[KLUG Members] Any sattelite ISP that supports Linux?

[Adam Williams]

>>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
>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

Right, with a strong emphasis on the "and" in "(from you ***and*** its
base station, remember)".  So that's a minimum of ~80,000 miles round
trip.  That is a bloody long ways to go.  And hopefully you've only got
one hop to go (a safe assumption if the receiver is in the USA).  Then
you've still got to be routed through a last mile land line to the
telco's switch, then to an MAE, then to where you actually want to
reach.  Those last steps can be painful enough using DSL! 

If satellites were such a great bi-directional communication method, why
are there fleets of submarines used to lay fiber cable across the ocean
floor?