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Hardware

2MBps Bandwidth Anywhere Via Suitcase Transmitter 131

Posted by timothy from the if-you-have-to-ask dept.
mysticbob writes: "This newly announced suitcase satellite xmtr does 2MBps upstream, anywhere in the world, and sounds easy to use. Could be useful (someday) for lots of remote users. Of course, it does require your ISP have a satellite NAP ... " This looks similar to (but sleeker than) another satellite video connection box we featured a little while ago, but without a built-in monitor. How small will these be in 5 years?
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2MBps Bandwidth Anywhere Via Suitcase Transmitter More

2MBps Bandwidth Anywhere Via Suitcase Transmitter

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  • Should be fun trying to get that on to an airplane.
    • "Should be fun trying to get that on to an airplane."

      Quoth the article: "The carbon-cased system is virtually the size of carry-on baggage (26 x 19 x 11 inches), with a design that combines the benefits of simple, one-person operation and exceptional technical performance."

  • Now I gotta carry around a satelite tramsmitter, too?

  • But at what cost? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nickovs ( 115935 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @09:06AM (#2875902)
    This looks just what you need for those broadband connections to the Congo or whatever but the cost is going to put it out of range for even the most technophile business users. Think about it, Inmarsat-M (9600 bps) costs about $4 a minute. Inmarsat-B (64K bps) costs about $10/min. I doubt that this is going to run at less that $40/min. After that even AOL looks good value :-)

    • Re:But at what cost? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by wangi ( 16741 )
      Inmarsat-M (9600 bps) costs about $4 a minute. Inmarsat-B (64K bps) costs about $10/min

      Yeh, id's be real interesting to find out the cost of this system. Comparison wise a 64kbps VSAT works out at around $5000 a month...

      • $5000/month? BT and Tiscali are set to offer VSAT internet access at ADSL speeds (150kbps up, 500kbps down) for GBP £60-70 a month. Fair enough, the install isn't cheap - £600 (Tiscali) or £900 (BT), but it's still a fraction of the $5k a month you're quoting.
    • LOL Oooh! 40 bucks a minute eh? I can't see the TV companies gong for that one. Have you ever seen how big Tv budgets are? It'll make your eyes water.
    • Don't be so sure.

      Those prices are very high, and you definately can't lump all satellite communications together.

      I use satellite here (full duplex, 1 Mbps) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for both internet and telephone traffic.

      You can get a T1 equivalent (meaning it's 1.5Mbps both ways, depending on RF quality at that moment) for around $2000/month, flat rate.

      At your Inmarsat prices, that would be $5000 a day, or 1.8 million a year, for a 9600bps connection. Perhaps they charge so much because it only gets used sporadically, from remote locations?
      • Whose satellite system are you using? I presume that yours, unlike Inmarsat, is geographically limited?
        • Of course it's geographically limited. The point of this was that you need an ISP that has satellite capabilities. Fixed access, or semi-fixed.

          I didn't understand it to be for real roaming, where you could set it up instantly, anywhere, and get net access...
          Did it not say that the ISP was above and beyond this?
      • Those prices are very high, and you definately can't lump all satellite communications together.

        that's correct -- getting satellite connections in North America isn't that bad financially. But if you wnt to pack your bags and go down the Amazon river, or hop over to the middle east, you have to start paying a couple bucks a minute...
      • Full-duplex T1 for $2000/mo? I'll take 20. What satellite provider? I work for a large satellite communications company in Canada, and full duplex T1 is almost 10x that much with any North American provider I've ever talked to. Even at large bulk rates you're looking at US$10,000/mo for 3Mbps.

        The economics of satellite communications aren't going to change much over the short to mid term, not until it costs significantly less to launch payloads into space.
    • This looks just what you need for those broadband connections to the Congo

      The Congo?

      How about most of the U.S. (by area, not by "household")?

  • The Military (Score:1, Informative)

    by Mighty-Troll ( 549627 )
    The Military has actually been using something like these for years (not exactly 2Mbps however). Our unit had something similiar, the idea being was to broadcast live video feed from special extremely lightweight cameras attached to our helmet, waist, and back.

    We each had our own transmitter to carry the data to anywhere in the world.

  • Cost / Availablity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JohnHegarty ( 453016 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @09:10AM (#2875914) Homepage
    The cost of this will be high. But this will mean
    1) Real streaming video from anywhere in the world. No more of this videophone stuff on sky news.

