[TowerTalk] The Socialized Power Grid

[Jim Lux]

----- Original Message -----
From: <tower at coffeepower.net>
To: <towertalk at contesting.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 23, 2005 5:07 PM
Subject: [TowerTalk] The Socialized Power Grid


>   In the past my first 'high speed' internet was DirecPC (downlink only
> sat.)  You use your exisiting modem to transmit your requests and
> everything comes down over the satellite.   You CAN (or could) get good
> speed off of sat.  I used to multi-thread my downloads and get T1 speeds
> all the time.  Of course DirecPC had serious customer service / quality
> issues as they liked to randomly throttle people that actually wanted to
> USE the bandwith they were paying for.  'Fair access policy' they called
> it.  Oddly enough I didn't think there was a big demand on my bird at 2
> in the morning on a wednesday or the like.

You'd be surprised.  Middle of the night is when big companies do mass
transfers to branch offices, etc.   If you go to (what used to be) Hughes's
website, it's full of promo material about how you can distribute sales
videos, update inventory databases, etc., overnight.  It was originally very
much pitched as a service where the satellite served as a link between
caches, and so the long latency for the trip up and back to the bird wasn't
a big deal, and for one-to-many links, the uplink (to the bird) bandwidth
was essentially shared.

This model is still quite common with VSAT  (Very Small Aperture Terminal)
based systems.. those dishes you see on top of a gas-station, for instance.
Many businesses have large data transfer needs to many locations, but don't
need interactive response, and renting a transponder for an hour for a
multimegabit per second blast from a satellite is much cheaper than buying a
stack of T1s to every little node.


>
>   I am currently using 802.11b wireless interenet access off of a tower
> that is probably between 5 and 10 miles away (guessing).  I currently
> get about 750k speeds off of it.
>
>