Things That Make You Go Hmmmmmm? Broadband Technology

I have no firsthand experience with satellite service, but does your parents provider have different tiers? Maybe they just got the basic entry level package...?

They have the highest tier (or fastest service offered) available and have searched for other satellite providers that may have faster service and have found that there simply isn't any faster satellite provider.

http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/packages/internet

Wow, only shows one package there at 1.5 MBPS... slow by today's standards.

I once had a house in the country satellite only. To aim the Direct tv satellite you just had to get it in the general direction and it worked great .... The Hughes satellite for the internet required hours of miniscule adjustments which needed repeared each time we had a bad storm.

I've always wondered why myself .....


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Yeah and that's "theoretical" speed. Probably averages well under a meg in real world conditions. So that takes me back to my original question. How can they push a full 1080P HD movie to your TV and not have the bandwidth available to play highly compressed website video content on your computer?

That might be the answer right there.

????????

The answer is simple I think - they are pushing the same 1080p signal to ALL their subscribers at the exact same time, so in effect it is one signal being sent out per channel of TV. If you are watching youtube, and say maybe 10,000 other internet subscribers are at the same time, even though youtube uses far less bandwidth, it would still use far more resources on the satellite end because there are so many users doing so many different things.

I don't think it's quite that simply. Based on your theory then you should see the same effect with cable TV/Internet, which you don't.

My guess would be internet service is not a priority for them. They aren't going to sacrifice TV signal quality to push out broadband internet most likely.

Bingo. It's all about bandwidth allocation.

We're on a satelite connection, and usually average about 1.8Mpbs, but the latency is the killer; usually 700-1000ms.

The bandwidth will drop significantly in the evening when more users are on. Anytime after 6pm or so, I'll only be able to get 100-200Mpbs, and sometimes much lower.

And, I've been told that as HDTV rolls out, and especially Pay-Per-View HD, bandwidth for Internet will be even more restricted.

It's a dying technology, with a lot of users moving to some sort of WiMax connection, which has similar speeds/latency, but should be more widely available, and cheaper.

I'm not so sure that's the case, it seems to me that it must be more of a technology issue. I don't think they'd want to keep one segment of their customer base (TV users) happy at the cost of pissing off another segment (Internet users). Seems like there must be more to it than that.

how many people get internet from sat that dont live in the middle of nowhere ?

I dont know one person that has sat internet i dont live anywhere near the middle of nowhere.

The only people that get sat internet have no other options.

Not sure what that has to do with the discussion but ok.

Simple, cable internet has far more bandwidth available. Satellites have limited bandwidth because they use "free air" radio rather than an enclosed cable. The radio spectrum is a precious resource. In addition adding capacity is not as simple as pulling new fibre between two points - building and launching a satellite is logistically and financially prohibitive. So the overall bandwidth allocation is pretty much fixed while they just keep adding on more and more customers.

Broadcast TV suffers too... to add a new channel they might reduce the bitrate of the others slightly... add 10 more channels (or go HD) and you'll start to notice the difference.

This is correct. Also, satellite doesn't require error correction so there's zero latency and a one-way connection can move much more quickly.

I have no clue if the argument is legit, but it does make sense, as bandwidth is bandwidth, and there's only so much of it to go around regardless of platform:

- One satellite serving a metro area plus a few people in the outskirts.
- Metro are people get to use "cable" for their internet if they want.
- Outskirt people only have satellite as an option for both TV and internet.
- Satellite company saves bandwidth by fucking over the few outskirt people to deliver what everyone wants best quality of: TV. The few internet subscribers (compared to the whole TV subscribers) get screwed.

Anyway... I at least thought the post made sense. *shrug*

it was good in canada like 9 years ago when I used to use it from bell expressview.... havn't sceen it since then.... not as many videos then but the ones I did download then went fast is i remember right

For a while there was a company in Australia that offered one way satellite - you used a modem for the backchannel.

The traffic was unencrypted too, anyone with a sat dish and suitable receiver could see it.

pushing a HD video from within their own network (the satellite network) is like a LAN, whereas when you try to access a Youtube video the connection still has to travel through the networks that make the internet. the bottleneck isn't in the satellite network but in the WAN (or the networks that make up the Internet) so to speak. what DL speed are you getting when you try to download the youtube video? is it broadband speed?

Here are five reasons that you get less bang for the buck with satellite, and why
it makes sense to have HD TV over satellite but not fast internet.