    2) Internet Cafe in the middle of no where. 2mb spead accross 20 computers still ain't half bad. Espically when you are 200 miles from the nearest fixed line.

    3) Here is an idea , place one of these on every plane.. get it to instantly send back all "black box" information , plus a live video feed of the cockpit. Could have saved alot of lives on 9/11.

    Anyway... like alot of things , it may be expensive for these now.. but give it 6 months or a year.
    • I think your time frame is awfully optimistic. Satellite technology always has been expensive, and even now, after products such as DirecPC have been out for years, its still expensive. We are competing for a finite and extremely limited resource as far as the capacity that these satellites can support. Unfortunately an Internet cafe in the middle of nowhere could barely afford to sustain basic utilities, let lone sustain its net connection. This technology does not apply to laws of economics, the same could be said for airlines that are fighting for their own survival right now. Even a company providing basic phone service via satellite couldn't even get off the ground. Until the number of satellites increases substancially, satellite services will not appeal to the market at large.
    • Could have saved alot of lives on 9/11

      Maybe. It wouldn't have prevented the hijackings, and probably wouldn't have gotten the fighters there any sooner.

      • It might not have had the fighters there quicker. But when the first plane hit, they could have checked all incomming flight , and seen another one on the way. With a highjacker at the controls. And been able Given an earlier warning for the second tower.

        Ever second of deley cost a life that day.
    • I can't wait until I can stop in an Internet cafe in the middle of the Sahara desert.

      The cockpit video feed is a nifty idea but it'd take a considerable amount of software on the ground to be useful, and it's next to impossible to change any software that the FAA currently uses. From what I'm told by folks I know who do air traffic control stuff, the software and hardware they uses is 60s era and no one's ever been able to update it. For all the talk about object oriented languages blah blah, apparently the be-all and end-all for stability and maintainability is Fortran.

    • The problem won't be the cost of the base station, it's the cost of getting the satellites into orbit. That's a fairly high fixed cost, and each satellite can only support so many concurrent connections...

    • Re:Cost / Availablity (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      3) Here is an idea , place one of these on every plane.. get it to instantly send back all "black box" information , plus a live video feed of the cockpit. Could have saved alot of lives on 9/11.

      Won't work. Several reasons:

      1. Not enough connectivity. There are a lot of airplanes in the air at any given moment.

      2. Cameras can be disabled. Takes a pice of duct-tape, e.g.. About as hig-tech as the other equipment used on 9/11.

      3. What does live information help if nobody is monitoring it? Cost is the keyword here.

      4. If such a box goes down, what will you do? Shot down the plane, because you cannot be sure it is hijacked?

      I am getting really tired of all these magic, foolprof ways that could have prevented 9/11.
      • "I am getting really tired of all these magic, foolprof ways that could have prevented 9/11"

        I agree with you that every SINGLE solution doesn't seem like a likely candidate to avoid that particular tragedy. I think one of the big concerns people have is the lack of information on what really happened. I'm really curious about what happened to the plane that went down when the people took out the hijackers. A 2 megabit two-way connection on an airplane can transmit a heck of a lot of data, at least when it's compressed.

        It is widely believed that the people on board that plane got wind of what happened in NYC and DC and that's why they decided to pay the ultimate price to stop it. Now lets say that this information made it to the plane that hit the second tower. Could the people on board that plane prevented it from hitting the tower? It's alot easier to prevent 300+ people from using a phone on a plane than it is to prevent them from typing/reading a text message.

        This is probably irrelevent now because I believe that anybody who hijacks a plane today is likely to get overwhelmed by the passengers, even if they don't intend to take out a building with it. I do believe, though, that having the blackbox actually transmit what is going on is vitally important. Remember that plane that crashed in NYC shortly after takeoff? It was impossible to tell for at least a day or two if that was a terrorist related attack. The reason for the delay was it took that long to find the black box.

        If the black box were transmitting somewhere, even in a lossy data format, at least we'd have a clue as to whether or not it was an accident. What difference does a day make? A day is an eternity for somebody to disappear.

