xplornet contact or any experience with their satellite service?

Mel Beckman mel at beckman.org
Tue Apr 21 18:54:27 UTC 2020


It’s not really oversold bandwidth. It’s just that the turnaround time for a bolus of data is too long for two-way video conferencing to be smooth or reliable. It’s like video conferencing using post cards :)

 -mel 

> On Apr 21, 2020, at 11:36 AM, Brian J. Murrell <brian at interlinx.bc.ca> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2020-04-21 at 11:11 -0700, Sabri Berisha wrote:
>> Hi,
> 
> Hi,
> 
>> Where I worked, phy transmissions are scheduled based on tokens. A UT
>> must have a token to transmit data. If there is no congestion, a
>> token will be available and the UT or ground station may transmit.
>> Congestion does not need to exist in the ground network or even the
>> transponder. It can even be in the spectrum of that geographical
>> area. 
> 
> Interesting.  So basically as Mel said, over-sold network.  :-(
> 
>> To overcome the latency,
> 
> Latency (AFAIU) is not really his primary issue.  it's the lack of
> consistency in bandwidth.  Periods of a second or two even where there
> is no transmission of anything at all followed by a second or two of
> transmission bursting even beyond his subscribed "rate".  This effects
> his subscribed rate but in a really bad way for real-time traffic such
> as live/two-way video.  He'd much, much more rather get a consistent
> pipe at his prescribed rate rather than an average of it over longer
> periods of time because then the codec would not have be encoding for
> those super bad periods of time where there are 1-2 seconds of no
> bandwidth at all.
> 
>> Satellite is obviously not the optimal medium for video conferencing,
> 
> Indeed.
> 
>> but I would recommend that your friend tries to ratelimit their
>> transmissions.
> 
> He doesn't need to.  The over-congested network is doing that for him. 
> :-(  In any case, I don't know that he has any way to put a rate limit
> on the tools he is using.
> 
>> The reason why your latency is higher than you expect,
> 
> It actually isn't.  It's nowhere near as high as I had come to
> (anecdotally -- I'd never had reason to do the math on the latency
> before now) believe it would be.
> 
> Fortunately he might be a candidate for Xplornet (or others') WISP
> services.  Hopefully they are a bit more stable.
> 
> Cheers,
> b.
> 


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