WISP vs Satellite

[olds]

I currently use Wild Blue Satellite because it's either that or dial up at 28k.

A company is/may be offering WISP to our area. I'd have to have a survey done to be sure we get the signal.

How does WISP compare to Satellite?

WISP

 

[spidey07]

Wireless will blow the smoke off of satellite.

 

[olds]

Originally posted by: spidey07
Wireless will blow the smoke off of satellite.

Cool, we get a lot of smoke.
😉

 

[nweaver]

I help with a small WISP...here is a ping to google. I get 1-2Mb/s throughput.

Pinging www.l.google.com [72.14.253.147] with 32 bytes

Reply from 72.14.253.147: bytes=32 time=136ms TTL=241
Reply from 72.14.253.147: bytes=32 time=233ms TTL=241
Reply from 72.14.253.147: bytes=32 time=231ms TTL=241
Reply from 72.14.253.147: bytes=32 time=147ms TTL=241

that is 3 hops (my house to the AP on the hill, down to our "noc" area, and another to the actual b/w). All in all, about 10-12 miles of wireless that I jump.

 

[p0lar]

Originally posted by: oldsmoboat
I currently use Wild Blue Satellite because it's either that or dial up at 28k.

A company is/may be offering WISP to our area. I'd have to have a survey done to be sure we get the signal.

How does WISP compare to Satellite?

WISP

Let's not forget that satellite really is still vastly superior to wifi (and variants) in terms of RF engineering, only that one is terrestrially-based and the other is in a geo-stationary low earth orbit. Both have their places, but for your purposes, go with the terrestrial wireless over DVB for broadband internet. Both are 'shared spectrum', just in different fashions.

P.S. Points to the person who can tell me how long ago technology akin to OFDM and even MIMO was implemented in SCPC.. 😉 Oh, and YES, DVB satellite technology sucks for everything BUT web surfing, and even then it's questionable. It's cheap, it's shared, no wonder it got such a bad rap back in early 2000 from DirecPC!!

 

[Modelworks]

Two things with satellite I do not like ( I had direcpc years ago)
Latency, the time it takes for the signal to travel through the satellite network it way too high , usually about 600ms+
Bandwidth , your limited because theres only so much room on the satellite and anyone who exceeds whatever they call fair access these days is throttled back, often to dialup speeds.

Wisp can be much better in both aspect.

 

[p0lar]

Let's just make sure we keep the dogging of Satellite contained to shared DVB, which is the most inefficient (and cheapest) way to share asymmetrical satellite bandwidth; otherwise, I'm going to break out descriptions on some recent (< 2 years) consulting jobs to show the real muscle behind satellite (SCPC) technology.

 

[Modelworks]

ok, show me any satellite broadband that has low latency ?
Damn, that speed of light thing always getting in the way.

 

[p0lar]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
ok, show me how any satellite broadband has low latency ?
Damn, that speed of light thing always getting in the way.

No dispute about latency whatsoever.. 86k miles is a long way! Actually, any link that has >= 600ms of latency, even with a 64k TCP window size, won't go any faster than ~900kbit/s in a single TCP session. Selective acknowledgements help somewhat, as would a larger window size, but that's a limitation of the protocol. You can parallelize TCP sessions to overcome that, but it's less than ideal and usually requires specialized software on the part of the client that is largely frowned upon by most server admins. This is why proxy servers are often employed in conjunction with satellite uplinks as well.

Now, for voice communications (usually carried via UDP), it's another story -- which is what I would refer to for some of these projects I've done. People that say voice over Satellite is inferior are just at odds with themselves over common sense. A GSM call that traverses two disparate GSM networks runs 600ms from phone to phone. 😉

Regardless, Wifi (and friends) really is just a downsized version of SCPC VSAT, with reduced distance and power requirements. RF engineering hasn't changed significantly in 60 years, only what is carried and the amount of spectrum used.

 

[NuroMancer]

Originally posted by: oldsmoboat
I currently use Wild Blue Satellite because it's either that or dial up at 28k.

A company is/may be offering WISP to our area. I'd have to have a survey done to be sure we get the signal.

How does WISP compare to Satellite?

WISP

If you are within the range (typically like 15k) it will be awesome compared to satilite.

We did a project that did a mixture of Sat (KA band) and Wireless to various sites, and wireless was WAY better then the sat.

If you look at nweavers ping, he got 170ish as a average.

The Sat units we tested got an average ping of 650. Now we went with sat because lots of sites are way out in the boonies. So no wireless 🙂

I'd say if you can get it, go for it.

 

[RebateMonger]

We had RF-based Sprint Broadband (our only broadband choice at the time) from about 2000 to 2002. We are about ten miles from the mountaintop antennas. While downloads weren't bad (up to 3 or 4 Mbps at times), uploads were around v.32 modem speed. And pings were often 1000ms-plus. Online gaminng, VPN, and remote desktop were a nuisance.