As the title of this e-mail suggests, the search for broadband continues.
After a brief dabble in wireless with a local ISP, which unfortunately came to nothing, I'm now investigating one-way satellite broadband. I've found a supplier called netsystems ( www.netsystem.com ) who use Astra for the downlink aspect of the connection.
I can make a slight modification to my Sky dish (i.e. add a dual LNB) and pick up the signal. However, I need to invest in what Net Systems call a 'Sat Modem'. They ship a free Windows 'Sat Modem' when you sign up, but I'm interested to know whether anyone has ever come across a Linux compatible 'sat modem'? I may be forced to move my Gentoo based router to a Win2k install to benefit from the faster connection offered by the satellite (Help!!!!)
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers, Nick
On Friday 24 October 2003 13:15, Nick Heppleston wrote:
They ship a free Windows 'Sat Modem' when you sign up, but I'm interested to know whether anyone has ever come across a Linux compatible 'sat modem'?
Ooh good luck with that. Most of the Sat modems I have seen use some sort of packet resizing/web accelerating trickery to get over the inherent latency in the network. So they all seem to behave like winmodems (i.e there is a lot of signal processing done in the driver rather than having an expensive dedicated controller in the modem) However some PC DVB (digital satellite TV cards) comply to the DVB/IB standard, if you can find one of these that will run DVB/IB mode in Linux it should work fine.
I'd have a long hard think about how you use your internet connection before embarking on a one or two way satellite solution. The bandwidth figures may look appealing, but the latency in the network is a real killer (you are going to be firmly in the 500ms + region of ping times here) So for say big downloads or streaming media it is fine, but for anything slightly interactive (browsing, shell sessions, games etc) it just isn't workable. You'd be far off better getting an unmetered dialup on ISDN.
That said, the one way providers I expect would have a caching proxy to help combat the web browsing side of things.
There were some plans to do a LEO satellite broadband service (Low Earth Orbit - 200 or so miles up) That would be a lot better than the 30,000 km + altitude of geostationary sats like Astra.
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Nick Heppleston -
Wayne Stallwood