        Getting back on topic, would this device work on an airplane? I don't think so. Im looking at the picture of the device and it shows a dish. My understanding is that the dish would need to be pointing at a satellite. I'm not sure an airplane would be able to track it. Even if it could, mounting the dish on the plane would be an aerodynamics problem, at least the way its designed now.

        Is it possible to modify this device for air travel though? My knowledge of satellite technology is really limited, if somebody could educate me on this topic I'd really appreciate it.
      • I am getting really tired of all these magic, foolprof ways that could have prevented 9/11.

        Gee, that's too bad, because they're going to keep coming until one (or more likely more) of them work. You can often solve problems by generating lots of mostly silly ideas as step one.

        Maybe there isn't enough connectivity yet, but that will gradually change as all aircraft, ships at sea, buoys, mountaintops, satellites, etc. become nodes. This might be one incentive to create it.

        Cameras can be disabled with duct tape, true, so why are there still so many security cameras out there? Why do so many criminals get caught on camera?

        Just put an arbitrarily large number of small CCD cameras on board and you'll solve the duct tape problem. Imagine a strip of one-way glass (smoky, mirrored, whatever) running the length of the aircraft ceiling, with who knows how many cameras behind it.

        Nobody monitoring live info? That would change the instant any camera went dark, or whited out, or whatever. All remaining cameras would immediately get live viewers, and the previous N minutes of recorded video from all the cameras would be retransmitted ASAP to the nearest listener.

        What do you do if a box goes down, shoot down the plane? No, you escort it down and only shoot if it violates the escort.

        I'm not saying that these solutions don't suggest their own problems. I'm also skeptical of live video transmissions in the near term. I'm just saying that if you want to solve a problem, you don't immediately dismiss all solutions that appear to have some sort of flaw. There may be something of value in some of them.

        Keep the suggestions coming.
        • September 11 can never happen again, at least with a passenger plane. Why? Because no passenger is going to sit tight and take a hijacker's word that they'll come to no harm if they sit quietly. Unless you smuggle on a whole football team full of terrorists, you're not going to be able to kill all the passengers, even if you get a firearm on the flight.

          I'd be more worried about terrorists doing things like blowing up dams, or sabotaging a bunch of power plants simultaneously . . . :(

        • What annoys me is that people now claim "this could have prevented 9/11" as a matter of routine without justification. This is a very cheap way of exploiting what happend.

          I am not opposed to ideas that come with a resonable analysis of possibilities and limitations.
    • In fact, the primary use of this new satellite uplink system IS for video feeds.

      I remember 11 years ago when CNN had to literally move a truckload of equipment from Jordan to Iraq in order to allow Peter Arnett to broadcast from Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm with broadcast-quality video, mostly because of the large size of the antenna needed to uplink to a satellite.

      At 2 megabits/second uplink speed, this new system has enough bandwidth to have picture quality very close to that you get with a traditional uplink to satellite. This means high-quality picture just about anywhere in the world, and may spell the end of the videophone except in areas where extreme portability is a must.

      Given that the whole setup is probably smaller than most checked luggage, expect within 18 months the likes of CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, the major American TV networks, BBC, ITV, etc. to use them on a large scale.
    • "Anyway... like alot of things , it may be expensive for these now.. but give it 6 months or a year."

      I doubt it. This is the type of thing that the military would really find interesting, and as long as it's interesting to the Gov't, the price will stay up. It's an interesing concept though. Imagine a command tank that has one of these guys in it sending/receiving that much data. Then it relays the connection to nearby soldiers wirelessly (like 802.11 only secure?) so they can get information to their HMD's.

      And then the army commanders can move their soldiers around point and click just like Command and Conquer!
  • This thing is neat!

    2 Mbps is pretty sufficient bandwidth; does anyone know what typical latency is for a satellite link? If it's measured in seconds, that's pretty rough...
    • From the satellite links I have worked with the avage latency was around 400-600ms. It simply has to do with the speed that the signal can travel over the distance and cannot be improved through traditional means. This is acceptable for most data transmissions though.
      • This is acceptable for most data transmissions though.

        It should be more than acceptable for most browsing and streaming video. But don't try gaming or anything like that. Any application that requires significant handshaking is going to fall apart. A typical example is trying to open up files and folders on a remote NT file server somewhere. I've also had trouble with Microsoft Outlook over high-latency connections, although I'm not sure why. Finally, you should remember that the latency from the satellite is ADDED to the normal internet latency.