While it's true that with both cable and satellite one or a few TV channels are dedicated
to internet bandwidth, the use that channel very differently. For cable, your cable line
goes down the block to a switch. In the box at the end of the block, it's converted from
a TV style cable to a high speed network cable capable of carrying many users.
So that one channel worth of TV cable has to serve a couple hundred users. In other
words, the switch, or CMTS, is just like a cable modem turned backwards - it
accepts a screw in cable from the subscriber and converts the signal to an internet
style cable which has plenty of bandwidth. Other groups of uses can use the same
channel with no interference because they are connected to different switches.
For more info, Google CMTS.

With satellite, there are no switch boxes in the middle of the sky. When the satellite
sends out a radio signal, it's being sent to every subscriber in the country. That
slice of the channel is yours alone and no one else can share it without interference.
That's because the satellite doesn't have a separate antenna pointed directly at your
house - it just sends out the youtube video into the air for it to be picked up by
whoever requested it. That's probably the biggest reason satellite doesn't provide
the same bang for the buck as cable - because with cable you and I can both use
channel 37 for internet without interfering with one another.

With the TV channels, all 3 million subscribers get the same show on that channel, so
it makes much more sense to use some bandwidth for that. In other words, let's say
a TV channel takes 10 Mbps. That's 10 Mbps to serve millions of users. Your internet
connection is yours alone, so providing a 10Mbps connection would be using that
10 Mbps to serve ONE customer instead of serving millions of customers with a TV
channel.

There are a couple of other reasons you get less for your money with satellite.
It costs about $300 million dollars to build, launch, and support a satellite.
Only once you have a satellite can you start putting internet equipment on it.
The cable company can just put that equipment on a rack which costs $200.
If YOU spent $300 million of your money putting up a satellite capable of a
couple hundred megabits, wouldn't you want to have a shitload of customers
sharing that bandwidth to try to get your money back?

The next two reasons have to do with how far away the satellite is.
A geostationary satellite, the kind used for satellite TV, is 22,223 miles high.
That's about the same distance as going all the way around the world and
returning to where you started. In order to use the internet, your satellite dish
has to send a signal to the satellite 22,000 miles away. If you've ever played
with a walkie talkie, you know that a $30 piece of equipment can only send a
signal about 1/4 mile, and that signal doesn't have enough bandwidth for a
quality sound, much less video. Imagine how expensive it would be two give
you a transmitter capable of sending clear video 22,000 miles! That's upload,
you say, we're talking about download. True, but they way the internet works,
in order to download you have to upload 1/8 as much. So for an 8 Mbps download
you have to be uploading 1 Mbps of error correction and such. If you wanted to
have equipment capable of sending a high bandwidth signal 22,000 miles, you'd
pay $15,000 to get set up.

Lastly, there's latency. You may be familiar with using "ping" to measure one aspect
of the quality of an internet connection. A good internet connection might have a
35ms "ping time" - the time it takes to send a packet to some site, such as youtube,
and have it come back. With satellite, you have to send that packet 22,000 miles
up in the air, then the satellite sends it 22,000 miles back down to youtube, then
you tube returns it 22,000 miles to the satellite before the satellite sends it back
down to you, another 22,000 miles. In total, the packet has to go 88,000 miles round
trip from you to youtube and back. Radio waves travel at the speed of light,
186,000 miles per second. That means it takes the signal about 1/2 second to make
the round trip. That's 500 milliseconds - more than ten times as slow as what
we expect from a good connection. There's nothing the satellite provider can do
about that because light, or radio waves, can only go one speed. There's no way
to hurry them up and make them go faster than the speed of light. With ground
based systems, each packet only has to go, to the closest mirror of the site.
Since satellite signals have to travel fifty times as far, they take longer. That doesn't
matter as much for video, as it does for loading a web page full of thumbnails, but
it does mean that satellite internet kinda sucks and there's nothing anyone can do
about it.

A big important thing to do, I would think, would be for you to make sure that your browser uses multiple connections. Instead of loading everything sequentially. Because if everything is loading sequentially, you're dealing with the ping time over and over and over again.

Great read, too bad half the idiots here won't understand a word you just said.

You are exactly right.

They "broadcast" 1 x 1080p signal to the earth for eveyrone to pick up, so the bandwidth that they are actually using is the same thing regardless of the number of viewers who may be tuned in at any time.

Internet bandwidth is completely different. If 100 people are watching the same video on youtube, it is using 100 x time the bandwidth.

SAT providers also meter their Internet usage carefully. Their first priority is to a good video signal which they guarantee. Internet speed is not guranteed by them at all, so its prone to constant slow downs.


SAT Service also sucks for Internet because the closest "hop" to you is 26,236 miles away. This means that every packet takes 0.14 seconds to arrive, plus another .14 to return to earth, not counting error correction etc. Not good for latency.