SatSig topic:

Hylas satellite

(Read 9803 times)

Nov 26^th, 2010 at 11:09am

Are you planning to operate a VSAT hub on this satellite ?

Hylas 1:
8 downlink Ka beams 250 MHz each, assume 500 Mbit/s each, total = 4000 Mbit/s
Various reports suggest 150,000 to 350,000 users.
Bit rate per user = 26.6 kbit/s to 11.4 kbit/s

Read more here: https://www.satsig.net/hylas/hylas-satellite-information-from-avanti.pdf (1.4Mbytes pdf)

If you want to lease capacity or to co-locate your VSAT hub at the Goonhilly earth station or to sub lease capacity off the Avanti Hughesnet HN9200 hub, contact:
Call: +44 (0)20 7749 1666
Email: marketinggroup@avantiplc.com

Best regards, Eric.

Nov 28^th, 2010 at 9:31pm

The w ww.avanti.plc web site home page involves the download of 41 resources (html, gif, jpg, js files etc) totalling 904k bytes.

The www.satsig.net web site home page involves the download of only 18 resources and totalling 151k bytes, so satsig is about 6 times faster.

I guess that Avanti are looking for web site visitors such as satellite service providers who already have good terrestrial internet access so are not worried about Avanti having a slow web site. I don't get the impression that Avanti want to sell services directly to people who might become VSAT end users. Avanti need service providers and local resellers, like Bentley Walker and Europe-Satellite, who will either lease satellite capacity and then implement their own VSAT hubs, or resellers who will simpy resell capacity provided from large Avanti HughesNet VSAT hub rack.

satsig.net web site is aimed at both end users and service providers. Given that many remotely located visitors are on slow dial up lines it helps them if the pages on satsig.net have minimal html and image file sizes. If anyone has suggestions to speed up the download of satsig.net pages to people on very slow dial up lines I would be interested. I have systematically made images as small as reasonable. The "20 recent" posts page in the forum has been speeded up dramatically by dynamically regenerating the page in the background every five minutes, instead of on demand which needs substantial computing resources. (this speeding up relates to the time it takes to create the page on the server - not the download time, which is affected by the customer access speed.)

Best regards, Eric.

Nov 29^th, 2010 at 10:41am

Hello Eric

Firefox says the avanti site w ww.avantiplc.com totals 21 item2 vs satsig's 21, for a total of 590k against 177k. I have flash disabled, but neither site has flash on the homepage anyway.

I use an accelerator service, which works very well for compression of html & css. Its the compression I'm after, not the 'acceleration' which is redundant since the satellite is faster than a dial-up anyway. Images are recompressed at a lower quality to reduce the size, but the above figures are with the accelerator service disabled. Avanti have several pictures they want to show right away, a common nuisance on homepages.

Satsig is fast enough in itself. However, some people (Frits knows he is) have a habit of uploading nice snaps in bulk. Slow for dial-up, bandwidth eating for us Ka system users. If these inserted images could be replaced with just a thumbnail with a link to the full picture it would be a boon. More work for satsig, though.

Regards, John

Nov 29^th, 2010 at 12:10pm

John

I take the point. In the first message of this thread above I have just replaced the original high quality image of the Hylas satellite with a small low quality thumbnail version with clickable link to the original image. Size reduction from 24k bytes to 2.3k bytes!

Regarding compression/acceleration software I tried the Bentley Walker acceleration software which compresses images at various customer selectable quality levels and also does lossless compression of text type files, like html. The results were amazing:
Long text files 1 : 17 compression.
Large high resolution images: up to 1: 70 compression.

Note however that less was acheived with already optimised, compressed files such a small low quality jpg and none at all with video/audio files.

Read more:

https://www.satsig.net/traffic/acceleration.htm

Best regards, Eric.

Dec 2^nd, 2010 at 5:05pm

Hello Eric,

Thanks for the shrinkage.

I use Propel Accelerator, which allows various amounts of image degradation. I keep it set to medium. I rarely watch videos, anything longer than 2 minutes and I feel very nervous, and end up watching Bitmeter instead.

It is amazing how huge the html itself is with some sites, and then there's the javascript - w ww.bbc.co.uk is a huge 771k, of which over 220k is code. No spaces in that, though.

Regards, John

Dec 3^rd, 2010 at 5:20pm

I live in a rural area myself but i do get about 7mb adsl but at peak times i only get around 1mb so i use my vsat as a back up as no good 3g coverage around here.

Dec 6^th, 2010 at 11:08am

1Mbps broadband? Luxury!

Eight km to the exchange with some sections of junk cables. No broadband, as BT will not replace the cables since there are only a dozen of us at this end.

Dial-up flaky (see above).

1G mobile phone, Vodafone works if you go up the garden, Orange doesn't. No 3G in this area, no 2.5G, some 2G, but not here.

No DAB radio. The BBC has apparently no plans for coverage. They will be content with 85% of the UK population, or 90% if the Government insists.

Probably no terrestrial digital TV, as after it switched over from analogue 12 months ago sat. dishes appeared absolutely everywhere. Except here, because we have never bothered with TV. BBC FM radio is just about receivable without using the Yagi on the shed roof, as long as nobody parks a tractor in the wrong place. Classic FM abandoned this area some time ago. We hope the planned shutdown of FM is abandoned.

And right at this moment, -5C and 3 miles of ice to get to the main road, with one car waiting for repair due to failng to make it down an iced-up hill in the other direction on Saturday. Well, we made it down, but parked in a hedge. Rural life in mid-Wales!

So a boosted Ka service (for broadband prices, hoho) would be appreciated. There is UK government money in it, after all. Actually, it will probably become essential.

Regards, John

Dec 23^rd, 2010 at 6:56pm

The Dec issue of SatMagazine is out.

It includes description of KA-SAT plus some comment on pricing:

"Eutelsat say that likely wholesale fees for capacity to its Sat2Way/Tooway service will be about €30 per month for a download speed of 3.6Mb/s (and an upload speed of 512 Kb/s) with a cap set at 2.4Gb max), or €60 for a 6 Gb cap. Eutelsat say that ViaSat supplied SurfBeam 2 terminals will cost around €300, (and compares with €2000 back in 2003)."

Best regards. Eric.