Kepler Achieves a World-First For Satellite Broadband With 100Mbps Connection To the Arctic

Small-satellite startup Kepler and its nanosatellites have successfully demonstrated achieving over 100Mbps of network speed to a Germany icebreaker sea vessel that acts as a mobile lab for the MOSAiC research expedition. TechCrunch reports: This is the first time there's been a high-bandwidth satellite network for any central Arctic ground-based use, Kepler says, and this connection isn't just a technical demo: it's being used for the researchers in the MOSAiC team, which is made up of hundreds of individuals, to transfer data back and forth between the ship and shore-based research stations, which improves all aspects of working with the considerable quantities of data being gathered by the team. On the icebreaker floating research ship, Kepler has demonstrated 38Mbps down, and 120Mbps up.

Latency?

[gaiageek]

I'm sure it's high, but I wish the article mentioned what kind of ping times they get.

Re:

[Kokuyo]

I was interested in that as well but let's be frank, this is probably not a use case where that is particularly relevant.

Re:Latency?

[Cowards Rule]

From their FAQ: "By offering services via LEO satellites, link latencies pna or nf ybj nf 100 zf. Ubjrire, Xrcyre'f freivprf qb abg cebivqr erny-gvzr Vagrearg, fb gur dhrfgvba bs yngrapl bsgra trgf pbashfrq urer. Bhe Tybony Qngn 'fgber-naq-sbejneq' Freivpr vf sbe yngrapl-gbyrenag qngn. Raq-gb-raq qngn qryvirel gvzr (creuncf n orggre grez guna 'yngrapl' va guvf pbagrkg) sbe fvatyr-cnff hcybnqf pna or nf ybj nf 10 zvahgrf naq nf uvtu nf 12 ubhef." Also, required accounts suck, so the text has been altered for your inconvenience.

Re:

[Opportunist]

So latency is good, but error correction is still slightly off?

Re:

[Entrope]

The rot13'd bits say current end-to-end latency is at least 10 minutes, and as much as 12 hours. The next FAQ elaborates that this is based on getting the data back to their ground station teleport in Inuvik, Canada, and should improve as they add more ground stations. (They do not mention a schedule for doing that.)

Re:

[hcs_$reboot]

what kind of ping times they get.

Since they can reach communications over 100 Mbps, the ping time must not be that bad.

Re:Latency?

[ledow]

That shows a terrible understanding of the problem at hand.

You can flood any size connection with just a basic torrent stream.

It does *not* mean that you won't have a several second delay on the underlying transmission medium.

TCP timeouts are in the order of seconds, not microseconds.

To use an analogy, you might have a six lane motorway, but the speed limit is 30mph. It can still take a huge number of cars every second, but for one particular car to traverse it takes far longer than on other roads.

Re:

[Hodr]

Truck full of hard drives has a crazy high throughput. Terrible ping. They are not directly related.

You could tie them together if the tested method of communication relies on acknowledgements, but that would be a stupid way to measure for someone trying to break a record (like trying to win a race with your feet tied together).

Re:

[rodch]

Kepler FAQ:
By offering services via LEO satellites, link latencies can be as low as 100 ms. However, Kepler's services do not provide real-time Internet, so the question of latency often gets confused here. Our Global Data 'store-and-forward' Service is for latency-tolerant data. End-to-end data delivery time (perhaps a better term than 'latency' in this context) for single-pass uploads can be as low as 10 minutes and as high as 12 hours.

Re:

[Holi]

can be as low as 10 minutes and as high as 12 hours. From the FAQ

Re:

[jellomizer]

Why should we base all internet for the ability to play online games with it?

I am not saying Latency is unimportant, but if it is in an acceptable range under 0.5 seconds while may not be great for video games, It would be fine for most internet activities, browsing, streaming and if you keep the connection going, you can send a lot of scientific data back to the server. Even a VoiP call with a half second lag, while slightly annoying isn't too bad.

Re:

[Sique]

We don't. But for instance, VoIP doesn't make much sense above a certain latency.

Call me when you can do it in a city.

[BAReFO0t]

And a realistic coverage.

