Someone invented a much better system, where a separate satellite-network allows everyone to connect to it directly for free, and just charges by the gigabyte, at a price determined based on supply and demand of available bandwidth. It’s not the Oneweb, which has an extremely-limited data capacity, this one can handle all global traffic.
Then no government will have any say in it.
I don’t suppose a link, or even a name, is out of the question?
The problem with satellite internet is that the delays are bad, especially if you use the internet for calls (video or voice) and gaming. Plus, as far as I know, the upload would be through DSL or something, since you’re not going to be able to send data to the satellite from your little dish.
This network is direct-to-home, and so all communications would be point-to-point through the network.
Delays are mainly due to bottlenecks in ISP’s; therefore actual delays in a single network would be 1/4 second for the same hemisphere, and 1/2 second for a different hemisphere-- which is not bad.
But the main issue is COST and SPEED: i.e. not many people are going to pay $10/Gigabyte for 125ms delay at 50mbps, when they can get 250-500ms delay for 1 penny/Gigabyte for 1000mbps or more.
I can’t say, it’s a client for my law-firm that handles the patent. But essentially it gives the same satellite-internet service as the giant 5-meter dishes, with a standard 30-cm dish, and for extremely low cost of like 1 penny/gigabyte depending on region.
If it is privileged information, why did you bring it up in the first place??
Because hope is a good thing.
If it weren’t for false hope, we’d have no hope at all?
The main issue with them is actually scale. They don’t scale well wrt new bandwidth, and it’s expensive to scale them up since it costs so much to launch new satellites and bring them into the network. There are tons of companies trying to address this (we had a company talking about providing service to some of our rural counties in New Mexico next year for instance). I think that some of the balloon tethering ideas or long duration drones are going to work better, even though I get the feeling folks around here are blowing them off.
There are few things that are going to work better than having a direct physical link for the last mile. In terms of simplicity which goes to cost, there is nothing that is going to be competitive with having a cord linking your home directly to a headend or CO.
That’s why the companies that have a wire going to your house have the competitive advantage, anything that anyone else can do, they could do as well, but they are one of the very few that can deliver low latency high bandwidth to thousands of houses simultaneously in a small area. Any sort of satellite or wireless drone or balloon system is going to have much lower limitations on how many customers it can link to at a given time, and there can only be so many of them running about as well. The bandwidth available for wireless communications is not infinite, it is actually pretty small, compared to the bandwidth that can be fit into a single co-axial cable, nevermind fiber.
Wireless forms of broadband will fill niches and be useful for emergencies, but will not be able to replace the utility of having all of the wired connections going into homes.
Actually, you can upload. But at about a tenth the speed. It’s ok for a few pictures attached to an email.
The latency is bad though. For myself it doesn’t matter since I don’t online game or use it for voice.
Where I live, I have no choice but some sort of satellite system. No DSL, no cable.
None of the ISPs mentioned here for example (The Best Gaming ISPs of 2017 | PCMag) are even close to 125 ms of latency. The highest is 43 ms, so I think your benchmark is off. Anyway, this is all a hijack of the original NN discussion, really.
If these satellite, balloon, or drone methods of data delivery actually happen, then I’d cheerfully reverse my stance against repealing NN. As it stands, a close relative who lives in a DC suburb only really has one option, and still her speeds and uptime are terrible. Under the current monopoly/duopoly situation, NN is critically important.
Yes, it is hard to believe. I’ve been in San Diego for nine years now, and i check AT&T’s DSL availability about once a year, and it’s no better now than it was when i arrived. There are parts of the city that can get the full, high-speed uVerse package, but my neighborhood isn’t one of them, despite being one of the most dynamic neighborhoods in the city. Within ten minutes walk of my front door, i have bars and restaurants and gastropubs and convenience stores and parks and softball fields and liquor stores. But my internet options from AT&T are still stuck in 1998.
I’ve actually been happy enough with my Cox cable internet, but the complete absence of competition means that if i weren’t, there would be nothing i could do about it.
Well, you need to make a greater effort to offer a coherent argument then, because that’s exactly how it appeared.
