[Hidden-tech] Satellite internet services

[Mark Bucciarelli]

On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 09:19:35AM -0400, Jeremy Dunn wrote:

> One main reason for dissastisfaction is the "latency" involved in a
> satellite connection. Satellites are in geostationary orbits, about
> 23,000 miles up. The signal must go through two earth-orbit-earth
> round-trips, 92,000 miles, which is about 1/2 of a light-second. Add
> to this the routing in the remote (groundlink) facility, and there is
> sometimes a 1.5 second delay. Also they tend to buffer packets sent to
> the satellite, to improve efficiency. This is fine for sending email,
> but it doesn't work well for applications that send lots of small
> packets (like a stock-ticker on your desktop), or for real-time games.
> These connections -do- compare favorably to dial-up if all you care
> about is downloading big files.

Virtual Private Networks (like SecureRemote) is another app that doesn't 
like latenency.

m