ViaSat Announces Affordable and Fast Satellite Internet – CES 2012
Looking for a new broadband solution and you live to far away from any close source for anything
above 1.5Mbs? Well how does 12Mbs sound for anyone no matter where you live? ViaSat has just announce the service for residential. They are partnering with Dish on their new Hopper and Internet as well, but you can buy it separate. The product is called Excede and you can purchase from the website.
I witnessed a demo of the product at CES and I was amazed by the speed. They claim they can keep the packets organized and they can keep bandwidth allocated per account, so they shouldn’t get over whelmed. It has passed FCC cert and you can buy it starting today. They told me they are competing with cellphone carriers and not DSL and Cable. Check out the link to the press release below.
The Exede service also includes advanced web acceleration technology to provide an Internet web browsing experience with “feels like fiber” performance. Through a constantly evolving variety of techniques that go far beyond simple caching of web content, this new web acceleration technology quickly delivers pages, even on media and video intensive websites.
It is definitely no
It is definitely no competition for cable or DSL so it is good that they are not claiming that. While there are some ways to help optimize the high latency links, it is sub-optimal in comparison to wired offerings. Consumers should pay attention to the “up to” and data caps.
They did say they are faster
They did say they are faster then 3G speeds for people out of the main broadband connections and they have higher caps then Cell companies. So I think this would be a great help to some people… Latency didn’t really seem to be to much of an issue. They wouldn’t let me grab the wheel and game on it, I tried…
I used to work on satellite
I used to work on satellite broadband products and am intimately familiar with their strengths and weaknesses. With satellite, there is no way to avoid the inherent latency for bits traveling from earth to satellite and back. Traditionally, this is a minimum of about 550ms though there are some ways of reducing this if you start talking LEO (Low Earth Orbit) vs. geo-stationary. I’m not sure what scheme ViaSat is using for sharing the bandwidth, but it will add additional latency.
The latency can be mitigated for some applications through various measures. Web browsing is a perfect one because it uses TCP and is compressible and can be cached. TCP applications can be accelerated by changing the protocol using a method which uses a negative acknowledgement scheme and spoofs the sending and receiving ends to “fool” them into thinking the other end acknowledged the transmission.
Gaming is going to be bad. Other real-time stuff like VoIP and video-conferencing will have some noticeable lag. Web-based applications like Gmail will have some lag.
So long as expectations are properly placed, this can be an excellent option for the right use case.
Aaron Ledger wrote: Other
[quote=Aaron Ledger]
Other real-time stuff like VoIP and video-conferencing will have some noticeable lag.
[/quote]
Funny you say that. They had Video and VOIP connected to this demo and they both worked great. I made call and it was better quality then some cellphone calls. They also did Video and it was just like on a cable line.. No issues.
There’s simply no way to
There’s simply no way to avoid the lag. It is inherent to satellite. I’m not saying that it isn’t usable, but it will have a noticeable delay when compared to your typical wired broadband.