Latest on Tiscali's satellite Internet service

LegacyUser

I was just talking to a product manager at Tiscali UK. He told me the following (I know some of these items were mentioned in a previous thread already, but I'm including them again for completeness):

1. It will most likely cost £49/month, although no final prices or installation prices have been set.

2. It will be available anywhere on the British isles, including Northern Ireland and the Republic (in other words, we get it right from the beginning!).

3. Downstream speeds will be up to 512kbps, upstream will be up to 153kbps.

4. It will be available on a commercial basis in 3 months time.

There you go. If anybody has any feedback or has additional details, please post.

LegacyUser

Brilliant !!, thanks for that info Urban Weigl

It's funny, the only way we can get cheap broadband here in ireland is if we look abroad to international companies

I don't really care, just once we get cheap broadband !

I also got an email yesturday from "Web-Sat". They have a download limit of 466MegaBytes a month and upload of 45 MegaBytes. Anything after that , and they charge extra..... altogether = £2000 installation, £150 a month + extra for more that 466 MB a month, which just aint good enough for home users

Thats why I'm happy to see this news from urban !!

LegacyUser

is it metered? if it was out now id go for it, but with adsl due out in 2 months and llu definitly starting in january(or eircom gets its ass sued)im not to sure it will be worth it, but you never know

LegacyUser

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Gladiator:
...with adsl due out in 2 months...</font>

I wouldn't hold my breath!!

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">...and llu definitly starting in january(or eircom gets its ass sued)...</font>

The deadline was January 1st 2001!!!!


Mike

LegacyUser

dont be so negative,

and january first wasnt the deadline for anything except the first round of prices which eircom meet, january 1 2002 is the deadline for the first excahnge to be fully unbundled

[This message has been edited by Gladiator (edited 29-06-2001).]

LegacyUser

Website for Tiscali?? Please??? I couldnt be arsed looking.



--Chris--

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<A HREF="http://uie.8m.com
" TARGET=_blank>http://uie.8m.com
</A>

THE source for Internet news in Ireland. Polls, broadband, letter to ODTR, ISP details and A PETITION AGAINST EIRCOM.

dahamsta

Where do you think would be the obvious place to look?

[This message has been edited by dahamsta (edited 01-07-2001).]

LegacyUser

made a f*** up sorry!, i see chris's website does work it's the link on this page that don't tho....very good site but the branching off is annoying all the same can everything not just go on irelandoffline.com?

Farls

[This message has been edited by Farls (edited 02-07-2001).]

LegacyUser

Yeah - I'll fix the link one of these days...

But, I'll have you know I had my website a few months BEFORE Irelandoffline came into existance.

--Chris--

LegacyUser

http://satellite.tiscali.com/

Be sure to sign up with the web form to express your interest.

Overall, satellite Internet is a very interesting technology for anybody living in a country with 3rd world telecom infrastructure, or if you're living out of reach of ADSL services.

There is one major disadvantage with satellite access: latency. Because of the distance the data has to travel, the satellite will add about 200ms in addition to the rest of the Internet, so if you're a Quake-player, cable or xDSL Internet would be much better suited to your needs.

LegacyUser

If the service is available in Britain, then it is technically available here. Is anyone interested in setting up a reseller organisation here?

LegacyUser

oh no way I don't believe it

The most important thing in playing online games is to have a low "ping". But now your saying that my ping will not be that good after all

So what ping would I have with this satellite isp ?

(eg)

56K, ping = 220
ISDN, ping = 70
Tiscali Satellite, ping = ??

LegacyUser

The reason the "ping" on satellite Internet isn't great is because the satellite is 36,000km up in space. Over that distance, the speed of light takes over 100ms to travel up. However, as data has to travel back down again, that's another 100ms+. It does this 4 times, so you'll end up with 400ms.

The bottom line is: satellite Internet will get you great download and faster-than-ISDN upload speeds, but as far as latency is concerned, it simply isn't ideal for playing Quake-style games (other online games like Starcraft should be fine).

Sorry to disappoint, but until they figure out a way to move data faster than light, there isn't much anybody can do about it.

LegacyUser

well if they put a QIII server in space it would reduce the ping by 50 to 70%.well how about it we all chip in and launch a satlite

LegacyUser

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Urban Weigl:
The reason the "ping" on satellite Internet isn't great is because the satellite is 36,000km up in space. Over that distance, the speed of light takes over 100ms to travel up. However, as data has to travel back down again, that's another 100ms+. It does this 4 times, so you'll end up with 400ms.
</font>

i have had experience with both types of sat access (ie) Unidirectional [Europeonline] and Bidirectional [Astra-BBI].
Pings on one-way are faster than two way.
pings for modem out and return via sat are about 350
pings for sat both way can rise to 800 and above.
reason: one way has less distance to travel.

One Way: send signal travels to ticali's uplink station (which may be in italy but i doubt it), im not sure of the distance to italy but i will guess 2000KM (being safe) then the signal goes up 36000KM and down 36000KM this is roughly 74000KM.

Two Way: signal goes up,down,return up, return down 36000KM, about 144000KM.

Personally i think pings on satellite are fu|<ing amazing, on way way, the signal travels over 70000KM and it only takes 500MS @ most, imagine it the BW counterstrike server was 70000KM away, what ping would you get?

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Britany Spears Looking incredible

LegacyUser

it might sound amasing to you, but what I'm looking for is a ping of around 50 (fifty), especially when I can get a ping of 150 with a 56K !!

LegacyUser

hmmm...with SNL i used to connect at the very best 37,333 bp/s and i had a ping of 200 once the clock struck 12am, another strange thing i noticed was when i used to be surfing around 4/5am (the good old times!) my dload speeds would jump to 15-24 kb/s this i found most confusing, but enjoyable all the same, especially when dloading patches for games!

Farls

56k in your FACE!

LegacyUser

Well this service looks like another complete pile o' pants.

If their marketspeak says peak 150kbits down then its probably gonna be much worse in action. Compare this to 128kbits with dual isdn today - it's nothing to get excited about.

Sat broadcast one way - down (like Sky TV) is actually quite simple, but does anyone know how these guys plan to sort out potentially 1000's of signals broadcast back up to them?

Another thing that drives me absolutely mad is how these guys never mention their total internet bandwidth. This sat MUST have a max total up/down capacity. For it to even support 10,000 concurrent users (a tiny tiny fraction of the potential Europe userbase) and give all of them 150kb then the downstream capacity must be at least:

1,500,000 kb (approx 1,500Mb)

Anyone care to make a guess at what the total capacity of this thing would be?

pH

LegacyUser

A single down push Transponder can do 45Mbit/sec and as Ticali own a portion of the sat their on then download bandwidth is no problem.
i beleive that the reverse can be said about uploads.
Europeonline have many tens of thousands of users and only 4 transponders, so Unicast downloads (ie) a private download can go to 45-60Kbytes/sec and shared downloads (Unicast) can go as fast as the tranponder their pushed on.
And EON have only a single OC3 pipe.
a single tranponder will easily serve the inital subscribers.

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Britany Spears Looking incredible

bkehoe

chernobyl, you cannot ping with Europeonline. The general nature of this nasty service is just a HTTP proxy. Also, unless it's decided to get better with all of us moving to Starspeeder, I doubt you're getting 60KB/sec when they announced a 256kbit cap, and when I used it a few months ago for the last time I only got around 20kB/sec.

Starspeeder, on the otherhand, works through VPN, so all internet stuff works, including ping. The lowest ping I ever got on this was 310ms, using ISDN of course as uplink. The lowest with dialup has been 390ms using it.

Ahh, but EON don't push the downloads at speed, only 2MBit....
In March 2000, EON had at least one OC3 for unicast, and had added another for the file fetch service. Are you saying that they've actually lowered connectivity?

Re Tiscali; I'll be getting this as soon as it's available, unless of course ireland offline is successful by then, and my ISDN becomes flat rate.

Brendan

LegacyUser

actually you can ping with EON and i often do, to ensure im tuned to a certain transponder.
Starspeeder sux, and guess who laughing now Brendan??
CBL have boned their subscribers again, i predicted this and got flamed on the SS boards for doing so, but who was right?

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Britany Spears Looking incredible

bkehoe

Tell me how to ping with eon then. The fools never cancelled my account even though I'm not paying.

Right about what? Starspeeder is fine, and is just going through a few timeout problems, which don't harm any of my downloads, and I haven't been getting corrupt files, like what used to happen with EON. The only harm the timeouts were doing to me was in IRC, but by doing a route add, it fixed that. Whenever I dl with SS, I get 50 - 60kB/sec (other than yesterday and today which is crap cause they're working on it).

If I could even get flat rate dialup, I'd much prefer starspeeder to 2 way satellite.

Brendan

LegacyUser

Aramiska officially launched today, and they've now put up content on their web site as well. What they are going to offer is 2-way satellite Internet which will be vastly faster than Tiscali's proposed service. It'll be aimed at SMEs, and they aren't revealing any pricing yet.

I talked to someone there personally, and although I assume that I'm not allowed to reveal the exact pricing, I can tell you that it's well within the reach of even very small SMEs.

http://www.aramiska.com/, before you ask "why didn't you post the URL!?"

LegacyUser

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by pH:
Well this service looks like another complete pile o' pants.

If their marketspeak says peak 150kbits down then its probably gonna be much worse in action. Compare this to 128kbits with dual isdn today - it's nothing to get excited about.

Sat broadcast one way - down (like Sky TV) is actually quite simple, but does anyone know how these guys plan to sort out potentially 1000's of signals broadcast back up to them?

Another thing that drives me absolutely mad is how these guys never mention their total internet bandwidth. This sat MUST have a max total up/down capacity. For it to even support 10,000 concurrent users (a tiny tiny fraction of the potential Europe userbase) and give all of them 150kb then the downstream capacity must be at least:

1,500,000 kb (approx 1,500Mb)

Anyone care to make a guess at what the total capacity of this thing would be?

pH</font>

From talking to someone at Freenet, another company that will be reselling Gilat's satellite Internet, I've found out that the satellite Gilat will use is one of the new ones, and Gilat has over 20 transponders there. This means that there will be about 1 gigabit of bandwidth on the satellite.

As for upload, the same service has been available in America for years, and there aren't any problems with it.

LegacyUser

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by bkehoe:
Tell me how to ping with eon then. The fools never cancelled my account even though I'm not paying.

Right about what? Starspeeder is fine, and is just going through a few timeout problems, which don't harm any of my downloads, and I haven't been getting corrupt files, like what used to happen with EON. The only harm the timeouts were doing to me was in IRC, but by doing a route add, it fixed that. Whenever I dl with SS, I get 50 - 60kB/sec (other than yesterday and today which is crap cause they're working on it).

If I could even get flat rate dialup, I'd much prefer starspeeder to 2 way satellite.

Brendan</font>

I can confirm this. I was getting 60kB/sec on starspeeder yesterday on usenet dl's.

My attitude is that it's a good bridge until dsl arrives.