2 way satalite available !

Kristok

I was wondering if anyone on the board has purchased Beam from Onstar Europe (http://www.onstar.eu.com) ?!?

I read about this service in a magazine and e-mailed them to find out if it was available in Ireland and received the following e-mail. Has anyone got this and if so can you comment on the performance ?!?

---

We are pleased to confirm that BEAM is available immediately throughout the
UK & Ireland.

Please find attached details on our BEAM services.

Our pricing is as follows:

Multiple PC Access

Installation* £190 IR / 240 euro
Connection £632 IR / 800 euro
Monthly Fee £315 IR / 398 euro

Single PC Access

Installation* £190 IR / 240 euro
Equipment Charge £632 IR / 800 euro
Monthly Fee £125 IR / 158 euro

*This is an indication price only. Actual price is set by the installer and
partly depends upon the complexity of the installation. This fee is payable
directly to the installer.

Installation is approx. 2-3 weeks from receipt of order. (Subject to
successful credit check & site survey)

If you require any further information please do not hesitate to contact us
on 1850 412100

---

Any actual user information on the service would be really usefull as I am really thinking about getting this service as after the initial installiation it will be more cost effective than eircom i-Stream in its current form !

P R O F A N I T Y

isnt there meant to be a cheaper one coming out in a month or two. personaly as far as i can see their all reseller or the one product. wait still thinks heat up.

phreak

satellite is by far the most expensive way of connecting to the internet and its affected by bad weather(its slower when there are clouds in the sky) and we get bad weather all year round in ireland.

b20uvkft6m5xwg

bkehoe or chernobyl

any thoughts???

[others as well of course]

chernobyl

Originally posted by Phreak
its affected by bad weather(its slower when there are clouds in the sky)

this is complete bs.

chernobyl

Decided to expand a little on my previous statement


For most ppl in ireland DSL is not a reality for them for the near futrue.
Bi Directional satellite access is proven ecomomically viable in the US and delivers what it sez.
For roughly £200 a month you get upcapped high speed access, which you can have tomorrow, DSL is years away for most.

[ps]
forget Uni Directional Satellite ISP's, they are a waste of time.

R. Daneel Olivaw

Kristok: are you the Kristok who used to run the site with the , eh, ST:TNG/Voy/SAAB/ TV eps for trading & download, etc., ?

Dotsie~tmp

Yeah its himself dan. Long time no see kris.
Dave.

phreak

is anyone really prepared to spend £200 a month?

Lemming

What kind of speeds are we looking at here for Bi-Directional Satellite?

R. Daneel Olivaw

On topic:
The problem is the pings. Flat rate high-speed access is great for browsing and downloading, but you will experience severe mental pain with 400ms (at best as the satellite is what, 36,000km away) pings in Counter Strike.

Off topic:
How come the site is live again? It went dead last January or so, and the forum's been full of warezers ever since (shame as it was the only way I got to see Star Trek: Voyager's series 7 way way before Sky started it).

chernobyl

Originally posted by R. Daneel Olivaw
On topic:
The problem is the pings,you will experience severe mental pain with 400ms (at best as the satellite is what, 36,000km away) pings in Counter Strike.

The problem is not where the satellite is, its where the ISP is, roughly a round trip of 144,000KM.
And you will get anywhere from 700MS up to 2000MS.
dont even think of gaming...

Kristok

My question is not really how it performs (prolly should not have asked that) but if the stated speeds are actually what you get ? I would really like to know if anyone else has got it because I dont feel like being the person to try it and get burned !

Off Topic:

Yup its the same Kristok, well it better be because I looked long and hard to find a nice nick that noone else used )

Anyway the reason the site is back up is because I just bought the domain name back from namezero. Dont expect the site back anytime soon cause that was just more trouble for me than it was worth. I will eventually reopen it in one form or another.

Alright Dotsie, E-mail on its way ;-)

Praetorian

We will never have cable / chorus out in Balbriggan (license problems). ADSL may take years (if it ever gets here at all) so………

I would consider buying this Beam product if I knew people were happy with its performance / reliability. Although 400Kbps / 128Kbps doesn’t seem amazing for a satellite connection.

Does anyone know if it would be possible to leave this connection on downloading and then to use your isdn for gaming, at the same time (on the same PC?)

For the perfect solution im going to pay A LOT of money or I need a miracle

Slaanesh

Alright there Kris, didn't think id see your ugly ass on these boards. What you been upto these days ?

Slaan.

Kristok

Aight Slaan,

He He, would not usually be intrested in the irish boards but I am very intrested in ireland offline for obvious reasons.

Na not been up to much really just finishing college and getting a rubbish job, the usual. What about yourself ?!?

jmcc

Originally posted by Phreak
its affected by bad weather(its slower when there are clouds in the sky) and we get bad weather all year round in ireland.

To some extent this is true. Severe rain/weather can cause the signal to fall below a usable threshold. This is likely to occur a few times a year and will affect users with domestic dishes as they are smaller. The normal fix for such situations is to use a larger dish and an LNB with a lower noise figure. Also the smaller dishes tend to be less mechanically robust. This can cause the dish to oscillate in high winds, thus potentially losing the signal. Such an effect will appear as blocking (blocks of the picture seem to break up) on video but on data, it is catastrophic, especially in the middle of a 600MB d/l.