Nobody is interested in a single 100Mb/s connection on an entire continent.
Nor in a service that only covers a single area.

Re:Call me when you can do it in a city.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Nobody is interested in a single 100Mb/s connection on an entire continent.

Why? That's pretty much what most US households share right now.

Re:

[jellomizer]

But that is for around a dozen or so devices in a house. 3 Streaming Services, 4 cell phones and 3 PC's and a Router and a Console.
Which is giving everyone about 10mbs a piece to work with. Which isn't too bad for home stuff. Sure if I am working from home, and I need to do some large data crunching, I may ask everyone to get off so I can download a dozen gigs of data for me to process.

Re:

[Alwin Henseler]

Nobody is interested in a single 100Mb/s connection on an entire continent.

Continent? Ocean / floating ice sheet you mean.

Nor in a service that only covers a single area.

No, in a service that covers that area better than other options. Which may not even be available (not hard to imagine if you're travelling in the Arctic).

Re:

[jellomizer]

We already have a good affordable methods for Cities that offer faster speeds.
LAN, Cable and Fiber are more than adequate for cities. As Cities has everything close by so we don't have much of any last mile problems, or trying to get cable over long distance for a single person.

Good Satellite broadband is more useful for the remote areas outside of any infrastructure.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Fuck the city, people there already have other options.

It's people like me in the sticks who get 20Mbps max with a second's latency from Viasat that need a new solution.

Roll on Starlink!

Re:

[dougmc]

Nobody is interested in a single 100Mb/s connection on an entire continent.

The continent of Antarctica called ... they'd like to have some words with you.

For example, these guys probably think 100 Mb/s would be a *huge* improvement over their current 1-3 Mb/s.) [extremetech.com]

Now, granted, I don't think this 1-3 Mb/s is shared by the entire content, but even if we add up everything for every station -- it's probably *still* less than 100 Mb/s.

They may be testing this stuff in the Arctic now, but the continent of Antarctica would probably really like some of it too.

100 Mbps

[hcs_$reboot]

100 Mbps shared from the Arctic means 100 Mbps for the user.

But at what cost?

[Alioth]

How much does it cost for the user, though? Is it metered? If it is metered, you'll want a good proxy setup in front of it to block things like requests for ads, block the operating system's "phone home" and software updates while connected, block videos etc. as these can chew through gigabytes without the user really knowing.

Country - thing

[stealth_finger]

Germany icebreaker sea vessel

A pet peeve of mine

[mwfischer]

It's apparently impossible to lay fiber to Antarctica. There is some amazing research being done there however there is a 12 hour window for internet access on a 7Mbps sat. It is almost running near 99 to 100% saturation. Thus the "$3 per email" phrase.

https://www.usap.gov/technolog... [usap.gov]

100Mbps is game changing.

Re:

[jellomizer]

Impossible No, Impractical Yes. It would be a a major undertaking to lay thousands of miles of cable across some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth for a few hundred researchers.

We lost a hundred men, and it costed a billion dollars. But it was worth it to see these scientist faces when they were able to play Fortnight from the south pole.

Re:

[Sique]

We are talking the Arctic here. It is however possible to lay fiber to Antarctica.

Re:

[willy_me]

The satellites travel from one pole to the other. Coverage at either pole should be excellent because all of the satellites pass over the poles. Coverage is more limited at the equator. In general, one needs to transmit a greater distance, and share the satellite with more people when operating at the equator. If they can repeat the achievement of 100 Mbps for a research boat floating across the Atlantic - that would be impressive.

Increadible

[satanicat]

It astonishes me that we can get, by the sounds of it, pretty decent bandwidth to the most rural parts of the world, but struggle to get access to parts of major cities where people really need accesss.

I mean, im not comparing apples to apples of course, but i just would have assumed an accomplishment like this might have been achieved after these seemingly small hurdles had already been solved.

In other news . . .

[Traciatim]

Pornhub traffic from the Arctic has increased by 30000% this week.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Really?!?

[Locke2005]

So icebound sailors have a faster internet connection than I do? I guess they need to stream a lot more porn...