Here is my point again:
Show me what part of that is Google Fiber proves there’s competition. Because it’s pretty clearly not that. It’s completely clear to me the point is that if ISPs go to shit, like the pro NN claim they will, Google will enter the market and compete, and not that they compete now.
Latency adds up, particularly via bottlenecks, so bypassing ISP’s entirely would counter this.
And it’s not hijacking for this reason, i.e. there can’t be any NN by there’s no N. ;D
You’re not talking about an alternative network, just ISP’s to connect to the existing one.
The internet might have lower latency, but again there’s the issue of cost which consumers would naturally consider.
Nothing in use now, but there is something patented which can do so via direct-to-home satellite. The worst drawback would be 250-500ms latency, but that’s total point-to-point; and there’s no subscription-cost, access is free except for data, which is determined by available bandwidth over a given region, in the entire spectrum; meanwhile speed is more than 1Gbps with a 30cm dish. So cost would be about a maximum of 1 cent/Gigabyte.
It also works for vehicles, at about half the speed.
Wireless is the future. Verizon did 5G testing in 11 markets this year and they say they are going to start selling plans in 3-5 markets this year. It’s far cheaper than maintaining the “last mile” connections and speeds are in the gigabit range or more.
Are there any facts about a client you won’t reveal, other than the name of the client?
Instead of talking about some patent, written by a person who’s obviously a law clerk of some sort, let’s talk about why wireless sucks and will always suck forever.
There’s a little law of physics called the Shannon limit. Noisy-channel coding theorem - Wikipedia
It means that there is an absolute cap, no matter the fancy tech you might develop, on how much a given portion of the airwaves can transmit. And the cap isn’t very high. And most importantly, it’s shared between all the nearby users in your area.
This is the problem with satellite internet. The satellite’s transceiver, even for a low flying satellite with a skinny antenna, is still going to “see” multiple square miles over the ground. The area the satellite can see, this shannon limit puts an absolute cap on how much data you can upload or download per second. It’s proportional to the width (in hertz) of the band licensed by the satellite provider.
So satellite internet will work pretty well, at least using low flying satellites, for rural users with few neighbors. It would be low latency, high speed. But for users in more crowded areas, they have to split the bandwidth up between users. Flat out, you might get a whole gigabit…to be split between all the users. If you have just 1 neighbor, 500 megabits each, that’s alright.
If you have 1000 neighbors…back to snail like speeds again.
Optical fiber, of course, has more usable bandwidth than the entire RF spectrum. The standard package, using cheap optical fiber, is gigabit duplex (which means 1 gigabit in both directions!). You can readily do terrabit if you use higher quality fiber and more expensive transceivers.
So what the government should have done, starting years ago, was to do the same thing they did with electricity, water, roads, and phone service. All of those services are natural monopolies. So the government either provides them directly or contracts a private company to do it, under strict government supervision. Fiber optic to your dwelling should be considered just as essential as electricity service, to be provided to all dwellings in an area, rich or poor, and the rates charges for service should be proportional to the service provider’s costs, same as electricity service.
The power company can’t demand that you use Reliant Energy branded appliances and charge ratepayers who have purchased appliances from the power company half the rate per kWh that they charge other customers, can they? So why can Comcast say that since you’re using XFinity brand streaming video, it doesn’t count against your bandwidth cap? That’s the same abuse.
Similarly, the power company can’t jack prices up to 50 cents a kWh and when asked to show the books, just refuse. Or start charging extra fees to Tesla owners. Or turn off the power to your house a couple hours a day if you didn’t buy their premium service package. (de facto, that’s what this net neutrality stuff will do. During periods of heavy network usage, you won’t be able to access sites that haven’t paid a fee to the ISP without them being glacially slow to access).
Or just not bother to upgrade substations, so that you periodically have rolling blackouts.
Did you know the power company is required to maintain enough generators to provide service even during periods of heavy load? Your ISP can just not bother to upgrade their routers so that during certain times a day, service slows to a crawl. (and this is commonplace)
Did you know the water company is required to keep the lines pressurized so it won’t let contaminants in? They are also required to also test the water to make sure it’s at least under federal limits for contamination. Don’t know of any requirements for service from ISPs.
What ever happened to that broadband-via-power-grid idea? Not enough bandwidth?