BiggA
join:2005-11-23
EARTH Reviews:
 ·Comcast
| reply to PapaMidnight
Re: Laws of Physics There have been small plane proposals, and they have a way to make them work, but probably not a business model. If the antennas have a 2.9 beam width, and the planes are 20 miles up, the planes could fly around in a mile figure 8 and still keep in contact. Of course these would only cover maybe a 50-100 mile circle at best, and you'd be pushing it for LOS beyond a 50 miles circle, as that's roughly equivalent to the look angles for satellite.
The ground-sat-ground latency is 239ms, but yes, if you wait for a reply from the server, then its 478ms, not counting network delays, plus the fact that the traffic is often offloaded hundreds or thousands of miles from where you are, so web content from your area will be that much slower, while stuff from CDNs would feed from the node nearest the satellite offload point, not near your actual location.
The issue is latency, not bandwidth. Wildblue has 1.5mbps with 22GB/mo. Granted, that's nothing compared to my school connection at 50mbps and 16GB/week or my home connection at 12mbps and 250GB/mo, but still, it's not horrible. The latency IS horrible. Even the latency on AT&T's EDGE makes me a little nuts, and that's ~900ms, compared to my usual 22ms connection.
Verizon could largely solve the problem single-handedly with a $50/mo 100GB/mo plan without overage charges that would be permanently mated to the five towers closes to the service address. The vast majority of these locations can get EVDO service, and in areas where its present but too weak, a masted repeater could get EVDO up to the mbit mark. Of course you could just do add-a-line, and get a tetherable phone and effectively get unlimited internet for $40/mo- on par with the cable and DSL companies...
EVDO is about 160ms ping, but that's mostly because once it gets to the tower, the data gets bounced all over Verizon's network before it hits the public internet. With some additional software to route fixed point traffic directly to the internet at the tower base, Verizon could become a really big player in the rural broadband market with their existing EVDO investment... |
