In some cities, you have a choise of wired DSL or cable or even microwave. But in lots of places, people have only one provider of reasonable-speed internet service. It's not unreasonable to demand that a franchised provider, like a phone or cable company, transport packets for a fee but not snoop their contents.
John
Wrong meaning of "Free". Libre vs Gratis.
Is there such a thing as a 2-way satellite link?
Thanks, Rich
There is NoCharge.
Dan
Yes
Except for frequency and distance it's not all that much different than a cell phone tower.
You must live in fantasy land-->"not snoop their contents". The Feds are everywhere.
Yes..how else has the "pay per view", "subscribe to view" etc been serviced? If you your ID code is not seen, the best you see is scrambled video and maybe (some) audio. Been this way since the 80's.
Comcast shouldn't be "The Feds." They should ship stuff, like UPS, and not poke around inside, or charge more for Netflix packets than for their own.
Do you WANT your ISP to selectively slow down packets based on their own self-interest?
John
OK, thanks, but would it be suitable for the Internet, i.e, somebody in the middle of nowhere could point their dish at a satellite and log on and get an uplink as well as a downlink, where, for example, someone could post to USENET, or host their own website?
What I'm getting at is, for example, Joerg, who lives somewhere in the foothills of the Sierras, can't even get a decent microwave link to the TV, and stringing a cable up there would cost a fortune.
Thanks, Rich
Yes, absolutely -- although you certainly pay "rather more" for "rather less" (speed/latency-wise) than with DSL or Cable, as you'd expect. (My recollection is that it's often ~$100/month for something like 512kbps down and 128kbps up, for instance... and the services are typically "more oversold" than DSL/Cable as well -- I recall reading that at busy times of the day, that
256kbps down was often no better than ~50kbps -- modem speeds!, and have finite usage caps. This was a handful of years ago, though, so it's likely a bit better now.)See:
---Joel
ISTR there are also hybrids around that use satellite downlink and a local terrestrial dialup to send packet acknowledges back. This relies on the normal mode of operation being predominantly bulk data flowing from the internet to the user.
The latency for short ack packets by dialup isn't too bad compared to the up and down delay. I suspect gaming would be pretty hopeless though!
A neighbouring village for no obvious reason has a very dodgy exchange that barely supports ADSL. In fact from what I have heard bonded ISDN would be faster on most days. They are a part of an experimental scheme to roll out true high speed broadband to the boonies using directed microwave links from the UK schools educational subnet. This network is underutilised (ie almost dormant) at the times of peak evening demand.
Regards, Martin Brown
Thanks for this. I'm retirement age, and idly contemplating investing in an RV and finally going around seeing the country, maybe visit Canada, and etc.
And of course, as a dedicated internet addict, I'd go nuts in the middle of nowhere with no internet connection! ;-)
Thanks! Rich
You could get a MyFi.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Campsites often have WiFi connections. A good number of restaurants, fast food and other, have free WiFi, as well as public libraries. With a decent newsreader off-line reading isn't too terrible. Stop by one of these joints every day to get your fix(es). ;-)
Consult with the CIA etc about that...
I understand that Dish Network had something like that, cannot say if it is still available or not. Different dish and lash-up than the TV.
yes, AFAIK it's a last resort.
Robert Baer wrote in news:8s6dne1m38QZmnLQnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@posted.localnet:
Yes,it's THEIR business.They get to set their rules. If you don't like that,do business with someone else,or start your own competing business.If you have the better deal,then the customers will patronize you,and the others will change or go out of business.
Besides,they are regulating based on data VOLUME,not on what the content is. It's no different than most water or electric utilities where you are charged a higher rate once you exceed some limit. You need more,you pay more.
In my town, there's only one cable company, an exclusive franchise that pays the city for the privilige of digging up the streets for their cables. Other people have tried to introduce competing technologies, some free, and the city, for some odd reason, never allows it. Imagine that!
AT&T is right now trying to seed San Francisco with a network of super-wideband RF boxes, and getting a lot of official opposition. Google couldn't *pay* the city to allow it to provide free wi-fi.
If you have the better deal,then the customers will
NN would assure that.
Fine, as long as they don't change the handling of packets based on their content or origin.
Cable company premiun channel and PPV revenue will probably be obsoleted by internet downloads of movies and such. Next step, there will be no scheduled TV content at all: everything ever filmed will be available at any time as internet downloads. Cable TV will cease to exist in its present form and the cable will be used purely to move IP packets.
The effects on advertising will be interesting.
John
Yeah, although when I was looking around at Hughesnet's offerings yesterday, it's really pretty decent...
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