So, my parents livr in an area where the only internet available is satellite. It sucks.
However, they also have satellite TV and can watch that no problem.
What’s the difference? Is it just a scale issue where TV has more money and resources compared to satellite internet companies?
In: Technology
One way of looking at it is that viewing a 1080p (HD) TV channel takes about 10-20mbps data download to view. So satellite is able to handle that bandwidth quite easily, also watching tv require VERY little upload signal. Basically enough to change the channel. Whereas a very low end internet connection is around 100mbps, my current home internet is 1500mbps and there are plans offering up to 8000, on top of that, internet requires a fair bit more upload capacity for many things like sending email attachments, uploading photos, gaming etc.
Have they looked at starlink?
Because beaming to a TV is mostly a one way exchange.
And it’s set data.
Internet is data both ways. Various data from anywhere in the world.
Because TV is not interactive, and satellite communications have some amount of built-in latency because of how far from earth the satellites have to be.
Latency is the time it takes for a signal to travel from you to whatever server and back again, and because communication satellites are generally in geostationary orbit so you can point your dish at the satellite and it doesn’t move. That means they have to be really far from the earth (because the closer you are the faster you travel relative to the surface of the earth) – about 35,000km – and because radio waves can’t travel faster than light it takes a certain amount of time for a signal to go from you to the satellite to the server and back.
According to [this](https://www.satsig.net/latency.htm) website the minimum latency for a single round-trip (say, to request the data from the server) is about 240 milliseconds if you’re on the equator, but then it’s another 240ms minimum before you get the data you asked for. This is also just the absolute minimum time it takes for the radio waves to get there and back again, so it’s not accounting for things like signal processing time at the satellite and on the server, any data that needs to be resent because of weather, etc, so it could end up being hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds (I tried playing WoW over Hughesnet in a storm once and my ping consistently read north of 8000ms, or 8 full seconds.)
TV signals are easier in this regard because it’s just a continuous one-way transmission, so even if it takes several seconds to get to you you don’t notice, then it’s just a question of bandwidth (the amount of data that can be sent in a given period of time.) However, there is hope for the future of satellite internet from programs like Starlink. What Starlink does differently is instead of putting one big expensive satellite in geostationary orbit they’re putting tons of small cheap ones in low earth orbit (550km instead of 35,000km) and bouncing the signal between them to get it from you to its destination and back. The round-trip transit time to Starlink satellites and back is on the order of 5ms (not counting for bouncing the signal between satellites, etc) rather than 240ms. Even if all told it winds up being 50ms that’s still a pretty reasonably low amount of latency, good enough for most online gaming even.
Internet requires back and forth. You ping my IP addresses, I ping your IP addresses. Broadcasting unlimited data(that might require a code) to everyone is much easier
Every bit you get from the internet is YOUR bit. You request if from a server, it is addressed to you and sent to you.
A television broadcast is sent out to everyone. Hell, the broadcast signal is hitting empty fields and mountaintops. Every bit is sent just once and a virtually unlimited number of people can get it.
Transmitting a single bit to everyone simultaneously means you just have to deal with that one bit.
Transmitting many, many different bits to many many different people requires lots of bits and the pipelines for moving them around get crowded.
Of course, the drawback of broadcast is that “everyone gets the same thing”. You aren’t selecting a web page you want to view or stating a show when you want. You are reliant on the broadcast schedule.
It’s easy to shout into a megaphone so a crowd of people can hear you. It’s much harder to perfectiby understand 100 conversations shouted at you at the same time.
Broadcast television is sending one signal in one direction over a wide area. No special antenna hardware needed, bandwidth usage remains low.
Satellite internet needs to send and receive multiple, separate signals. All those individual signals have to compete for limited bandwidth (both in the radio spectrum and the satellite’s processing power), slowing down the service for everyone.
Starlink seems to have mitigated this problem by basically just throwing more and more satellites with special directional antennas at it. Seems to work, but expensive as hell and there’s still the problem of high ping since the signal has to travel a greater distance to space and back.
It’s the difference between shining a light and having a billion lights all flashing a code at you, while you’re shining a billion coded lights back – perfectly.
It’s just not the same at all.
Satellite TV is like getting 80,000 people at a football game to hear an announcement.
Satellite Internet is like getting them all to hear different things, and being able to hear all of them reply.
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