ically, an ISP that provides DSL places these DSLAMs in areas where enough people will sign up for DSL to make the service profitable. In rural areas, this simply isn’t feasible. Take my parents’ neighborhood, for example:
- If there were a DSLAM anywhere near them, there would likely be a maximum of ~100 people who could possibly connect to it due to range when using a 17,000-foot range as listed in the Wikipedia quote above.
- Some of their neighbors don’t want high-quality Internet access. This brings the number of possible subscriptions down.
- The phone lines in rural areas aren’t exactly new. Some areas have phone lines that are 30+ years old – even dial-up on many lines can be limited. These bad lines would dramatically decrease the range of a DSLAM – if it even worked at all.
So DSL in rural areas isn’t really a viable option for providers. So what about satellite Internet makes it so slow?
How Satellite Internet Works
This is how satellite internet works:
There are five main steps to satellite Internet:
- You type rwenger.com and press enter. Your satellite dish says “Hey, get Robert’s blog” to the satellite.
- The satellite relays that message to a place back on Earth where these requests are processed.
- That place finds the website with their Internet connection.
- They send the page back to the satellite.
- The satellite sends the page back to you.
It’s obviously a little more complicated, but you get the gist. Signals go between the Earth and the satellite 4 times in this process. How much time does that take? First, we need to know where the satellite is.
Satellites for satellite Internet are in geostationary orbit. This means the satellite is 22,236 miles above the equator, and it orbits the Earth every 24 hours. This makes it so that the satellite stays in the same place in the sky all the time, and you don’t have to keep moving your satellite dish as the satellite moves around the Earth. That would be a problem, so the satellite is kept in the same place above the ground all the time.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s say the customer’s satellite dish is on the equator and directly below the satellite, placing the satellite exactly 22,236 miles away. If the signal travels that distance 4 times, that’s 88,944 miles. These signals are in the electromagnetic spectrum, so they travel at the speed of light (186,282 miles/second). Something going that fast takes ~0.48 seconds to make the entire trip. So if you use a satellite in geostationary orbit, you will wait at least half a second before the page even begins to load, no matter what!
As far as an Internet connection goes, that’s forever.
Once a connection is established, it’s also pretty slow compared to a wired connection. One reason for this is because sending hardware to space is expensive. The cheapest satellite launches for communications satellites right now are around $60 million, and that’s not even including the cost of the satellite itself – easily hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases. Once the hardware is in space, it’s not really possible to change it either, so the company is stuck with years-old satellites meant to deliver lower speeds than what might be possible today. Generally, the fewer satellites a company needs, the cheaper it is, so satellite Internet providers don’t want to launch a lot of extra satellites. And since many customers share each satellite, speeds slow down and bandwidth caps make sure no one uses “too much”.
Besides moving, there aren’t really many other options for rural Internet right now. Cell towers work, but they are also spread thin in rural areas and have data caps. If a cell tower is close enough to your house to be reliable, that’s great, but in many places that’s unlikely.
So let’s make satellite Internet better. How? Move the satellite closer.
Satellites orbiting in Low Earth Orbit are much closer at 100-1200 miles. If there were a satellite 400 miles away, we could communicate with an ISP’s request processing place in about 0.01 second. That pretty much eliminates the issue of lag for gaming, delaye