Local Terrestrial Wireless Broadband Services

StarLAN Consulting Services strongly recommends Air-Pipe of Spokane as your first choice for wireless broadband connectivity.  Air-Pipe's network is based upon Motorola's Canopy™ system.  Designed from the ground up to provide wireless networks from 1000 feet to 25 miles, Motorola Canopy™ is the leading edge technology for high-speed, wireless Internet access. It is a proprietary technology, making it one of the most robust and secure wireless technologies on the market. How secure is it? The US government uses Motorola Canopy™ equipment in military and disaster recovery deployments. It is both secure and reliable.

Motorola Canopy™ is not Wi-Fi, it does not succumb to interference from common consumer electronics and appliances. It is not 802.11 wireless. Motorola Canopy™ is designed for long distance high-speed Internet Access. 802.11, 2.4GHz, or Wi-Fi by any other name, is designed for 10 to 1000 feet only. Visit the Motorola Canopy™ website and learn more about it. Better still, Visit the Air-Pipe website for a complete rundown on their technology and availability in your area.

Satellite Broadband Services

Consumer-grade satellite services are offered by three mainstream companies: WildBlue, StarBand and HughesNet (formerly DirecWay). Each offers services ranging in speeds from .5 to 1.5 megabits per second for downloads and from 50 to 256 kilobits per second for uploads. Note the disparity between upload and download speeds - kilobits vs megabits. This is quite common across the entire range of broadband services - not just the satellite-based ones. The reason for this is that most Internet use involves a relatively small request sent from you the user to a server which then delivers the content - a web page, for example - that you requested. The request is small, but the delivered product can be quite large. Generally speaking, 90 percent of residential internet usage is download - the other 10 percent is upload in the form of emails, emails with attachments and web page requests. Service providers allocate their bandwidth accordingly.

All of the consumer-grade offerings with the exception of WildBlue have one thing in common: they operate over what are called DVB/RCS networks. DVB/RCS stands for Digital Video Broadcast / Return Channel Satellite. In short, these companies achieve a two-way internet access solution by means of a hack of standard network protocols sitting on top of a network architecture originally designed exclusively for video. You have to play a few tricks with the TCP/IP protocol stack that all internet traffic uses to get from point A to point B in order to get halfway decent speeds (or apparent speeds) on such a network. The exact and detailed explanations for all of this get pretty deep and arcane in a hurry, but the Educate Me section of this website will explain a great deal of it. The important thing to understand is that the tricks used to squeeze performance of any kind out of a DVB/RCS network cripple just about everything except basic web surfing and email access. There are some exceptions to this, but they exist at the enterprise-class levels of service and technology.

Here's what consumer-grade satellite services will do:

• Everyday internet browsing. Use your browser to go anywhere you want to go.
• email. Get your email through a web-based email system and/or a local email client like Outlook, Microsoft Live Mail or Entourage on the Mac side. Works likea champ with both StarBand and WildBlue.
• Remote connectivity - with limitations. Some forms of remote connectivity  - that is, the ability to connect to another local area network via the Internet - will work with StarBand and WildBlue, but with specific qualifications. None of the methods typically used by telecommuters and corporate connectivity clients are explicitly supported by StarBand and WildBlue. For example, Citrix Metaframe clients will work on both networks, but performance is significantly better on StarBand's Nova product offering. The reason is that the StarBand network's latency is lower than that of WildBlue. By about half. That's significant when you're looking at keystroke lag. SSL-based VPN s will also work tolerably well over WildBlue and significantly better over StarBand. IPSec-based VPN s are non-starters over either network at this time, but StarBand may choose to support that level of connectivity at some time in the future.

Here's what consumer-grade satellite services won't do:

• VoIP, or Voice over IP. This means that telephone-over-internet services such as Vonage, Skype and Nuvio either won't perform well or just won't work at all.
• IPSec VPN support. The architecture of consumer satellite internet systems is such that IPSec-based  VPN (virtual private network) connections work so slowly that they are for all intents and purposes unusable. Since the majority of VPN clients are IPSec-based, however, you'll have to get a careful assessment of your VPN usage before committing to WildBlue.
• VLAN suport. Same issue as VPN support. If your workplace uses VLANs as a way of knitting together different network segments, this won't work at all over any of the consumer satellite networks. VLAN support is also one the linchpins used to implement Quality of Service (QoS) network architectures necessary for multi-line VoIP solutions.
• Streaming audio and video. Consumer satellite networks are all bandwidth-limited, regardless of the speeds they advertise. So getting movies and music over these connections will quickly trigger their various 'Acceptable Use' or Fair Access' policies. This means that you'll find yourself busted back down to dialup speeds or less for transgressing these often obscure policies. Go to the link shown here to get a good look at how these policies might affect you. So think twice before downloading last week's episode of Desperate Housewives.
• Network support. As we mentioned above, multiple workstations using a single consumer-grade satellite connection will quickly trigger these companies'  'Acceptable Use' or Fair Access' policies. All it takes in some cases is three or four machines downloading a software service pack or update simultaneously. And that's a business-killer, folks.
• Remote access. See our discussion above.

The Takeaway:

If you want to do any of the things listed above, then consumer-grade satellite internet services are not for you. If you even think that you might want to do any of the things listed above, then consumer-grade satellite internet services are not for you.

Don't buy them or you will be disappointed!