floyd@apaflo.com (Floyd L. Davidson) hath wroth:

Hello again. It's been a long time since we've locked horns.

>However, satellite bandwidth is expensive, and this would
>increase efficiency by nearly two times. Plus provide better
>service (lower latency, which is significant for both voice and
>video conferencing).

Sure. You forgot all those wonderful peer to peer applications that I
mentioned later. Personally, I think it's a great idea. I just don't
see how it's going to be built and implimented. For example, the
traffic going up and down is not convenient ethernet packets that a
router can easily digest. It's a compressed, paralleled, and possibly
encrypted 6MHz wide 256QAM(?) RF stream. In order for a Cisco router
to decide where to send this or that packet, the satellite would need
to demodulate the whole mess, extract the packets, inspect the headers
(and contents), reassemble the extracted packets, re-compress, and
re-modulate the RF signal, before sending it on its way. I have no
doubt that it can be done, but are the alleged benifits worth the
effort? For consumer satellite internet, probably not. For military,
cost is no object.

>Okay, you would benefit! That's good Jeff. But global legal
>file sharing would be improved to, so I would benefit also,
>which *is* important... ;-)

Nice try. For what it's worth, I barely do any illegal file sharing.
I'm too busy doing other illegal things. I will confess to having
downloaded some cracked commercial software so I could play with it,
and one DVD image, which incidentally was garbage and took 2 days to
download. I don't think I would benifit very much.

Incidentally, if the benifits of the latency reduction were so great,
what happened to all the "terrestial satellite" ideas, such as
tethered aerostat balloons and airplanes flying donuts?

>>The problem is that the ISP never sees the peer-to-peer
>>traffic as it never goes down to the ISP's ground stations. That
>>means that the ISP can't easily do filtering, traffic management,
>>sniffing, and abuse mitigation.
>
>Why not? It's all done in the router. Granted that it will be
>more expensive because power on board a satellite is limited,
>but I suspect they've got this down to some fairly low power
>technology by now.

Perhaps I have a limited imagination, but I'm visualizing all the
features and functions of a Cisco router run by remote control over
the same inband channel used by the subscribers. That means Netflow
and SNMP as implimented with Open View or some other network
management program. To avoid having this become the "bottleneck in
the sky", constant monitoring and traffic shaping will probably be
required. I just can't visualize how it's going to be done unless
they also install the network management workstation inside the bird
and run it by remote control.

I agree on the fairly low power technology in routers. That's been a
design goal for many years as data centers are doing battle with the
electric bill and cooling. Seen any ISP quality Cisco routers that
are battery operated?

>Well, there are problems. One is that NSA will have to buy a
>whole transponder on each satellite just to handle the snooping.

Yep. Not just NSA, but whomever operates the system probably wants to
do some snooping. With all the traffic going directly between users,
and NOT going through the ground station, snooping is almost
impossible. However, NSA has (my) money, so dedicating a management
channel for selective sniffing, err.... quality monitoring, would not
be impossible.

Incidentally, my reading of the tests performed on the existing CLEO
test system point to IPv6, yet another layer of complexity.

>>Yep. More research, justification, politics, bribes, deals, awards,
>>litigation, consortia, licensing, auctions, press releases and
>>technology are necessary.

>Yeah, that's *wrong* (because *my* friends aren't getting enough).

My friends say they aren't getting enough, so you aren't going to get
any. The problem is that this router in the sky would normally be a
fairly quiet application of existing technology and deployed without
fanfare. However, something different is happening this time, which
seems to be turning it into press release fodder. I'm suspicious
enough to suspect that there's something else going on here.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558