[KLUG Members] Any sattelite ISP that supports Linux?

[Adam Williams]

>Geosyncheonus orbit, for a single uplink-downling pair, is 47,000 miles,
>or 210 ms. something like 96% of the traffic can be characterized this
>way. At 210 ms, the packet is STILL in delay lines and buffers for that
>(typical) 500-1200 ms at the ground stations....so the shortest part of
>the trip is... the trip!

Depending upon ones provider it is possible to ping (yes, these are
small packets) sites in the UK with sub-200ms round trip times, using a
hard line.   Below 200ms applications like VNC, SSH, and VOIP all work
well, even compressed X is "usable".  Passing 250ms and such
applications start to exhibit a noticeable performance problem.  So a
guaranteed extra 200ms on every packet can be pretty painful.

Also the hacks applied to satellite IP stacks include huge window sizes
(often fixed, not sliding),  the primary purpose is to reduce ACK/NAK
confirmation traffic.  But [effectively] disabling ACK/NAK can very well
introduce additional performance problems, especially during signal
brown outs due to rain fade and other atmospheric disturbances.

SNA connections can be tuned to provide intelligently efficient traffic
over these high latency lines but I haven't seen any provider offer that
to home users. :)  

When we did satellite we created a connection pool of LU6.2s and "muxed"
network connections over those.  It worked pretty well but I think that
is WAY beyond the home user.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
This message undoubtedly processed by the purely benevolent "US
Department of Homeland Security",  but don't worry... they're
only goal is to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of property.