Those living in rural areas lacking high speed service through DSL, cable, or fiber optics have resigned themselves to living with slow, cumbersome, and unreliable dial-up telephone based services, or just going without. Reliable access to the information superhighway for personal and business applications has now become more of a necessity than a luxury. Satellite internet is a viable and preferable option for many of those users.
It would not be practical to wire the whole planet for service. For that reason much of the population has in the past been limited to telephone dial-up service. Many people living in these situations never have used the world wide web, the place where the world increasingly communicates and concentrates its commercial activity.
Depending on the user's needs, receiving signals through low earth orbit or geostationary satellite internet offers vast improvement over dial-up. The main problems with dial-up have always been the slowness of the signal, and the resulting disconnects due to timing out, or just getting kicked off the system in the middle of whatever you were doing, because other users want access. This option to dial-up is available anywhere in the world, provided there is line of sight access to the signal, at reasonable cost and works fine for most applications.
There are some factors inherent in this technology that can limit its usefulness to some internet users. They have to do with signal latency. A signal does require time to travel from earth's orbit to your computer, even though your data travels at the speed of light with a satellite connection.
This is called signal latency. It takes about 1/4 of a second for one round trip, or for your request for data to go out, and the response to be received back. Considering double delays for packets and other network delays, it can be considerably longer. However, this is not enough to deter most users, who understand that overall, satellite is much faster than a dial-up connection.
This delay may not be so noticeable while reading e-mail or searching the web, but certainly is for interactive video games, video conferences, or Skype. Here the delays can be frustratingly long and the applications may not function at all because they have trouble interpreting the latency. This seems to be a problem with human interaction as well. Even when consciously aware of the latency issue, delays in responding are subconsciously interpreted as doubt on the other end, which leads to mistrust between the communicants.
With different plans based on signal speed and options to lease or purchase equipment, broadband is possible for everyone. Satellite internet can be obtained at reasonable cost and works fine for most applications.
It would not be practical to wire the whole planet for service. For that reason much of the population has in the past been limited to telephone dial-up service. Many people living in these situations never have used the world wide web, the place where the world increasingly communicates and concentrates its commercial activity.
Depending on the user's needs, receiving signals through low earth orbit or geostationary satellite internet offers vast improvement over dial-up. The main problems with dial-up have always been the slowness of the signal, and the resulting disconnects due to timing out, or just getting kicked off the system in the middle of whatever you were doing, because other users want access. This option to dial-up is available anywhere in the world, provided there is line of sight access to the signal, at reasonable cost and works fine for most applications.
There are some factors inherent in this technology that can limit its usefulness to some internet users. They have to do with signal latency. A signal does require time to travel from earth's orbit to your computer, even though your data travels at the speed of light with a satellite connection.
This is called signal latency. It takes about 1/4 of a second for one round trip, or for your request for data to go out, and the response to be received back. Considering double delays for packets and other network delays, it can be considerably longer. However, this is not enough to deter most users, who understand that overall, satellite is much faster than a dial-up connection.
This delay may not be so noticeable while reading e-mail or searching the web, but certainly is for interactive video games, video conferences, or Skype. Here the delays can be frustratingly long and the applications may not function at all because they have trouble interpreting the latency. This seems to be a problem with human interaction as well. Even when consciously aware of the latency issue, delays in responding are subconsciously interpreted as doubt on the other end, which leads to mistrust between the communicants.
With different plans based on signal speed and options to lease or purchase equipment, broadband is possible for everyone. Satellite internet can be obtained at reasonable cost and works fine for most applications.
About the Author:
If you found this article interesting, You may learn more about satellite broadband from John Lenokon. You can also learn more about ISP services in your area to help you make an educated choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment