| Rural France, Ireland, Australia, U.S.: You Get Satellite |
| Written by Dave Burstein |
 France's Natalie Kosciusko-Morizet has allocated 250M euros to satellite while Jonathan Adelstein at RUS has added a dedicated round of stimulus funding. Using satellite for about 1% of homes cuts the cost of universal U.S. "broadband" from $20-35B by about half. Les Echoes/EUTELSAT estimates 750,000 French homes won't get fiber and are candidates for satellite. In Australia, NBN chief Mike Quigley will reach a "few percent" with satellite, capacity he may build or buy. They just started an RFP. Mark Dankberg of Viasat told an FCC workshop the new satellites for 2011 can deliver 5-10 megabits with improved latency, and EUTELSAT has a similar megabird planned for Europe later this year. Satellite bandwidth is shared in a complex fashion, but with a gigabit of spot beams available that speed is plausible. The current French offering from SFR/Tooway is 34.90€ for download speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps and between 2.4 and 4.7 GB of data. An “Endless Night” option also enables users to surf the Internet on an unlimited basis between 11 pm and 7 am (download your movies at night, please.) In Ireland, the offer (from 3) is Tooway 3.6 Mbps broadband service for €19.99 per month, following a one-off €49.00 installation & hardware charge. The lower price reflects a 80M subsidy from the EU and the Irish government for rural broadband.The lower latency comes from improved routers on the bird and some software tricks, not an abroagation of the laws of physics. The signal still needs to travel 22,000 miles to orbit, so there always will be a delay. Dankberg tells me the result will be fine for many purposes, although VOIP calls will probably be worse than most mobile phones. |