        • Should be acceptable for streaming video? Shouldn't somebody tell those DirecTV folks their whole system might not work? As for high latency and handshaking why would you be using a small network file sharing protocol like SMB/CIFS to share files over the internet rather than something like WebDAV which works much better under high latency conditions.
          • Shouldn't somebody tell those DirecTV folks their whole system might not work?

            I'm not sure what you mean by this.

            why would you be using a small network file sharing protocol like SMB/CIFS to share files over the internet rather than something like WebDAV

            Remember, not everybody has control over how their administrators set up file systems. If SMB works fine for most people, they aren't going to use WebDAV just for the people who use Satellite -- at least not yet -- maybe if it comes into wider use....

            • If you've got the forsight to send somebody out into the world with a portable satellite link you should have the forsight to offer some sort of file sharing mechanism they can effectively use. Nobody is going to be fucking buying one of these to VPN into a company's servers from their cozy casbah in the middle of the desert. For the price per minute cost (probably close to Inmarsat) it would be costly to do anything but broadcast pertinent information. Also DirecTV is streaming video, they have made it work. The irony is you were suggesting streaming video MIGHT work yet satellite television companies have been proving you right for decades now.
              • If you've got the forsight to send somebody out into the world with a portable satellite link you should have the forsight to offer some sort of file sharing mechanism they can effectively use.

                I agree, but file sharing was only the first example that came to mind.

                Nobody is going to be fucking buying one of these to VPN into a company's servers from their cozy casbah in the middle of the desert.

                Actually, if anybody COULD afford to VPN into their servers, it would PROBABLY be somebody with a cozy casbah in the middle of the desert. :-)

                For the price per minute cost (probably close to Inmarsat) it would be costly to do anything but broadcast pertinent information.

                Yes, but that is TODAY. Things may change. The real question is what kind of market will develop for commodity satellite internet connections given the latency.

                Also DirecTV is streaming video, they have made it work.

                Yes, but to the best of my knowledge, it's not streaming video over TCP/IP. Maybe I'm wrong here.

                The irony is you were suggesting streaming video MIGHT work

                No. I said "It should be more than acceptable for most browsing and streaming video." meaning that I saw no reason it wouldn't work for streaming video and that there should be very few if any problems browsing. If you're dying to get into an argument, at least make sure the person you are arguing with truly disagrees with you first.

                • The cost per minute on a satellite stems from the expense of bandwidth on a satellite. A single transponder can only handle so many simultaneous uplinks before individual connections become unreliable. For a single band from a particular bird you only have X bandwidth so if you want a higher throughput you charge more mula so people don't stay connected as long and thus more people are able to connect during the course of a day. You don't want to get a "Network Busy" error in the middle of the Pacific with a broken drive shaft.

    • Re:The Latency? (Score:3, Informative)

      by wiredog ( 43288 )
      IIRC, 0.25 seconds each way to synchronous orbit, so a minimum latency of 0.5 seconds. Plus time to go through landlines, routers, switches, etc.

      That pesky speed of light is just too slow.

      • Re:The Latency? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Molina the Bofh ( 99621 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @09:49AM (#2876048) Homepage
        There is a very interesting article [cisco.com]about TCP that has more details on this. It's worth reading the whole article.

        For those who don't have time/patience to read the full article, here's the most relevant part:

        "Satellite-based services pose a set of unique issues to the network designer. Most notably, these issues include delay, bit errors, and bandwidth.

        When using a satellite path, there is an inherent delay in the delivery of a packet due to signal propagation times related to the altitude of communications satellites. Geo-stationary orbit spacecraft are located at an altitude of some 36,000 km, and the propagation time for a signal to pass from an earth station directly below the satellite to the satellite and back is 239.6 ms. If the earth station is located at the edge of the satellite view area, this propagation time extends to 279.0 ms. In terms of a round trip that uses the satellite path in both directions, the RTT of a satellite hop is between 480 and 560 ms.

        The strength of a radio signal falls in proportion to the square of the distance traveled. For a satellite link, the signal propagation distance is large, so the signal becomes weak before reaching its destination, resulting in a poor signal-to-noise ratio. Typical BERs for a satellite link today are on the order of 1 error per 10 million bits (1 ¥ 10-7). Forward error correction (FEC) coding can be added to satellite services to reduce this error rate, at the cost of some reduction in available bandwidth and an increase in latency due to the coding delay. "

        • Been there, done that. (Score:3, Informative)

          by mindstrm ( 20013 )
          It's a definite issue, but they are a bit misleading as well.

