Excellent

On the net from an undefined location.

How long will they allow this I wonder ?

Mmmmm. Or maybe not.

Satellite for downstream is one thing, but this seems to use satellite for downstream and upstream. Nice ping times there then, gaming should be real fun. And even for surfing, with round trip latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds (is that right for geostationary?) the surfing experience will leave something to be desired. It might suit outlying areas which are out of the reach of both DSL and 3G, and where the main interest is non-interactive stuff (classic non-web-based email, downloading files via classic ftp, uploading website updates ditto, etc) but I can't see it catching on as a consumer technology for consumer applications. But the UK has government subsidies going begging for the nice Lord Carter's broadband universal service obligation (yes, Lord Carter of NTL and Ofcon) so I guess these folks want their share of the trough.

Re: Excellent

"On the net from an undefined location."

Ah, yes, I'd missed that. Good point. But I think in practice it is more likely to be on the net "from a location that isn't white-listed for the service you wanted and which our terrorist filter has flagged up as requiring further investigation with some rubber hose". Still, one can dream.

They still know where you are...

The "satellite" side of satellite broadband is download only, the upload is still via phone line (and presumably still slow).

Unless you have a ground station in your backyard, of course.

Bit costly though.....

30 squid just for 10meg bb is a bit much in comparison to other broadband package costs already out there. I get 8meg & phone for half that cost.

That said, I wonder if this will dent Jackboots Smith's IMP idea? Will the Home Office be prepared to pay the French for data storage and retrieval and how much will that cost the French to isolate the UK data from the rest of Europe?

Bring on 2010 and the broadband wars.

Nice..

The hardware may be a little pricey, but in all thats not a bad price considering over satellite services.

Useful, but...

...how badly capped/throttled will this be? With is serving the whole of Europe I suspect the answer is "Significantly"

Latency

The latency will be horrendous- say about 500ms. So not much good for the gamers.

Ordinary surfing, email and torrenting will be fine though....

All weather

or pointless in Scotland? :D

Usage Restrictions

According to ispreview.co.uk the £30 package is also limited to just over 1GB of monthly usage before restrictions kick in.

What makes you think your position is "undefined" ?

What makes you think that your transmission point isn't trackable?

LATENCY?

Fine for browsing not so good for gaming...

What's the latency going to be like?

.. it's going to be naff compared to land-based stuff because of the distances involved, no?

Pretty poor for gamer types, I'd recon.

C

Hmm

Would be quite good out in the sticks where the BT equipment is being held together by chewing-gum and celotape... probably be fairly conspicuous carrying that dish round with you though anon ;)

Is that a few seconds of lag in your connection ?

... or are you just happy to not use any services dependent on low latency ?

One Word

Latency

BT

Don't forget, it also gives consumers freedom from the BT infrastructure and their hideously unprotected cable ducts which get destroyed by a mere large thrust borer, throwing the whole country into chaos.... and happily avoided by the froggy splattellite consumers.

Un-excellent

These services are not new - the business plan is quite simple:

1) Don't understand the issues.

2) Sell to a hundred or so subscribers.

3) Go bust, leaving the subscribers out of pocket for the set up charges.

I worked for a company (a subsidiary of a very large global organisation) who tried this during the .com boom. They had the same selling point (high speed net access in areas without ADSL coverage), the same technical problem - which basically boils down to massive latency (geo-stationary orbits haven't got any closer). The only thing which appears to have changed is that their potential market (people who can't get ADSL) is much smaller.

Up speed?

I presume the 10mbit/s is downstream only and your speed upwards will be limited by whatever other technology you have at hand - ADSL, phone, whatever - and you'll end up paying for both. Unless they plan to give every customer a satellite uplink dish?

At Last!

Satellite Broadband has been available for years, but hasn't been aimed at the ordinary man in the street. Internet connectivity outside major cities and towns is a joke in the UK. This is long overdue. It's just a pity that it's a foreign company has seen the light. I'm sure though that Big Brother will tell them to keep logs . . . Static IPv6 addresses for all their customers?

Cap

I bet the data cap is fairly brutal. I was with Eutelsat (on eBird) for some time and the download limits where about 300MB a month before speed restrictions cut in.

total satellite downlink/uplink speed?

Does anybody know the total up- and downlink capacity of this next generation satellite?

Will they switch to a laser link between the groundstation and the satellite as demonstrated by ESA some years ago?

Or is the current radio technology good enough for xxx Gbit/s?

Just wondering, because 10 Mbit/s per user will mean lot's of Gbit/s or even worse in total. Even when lot's of users are not using all of the 10 Mbit/s all the time...

Or do they just not subscribe more than

total_bandwith/(average_bandwith*number_of_users)

Mine's the coat with the question marks in the pocket...

Either its 2Mbit or 10Mbit?

"A French firm plans to launch a satellite next year that it says will offer the entire UK up to 10Mbit/s broadband, including rural areas that are poorly served by ADSL and cable.

