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The above five regional links provide my review details of a number of companies selling satellite internet to end user customers. Due to the many new satellite internet companies set up in the past five years you need to read those pages carefully and also review the further companies listed towards the ends of those pages.
Satellite dish azimuth and elevation pointing calculator
(Maths only : you need to know your lat and long first.)
Tell us your problems or help others with your experiences in the forum:. |
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This web site is here to promote legitimate, satellite internet for people in all locations, who are unable to gain access using terrestrial ADSL via copper or optic fibre phone lines or using cable modems. Satcom is an alternative and provides independent small-dish two-way access from anywhere except the extreme polar regions.
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| There are over 300 communications satellites in the geostationary orbit, directly above the equator, spaced typically 2 or 3
degrees apart. Because they orbit the earth at the same speed and in the same direction as the earth rotates they remain fixed in the sky and you can
use a fixed pointing very small aperture terminal (VSAT) to communicate. The maximum possible coverage area from any one orbit position is approx one
third of the earth, as that is all that is visible from the orbit position at a height of 35726 km. For example, a
satellite above the equator to south of India can provide coverage which includes South Africa, Europe to Japan and Australia, as well as India which
is almost directly below it. To help with small dish operations spot beams are pointed down at particular areas. This web site
shows many such beam coverage areas. In general smaller spot beams permit smaller earth station dishes. The satellites are owned by large
multinational companies or by specific national companies.
Intelsat, NewSkies and Eutelsat are examples
of international and regional operators providing satellite internet capacity. At Ka band there is a trend towards the spot beam design and the VSAT technology used being all determined by the satellite owner, with smaller reseller companies employed to essentially sell "Satellite broadband" to end users customer, collect the money and resolve as much as possible of the customer support locally. The capacity for satellite internet is measured in amounts of transponder bandwidth (MHz) and downlink eirp power (dBW) and uplink G/T (dBK) and sensitivity (dBW/^m2) are sold to satellite internet service providers who have teleports with groups of large earth station dishes. The conversion of bandwidth, measured in MHz, to information data rate is complex and depends on modulation method (e.g BPSK, QPSK, 8-QAM or 16-QAM) and the forward error correction coding rate (e.g 1/2, 3/4 or 7/8) and the type of FEC (e.g. Turbo Code, Viterbi, Low Density Parity Check or Reed Soloman or combination thereof). The size of the dishes used also affects the achieved capacity. Using a larger dish may markedly reduce costs per Mbit/s. Satellite internet companies then sell the service to end users by providing them with equipment and with monthly download (Mbytes) capacity, plus customer support. Customer equipment consists of a small dish, from 60cm to 3.7m diameter, at least equipped with a receiver module (LNB definition = Low Noise Block down-converter) and transmit module (BUC definition = Block Up-Converter). See pictures of typical customer VSAT installations. The indoor equipment receives the signals and extract data for the customer's PC or local area network. The indoor equipment also prepares data for transmission, typically in very brief TDMA bursts whenever the mouse is clicked to send a request to the internet. Monthly bit rate rental is specified, for example, as 512k down / 64k up shared 20:1 at price $202 per month. This price is per VSAT customer terminal (i.e. $4032 per month in total). Such a service would suit 1 or 2 PCs per site. When you are downloading a file the speed may be up to 512k bit/s. With 50:1 sharing you would find that for much of the time the available bit rate is lower - as other people will be using the capacity at the same time. In shared arrangements there are often monthly download and upload limits (measured in G bytes per month) per customer, so that one user cannot block everyone else. Such fair-use or fair-access-policies (FAP) policies can be complex and, for example, may allow 50 Mbytes to be downloaded at high speed (say at 355 kbit/s) with such activity then followed by several hours of restricted lower speed 128kbit/s service until the service returns to high speed at the end of the day. Such policies vary greatly from one service provider to another. When calculating the downlink bit rate capacity required, allow 14 kbit/s per PC, so if you have 100 PCs in your local area network (LAN) you need at least 1 Mbit/s dedicated download rate. Uplink bit rates required are about 1/3rd of the downlink rate. If your use is only web browsing then the up/down ratio is about 1/5. If you do lots of VoIP calls then you need more equal capacity up and down. Remember you only get what you pay for. As a rough estimate, for C and Ku bands, if you see a monthly tariff, divide it by $70 and that will give you the number of PCs that you can connect in your LAN. Don't believe marketing hype about "unlimited" downloads on what are, in reality, shared services. For lower cost Ka band such as Wildblue, Tooway and Avanti-Hylas, figures as low as $40 - $80 per month may apply for basic home satellite internet access. If you need dedicated satellite internet, for services like VoIP which require at least 11kbit/s each way all the time the call is in progress then dedicated continuous information rate service (CIR) is appropriate. Dedicated service is very many times as expensive than shared service but is suitable for internet cafés, businesses and community ISPs. A VSAT terminal is therefore often shared amongst a community of users to share the cost of the monthly charges. This is not a satellite internet price comparison site. You need to contact any of the companies mentioned directly and ask them for prices. Operation is in microwave frequency bands called C band (4/6GHz), Ku band (11/14GHz) and Ka band (20/30 GHz). C band is ideal for heavy rain locations. Ku band is the most popular with dish sizes in the range 60cm - 1.8m diameter. Widespread consumer oriented Ka band spot-beam services exist in the US and Canada. Examples are Wildblue and Viasat Exede. In Europe, Ka band preliminary services operated on Hotbird for several years and in Spring 2011 a major Tooway satellite internet service has started on KA-SAT. Read more in the Tooway and KA-SAT forum. More recently HYLAS has started operation, with Europe, Middle East and Africa coverage. Yahsat also provided Ka band spot beam service in the Middle East and a number of Africa countries. Wide bandwidths are available for satellite service in Ka band and this combined with satellites having very many spot beams means reduced costs to end users. Minimum tariffs for home users around $30 - $40 per month. Ka band suffers from severe rain attenuation and reduced bit rates and outages should be expected. In equatorial areas (up to +/- 45 deg latitude) O3b is planning a revolutionary, medium height, orbit system intended for town ISPs and cell phone trunking, also for relaying massive dat files from maritime seismic survey vessels. The customer sites will each have two antennas, tracking the satellites as they move across the sky from west to east. Reduced latency or delay, due the reduced distance to medium orbit height is a key selling point. Emails sent to me asking for space segment leases, asking for VSAT services or equipment or asking for satellite internet etc may be forwarded to any possible suppliers unless you specifically request otherwise. This site contains a favourite icon (favicon) Reviews of equipment and services are welcome. Please e-mail me Eric Johnston. I am pleased to accept technical reviews and descriptions of alternative technologies and ways of providing services. Please send your images also. If you have a web site, please put text links direct to specific pages here, rather than copying pages. Your cooperation would be appreciated, thank you. All content Copyright (c) 1999-2013 SSL Ltd. All rights reserved. Established web site since 1 Jan 1999. Legal disclaimer, terms of use and conditions and non-privacy statement. Your use of this site implies that you accept cookies. I am not sure the site does make cookies but I'm saying this just in case. This satsig.net web site was successfully transitioned onto our SUN NETRA T-1 server, and later to a Virtual Machine. Index to miscellaneous pages.
France - Internet par satellite.
Deutschland Satellite Internet.
Vipersat VSAT hub. High resolution
satellite photo images. EU constitution treaty |
Ku band BUC sale. |
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"Satellite Signals", "SSL",
"SatSig" and "Ivsat" are TradeMarks. Last updated
31 Jan 2013
Other names used on this page, SUN, Solaris, Wildblue, Intelsat, NewSkies and
Eutelsat are trade names of the respective companies.
