[KLUG Members] Any sattelite ISP that supports Linux?

[Peter Buxton]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 06:50:29AM -0400, Adam Williams wrote:

> With satellite you've just added roughly a couple of hundred thousand
> miles to your packets travel.  Even at the speed of light (and
> remember, "c" is the speed of light in a vacuum, atmosphere is slower)
> it takes awhile at those distances.

Actually, it's much less than a hundred thousand miles, though this
doesn't help the latency issue. Remember that outer space begins a scant
one hundred miles above the Earth, barely enough to get me to Chicago.

This is a small reminder of the inherent difficulty of the direction
'up:' it took 6-10 thousand years of civilization to get 'up' to low
Earth orbit (Sputnik). 20 years after that, we walked on the moon. And
remember the difference between the Saturn V required to get off the
Earth versus the tiny Lunar Module; the latter escaped the moon (with
one less guy than the Apollo capsule, to be sure) with a tiny puff of a
burn.

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/rocket_sci/satellites/geo-high.html

   For a satellite's orbit period to be one sidereal day,  it must be
   approximately 35,786 kilometers (19,323 nautical miles or 22,241
   statute miles) above the earth's surface.

So your satellite is about 40,000 miles away (from you and its base
station, remember): more than 1.6 times the circumference of the Earth
and far more than your typical packet travels. But the high possible
interactivity of a TCP connection is *far* different than the one-way
streams of video broadcasts (I'm thinking an SMTP transaction).
Satellites cost a lot: no satellite has more router equipment than it
needs, which means it probably is not an intelligent switch, which means
is it basically an expensive mirror.

-- 
http://www.killdevil.org/~peter
ED(1)! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR!