Posted on 05/28/2005 11:58:37 PM PDT by HAL9000
Six years in the making and at a cost of nearly $500 million, a satellite Internet service for rural America now has an official launch date.Denver-based WildBlue Communications announced plans Thursday to roll out its high-speed Internet service on June 2, with Strasburg as the company's first market.
A Strasburg couple with two teenage sons, a Dell computer and 26-inch satellite dish has signed on as WildBlue's first subscriber.
Theresa Tuttle says it's "simply awesome" that her family will soon be able to surf the information highway as quickly as any city slicker with a DSL line. Husband Dave works for the Adams County Highway Department, but she runs a family portrait and photography business out of their home.
"I've lived here all my life," she said. "We have tumbleweeds and dirt, no Kmart or King Soopers, and I have no complaints as far as that goes. But with the digital world and where we're headed, getting on the Internet just isn't fast enough."
Cable service isn't an option for the Tuttles, whose nearest neighbor in the community of 2,400 is two miles away. The broadband movement also has sidestepped their local phone company, forcing the Tuttles to make do in cyberspace with a slow-moving, standard dial-up.
WildBlue says its $50-a-month service will offer homes and small businesses an Internet connection via satellite that is 30 times faster than standard dial-up.
The company, backed by John Malone's Liberty Media, is targeting a national rural market that includes 25 million to 30 million homes and small businesses. In Colorado alone, WildBlue estimates 1.5 million homes and businesses don't have access to DSL or cable.
WildBlue Chief Executive Tom Moore said Strasburg, roughly 30 miles east of Denver, is representative of the nation's rural communities in search of a viable, affordable broadband Internet model. Homes and neighborhoods are spread far apart, ruling out the arrival of broadband cable and DSL in the foreseeable future.
The town's Main Street straddles the border of Adams and Arapahoe counties. Wheat fields surround family-owned farms and a growing number of tiny subdivisions.
"We're after those 25 million homes that can't get anything," Moore said. "If it wasn't for a company like WildBlue, families like the Tuttles would be on dial-up for a long time to come."
According to one research group - the Center for the Study of Rural America - only 5 percent of communities with fewer than 10,000 residents have broadband access.
EchoStar Communications, the Douglas County satellite-TV provider, is testing Internet services, and larger rival DirecTV has a small Internet-by-satellite program. Yet as of last year, satellite accounted for less than 2 percent of all high-speed connections in the country.
WildBlue promotes itself as the only company founded specifically for satellite Internet. Its state-of-the-art satellite launched last summer is leased from Canada-based Telesat, another large WildBlue shareholder.
Another major shareholder, National Rural Telecom Co-op, has been contracted to market the service. In addition to WildBlue's basic $50-a-month service fee, the NRTC will charge subscribers a one-time $300 fee to cover installation and equipment.
Moore said he doesn't expect WildBlue's national rollout in June and July will require a bigger work force than the company's current 130 employees. The number of subscribers the company hopes to sign up in its first year is confidential.
"How long it takes us to get there, we don't spend a lot of time talking about. But we think the potential market is huge," he said.
Yes and the HAM radio operators are fighting it BPL (broadband over power line). It interrupts communications in a number of radio bands.
What is the impact of latency? Can I play real-time Internet games or make Internet phone calls on your service?
The WildBlue system is engineered to help offset the impact of latency, which is the delay caused by sending signals from the earth to the satellite and back again. However, there is a delay of about a quarter second as the signal travels up to the satellite and back down to the ground. For most applications this latency does not affect performance, however, there are some applications like voice over IP (telephone service delivered over the Internet, also known as VoIP), or real-time interactive gaming, where latency will have a noticeable effect on performance over the WildBlue network, as it would on any satellite-delivered service.
That's 240ms min at the equator longer if off axis, add the usual 90 to 120 normal latency of the internet itself and you are unplayable in action games. No network optimazation will overcome that.
Doesn't matter, Ka-band spot beam or whatever, the signal has to travel up to a satellite 22,000 miles up, and 22,000 miles back down at the speed of light. Bad latency (high ping)is inherent to satellite internet.
Its a new type of satellite with higher capacity. Especially upload. No more 56k dial-up for your uplink, you will get actual 128kb-256kb.
Gah...optimization
What about it?
DirecPC was released at about the same time, Fall 2000. Starband's direct (and only) competitor back then.
Yet another mistake by the reporter.
I'm not saying sat Internet is great, but the facts in the above article are significantly misleading.
Great minds think alike.
We faced this at Starband, it's absolutely true that sat Internet has limitations and there's no really good way of engineering your way out of them. Sat Internet is not for everyone.
So I'm very amused by this WildBlue propaganda from Rocky Mountain News, what a puff piece.
Starband had dozens of the smartest engineers I've ever worked with, and they were all experienced sat guys. They twiddled with the TCP stack, mucked around with the packet encoding, and etc (sat stuff I don't really understand). We built a huge cache farm and did everything else we could think of to optimize the user experience while minimizing the (inescapable) latency effect.
Physics is physics, and I can't imagine that WildBlue has overcome that little stumbling block despite their fantastical PR.
Yeah, it's a long trip. To make matters worse, Direcway and Starband route their connections through a lot of processing on the satellite, which slows things down even more. Wildblue's bent-pipe architecture and the Mentat stack should have better throughput for web surfing and file downloads, and it may be good enough for most streaming media.
That old saying about the speed of light: it's the law. Nothing can change that as far as we know so you have to have that distance latency in place.
I think the ultimate solution here will be WiMax but we'll see.
Any time I have detailed insider information about a news story, I am amazed at how bad the reporting is. I try to assume a similar level of reporting in everything I see, where I don't have insider information.
Of course not,the problem is when you CAN'T get broadband,or DSL or anything other than 28.8 dial-up.
I've been a Beta tester for Wildblue for a couple of months and I'm totally satisfied.
Direcway has been around for years.
Tired of dial-up but refuse to plink a bunch of money down for satellite (already have DirecTV but the internet receiver is a whole different set-up and installation fees).Cable and DSL has been about a mile down the road (where the city limits start) for about 5 years now. Still waiting for access. My 56k normally gets about 26400 to 37300 bps. Very frustrating!
I'm told that Direcway is Starband, though I've never tried to confirm it.
Starband is either partially or fully owned by Echostar (DISH Network), I haven't kept up with their biz dealings.
Yes,that's why I'm leading an extremely boring life in Iraq and my friends and family are convinced I'm dodging suicide bombers every day.
The one constant I see from American in/home from Iraq, is being *pissed* *off* at the reporting of the L/MSM.
I have Starband. Normally get 85kB/sec or about a megabit/sec on the download, but about 30-50kB/sec on the upload. The ping times are long because of the satellite hops. Would I rather have DSL? Maybe. Better than dialup? No question.
Would I switch to Wildblue? Only if there was a meaningful increase in bandwidth. Starband runs a "winmodem", where the satellite portion of the service must run in conjunction with their proprietary software on a Windows machine. I just dedicated a junker 233mhz motherboard to the task and run WinProxy. WildBlue uses a hardware box that runs everthing. The Starband winmodem is of course vulnerable to any Windows attack and since it has an IP address visible to the outside it invites hackers to try putting zombies on it.
Any satellite service will degrade or be cut off during heavy rain or snow fall. It all depends on droplet size and density. But the link rarely goes down for more than a very few hours. When your phone line goes down, it can go down for much longer.
The problem with broadband over powerlines is that it is likely to trash am radio, not to mention ham radio. Powerlines were not meant to carry broadband and the FCC is ignoring their own rules that have been around since forever to hand the power utilities a moneymaking opportunity
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