| reply to PastTense
Re: Anyone understand physics of the electromagnetic spectrum? said by PastTense:I don't see how you can handle 2 million 5 Mbps connections off of one satellite. Could someone explain the physics of this?
Same way that cable Internet can offer 20 Mbps packages to an entire neighborhood over just four channels. Residential Internet service simply *has* to assume that people will not saturate the connection 99.9% of the time in order to achieve low pricing that the consumer is willing to pay.
EchoStar 17 has 100 Gbps of aggregate capacity. 2 million users at 5 Mbps each would be an oversubscription ratio of 100x -- pretty typical. Per-user guaranteed bandwidth would be 50 Kbps. That's a lot better than the existing satellites, which have single-digit Kbps of per-user guaranteed bandwidth.
Caps should keep users watching the meter and not streaming too many videos, so this could realistically give a couple of hundred Kbps during peak times.
Of course, until the 2 million users actually show up, there will be plenty of bandwidth to spare. |
