[Fwd: [thelist] cable modem bandwidth]

Daniel J. Cody djc at five2one.org
Wed Sep 13 22:40:26 CDT 2000


Satellites are a funny thing. Here's the skinny:

If you went with satellite service to connect to the internet, you would 
see a serious improvment in your download speeds. The 'DirectDuo' 
package from direct TV is a nice little thing if you want sat. TV and 
fast downloads all on one dish.

The downside to sat. internet access is that you can't upload(send data 
to) that satellite you're downloading from. Most every sat. provider 
will make you get a seperate ISP account(at your usual 33.6 - 55K 
speeds) to *upload* internet traffic to. So its like this: You're 
downloading mp3's at the speed of light, but it takes forever to upload one.

Sat. speeds are generally in the range of 128Kps - 540Kps - which is 
pretty good. Its pretty good if you're just downloading stuff, which the 
general web user is doing. To diagram it:

                        |-   > uploads go to an ISP connection > to the 
internet
your computer: |
                        |- > downloads come form a sat. on high above 
the earth > which connects to the internet in ways we dont want to get 
into here :)

i know thats a shitty diagram, but basically the traffic you send *to* 
the internet goes at regular modem speeds(through an ISP) and the 
traffic you *download* from the internet comes from the sat. at nice speeds.

The downside is you have to pay for a regular ISP connection to upload 
shit through your modem and you have to pay for the service the sat. 
provider gives you.

To answer your question, yes the internet has decentralized business in 
a way. Sadly, that has nothing to do with your sat. conneciton :)

If you(or anyone else) has questions about internet service, please feel 
free to ask. I know theres a ton of marketing shit out there that 
confuses alot of us. Hopefully we can clear some of that up here :)

.djc.
                     
> 
> Which leads me to ask about satellite connections.
> 
> We are in the unfortunate position of being too far away from the DSL shelf
> and on a rural road where cable doesn't(& won't) run. Satellite seems to be
> our only hope of a decent internet connection. You'll note I said "decent"
> - our phone lines won't even suppport 56k so *anything* is better than what
> we have! 
> 
> Has the internet decentralized/globalized business? Yes. But I can tell you
> from experience, ya really have to *want* to live in the boonies! ;) But I
> digress. So how about those satellite connections?
> 
> 






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