Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Can the idea of using satellites for Rural Broadband really fly?  That's what the RuMBA is asking, and the industry seems up in arms over their conclusion.  The Rural Mobile and Broadband Alliance, or RuMBA for short, released a whitepaper last week detailing the feasibility (or lack thereof) of satellite service as a broadband upline to rural subscribers.

The whitepaper cited, among other things, latency and bandwidth issues.  Latency, in addition to affecting speed in general, makes communication such as VoIP veritably useless over satellite.  And the bandwidth is a simple matter of how many nodes (satellites) there are to service the subscribers and their data demands.  The whitepaper concluded that the capabilities of satellite as a broadband service fall far short of the FCC standards for "broadband" and further would be unsuitable to meet the standard broadband demands such as cloud back-up solutions, realtime video streaming, and other constant high-bandwidth uses.

But proponents of satellite companies are not so happy with the research, calling it biased and innacurate.  Connected Planet points out that satellite companies are enhancing their protocols as we speak to improve on the bandwidth and latency issues.  The article in response to the whitepaper articulates a position that is none-too-pleased with the ommission of these details in the RuMBA's research.

First of all, let's be clear: research surrounding feasibility cannot be based on announced plans that haven't even made their way into production yet.  The fact that several sattelite companies have received stimulus money to invest in improving bandwidth doesn't mean they've done it (they haven't) and cannot be expected to weigh on the conclusions of academic research.

But secondly, can anyone really improve the latency problem?  Satellites travel roughly 1000 miles above the earth's surface.  Now, at first glance, that doesn't seem like much.  It's less than half the distance from New York to LA, and there's relatively low latency on that data journey.  But that's assuming the satellite is directly overhead.  Your chances of that ever happening are roughly 1 in 3.6 Million.  Most of the time, you will be connecting at an obtuse angle to the satellite.  Distances to the node can be 3 to 4x the distance the satellite is from the earth.  And that's just to your first node.  From there, the signal then must be relayed back to earth again.

Short of finding lower orbits or increasing the speed at which radio waves travel, the latency issue for satellite broadband will be insurmountable.  Considering the fact that both of these solutions would be physically impossible, I would have to agree with the findings of the RuMBA's whitepaper.  If rural subscribers are going to enjoy broadband access, it's going to ride waves, but it won't ride them all the way to orbit and back. 

Fixed Wireless Broadband connects to the first terrestrial node within a few miles of signal origination.  Latency is a non-issue.  And as for bandwidth, the federal stimulus money allocated to wireless broadband is not only greater than that of satellite, it's also being implemented in more towers and upgrades as we speak.  The solution to rural broadband is decidedly found in wireless.


posted by Unknown at 10:39 AM Link to this Article

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