1 edit | reply to Viscer
wow I used to use HughesNet back when it was called Direcway. If you wen't over FAP you could get fullspeed back in like 2 hours.
24 hours? Thats ridiculous. They need to put more sattelites in the air, or make the sattelites bigger and carry more routers, and then offer a non-fap account for like 300 dollars a month or something.
And as far as the latency... Isn't it really just beams of light? Does it take a whole second for a beam of light to travel right outside our atmosphere and back?
Either way it's still amazing technology and I'm sure it will improve over time. |
| It's radio beams, rather than light, but they suffer the same basic limitations. To be in a geosynchronous orbit, always in the same place relative to the sky, a satellite has to sit about 22,500 miles out in what's called the Clarke Belt (after Arthur C. Clarke, who originally proposed using geosync satellites for communication relays). To get that distance at the speed of light takes about 120 milliseconds, and then another 120 ms back to Earth. Double it again for the return trip. That's 480 ms bare minimum round trip, to which you add the latency from the network ops center to the target server and back, as well as all the network hardware it needs to run through at the NOC. Bottom line is that 600 ms is considered a minimum latency for satellite of that kind. Of course, that doesn't excuse when ping times go to 1000 or more, which is just bad performance on the part of the ISP.
There was talk years ago about using low-orbit satellites for broadband, which would shave the latency down to basically landline times. But because these satellites were constantly moving, you'd need to build at least 40 of them to provide continuous coverage, and that would require a large initial investment. |
