[AusNOG] Re: Satellite ISPs

[Kai]

Last year I was working for an organisation with nodes in remote and 
hard to access places like Balgo (no, not Balga in Perth, I'm talking 
Balg0, about 200k's South East of Halls Creek), Kupungarri, Billiluna, 
Imintji, etc

They already had existing two way satellite services which were 
expensive and of course high latency but I was asked to investigate and, 
if practical, implement ISDN on those area's. The idea was of course to 
use the reduced latency of ISDN to make our applications work better 
when used over VPN, whilst also leaving the sallite available as a 
fallback if the ISDN failed and or setting priorities so any traffic not 
destined for the VPN would go over the higher latency satellite and 
leave more room on the ISDN for the VPN traffic.

Being in the Kimberley, wet season monsoons can quickly wipe out a 
satellite service for a few days, sometimes a week or so, but once the 
clouds have cleared (or the cyclones have passed) there's also the 
chance of local exchanges flooding or poorly insulated cables arcing and 
all that, and yes it's expensive to have two services feeding the same 
sites, redundancy is essential when travel time to those sites is at 
least a day by car and there's no regular air services.

BigPond ISDN was the only option availabe and the set-up/installation 
fees were not cheap, the download quota's are also extremely minimal and 
of course the usual Telstra requirement of having all phone/data 
services with Telstra.

eg
http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/dialisdn/isdn_plans/default.jsp
has the requirement to be on BigPond Home
http://www.telstra.com.au/isdn/pricing.htm

I don't have all my research data with me from that project but you're 
welcome to contact me off list with any questions.

Curtis Bayne wrote:

> Hey Edwin,
> 
> Sorry for the late reply - but has your friend considered ISDN? 
> Throughput may not be quite as good, but it may be the only alternative 
> for latency sensitive applications. You'll find that latency 
> on satellite is usually around the ~700-800ms mark, weather and location 
> permitting.
> 
> Curtis 
> 
> 
> On 03/06/2007, at 12:55 PM, Edwin Groothuis wrote:
> 
>> Thanks to all who replied. Much appreciated by my friend, and I've
>> learned quite some about what the possibilities are.