The Suitability Of Satellite Internet | The Communication Blog

Thursday, April 21, 2011

The Suitability Of Satellite Internet

By John Lenokon


Those living in rural areas lacking high speed service through DSL, cable, or fiber optics have resigned themselves to living with slow, cumbersome, and unreliable dial-up telephone based services, or just going without. Reliable access to the information superhighway for personal and business applications has now become more of a necessity than a luxury. Satellite internet is a viable and preferable option for many of those users.

It simply is not feasible to wire all the homes on the planet for service. Therefore large portions of the population have been dependent on their telephone line and dial-up. Many people in these living situations have never connected to the world wide web, where increasingly the world's communications and commercial activity is focused.

Depending on the user's needs, receiving signals through low earth orbit or geostationary satellite internet offers vast improvement over dial-up. The main problems with dial-up have always been the slowness of the signal, and the resulting disconnects due to timing out, or just getting kicked off the system in the middle of whatever you were doing, because other users want access. This option to dial-up is available anywhere in the world, provided there is line of sight access to the signal, at reasonable cost and works fine for most applications.

There may be factors inherent in the technology, having to do with the signal, that some may consider to be limiting. Your data does travel at the speed of light with satellite internet, but this does take some time for the signal to travel between your computer and earth's orbit.

It will take about 1/4 second for a round trip. The round trip is a request for data sent out, and the response coming back. Packet double delays and network delays can make the time considerably longer. However, because most understand that satellite internet is often hundreds of times faster than dial-up, this delay is negligible.

This may not be so noticeable when checking e-mail or searching the web, but this system may not be suitable for various interactive uses such as video games, Skype, and video conferencing. Some of these applications will have difficulty interpreting the latency and will not function correctly. It seems that humans can have the same difficulty. Even when they are consciously aware of the latency issue, delays in responses subconsciously signals doubt and triggers feelings of mistrust between communicants.

A variety of signal speed plans, and options to purchase or lease equipment plans make broadband practical for everyone. Although satellite internet has some inherent limitations, it is a viable option for rural or mobile users.




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