Back just after the millennium, there were at least two attempts at making a low-cost wide-availability satellite broadband network. They said it would be here in about 2004, with prices comparable to ordinary broadband. Did all of that just die away?
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I don't see satellite broadband ever becoming really popular because there is an inherent latency problem. There two big things in a network are bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is how much information we can move at a time, and latency is how much of a delay there is between the time we send it, and the time it is received.
As an analogy, imagine a car full of DVDs. That would be a huge amount of bandwidth, but terrible latency. Likewise, when information gets transmitted up to a satellite, it has to go a really long way, and there is just no way to get around this.
For something like email, people aren't going to notice the extremely high latency. But for stuff that's really interactive like an online game, the latency will be intolerable. In my mind there are just too many things that would be annoying with the high latency for satellite to ever become really popular.
OK, I hadn't thought about that.
Is there really such a big difference? After all, it's pretty normal on the Internet for a packet to zip around over half the planet through many points before arriving.
'Is there really such a big difference?'
Yes.
Satellite Broadband has been in the U.S. since at least around 2002. It's a big step above dial-up (yes, there are still people on dial-up) and a big step below DSL or Cable.
Yes, the reason I mention it is because several of my net friends are still on dial-up, and so I can't send them video files.
But maybe the latency issue would be different if they did build a serious satellite network with many sats in rather low orbit? So far as I know, the only current option is a satellite far above the equator, no?
Latency also has a severe limiting effect on bandwidth. Often packets have to arrive and get ack'd back before more are sent. This isn't such an issue with bulk file downloads as with pages that contain many components (js,css,html,images etc).
This is why over here in Thailand with 500ms round trips to USA even though the bandwidth is often good I just can't get good page loads.
Downloading from a satellite is one problem, which has been described by the previous posters. Uploading to a satellite is a much more difficult problem.
After all, it's pretty normal on the Internet for a packet to zip around over half the planet through many points before arriving.
Well... no, not really. Much of my internet use is to servers 20-80ms (milliseconds) away from me, leading to fast interaction and fast downloads. Anything through a satellite is a minimum of 270ms away, 5x to 10x longer. That's enough to kill any sense of interactivity.
If you talk to someone far away over the phone, it's very obvious whether you're on undersea fiber versus a satellite link. It takes a little practice to get into the right conversational rhythm to make a satellite phone call work.
Right, thanks to all, I was not quite aware of these things.
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