverage at any given point (numbers pulled from memory, so give or take 20%), so you'd need 10 satellites. Would that be worth it to eliminate the 0.2 s latency?
      • It might be for voice / video conferencing applications. 0.2s is close to the threshold where you notice it consciously, and far above where it starts to irritate most people sub-consciously. If they did this, then they might also be able to sell space on the satellites to other people under the orbital path.
      • I think you'll need more sattelites than that. Remember that the earth spins inside their orbits so when the tenth satellite passes over Japan the first will be on the same latitude as Japan, but on a rather different longitude. Thus you'll need more satellites to cover Japan 24/7.
    • Actually it's several islands and it's not that "compact". Its area is close to California and a tad larger than Germany. Unlike California though it does not have large forest/desert areas and unlike Germany it is more stretched (North to South). I don't think low-orbit satelites would work.
      • Looking at a map, it looks more like west to east, or at least enough that it'd be difficult to cover. Being stretched out North-South would only be an advantage since you'd have more effective air time and less people/km.
      • " Actually it's several islands and it's not that "compact""
        All things are relative. Compared to the US, Canada, China, India, Australia, and Russia it is pretty compact. The size really doesn't matter that much when talking about a constellation leo system. It would still take a lot of birds to give you coverage. Frankly for the bullet trains I would think WiFi Max would be a good solution. For the mountain areas a Satellite in geosync would work better than a leo system. The mountains you would tend to ha
      • It does not matter anyway, because you cannot setup a small set of low-earth-orbit satellites to orbit your own country.
        Any satellite will always orbit the entire earth. When your coverage area is small you need just as many satellites, at the very best you could cut down on solar panel size as it could use smaller panels and charge a battery while it is not over your small country.
    • Aside from the problem of needing many more sats in orbit, you also have to make every dish in the country be able to track a moving bird in real time. The big advantage of geostationary orbit is that you just point at a spot in the sky, and it stays there.

  • Outdated by the time it starts working? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by My Iron Lung ( 834019 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:33AM (#13293107)
    In 2015, ten years time, this might not be such a great speed? Although it's quite fast now, and will probably still be reasonably useful in the future, it might be about as popular as dialup is in my city (not very). Who knows what zany download speeds will be the norm in the future, across electrical wires or otherwise.
    • When they first came out, the phones were the size of a cinder block and cost a few dollars per minute when the celular industry was already at small form-factor and 20 cents/minute rate and going towards semi-flat rate plans that we see today. Of course they went belly-up about a year after launch, even at the rise of the dot-com frenzy.

  • Latency (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Drew Curtis ( 904851 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:36AM (#13293123) Homepage
    One thing that the news item left out of this wonderful product is that the average latency of about 800 ms for a satellite connection makes the product a poor supplier of interactive internet browsing. It will suffer the same problems that the Directway system does.

    That doesn't mean it doesn't have a lot of uses. It just means that when the marketing types start hyping the product they conveniently overlook its limitations. And in comparing it to fiber optic without mentioning latency issues, they are doing just that.

  • Satellite ping time myth or fact? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by burnttoy ( 754394 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:44AM (#13293148) Homepage Journal
    I've had this argument before and we never came to a sensible conclusion. Personally I still think that high bandwidth satellite data transfer has much merit as long as you can get the satellites up there cheaply enough.

    A geostationary orbit is about 35,000km up. lets call that 50,000km as we might not be right underneath it. Light travels at 300,000km/s so the travel time for a message is ~166ms. multiply by 4 (a->sat, sat->b, b->sat, sat->a) gives ~666ms, the latency of the beast ;-).

    OK, not the greatest but pinging slashdot gives me an average of 349ms from London,UK so it's not as good but then not terrible either.

    I wouldn't want to carry out interactive surgery or try and play a concert with remote players (latency kills live music!) but for just getting hold of and/or disseminating info it's not too bad.

    If the satellite were to be placed in a far lower orbit then latency numbers will drop. I believe this requires spin stabilisers and some sort of engine to keep the satellite from plummeting to Earth though.

    I can't say I'm an expert in satellite orbits and I can't find any more details on the proposed orbit of this project. Anyone care to help me out?
    • If the satellite were to be placed in a far lower orbit then latency numbers will drop. I believe this requires spin stabilisers and some sort of engine to keep the satellite from plummeting to Earth though.

      Worst of all, it would not be stationary anymore but move (fase!) with respect to the Earth's surface, calling for a handover mechanism etc. AFAIK an engine would only be needed to compensate for the bit of drag caused by the (thin) atmosphere.

