On 8/19/07, Elton E. (Tony) Clark <eltonclark@gmail.com> wrote:
> *I have an ol' friend in the "outback" of wildest Vermont who can't get DSL
> or cable for his internet source and he's getting sick of "dialup" . . He's
> heard bad stories from someone on Hughes Satallite and I wonder if any of
> the astute collective wisdom of the "Shop Talk" list can comment on their
> experience with any of the satallite internet service providers . . *
> *We'll appreciate advice.*
> *Tony in Texas *
I've no direct experience with huges, so I'll restrict myself to
making general technical comments that apply to all satellite data
links.
They're laggy. There's an inherent delay of about a quarter of a
second between when you send a packet to the satellite and when it's
received by the ground station at the other end. That's a function of
the speed of light. There's then the time that it takes for data to
transit the internet between the ground station and the final
destination, probably 0.1 second or so. Then the 0.1 second for
response data to get back to the earth station, followed by the
quarter-second trip to your satellite receiver. That gives a minimum
round trip time of about 2/3 of a second. If you're surfing the web,
or getting email with POP or IMAP, that's livable. If you're trying
to do something interactive, like an ssh session, it's downright
painful. It's not unusual for the processing time on the satellite to
add additional time to this, as well.
Second, there's limited bandwidth between the satellite and the ground
stations. Depending on how badly it's oversold, and what other
people's usage patterns are, you may find the speed very bursty.
Download speeds shouldn't fall below dialup speeds, but uploads might
well.
--
David Scheidt
dmscheidt@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
Shop-talk mailing list
http://autox.team.net/mailman/listinfo/shop-talk
|