          If you consider the satellite communications from a raw radio perspective, you ahve to take this stuff into account... what am I trying to send, how am I going to encode it, etc.

          The thing is, as long as the satellite layer has error correction of it's own, TCP will deal with it. (because TCP won't see the errors)

          And satellite is no different than any other form of RF communication. It doesn't present any other challenges, other than having a higher latency than other connectins. The distance - signal - noise garbage is the same for any transmitter. You can't just say 'it's far, so it's hard'. It also depends on your transmitter, receiver, output power, etc.
          You get the exact same issues trying to engineer a radio linke 20 miles long using microwave gear.
      • Just a question, how come the time to and from a synchronous orbit is 1/2 a second, but I can talk to my mother on the other side of the planet with no noticable delay?

        Are the satelites an order of magnitude higher than the earth is wide?
        • Yes. You are travelling along the circumference of a small circle versus travelling along a long radius. IIRC, the circumference of the Earth is about the same length as the distance to synchronous orbit.
        • Yes. According to this distance calculator [indo.com], the distance between New York and Tokyo [indo.com] is 6760 miles (10879 km).

          Compare this to a satellite at an altitude of 36,000 Km, and consider the data has to go up and down.

          That's the reason they lay fiber optical cables overseas instead of using satellites wich, I guess, wo0uld be cheaper.
        • Yes on both counts.

          You can talk to your mother with no delay because most international calls, especially from really modern systems like those in North America go via undersea cable, not satellite.

          I've talked to my mom (who's on the same side of the planet, just 60 degrees north) and it's definately satellite most of the time.
        • because most of those calls go via cable.

          Trust me, you'll know when your call is going via satellite, the delay is quite noticable and very disconcerting. Sometimes you can hear the echo of your own voice (eg if they're using a speakerphone), the person you're speaking to will seem to pause before replying to you, and continue speaking if you try to interrupt.

      • IIRC, 0.25 seconds each way to synchronous orbit, so a minimum latency of 0.5 seconds.

        It's not so bad. Analog modems sometimes add several hundred miliseconds to ping times.
        Still o.k. for online gaming. While surfing or even "talk"ing you will not notice much.
      • Latency is far more than just transit times. You have to add protocol handshaking, buffering, and I don't remember what else. I think just getting the connection established was 2.5 seconds. I worked for a company wanting to do intranet over satellite. We designed a multicast solution that looked like TCP on each end, but really used connectionless communication for transit. Problem there was that TCP is higher priority than UDP on those networks, and the UDP gets dumped easily if there is any threat to the connected sockets.
    • From my exposure to broadcast technology, I've found that latency can add up to a second, up to two in real heavy traffic -- hence those ugly pauses in broadcast signals from Afghanistan. That's fine for most Internet uses, but forget any true interactivity -- no fragging anyone in Quake III with this. On the other hand, anybody paying those satellite rates won't be playing Quake.

      As for size, take a look at the antennae from the Iridium phones -- those took two years to get down to a manageable size. For this sucker, though, probably three or four.

      Of course, that's just my opinion. Set your flamethrowers for "crispy" and have at it.

  • Dangerous? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TommyBear ( 317561 ) <tommybear2@gmail.com> on Monday January 21, 2002 @09:13AM (#2875926) Homepage
    Does anybody here know if this type of equipment is harmful, in terms of radiation or exposure to the transmitted beam?

    Something that small that can transmit at 2Mbits/sec must be quite powerful. What is the tranmission carrier? Microwave?
    • Such devices` microwave emissions are mostly harmful. Both because microwave is a non-ionizing radiation, and because the radiation which gets to you is decreased by distance^2, therefore negligible. you will probably enjoy this toy better if you dont have to be afraid from sudden brain frying...
    • So much of our common electronics produce radiation (ever use a microwave?) that the government imposes regulations on what a product can emmit. However, from electric towers being cited for causing cancer to the possibility that cell phones induce brain tumors, whether current regulations put us anywhere near the safety zone is very debateable.