I haven't seen any traffic costings/limitations for the Onbeam service yet but two-way satellite seems to be fairly expensive.

EuropeOnline has given satellite internet a bad name (those fscking luserss are so incompetent in design and operation that they make Eircom look like a good internet company) though Satnode appears to a viable solution though it is only one-way. The new Xantic operation (from Sirus @ 5E) seems to be good however the traffic cap is too low to make it viable.

Regards...jmcc

bkehoe

In relation to VSAT, lower signal can lower the uplink speed, but in reality this is very rare, and usually only occurs from a combination of bad alignment and bad weather. The sat dish Beam fit has been tested in all the countries they cover, and should be sufficient (75cm I'm told).

In relation to one way services, the DVB card shouldn't decode any 'bad' packets it receives, and thus your pc won't get the data and will re-request it from the server again. Signal related problems are much rarer on one way sat, and weather doesn't affect a properly aligned and sized dish.

Agreed about Europeoffline.

Xantic is quite good; I've been trialling their service for a few days, and single threads reach 50KB/sec, and multi threaded downloads go to near 175KB/sec. Note that this is the Business version.

Satnode is VERY bad if you want to use it for fast browsing. The service has been clogged up with tons of people using download managers with a few hundred threads open (this happened to Starspeeder till they put in place restrictions on the number of connections from each client). Basically there is always a 2 - 4 second lag/ping when using Satnode. If you use single thread downloads, you'll be lucky to get 5KB/sec. Multithread; approx 20 - 30KB/sec depending on time. Note that when you're connected to Satnode, Xantic, e.t.c. every net traffic is routed through it, so download with satnode and you got a 3000ms ping. Xantic has around 450MS pings.

Also, when you connect to ISDN with Beam, ISDN will take priority, so you will need to open a dos window, and add a manual 'route' for the server your downloading from which will force it to go through Beam. Not that hard really, but not practical if downloading many small files.

Brendan

chernobyl

If the dish is aligned correctly then no amount of rain [well maybe 6 feet of it] will have an adverse effect of downloads.



Unicast ISP's are not economically viable as proven by all the millions lost in them.


I have used Satnode and Xantic.

Satnode, i got roughly 100kbit/sec..so its sux

Xantic, over capped and speed offered was never achieved, even @ 3am.

Kristok

Could someone tell me the url's for Satnode and Xantic ?!?

Also are they both still in trial stages or have they been released ?!?

jmcc

Originally posted by Kristok
Could someone tell me the url's for Satnode and Xantic ?!?

Also are they both still in trial stages or have they been released ?!?

http://www.emmettsat.net/

I think that 3 day trials of Sat-Node and Xantic are available. The Sat-Node service is available on Astra @ 19.2 Degrees East. The Xantic service is available from Sirius @ 5E. A standard domestic setup should be OK for Astra but from looking at the footprint, a slightly bigger dish would probably be better for Xantic.

Eutelsat is running a test program for the OpenSky service on 7E. Again this needs a slightly bigger dish for reliable service. The cap is 300 MB a month and the test program period is free (it ends in November). I was going to swing one of the dishes over (I moved a small domestic one (50cm ish) to test but could not get a decent lock on the signal and I was too busy to move any of the larger dishes. Though with the particularly fscked up service on EON, it might be worth swinging a 90cm over. (http://www.opensky.eutelsat.net )

The great thing about offset dishes is that they can also be mounted horizontally. This makes them very useful for testing gear at ground level.

Regards..jmcc

jmcc

Originally posted by chernobyl
If the dish is aligned correctly then no amount of rain [well maybe 6 feet of it] will have an adverse effect of downloads.

Only if there is a sufficient rainfade margin.

Unicast ISP's are not economically viable as proven by all the millions lost in them.

A properly run Satellite ISP would probably be viable but the main target for such an operation would be the business user. Operations like EuropeOnline massively oversell their bandwidth and have poor terrestrial connectivity. The result is a clusterfsck of Europe wide proportions as all the warez dudez staturate the service. In theory the usage pattern is meant to be asymmetrical though with FTP and HTTP, there is still a lot of two way traffic. With multicast, there is no uptraffic ((back to the ISP) though I may be wrong on this as I can barely keep my eyes open this late). Satellite is ideal for this kind of service as it allows data to be dumped down a big pipe quickly.

The same arguments about terrestrial ISP usage/viability also apply to satellite ISPs. But what we are seeing on satellite (contention/poor datarates) is hardly anything compared to the hassle that will occur on ADSL. Having a continually on connection changes the way you use the internet and people will become more bandwidth hungry as a direct result. Everyone wants high bandwidth internet connections but few want to pay for them. The result will be a half-arsed implementation like Eircom's, bandwidth starved and management mangled. Eircom used to have a packet switched system (Eirpac if anyone remembers it) which had a metered billing system. You had to pay by the byte and these scumbags were in the business of screwing the last penny out of the consumer. Unfortunately, I don't think the people in Eircom are bright enough to implement such a metered solution (actually the concept of assigning a value to data is complex and difficult to get right). Instead they go for a bulk allocation of n GB per month regardless of the value of that data. This is the easy way out. Satellite delivery and Wireless are probably going to destroy the viability of Eircom's little ADSL operation.

Regards...jmcc