    • You would still have all the normal routing delays, so this would probably jack your ping time to slashdot up around 1000ms. It's the same sort of issue DirecWay systems have in that regard. That kind of latency is instant death if you're playing counterstrike or the like, of course, but for downloading email, web pages, even doing ftp or whatever it's still really not a big deal. It's probably enough to make VOIP annoying, but not unusable.

      There are some alternatives with lower ping, but they all have pr

      • Satellite constellations are more like 30+. If you are going to be doing heavy bandwidth multiple connections you will use even more.

        Teledesic (since dead, IIRC) proposed a constellation of over 700 satellites. We all had a hearty chuckle over that in design class. They changed that before the world lost sight of them to less than 300 satellites. I would love to see how much crack they import for the use of the guys designing the hand-off protocalls.

        Regardless, you simply cannot get around high ping when it

    • Re:Satellite ping time myth or fact? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ironsides ( 739422 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @07:48AM (#13293630) Homepage Journal
      A geostationary orbit is about 35,000km up. lets call that 50,000km as we might not be right underneath it. Light travels at 300,000km/s so the travel time for a message is ~166ms. multiply by 4 (a->sat, sat->b, b->sat, sat->a) gives ~666ms, the latency of the beast ;-).

      OK, not the greatest but pinging slashdot gives me an average of 349ms from London,UK so it's not as good but then not terrible either.

      There is one additional source of delay that you are failing to take into account. When encoding and decoding the bitstream into RF, there is some delay. The transmitting end has less than the receiving end. On the receiving end, the RF signal has to be digitized, run through some form of Fast Fourier Transform and decoded to get the bitstream. This will add some time to the pings.

      On a different note, I'm currious as to how they are going to get 100mbit out there. On a 36Mhz ku band transponder, the maximum throughput is probably close to 200mbit using DVB-S2 (the latest and greatest satelite transmission codes). They are going to need a lot of transponders/bandwidth to provide satelite broadband to the boonies.

      One thing on the ping times though. For regular downloading of webpages, What if they set up on the ISPs end a cache manager that would take your request for a web page, cache all content on that web page (and a few surrounding links) and then forward you the web page along with all associated images all at once so you weren't requesting everything a packet at a time?
      • "On a different note, I'm currious as to how they are going to get 100mbit out there. On a 36Mhz ku band transponder, the maximum throughput is probably close to 200mbit using DVB-S2 (the latest and greatest satelite transmission codes). They are going to need a lot of transponders/bandwidth to provide satelite broadband to the boonies."

        It's probably Ka band, like WildBlue.
    • A geostationary orbit is about 35,000km up. lets call that 50,000km as we might not be right underneath it.

      Hint: If you're 50,000km away from a geostationary satellite, you're not on Earth. Even in theory you're looking at a coverage of less than half the earth (about 42,000km away). Since you get a lot of athmospheric interference at the edges, probably even a bit less.

      Kjella
    • Would it be possible with the new fangled IPV6 using "flows" (or whatever they're called) to essentially split the internet traffic up into two chunks.

      1) Lots of data, latency not an issue
      2) Less data, latency an issue

      For example, with streaming video or streaming sound, it really doesn't matter if it comes in 1 second or even 2 seconds delayed, so put it over a high-bandwidth high-latency device such as a satellite. Also on this medium would be all regular uploads and downloads such as web surfing an
    • pinging slashdot gives me an average of 349ms from London,UK

      You need to look for a better provider....
      Here in the Netherlands I get:

      PING slashdot.org (66.35.250.150) 56(84) bytes of data.
      64 bytes from slashdot.org (66.35.250.150): icmp_seq=1 ttl=45 time=167 ms
      64 bytes from slashdot.org (66.35.250.150): icmp_seq=2 ttl=45 time=167 ms
      64 bytes from slashdot.org (66.35.250.150): icmp_seq=3 ttl=45 time=167 ms
      64 bytes from slashdot.org (66.35.250.150): icmp_seq=4 ttl=45 time=167 ms
      64 bytes from slashdot.org (66.35

  • Coincidence? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rxke ( 644923 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:52AM (#13293169) Homepage
    Also in the news today:
    Arianespace has launched the heaviest comsat to date, also aimed at providing bradband services to the Asian market....
  • Use of this satellite will begin in about 2015, supporting a "maximum speed of 10 megabits per second" with cell phones. Right now there are about 82 million mobile phone subscribers in Japan ( source pdf [neca.org]), 40% (and growing) of which are using 3G technology (source [wikipedia.org]). 3G service is moving into the 3Mbit/s range right now.