    • Yes, it is dangerous. It's also unidirectional and pointed up, more or less. Don't get in the way of the dish when it's on. People who can manage to avoid putting their hands in switched-on blenders or putting their heads in fireplaces should have little trouble with the concept.

  • Can't every one see the social implications. Geeks won't have an excuse to stay home!
  • This unit is a "unique, IP-based solution" with a pretty heavy duty upstream bandwidth of 2 Mbit/s.

    Sweet...

    One problem though...

    I read the article top to bottom - TWICE, and as far as I can tell, the downstream bandwidth is 0 Mbit/s.

    Well, maybe two problems. Not only does there seem to be ZERO downstream bandwidth, they avertize it as an "IP-based solution". Maybe I'm mistaken, but all IP based protocalls I'm familiar require an upstream SYN and a down stream SYN/ACK before you can send any data.

    So, what happens? You send nothing but SYN packets at 2 Mbit/s? Sounds like the only thing the unit is good for is a pretty nasty mobile Denial_Of_Service attack station.

    -
    • I think its just not mentioned becase the download will never be a problem on this type of system.

      I persume the download speed will be at least upload X 2. or x20.

      Plus without download speed , you can't operate any protocol. Evan an pop3 email requires a responce, let alone streaming video. Evan if you could send it there could be no error correction ...etc... without it.

    • I read the article top to bottom - TWICE, and as far as I can tell, the downstream bandwidth is 0 Mbit/s.

      I noticed that also. At this page [radiotvnet.com] there's a listing (scroll down) in which there's a link for the detailed PDF datasheet [radiotvnet.com]. I don't see anything in there either about downloads, except:

      "SWE DISH offer different option for receiving the satellite transmission. We can install a dedicated downlink at the customer site or offer downlinking at teleports worldwide for injection into the internet backbone, virtual private networks, fibre connectivity, etc."

      Good enough if you're running a pirate hit-and-run transmission of back episodes of "South Park" but don't want anyone hacking into your box to track you. :)

    • Maybe I'm mistaken, but all IP based protocalls I'm familiar require an upstream SYN and a down stream SYN/ACK before you can send any data.

      ITYM all TCP based protocols. Multicast UDP is a good example of a case where "useful data" is communicated without any return packets. While it makes no provision for retransmitting errored packets, for real-time broadcasting it's probably better to lose part of an image than to have the video feed stop for two seconds while it retransmits the lost packets.
  • This newly announced suitcase satellite xmtr does 2MBps upstream

    Unfortunately, the downstream speed is only 300 baud. Oh well.
    • Unfortunately, the downstream speed is only 300 baud.

      Ooops, a design problem! This limits its usefullness for conventiobnal sufring, etc.
      severely.

      300 baud is _very_ slow. So slow that a shell-login with 300 baud becomes almost unusable.

      Are you sure about this?

  • Re: How small? (Score:3)

    by Snootch ( 453246 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @09:18AM (#2875945)
    How small will these be in 5 years?

    That's not the question to ask. The question is really: how cheap will they be? 90% of the cool stuff like this never gets to mass-market because he price is prohibitively high. Of course, if they come down, I'm getting one, but that if is a big one.
    • Actually, "How small" is important.

      Satellite transmitters have a higher power requirement than a notebook computer or cell phone. You will need some hefty batteries if you really want to go remote. The suitcase is for the power, not the electronics.

      So when will batteries get smaller?

      • No, the suitcase is for the antenna and electronics. Power is external. 24VDC is one of the options. Sounds like if you want to run it away from the mains, you'd better have either a generator, a tap into one of the big trucks with 24V batteries, or a van set up for the job.

        Since it has 2MHz upload and 300 Hz download, it's not for internet surfing, but rather for a mobile TV camera crew.
  • I'm sick of seeing 16.0 kbps RealPlayer video clips from Afghanistan.
  • Finally, a reasonable solution for the Dashboard PC! Woo hoo... (http://www.dashpc.com)

  • Of course, it does require your ISP have a satellite NAP

    Why would Napster be any different over satellite than over land lines? Is it because anybody can just pluck somebody's MP3 files off the airwaves, and Canadian law implies that the RIAA can do nothing about it?

  • Thought wow 2 MBytes. That is a whole lot of bandwidth out of an item that small...It is 2 Mbit per second.

