Sky Broadband

Aepos

I heard a rumour that Sky are going to provide a sort of broadband internet download facility similar to europe on line, Does anyone know if this is true???

Nuphor

Perhaps not Sky themselves, but now two company's (which I know of) offer broadband over a normal sky dish:

Silvermead - http://www.silvermead.net
CPSat - http://www.cpsat.co.uk

Maybe Sky may approach them, but this rumours been flying about for quite some time.

watty

"broadband" over satellite is a myth.

EOL works badly and it the best. It is download only. You have to wait for larger downloads to be scheduled.

Two way is not 100% useable/compatible due to the very large transit delays for packet acknowledgement (22,500 miles X 4 at least).

One way descent download is expensive, two way very expensive.

If it is from 28.2E you would need a multiple output LNB (i.e. QUAD) and satellite card also.

The digibox can do nothing in this respect.

SatatOnce / Casablanca is not brilliant, but has advantage of being free. I use it everyday to get Newsgroups. It also does HiRes Film trailers, popular web sites and some usefull programs on download.

Nuphor

I tried Sat@once a couple of months back, but stopped soon after. Too much European content; has this changed?

I don't speak Italian ya see

You'll need a quad (or dual) lnb alright, and some cabling, and a DVB card. But Sky users' dishes are pointed in the right direction.

watty

The Italian and German are now separate webcasters.

if lots of English speakers signup (free forever), then English will get its own webcaster.

Unlike socalled "broadband" Satellite Download, Casablanca is 100% multicast broadcast. So the more that join the more choice and better it can get. EOL, silvermead, cpsat etc are all good when just launced by can only be economic (and survive) if enough people sign up to make it as bad as a phone line.

Casablanca can only get better and has done and will always be free. All 63,000 users get the SAME info allowing a very cheap 3Mbit, but 10,000 users of EOL/CPSat/Silvermead with even 0.25 M bit each would need 2,500Mbit of Satellite, about 100 transponders (a typical bird has 32).

Casablanca is like SkyInteractive or Teletext, you all get sent the same so it can be free. EOL/CPSat/Silvermead is more expensive Bandwidth per person than GSM! So either operators go bust or it gets VERY slow and unreliable, as each user tries to get different content.

Ironically as Casablanca reaches 1Million users a very tiny amount of adverts on the Portal will pay for even more bandwidth and choice. Eventually even a choice of English Webcasters, like diffeferent Interactive Channels or Teletext magasines... Except the content is real :
* Web pages
* Trailers
* Freeware/ Shareware programs
* Newsgroups
* Subscripbtion (free) Email

Also the SatAtOnce NewsServer accepts binarys, so you can "post" an newsgroup request there via dialup and anyone with broadband can upload the program or video (share or free only, no warez, no pirate) and maybe 4 hours later it arrives on Webcaster. Sometimes this works as good as EOL but free!

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It will mostly fill with good stuff to browse for hourse no phone charge.

Nuphor

I don't suppose you have any links that'd give me some information on how much data a bird can transmit. The UK TP on Eurobird is able to, according to Plenexis, able to spurt out 4 Terrabytes an hour. Considering only UK and Ireland use the TP, and that only about 5000 in the entire UK use Satellite net access, I can't see the TP getting flooded all that soon. I've been getting a rock solid 256K connection - exactly what I pay for - since the TP went live. While I agree it can never EVER be compared with any xDSL product, for rural users, it's a godsend.