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Not expecting much response here, but thanks anyway.
wow! 50mb/s
I like this air dsl. Wait till I try AirLAN and AirTraffic
<note> I know it is bad, but I could not resist</note>
... hmm, it's an acne-ridden tube in a cut-off denim jacket.
yeah, yeah, you've had your fun. Don't know you're born, you lot. No HDSL, no ADSL, no cable, you should see the monthly rate for this stuff. That's why I'm asking.
Unless you're really in the middle of nowhere, forget it.
AirDSL generally refers to ADSL over 802.11 style wireless networks, not satellites. That's preferable if you can get line of site.
There's quite a few smaller towns that are clubbing together to sort out 802.11 wireless broadband access using T1 or T3 lines. There's a website for it somewhere - might be worth asking your local council.
TJ
Unless you're really in the middle of nowhere, forget it.
(Raises hand)
Nope, this is genuine up-and-down satellite, not very fast, very expensive. Have no choice, other than springing for a CDN.
It's that stuff about the weather that bothers me. I thought it was actually a bit of a modern myth, as I've seen a fair few sites (impartial ones) claim that the weather won't affect service. The blo*dy dish is 1.2 metres, so you'd hope not.
Do you have personal experience of this stuff, by any chance?
Just a comment from a current satellite user...
The data rate can be very good, except during violent lightning storms and very high winds. However, satellite has a very long latency, due to the fact that the satellites are in geosynchronous orbit at approximately 22,300 miles above the earth. This means that every request your browser sends has to go up to the satellite, back down to earth, and onto the internet. Then the response also has to make that same up/down trip, for a total of 89,200 miles round-trip. Dividing that distance by the speed of light give 480 millisconds, or almost half a second of additional delay.
The satellite providers use proxy clients at their end of the connection to speed up your experience while surfing. Basically, they use computers at their end as proxies to read and interpret the pages you request. They find all of the images, scripts, stylesheets, etc. included by the page, and then issue requests to the host server for those additonal elements. Then they bundle it all up and send it back to your machine as a "package". Their software on your machine feeds the page you requested to your browser, and then caches the rest. When your browser begins requesting these other page elements, they are already available on your machine, saving that long round trip to space and earth and back.
What this means practically is that page-to-page browsing is about the same or a little slower than using a fast analog modem. However, if you are downloading large files such as security patches and browser updates, the speed is really quite good. I live where DSL and cable are not available, and the analog phoneline quality is so bad that I can only get about 14.4kB -- if the connection doesn't drop, that is. So, I use satellite. My succinct review of it is, "better than nothing, better than analog, a little slow on surfing, fairly fast on downloading big files."
The terrestrial microwave-based 'radio DSL' is pretty much indistinguishable from regular ADSL. It does require line-of-sight to the radio base station for your area, and can also be disturbed by very high winds and very, very heavy rain. I'd get that service if I could, though, because it eliminates the 89,200-mile airtime of satellite and the resultant latency.
Sometimes I sit back and think about all of the technology it takes for me to post here, and I'm amazed that it works at all. Actually, 99.9% of the time, it works very well. Cost in the U.S. is 150-200% of ADSL.
Jim
Cost here (Italy) is roughly 8 times that of bog-standard ADSL, 3 to 4 times that of a business-level ADSL. Plus some pretty steep set-up costs.
It's that stuff about the weather that bothers me. I thought it was actually a bit of a modern myth, as I've seen a fair few sites (impartial ones) claim that the weather won't affect service. The blo*dy dish is 1.2 metres, so you'd hope not.
Extreme weather conditions will affect it - 99% of the time you'll be OK. See jdmorgans post about that. I don't know exactly where you are and what your weather conditions are like. Just one to note really.
Do you have personal experience of this stuff, by any chance?
Yes. Not directly, but a friend of mine had it (also in the middle of nowhere) and I have used it and chatted to him about it (and been cut-off mid-MSN conversation when he had a local storm!).
TJ