    Similar trends can be seen in the broadband internet market, with normal (non-fiber) broadband speeds of 40mbps becomming common.

    At this rate, the down-to-earth infrastructure in Japan wi
  • I wonder if the same equipment would fit on one of these [sanswire.com] . Perhaps an array of smaller devices?

    I wish this would catch on. Assuming they work out the obvious problems with super-high flying aircraft, this might be a neat lower cost alternative to things like this, also something you could take down to make changes to (like upping the capabilities of the hardware, maybe?).

    Either way, great concepts on both parts.
  • The average customer can live with extended ping times. How many "interactive" websites are really worth your time anyway? Obviously, if you're into on-line gaming, the delays will be noticeable. But this would certainly be acceptable for normal browsing, VoIP, etc. For some reason, I doubt those living in remote areas will be whining about "ping times" when they will just be glad to be connected to the rest of the world.

    We can be such spoiled brats sometimes...
    • You are mistaken. It is completely unusable for VoIP and it seriously decreases performance of any TCP connection not specially tuned for long delay.

      Some people think "but all telephony is via satellite" but this is not true at all. In the early days of international telephony, satellite links were used. But today, international calls are almost allways via cable.
      When you talk via satellite you notice that a lot of time the two parties are colliding with eachother because an untrained individual cannot c
  • ....with this [ebay.com] nifty invention.

  • RUN if ping times get exceptionally better!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by simos ( 84652 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @09:30AM (#13294357)
    An advice to our Japanese friends:

    RUN LIKE HELL if the ping times get exceptionally better!!!
    • Actually, if the satellite started to fall, it would not go straight towards the center of Earth (and in any case, it would crash on the equator, not Japan). Conservation of angular momentum ensures that its motion around Earth would speed up, so it would start drifting towards the Americas, and maybe go around the world a couple of times before hitting ground.

      -- TeknoHog, spoiling the fun with technical remarks since 1978.

  • Satellite Internet Not that Uncommon (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ZPO ( 465615 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @09:51AM (#13294535)
    Satellite Internet is already available and not that uncommon. Take a look at http://www.satsig.net/ [satsig.net]. We use satellite Internet here in Iraq and it works rather well once you adjust your systems to deal with the latency. I've got VoIP running quite well with it.

    The article is more than a little short on salient information. I'd take a guess that they will focus a very high gain spotbeam on the Japanese home islands and provide a few wide coverage transponders as well. That will give them the power density to use small earth terminals within Japan.

    Pricing is going to be the likely downfall of such a consumer oriented system. Relative to terrestrial broadband networks, satellite Internet is very expensive. For my current service, I pay ~$700/mo for 1M down and 256K up. Thats at a 10:1 contention ratio on a Linkstar (DVB-RCS MF-TDMA) system. Other plans are cheaper, but as the contention ratio goes up, the service delivered is only really suitable for very bursty non-realtime traffic.
  • Boy, I'm sure a sattelite that large and powerful wouldn't be used for any types of electronic recon... right?
  • Semi-OT but something I was curious about. What's the approximate latency on intercontinental connections via the trunk cables? I'm not quite sure on the distances but I'd imagine that they're enough to through a bit of skew into a connection between, N. America and Japan (or for fun distances, Canada and Australi)

    In that case I'd imagine an international connection would suck royally for somebody viewing a N. American website/game as the latency would involve:

    User-->Satellite-->Japan-->Trunk-t
  • This kind of a service is already available in the US http://www.infosat.com/services/hsi/index.html# [infosat.com]

  • ALEXANDRIA BAY, N.Y. -- Security officials gathered Monday at a Canadian border crossing to mark the first test of a radio frequency identification system to be used by foreign visitors.

    If successful, radio "tags" carried by travelers will be part of the standard registration process for those entering the United States.

    The technology is like that used to speed passage at toll booths on many highways, said P.T. Wright, the operations director for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's US-VISIT Program [

  • Placing a huge satellite in geosynchronous orbit is going to be hugely expensive. It is only going to provide a niche solution due to the second-scale ping times. I think most people want a solution that is responsive! SSH sessions will be almost unusable over this system.

    Placing so-called "stratellites" in the upper atmosphere makes so much more sense. Just a handful would be required to cover all of the Japan. And the great thing is that you can replace/repair/upgrade them if you need to. The geo-sy

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