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August 19th 04, 02:38 PM

PAMNO (N2EY) wrote in message ...
In article ,
(Brian Kelly) writes:

Say you orbit a new, state of the art satellite. How much bandwidth
can it provide to how many customers?

A whole bunch. Even the old birds which have been up for years can
repeat something like 900 TV channels and those are not considered
high-capacity satellites.

That means 900 customers can have 6 MHz of bandwidth each. Or maybe 5400 can
have 1 MHz each.

That's with antique satellites, not with the monster birds being
tossed up these days each of which which has orders of magnitude more
capacity than the TV repeaters.

When the satellite repeats a channel, it doesn't matter how many
people watch
it. Internet bandwidth is a completely different beast.

Welp, I read recently that several new satellite ISPs have jumped into
that biz so common sense indicates that they have to have unused
bandwidth available in copious supply or they wouldn't have opened
shop. Fact is that the demand for sattelite access is very
cost-limited which automatically keeps the need for bandwidth down to
manageable levels. Sattelite comms will continue to grow in markets
where the users are 'way out in the boonies where cables will never go
and they don't have any options and there are plenty of those. Then
comes the huge and growing market for sattelite mobile comms. And the
consumer market populated by folk who just like working the birds.

It appears to me that in the limit and ignoring some obvious realities
the Wi-fi vs. Satellite market competition won't be a competition. By
their very natures Wi-fi or some evloutionary form of Wi-fi will grab
the big pieces of the light-duty consumer and business travel markets
and the sattelites will continue to carry the heavy duty business
mobile and remote access comms.

And all this with the monster volume of *really* broadband military
sattelite comms sharing the RF spectrum with the commercials.

Compare that to what is
available in a single fiber. Also remember that once the duct is in
place, pulling another fiber isn't that expensive, and that new
technologies permit more bandwidth in existing fibers.

What "ducts"?? There aren't any ducts running into farms and vacation
lodges out in the boonies. They'll have the last mile problem for
years to come. Until the phone companies replace their twisted-pair
wiring with cable, fiber optic and otherwise.

I meant ducts that carry it to within a mile of the customer.

Many people in this country live twenty and more miles from anything
even vaguely resembling a cable. Wi-fi is never gonna reach them.

Ducts that go
across the country, etc. Satellites can't create another RF spectrum.

What's a "duct" anyway? How many of those are running all over North
Dakota and Idaho??

73 de Jim, N2EY