    Oh well, tone down excitement. Bad editor, bad, bad editor, got me all excited.
  • Gee, and we thought clear-text was dangerous across land lines. In fact, following along the echelon/big brother lines, here in Virginia I have actually seen very large satellite be built, then seen a house nearby be taken over by Feds. The thought is they are sitting in the house pulling down all the transmissions directly from the satellite for mass monitoring.

  • "How small will these be in 5 years? "

    My guess is these units will be the same size in 5 years. Damn trick questions....

    ;)

    --T
  • How small will these be in 5 years?

    In 5 years they won't even be luggage, they'll be like large wristwatches. In 10 years you'll have them in a ring on your finger. In 15 years you'll need a truck for the electron microscope.

    -1 Interesting ... -1 Insightful ... -1 Funny [slashdot.org] ... The most amazing [slashdot.org] Slashdot phenomenon ever [kuro5hin.org], perhaps [slashdot.org].
  • Recall that the first car phones where fitted to the trunk and only worked within range of the one or two towers in that city. Then they went to remote phones / early cellular that were about the size of an Army Field Radio.
    With the exception of the antennae, I suspect these can be pushed down to something the size of a small PDA. The physical limitation will be the physical antennae.
  • The carbon-cased system is virtually the size of carry-on baggage (26 x 19 x 11 inches)

    Good luck getting one of these through airport security!

  • More links (Score:3, Informative)

    by macjerry ( 535984 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @09:44AM (#2876029)
    The company [rell.com]

    The Press Release [rell.com]

    The SWE-DISH site (requires flash) [swe-dish.com] Also has a PDF of the specs for this boxes.

    From the specs:
    Encodes live Windows MEdia, Mpeg 4, Real Media and Mpeg 2.
    Also has e-mail, ftp, internet as well.

  • Cellular... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @09:46AM (#2876036) Homepage

    5 years ? Given that by then the 3G networks will be very entrenched and will be offering 2Mbps or more, why bother with a Sat ? Sure for the "very remote" but if you don't have the mass consumer market then those remote instances will still be very very expensive.

    Another interesting gimmick to put alongside Iridium. Cellular technology makes a million times more sense in terms of cost, ease of use and availablity. Do you realy want to have a mobile network that only works if you can lob the suitcase outside ? Not very useful in an inner office or at the airport.
    • This technology will be extremely useful for news channels, you know those crappy video phones they use now?, it's like watching streaming videos off a 56k modem. This will probably help to bridge this gap
  • How about the 100Mbs Suppository?

  • Ok, great. We can get 2Mb/s anywhere in the world. But the transmitter is as large as a suitcase. Too inconvienent, you say? Does anybody remember the first cellular phones? Those things were about the size of a small backpack, and you could only use them in a car. Not do mention the cost. Those things were damned expensive. But now, you can go anywhere that sells wireless phones, and pick up one that fits in the palm of your hand, and pay less than $200 for the privliage.
    It's the same with the first "laptop" computers, they were about the size of a minitower desktop, and you could only use them if you had a power source to plug into. If you had less than $5000 to spend on a computer, forget about it! But now, you can go to any computer store, and pick up a palm pilot (which has more processing power than the machine my family paid $3000 for back in 1987 had), for a cool $199.98.

    I guess the point i'm trying to make is, wait a few years. Given time, technology will shrink and grow less expensive, and thus more avaliable to the common geek.

  • 2002-01-21 15:09:06 Slashdot censorship (yro,slashdot) (rejected)

    I suggest this story in light of the past events that took place on Slashdot forum [slashdot.org]. There is a story [kuro5hin.org]on Kuro5hin about this as well. It should come to everyone's attention that there are some issues with Slashdot moderation system as well as other issues, such as story posting. I suggest we discuss these issues in this story post. As a public forum, we can at least try and be civilized and pretend that public means democratic. I believe the stories posted on Slashdot should be voted for by Slashdot users, I think that Slashdot editors should not distance themselves from this community.
  • Here are some more info from a team member constructing the IPT Suitcase (project mgnmt Encoder & Router):
    2Mbit/s uni and bidirectional IP.
    proxy TCP over UDP (handle latency over 0.7s roundtrip)
    MPEG1/2/4 encoding and streaming (From HW MPEG2 to Windows Media Encoding using proxy)
    Router supports QoS and TCP tuning for Satelite.
    Encoder PC using windows 2000
    Router PC (inside suitcase) Linux (SuSE)
    Using IP makes it possible to use any internet service, where there is no other access or where you can't dedicate enough constant bandwidth for streaming video.
    --
    bjornrun@eblueweb.com

  • From a satellite user. (Score:3, Informative)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:34AM (#2876197)
    I see people talking about how incredibly expensive this must be, as well as saying things like "Now we can get internet in the congo".