This week, Eutelsat is launching "Tooway" broadband in the UK at up to 2Mbit/s, via an existing satellite."

So which speed is it? The article states 2Mbit throughout. That is not 10Mbit.

On a good point - at least satelitte broadband is getting cheaper.

Vive la France!

As the title suggests.

They do water better than the Brits, they do electricity better than the Brits, they appear to grab a concept of "public" and universality better than the Brits.

Move over BT?

VoIP??

Huh? What kind of VoIP do you get with geostationary satellites in the link both ways? Remember the delays in the days when transatlantic phone calls went via satellite not fibre? Now add some delays for digitisation and IP packetisation and IP routing, and you might as well just use postcards, or, if available, an actual telephone line.

Terrific news

Especially for my client in a small village near Henley-on-Thames where, believe it or not, she can only get dial-up. 3G? Nope. 2G? Poor....

Funny thing is apparently one of the top execs from BT has moved in down the road, so I figure broadband won't be too far off...

I reckon her and her neighbours could share the costs ;-)

Mobile broadband

If someone makes a self-tracking dish you could go anywhere, press a button (or have it automated), the dish tracks to the satellite and you have mobile broadband without the extortionate prices of going through mobile phone networks.

Wow I have super vision...

I seem to be the only one to be able to read the whole article.....otherwise people wouldn't be posting comments like.

The latency will be no good for gaming....

"Fremaux conceded that the updated technology will not overcome latency problems for online gamers, however."

*********************************

"So which speed is it? The article states 2Mbit throughout. That is not 10Mbit."

"at up to 2Mbit/s, via an existing satellite.........Its new craft, launching in the third quarter of 2010....."

Sigh....

Re: vive la France

Try living here, you'll see that ISPs are, on average, every bit a crap as they are in the UK, and don't get me started on 3G. Grass is always greener, etc...

Some points for the hard of reading

> Latency

If you check out their website they do indeed specifically state that it is not suitable for gaming. If someone wants to moan about it then go invent a new way to change the laws of physics to reduce the latency of a satellite link.

> Throttling

Satellite bandwidth is an expensive commodity. If you think about the cost to put a satellite into orbit versus the cost of a mobile tower or ADSL kit in an exchange you can see there is a massive difference. Now this means that generally contention ratios are more prominent on Satellie links and you are far far more likely to be sharing a single upload path with another 50 active users than you are on an ADSL exchange. This is the main reason why the network bandwidth has to be effectively managed on a Satellite network. If they're just employing draconian bandwidth caps then I must go have a word with them about it when my current contract runs out.

> Performance

Satellite performance for web browsing and using the Internet is actually very good due to improvements in upload modulation techniques, connection acceleration and caching. Satellite is very suseptable to performance glitches due to people trying to use BitTorrent as the large number of connections opened will very quickly load up the connection accelerators and cause a performance hit across the network (related to throttling). Web browsing appears to be slower as it takes a second or two to start displaying the page, but in general the load times are comparable to an ADSL link (if the service is managed properly). I've done 1000's of side by side page loads between an ADSL link and a Satellite link. They give a different feel but the performance is roughtly the same.

> Cost

Satellites are expensive 'nuff said. £400 for the ground station and £30 a month is very very reasonable for what you get. This isn't aimed at toppling BT for number 1 spot in the internet users charts. It's there to fill a void that the other providers can't be bothered to spend money in. For some people this is going to be the only option of high speed internet access so don't diss something that doesn't (and never will) apply to you.

> The equipment

Yes it transmits and receives. It doesn't use a phone line for those that missed it.

Blackout ireland?

At least you could give Eircom the finger.!!! :-)

Completely Useless

Having lived on the west coast, new zealand I had to put up with satellite broadband for a while. Latency was 1+ seconds....

it was faster to use a 56k for most things.

Do the morons who push this tech even know what its like to use it?

Even 3G is faster

aww gawd!!!

thats it, now i need a new place to live...

living in the internet city (a dump called Norwich) is getting too much

when you go to bed at night and suddenly start suffering tinitus/ flickering lights in your vision from the millions of wi-fi/DVB/3G/WiMax transmitters in the city, which for some reason get cranked up to maxamum power levels over night.

ADVERT:

Wanted: comfy, spacious DEEP CAVE required for conversion to domestic home, preferably in the UK. running fresh water not a requirement, though would probably be nice, no mould would would also be nice, preferably near the coast. exclusive sea view/access only properties would probably not be suitable as they would get regular rinsedowns by the sea...

failing that i'm off to some part of poland or eastern europe where they are not going to throw up a mast for every person on just the offchance that someone might want to contact someone else.

hmm..... chenobyl sounds like a good idea, definatly no masts of any kind, no (operational) power lines, very few people living nearbly, lots of wildlife, definatly no problems with suitable free accomodation....

now where's my lead lined radiation suit and air scrubbers....