Re: satellite BB

In article <3f5f0815$0$247$(E-Mail Removed)>, Doz wrote:
> Hi all,
> A friend is contemplating the worst... satellite broadband!
>
> Anyone use this ?
>
> Any reviews ?
>
In a word do not. My friend got one which his company has installed, its
horrible. Using a linux box with fine tuned QoS (Quality of Service) it
keeps the latencies 'low' and steady (at 800ms) and makes ssh (secure telnet
to those who do not know) usable, as for anything else other than big
downloads, you might as well forget it.

If you need more details get in touch....

Regards

Alex

--
Alexander Clouter <(E-Mail Removed)>
MetroNet Support http://www.metronet.co.uk/support/



Metronet Support

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003 11:18, Metronet Support wrote:

>assh (secure telnet to those who do not know) usable, as for anything
>else other than big downloads, you might as well forget it.

I know someone planning to move to a property which might be too far
from the exchange (between two towns, approx 5.5 miles to one) for
ADSL and is considering satellite, in part because some allow the
incoming e-mail to get through even without needing to dial-up, but
also because he gets software downloads from his (US-based) employer
and customer sites (using FTP). Are you suggesting satellite would
make humble browsing "unusable" or (more likely), just "frustrating" ?
Thanks. Peter M.

In article <(E-Mail Removed) >, Peter Morgan - 0870 432 9631 wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Sep 2003 11:18, Metronet Support wrote:
>
>>assh (secure telnet to those who do not know) usable, as for anything
>>else other than big downloads, you might as well forget it.
>
> I know someone planning to move to a property which might be too far
> from the exchange (between two towns, approx 5.5 miles to one) for
> ADSL and is considering satellite, in part because some allow the
> incoming e-mail to get through even without needing to dial-up, but
> also because he gets software downloads from his (US-based) employer
> and customer sites (using FTP). Are you suggesting satellite would
> make humble browsing "unusable" or (more likely), just "frustrating" ?
>
The downloading and use of e-mail's to be stored on a local server you will
find works well. It would work better if your mail server actuals fetches
its e-mail from an ETRN capable remote mail server which acts as a repository
mail spool, and then say every 30mins your mail server fetches the mail; no
SMTP to the outside world for many reasons

The FTP updates should be okay, as will humble web browsing. So you ask what
is the problem? The problem occurs when you want to do any of these things at
the same time, latency is exaggerated and exponentially increases the
problem, as DNS requests are UDP packets those are usually the first that are
lost. You should put some form of QoS (Quality of Service) on the link to
simply keep things under control.

Without QoS you will find that when you do an FTP transfer you will be unable
to a single other thing until it finishes, with QoS it will make the space
and bandwidth available for other things to start 'promptly'.

There are a few things which help with web browsing. The BT system (which
actually belongs to some international consortium) has access to some fancy TCP
combining technology which gets entire web pages in one go and then bundles
them in more or less a zip file and sends them across the satlink; reducing
all the TCP (and also HTTP) handshaking that needs to take place. This is
only available under windoze or if you splash out for the full speed several
IP address version you can combine it with a local web proxy which will
makes things much more usable.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the satlink is run on old equipment, an
internet anti-congestion feature (ECN) cannot be used over the link (packets
are dropped as they are assumed to be corrupt, breaking the TCP RFC) so
systems that have been standardized for years cannot be used to transparently
make things better. You get no support from BT and outages are often. Also
recently the satlink my friend reports cuts out all TCP traffic for many
minutes (ten/fifteen) chunks, although ICMP (ping) and UDP packets are still
strangely okay; in summary its a poor service that is heavily over priced.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been helping someone online who lives in
Nigeria with QoS on their satlink, everything there is much better and
cheaper, my QoS script actually has made their VoIP traffic stay usable even
when they are saturating their 128/96kbps link. The Nigerians seem to get
better technology then us....its shocking :-/

Regards

Alex

--
Alexander Clouter <(E-Mail Removed)>
MetroNet Support http://www.metronet.co.uk/support/

Metronet Support wrote:
> In article <(E-Mail Removed) >,
> Nigeria with QoS on their satlink, everything there is much better
> and
> cheaper, my QoS script actually has made their VoIP traffic stay
> usable even
> when they are saturating their 128/96kbps link. The Nigerians seem
> to get
> better technology then us....its shocking :-/
>
> Regards
>
> Alex

Think you'll find it's more the fact that over there they will sort
out a problem & maximize what they've got, whilst over here if it
don't work straight out of the box/packet then the users are just not
interested & it's a case of throwing money at it until it does work
straight out of the box.

--
B-)
Life is pain.....
Deal with it!!