    Let me enlighten you a bit.

    You can already get internet just about anywhere via satellite. Yes, it will require a fixed installation and a hefty dish, but it's commercially available, NOT rediculously expensive (comparable to landline), and works quite well, all things considered.

    Yes, the latency is high, thanks to the laws of the universe and all that... but if your choice is no internet, or 2Mbps with a 450ms latency tacked on off the bat, the 2Mbps will do fine. (it only really sucks for gaming anyway.. websurfing is fine)

    The benefits of this portable, small unit are just that. It's portable, and it's small. It's not a breakthrough in satellite communications, only in portability.

    This doesn't look to be an ISP delivering service either, like people mentioning inmarsat, etc... It's simply a satellite rig that can be used with a multitude of birds. There are a number of ISPs out there that have sattellite capability.
  • ...that Disney[?] movie with Tim Allen?

    First thing he does when he gets to the island is set up his laptop and start trading coffee beans [which is funny that he is trading in NY when the coffee is harvested only miles to the south].

    This sort of thing would help a lot if let's say, you were the president of Enron and you wanted to be out of the country when you bail on the stock. You don't want to play Quake over this, but trading stock would be nice. Pick a few quotes, and just have those streamed. Then you've got that huge uplink to make sure your purchases get sent.

    Don't say that 300 baud [d/l] isn't fast enough to get quotes. My ***** has an old computer he _has_ to use to get quotes for work and the modem is 300 baud. Slow enough to make a present calculator able to break the encryption in real time.

    I guess it would also be nice if you are hosting warez and want to stay on the run. Are we going to start seeing mobile pr0n sites from the jungle?
  • When you have a 2mps internet connection, who needs clean underwear and deoderant anyway?

  • Slow growth (Score:3, Insightful)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:57AM (#2876312) Homepage
    Sure these uplink boxes may be small in 5 years, but they won't be mainstream.

    Generic hardware scales well. Invent something, make a million of them, costs plummet. But this also requires a sizable chunk of satellite bandwidth, and you can bet that not only can the current satellite infrastructure not handle more than a handful of these uplinks, but that that infrastructure will grow a whole hell of a lot more slowly than would be required for a cheap uplink box in 5 years.

    More to the point, what company would pony up the dough to field a team of these satellites, with so unproven and nacent a market? I think we all remember Iridium...
    • How about Teledesic? They want to launch a 288-satellite constellation by 2005.

      According to their FAQ, Teledesic's primary investors are telecommunications pioneer Craig McCaw, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Motorola, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, Abu Dhabi Investment Company and Boeing. Sounds like there's enough money there to sink an aircraft carrier...
  • Good luck getting that suitcase through airport security.
  • So now we can look forward to much better picture quality of Bin Laden's capture and hanging...

  • How small? (Score:3, Funny)

    by dstone ( 191334 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @12:40PM (#2876840) Homepage
    How small will these be in 5 years?

    Like every other gadget... small enough to lose in the couch.
  • Hughes has had this type of device for at least 5 years. I worked for a major securities firm who used Hughes for its satellite networking. I wrote a lot of their network delivery system. We had a couple of 'fly-away' dishes that we used for disaster recovery. These items at the time had 512Mb/s uplink speed. You could set it up in a couple hours. We used one in Oklahoma after a huge snowstorm collapsed the branch building, and again in Flordia after some of the hurricanes.
  • Does anyone know what the current connection speed is of those news reporters in the middle east? Their streaming video comes across pretty bad sometimes. 2Mbs ought to be enough I would think. I know NPR used a 56k connection for a while but it was audio only.
  • Does morpheus [musiccity.com] use KaZaA as it's engine? I know it names all the files kazaa29387409871234.dat If this is the case, what other software out there uses KaZaA as it's engine and what is going to happen to all of those?
  • I love it quite a bit.
    No, really. The way it is open and everything.. allows us to take charge and open things up.

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