back to article You don't need phone lines or cable for ANYTHING, says Dish

Dish wants everyone to know it can do broadband too: using LTE kit and radio spectrum it plans to acquire from Clearwire, the TV broadcaster has been pushing 50Mb/sec into homes. The trials ran in rural Virginia, using two towers to deliver between 20 and 50Mb/sec to homes using a 40cm receiving box fitted by the same chap who …

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  1. Danny 14

    Im assuming the US suffers from the same data cap affliction, surely LTE caps will be more severe than cable?

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  3. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Face piles of trials with smiles

    > 4G telephony, but the standard has aspirations to fulfil just about every radio need

    That's great for a trial, but when happens when everybody tries to use their 4G connection to stream the Superbowl (other sporting occasions are available) in HD at the same time?.

    The nice thing about broadcast transmissions is that they scale beautifully.

    1. Tom Wood

      Re: Face piles of trials with smiles

      This is Dish... primarily a satellite TV provider. Nobody is going to stream the Superbowl live over LTE when they have a HD satellite stream right there.

      Though I appreciate that's not really the issue you're getting at. Hundreds of people in the same neighbourhood watching different on-demand content might be more of an issue...

  4. scot stockwell
    Stop

    nice speeds

    but what about the latency??

    1. Ragarath
      Stop

      Re: nice speeds

      Exactly, any time sensitive application is going to suffer, 110ms on that vid!

      Nice speed but I will take the 2Mb DSL line with 20ms thanks. Although I can see a lot of places that do not care about the latency.

      1. Anonymous IV

        Re: nice speeds

        Am I missing something? If you are watching a video, does it matter that you're seeing each frame 110ms after its transmission time? Surely there's only a problem if you're sending stuff back...

        1. Piro Silver badge

          Re: nice speeds

          You clearly don't use voip, or play any games online at all.

          Latency matters.

          Also, every single request made is just a little bit slower than on a wired connection, regardless of how fast it loads after the data is shoved down to you.

        2. Ragarath

          Re: nice speeds @Anonymous 1V

          And if you only pay for the service to do streaming then that is fine. As I said in my post, "I can see a lot of places (that was meant to be 'uses') that do not care about latency."

          But if your using this for VOIP, Gaming etc. as well as business applications then it will affect is. And you can almost guarantee this test had no contention and was probably the only one connecting to that AP at the time. What happens when the whole neighbourhood is connected?

          1. Danny 14

            Re: nice speeds @Anonymous 1V

            I imagine the people looking at this solution have a choice of satellite, dial up or nothing. So even 100ms would be a major improvement.

            100ms isnt too bad for gaming either, I regularly play on US servers (150ms ish) without too much of an issue, sure it isnt as good as EU servers (<50 depending on whereabouts in the EU).

    2. David Kelly 2

      Re: nice speeds

      Excellent question but what is described is a terrestrial system which should be comparable to cable TV latency. Possibly better as straight line to tower is shorter than wire. And speed of light through air is faster than through coax.

      Speed of light through coax is about 60% to 70% of the speed through free space.

  5. 404

    Latency and more

    We live out in the woods so my place has three satellites - Dish HD, Dish analog, and Exede Internet ($89.99/month). It was Hughesnet ($99.99month) for six years but they seriously pissed me off and is a whole other story.

    Latency on Hughsnet, with the HN7000S system was 1100ms-2500ms with 550MB/day download allowance on the small business plan - we could play multiple EQ boxen under 1500ms, painful but playable. VPN worked, slowly. It got worse as time went on and right before I cancelled, they had replaced the transmitter and modem with crap results.

    Exede was our solution with 15GB download/month with 610ms-750ms latency. EQ is way more pleasurable with VOIP/VPN/FTP working downright GREAT compared to Hughenet.

    Speedtests avg 11607kbps down, 3234kbps up with Exede and Hughesnet 986kbps down, 22kbps up.

    Now, all that being said -> both Dish and DirectTV offer 'highspeed' internet access, comparable to '4G' speeds(heh), but they repackage Hughesnet and Exede with lower caps (12-5am download zone unlimited if you go directly to Exede but not HN or the repackagers). They both lie about 'downloading those videos/movies everyone has been talking about'- the download caps will allow about 4 movies per month and then you're stuck at dialup speeds til end of month, yes, throttled to dialup. You can buy more data at $10 per GB. Rain can and will knock you offline - quicker than it knocks out sat tv.

    It works good enough, especially since I've been on a waiting list for a DSL port since 2006-> I'm not holding my breath.. at least any more... pass out too much and they don't care lol.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wireless Internet - where "Unlimited" means 5GB/month

    I've not yet met a wireless Internet option where one could run a household on it, without the provider panicking over normal family usage patterns (many hundreds of GB per month).

    As far as I'm concerned, they're all liars.

    1. h3

      Re: Wireless Internet - where "Unlimited" means 5GB/month

      I don't think that is normal patterns other than with kids pirating. (Or wasting bandwidth like netflix.)

  7. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    And what about when it snows...

    ...or rains heavily? And the signal is intermittent at best?

    1. Mike Flugennock

      Re: And what about when it snows...

      You're reading my mind, man.

      We have satellite TV at our house, and whenever we get one of those big summer downpours with densely-packed large drops, or one of those winter snow squalls with densely-packed large clumps of flakes, our satellite signal is occulted and we're without satellite TV for upwards of half an hour at a time.

      Not that there's anything worth bothering with on all those cable channels anyway, but that's beside the point.

      "Don't need phone lines or cable for anything", my ass.

    2. Tim Bates

      Re: And what about when it snows...

      My first thought was rain fade too... But it appears they're talking short distance 2.5GHz point to point links here, not satellite (despite the company name), so it should cope OK.

  8. kwg06516
    FAIL

    Of course they can do it...

    but can they deliver it at a price competitive with ground based services? I live in the States and I've been trying to get my mother off AOL dialup. AT&T runs the DSL racket in her area. New connections have not been available for over a year and cable is twice the cost of DSL. The satellite services I've looked at are both very expensive ($100/mo or more) and have very limited bandwidth (2GB per month). As long as they only target customers living off the grid they'll never be able compete.

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