HYLAS 1, the satellite launched in November to service Avanti's broadband internet offering, is fully operational and ready to go, though questions remain about who is going to be using it. HYLAS 1 was successfully launched in November, completed testing last week, and is now ready for commercial services. The first customers …

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Friday 25th March 2011 16:07 GMT Getter lvl70 Druid

riiiight...

I have Hughesnet now because I'm in that five percent in the US without broadband wire or wireless.

The dish and the 2watt modem cost around $800 up front, then there is the $99 a month charge for the 'small office pro' package which gives me 500MB a day download limit with speeds up to 250k/sec down, mostly a lot less. It sucks and it's only redeeming characteristic is that it's somewhat faster than dialup. I'm not even getting into latency... or weather issues. If you go over your limit, you're downgraded to LESS than dialup speeds... I can't even imagine what they would charge to reinstate your connection if you whipped through your 3GB the first week of the month - Hughesnet charges $12.50 to 'recharge your fill bucket' per 500MB 'day'. if you go over. Oh yeah, they do let unlimited downloads occur without impacting your daily limit if you download from 2am to 7am.

The article seems to paint a rosy picture but in reality, satellite sucks ass. Just like back in the dialup modem days, they will oversell the hell out of it and will never hit the advertised 'up to' speed (which was most likely one whole connection from one computer to test speeds). Hell, I'm on a commercial-only bird and I can tell when the Pacific Coast gets up and gets busy just from the degradation of speed.

Where am I going with this? I don't know. I just do know satellite is the next best thing to dialup (like crawling opposed to being dragged) and you will pay big time for the privilege.

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Friday 25th March 2011 16:59 GMT Mage

Broadcast

The best use is Broadcast for TV, backup feeds to Broadcast sites, Cinema HD feeds, OB feeds and temporary emergency communication.

Internet in Europe by Satellite doesn't make sense. Similarly, the best use for LTE is Mobile, not a replacement for real fixed Broadband.

Mine's the one with GPON specs and maps of ducts and poles for fibre.

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Monday 28th March 2011 08:26 GMT another_vulture

Best used for ships and disasters

You don''t use satellite if you have an alternative, so the areas in which it makes sense are shrinking, But the demand in these areas is still increasing.

But once the satellite is launched, if fixed demand does decrease, it is very cheap to re-purpose it for maritime, where there is no alternative.

Another major use is during a disaster (e.g., Katrina) that wipes out the comms infrastructure. You can get a temporary cell tower/wifi hotspot, with a generator, running in about an hour after delivery, and you can deliver using a helicopter.

A third major use is as backup for terrestrial links. Several big retailers do this, each with thousands of stores. this leaves the store's inventory system up during a fiber cut or other local outage. At most a very few of the stores need to use the system at any one time.

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Tuesday 29th March 2011 09:34 GMT D Peilow

Be interesting to see what the chaps from Paris will charge for 4Mbit/s

It was ESA, not the EU, that 50% funded this btw.

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