Fast satellite Internet

On Sunday I sent an email to Skymesh, complaining that my satellite Internet connection had degenerated to the point of being unusable. I received an automated reply, then I waited for a human to respond...

All day yesterday I waited, no reply, awful Internet, had to resort to dialup.

This morning, my satellite Internet is so incredibly fast, it has never been this good. So, it looks like a human has done something. Quite incredible.

The Skymesh site has a speed-test tool, and at about 7am local time I ran it and got this:

Data center: Sysdney
Earth station: Kalgoorlie
Distance: 78,000 km
Satellite: IPSTAR-1, Beam 501
Ping: 828ms
Download: 510 kbps
Upload: 246 kbps

Running the test again at 8.30am local time, it is a bit slower, but this time I discovered something very interesting. I have both SeaMonkey and Firefox installed, and I can run either, even simultaneously. Running the speed test, SM reports a ping latency of 2,675ms, whereas FF reports 627ms. Oh!

The Skymesh support page http://www.skymesh.net.au/support/ has some suggestions for optimising FF, but I checked and SM and FF are configured the same. So, why the difference in the latency report?

Anyway, my subjective impression is that SM is accessing the web just as fast as FF.

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Comments

MSCI
Username: ttuuxxx
Hi Barry, maybe soon if Julia wakes up and smells the coffee, she might open her eyes to a better NBN, Canada has always been a leader in fiber optics like JDS Uniphase, at one time in the 1990's JDSU stock was worth almost 50% of the Canadian stock market. Anyways the latest is that this Canadian satellite company is going to launch 78 low level satellite's at a cost of $11 million dollars and Each MSCI satellite has a data-transfer capacity of 12 gigabits per second and Each satellite will provide coverage to a circular area of about 7 million square miles. That's a lot of bang for the the buck. Doing something like that for Australia would be way cheaper than the NBN. http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20028859-264.html

MSCI oops
Username: ttuuxxx
"Sorry Barry its not at a cost of $11 Million, It should be $11Billion, still really cheap for 78 of them. ttuuxxx

will I ever get this right lol
Username: ttuuxxx
"Sorry once again the link about the 78 sat's is http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20028859-264.html and the Sat's homepage http://www.commstellation.com/ I have no clue how that other link in the first post was posted. ttuuxxx

Re 78 satellites
Username: BarryK
"ttuuxxx, That is really interesting. Yeah, it is a real worry that the NBN might end up being a white elephant. Don't want to get into a political argument, but perhaps the coalition's option of a lower-cost more cautious financial outlay would have been better. On the otherhand, perhaps the fibre cable is better from a national security viewpoint. The technology for shooting down satellites is also advancing. ...just wild speculation!

skymesh
Username: scsijon
"http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1594266&p=-1 online access to the big boss of skymesh for it's users. He already "knows" your name and your Puppy connections. Yell if you need help. regards scsijon

Tags: general