ban satellites from nbnco ...says o3b ....

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/28197/127/1/1/......
.... whirlpool.net.au ...and ... itwire .....
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... by Stuart Corner
Monday, 05 October 2009
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Greg Wyler, founder and CEO of future low earth orbit satellite operator, O3b Networks, will address the Senate Enquiry into the NBN to push his company's claims that the round trip delay inherent in geostationary satellite systems makes them unsuitable for providing broadband services to those Australians beyond the reach of the National Broadband Network's fibre.
He is expected to tell the enquiry to demand that latency (the time it takes data to travel from Internet user to host system and back again) for NBN services be required to be less than 180ms.

O3b's interest in the NBN co-incides with comments made recently by NBN Co CEO, Mike Quigley, who acknowledged the latency problem with geostationary satellites , saying: "These satellites are up there at 36,000 kilometres which means it takes light some time to get up there and back."

Wyler will address, by teleconference link, the NBN enquiry hearing to be held in Melbourne on Wednesday 7 October to flesh out his submission lodged earlier with the enquiry.

In that submission, Wyler claimed that "12Mbps is adequate throughput, but the latency must be kept low. With high latency web pages will load slowly, videoconferencing will be stuttered with unnatural gaps and web 2.0 desktop applications will not function well."

He explains that, while there are technologies that help improve the download speed over high latency links by modifying the way the TCP/IP interactions work, these have minimal impact on interactive rich dynamic content where there are lots of server/PC interactions such as web 2.0 applications, gaming or videoconferencing.

His submission cites O3b's tests on the time taken to load the Wall Street Journal's web page over a 10Mbps link when latency is artificially increased: as latency ramps up from less than 50ms to more than 700ms, load time increases linearly from seven to 45 seconds.

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... The planned O3b network will comprise multiple satellites at a height of 8000km, giving a roundtrip latency of a claimed 124ms compared to 550ms for a geostationary satellite.
Wyler claims that, with O3b's 124ms of round trip latency, and 62ms one way latency, voice, videoconferencing and interactive gaming and web sites will allow natural conversation. "Video conferencing for educational, business and medical uses require low latency so that users can interrupt, motion, and maintain proper lip synchronisation. Online gaming requires low latency where reflexes and response times are key to the enjoyment."

He concludes his submission by saying: "While there will be a lot of focus on the throughput of the links (ie 12mbps), we suggest you carefully specify the latency as no greater than 180ms to ensure everyone can both use and develop all of the exciting web 2.0 applications and beyond.

O3b Networks, a company headquartered in the UK's Channel Islands, was formed in 2008 with the stated aim of providing broadband services via a network of low earth orbit satellites (leosats) to the "other three billion" people (hence the name) mostly in developing countries who have limited Internet access. Its satellites are being built by French company Thales Alenia Space and are scheduled to be launched and in operation by late 2010.

O3b does not plan to provide direct links to individual users but to backhaul regional networks that are beyond the reach of fibre. While this concept might be suitable in many densely populated developing nations with poor infrastructure, it does not seem directly applicable to Australia where many of that 'last 10 percent' are very isolated from each other.

However, Wyler claims that "In the Australian environment a combination of terrestrial wireless and O3b satellites will be a cost effective way to reach the remaining households not connected by fibre. For significantly less than 10 percent of the [$43b NBN] budget, the remaining homes can be reached.
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