floyd@apaflo.com (Floyd L. Davidson) hath wroth:
>Locked horns? We're both too old to have anything left but
>worn stubs where majestic antlers once grew...
Sure, but I still keep my stubs sharp.
>This
>is a seriously larger amount of equipment than just adding a
>little old Cisco router! It would be several times as much
>equipment as current systems use.
Exactly. It's not just a router that has to be launched into orbit.
It's major parts of the ground station and parts of the ISP.
Incidentally, one of the reasons the modulator/conglomerator costs
$30K is not the cost of the components. It's the huge amount of
custom tweaking, tuning, and testing required to get everything to
work correctly. The world wide demand for non-VSAT ground station
hardware is not sufficiently big to justify cost reductions. In
effect, what putting the router in the bird does is redistribute the
various boxes in the system diagram to other locations. The functions
still have to be there in order for things to work, but not
necessarily in the same location. Moving the router/switch to the
satellite does this, but drags along quite a bit of additional
hardware into the bird that offers no corresponding cost, reliability,
or performance benefits.
>Using current technology something like that is going to be very
>crude and have few capabilities. But in 20 years it will be
>doing things we can barely imagine right now. Hence most of the
>discussion about what it can do, is not what the first try will
>produce, but what it will eventually lead to.
Yeah, I also like to read (and write) science fiction. You should see
some of the product proposals and business plans I've helped craft.
Despite rapidly advancing technology, the politics and funding still
take what seems like forever. For example, the local skool district
finally received funding for a computer purchase the specified highly
obsolete computer hardware and technology. I'm working on a proposal
for a university network expansion that specifies 10GBit fiber to the
desktop, which currently doesn't quite exist. It has to be done that
way because by the time the funding arrives, 10GBit ethernet will be
commodity hardware. One doesn't need a crystal ball to do this, but
it does help.
The same thing applies to satellite internet access growth. You
mention that your town is already wired for fiber. Which makes more
sense? Build a military routed and switched infrastructure in the sky
that may take 10 years to be accessible by the great unwashed masses,
or run fiber down the Trans-Alaska pipeline route that will bisect the
North Slope and possibly trash the caribou migrations? Which is
cheaper? Which offers more bandwidth? Which is available now? Which
works better with VoIP? I think the answer is obvious.
What satellite service offers is instant infrastructure. No need to
lease right of way. No need to protect it from hostile natives,
terrorists, and eco-maniacs. No need to wait for the endless
hearings, plan revisions, pork barrel, and political contributions to
conclude in a compromise that nobody wants. Just launch the bird and
enjoy limited bandwidth, high latency, rapid obsolescence, and
expensive CPE costs. Replacing the bird every 10 or so years means
you also have to repeat almost the entire initial expenses. From my
warped perspective, satellite is a great way to tread water until you
can run the fiber. Why not just run the fiber and forget the
satellite?
>I think that once the critical mass is reached, and the price is
>low enough that even a few consumers can afford it, it will
>instantly become a very significant service, the price will
>drop, and it will become ubiquitous.
Yep, said the chicken to the egg. However, I'm not so sure that there
are enough customers willing to pay exorbitant prices for routed and
switched satellite service while waiting for the price to drop.
Certainly the military and some clandestine government acronyms are
willing to get the best, no matter how much it taxes me, but the
commercial customers are considerably more attached to their dollars.
Customers in remote locations without alternatives will pay almost
anything, but at the first sign of a better or cheaper alternative,
will abandon satellite internet without much provocation. I've seen
it happen locally.
>The entire US may be layered with fiber optic cable, but the
>rest of the world is not.
Actually, many parts of the world have better communications
infrastructure than the US. That's mostly because there is no legacy
hardware to squeeze every last dollar out of before replacing it with
something more modern. When the local telcos depreciate CO equipment
over a 20 year period, you can bet that they're going to try to get
customers to continue using it all of the 20 years.
>That's a good point. Why bother with something that only
>produces a stupid song or two. There's real money to be made
>out there! (Especially for faithful Republicans; but maybe we
>can change that when Hillary is the CinC.)
Faithful Republican is somewhat of an oxymoron. I know quite a few
Republicans, few of which I would consider faithful to the current
regime. Anyway, at one local ISP, the current traffic distribution
is:
40% File Sharing (mostly BitTorrent)
40% Email (mostly spam)
10% Web browsing
5% Usenet (mostly binary downloads)
5% Other
The "other" class tends to increase to as high as 20% during worm
attacks. In theory, the distribution should be similar for a
satellite internet connection. Like it or not, file sharing can't be
easily ignored. If you decrease the latency and enable more efficient
peer to peer networking, then you're going to see more such file
sharing applications being used.
>>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?
>
>Poof... History.
Maybe. Such technologies have the irritating habit of being raised
from the dead and reappearing in a different form. Terrestrial
satellite is still a great solution to a non-problem with all the
ground based costs of a real satellite system. When (and if) the cost
drops for satellite internet systems, I suspect that these will become
more financially viable and perform a resurrection.
>>impossible. However, NSA has (my) money, so dedicating a management
>>channel for selective sniffing, err.... quality monitoring, would not
>>be impossible.
>
>Hmmm... I suspect that is already a virtual legal requirement.
Even if it government mandated surveillance were not a requirement, it
would still be desirable from the standpoint of operations. IMHO,
there's no way to do effective traffic management and traffic shaping
without such monitoring. The real question is how much downlink
bandwidth is going to be available for the purpose.
>See... those are *greedy* bastards. Mine friends are *needy* bastards.
>(Isn't that what everyone who lobbies Congress says?)
I don't know about Congress, but with the FCC, it's close. The basic
"need" this season is communications infrastructure in rural areas.
This has been the case for perhaps 10 years and probably will continue
to be the case during my lifetime. Every request for spectrum before
the FCC includes the promise to deploy it in rural areas for the
benefit of the internet deprived. It's almost a requirement to get
any manner of attention. Proposals that one would never suspect had
anything to do with rural communications, includes a clause on how the
proposal would benefit these areas. However, as soon as the ink is
dry on the license authorizations, the systems are initially deployed
in metropolitan areas, where the vendors can make a profit. Why both
with areas that have few users? My friend may be greedy, but they're
not stupid.
>I've spent my whole life wondering why I never seem to get to the
>good stuff before the greedy bastards do...
Easy. You live in the wrong part of the world. If you lived in the
big city, you would multiple communications alternatives, municipally
subsidized wireless, real competition, and a large enough user base to
affect changes.
>A really good point. And I've seen nothing that indicates why
>they've made a big deal out of it.
Perhaps Cisco wants to be known as an aerospace company? Maybe the
military has gone into the commercial services sector like they did
with GPS? Maybe the military will be selling ISP service like the EU
is doing with Galileo service? Perhaps someone is expecting investors
to pay for benefits of routed/switched satellite service?
--
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
Re: PENTAGON TO PUT INTERNET ROUTER -- IN SPACE 
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