Question about satellite internet

pickarooney

Not sure if this belongs here or in Net/Comms.
My sister is currently living in Zambia and has no phone line whatsoever. OTOH, she has a satellite internet connection, the receiver of which is right outside the door and not shared with other buildings. She tried to ring me via Skype earlier, but the signal was extremely choppy and communication impossible. She said she could hear me perfectly though.
So I asked her to check her connection speed and the results were pretty bad

::.. Upload Stats ..:::
Connection is:: 24 Kbps about 0 Mbps (tested with 97 kB)
Upload Speed is:: 3 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net/ (main)
Test Time:: Wed Apr 27 11:00:21 UTC+0200 2005 
Bottom Line:: 0X faster than 56K 1MB upload in 341.33 sec
Diagnosis: May need help : running at only 55.81 % of your hosts average (iwayafrica.com) 

The connection in the place she is has a router connected to 2 PCs, which act as gateways to the other PCs in the office (not sure why they're not all connected directly to the router). I suppose the connection is only at 55% because the other PC(s) were taking the rest of the bandwidth?

Does anyone know how she's uploading to the internet given that there's no phone line? The ISP (who charges 100 dollars a month for the connection) says they can boost it for an extra wodge of cash. Does this mean they're limiting the signal on their end or there's a physical limit on the connection currently?

Sorry if this is vague, I've no knowledge of satellites and my sister's not that technical. I can get more info if I know what to ask

JNive

From the looks of it, her 'satellite' connection is rated as equivalent to 56K dial-up with a 24Kbit/sec upload there. the host average is the average of all people from her ISP that have tested on that site. So it sounds to me like its just a poor service anyway. The average is obviously about 5.5kb/sec upload so my guess is its the 128K upstream package ( they download from a shared-return 48MBps link ), and she isnt getting the full amount. Make sure she does the test when NOTHING else is using the satellite connection, and i mean nothing. lol

Steffano2002

I thought all satellite connections were "download only". All incoming traffic is dealt with by the satellire dish. All outgoing traffic had to be done via a phone line. But there is no phone line in this case...
Can dishes upload to the satellite? I'm not very familiar with satellite internet...

JNive

of course they can upload, how else can you have broadband/internet on it hehe, but yah, they are simply bi-directional services.

bk

JNive some older Satelitte services use to be one way only (download) and used dialup or ISDN for the return path (upload).

Most of the newer services are bidirectional but they suffer very badly from latency, the Satelitte is 24,000 KM up after all.

It sounds like your sisters service is just bad. BTW even if the upload speed was better, Skype still wouldn't work very well, because of the high latency (the amount of time it takes for a packet to travel from your computer to hers).

You could probably use Skype like a walkie talkie, you saying your thing and then waiting for the response a few seconds later, but it wouldn't be anyway close to regular telephone standards.

pickarooney

Thanks for the info lads. I guess she'll have to go back to writing letters

crawler

bk wrote:

JNive some older Satelitte services use to be one way only (download) and used dialup or ISDN for the return path (upload).

Most of the newer services are bidirectional but they suffer very badly from latency, the Satelitte is 24,000 KM up after all.

It sounds like your sisters service is just bad. BTW even if the upload speed was better, Skype still wouldn't work very well, because of the high latency (the amount of time it takes for a packet to travel from your computer to hers).

You could probably use Skype like a walkie talkie, you saying your thing and then waiting for the response a few seconds later, but it wouldn't be anyway close to regular telephone standards.

Just to nitt pick - it's actually 24,000 miles (35768km)

julius

crawler wrote:

Just to nitt pick - it's actually 24,000 miles (35768km)

I'm a bit bored so:

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970408d.html