Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan

[Not Me]

CNN) -- Japan launched a rocket Saturday carrying a satellite that will test new technology that promises to deliver "super high-speed Internet" service to homes and businesses around the world.
art.japansat.ap.jpg

A rocket carrying a super-fast Internet satellite lifts off from its launch pad on the Japanese island of Tanagashima.

The rocket carrying the WINDS satellite -- a joint project of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries -- lifted off its pad at 5:55 p.m. (0855 GMT).

If the technology proves successful, subscribers with small dishes will connect to the Internet at speeds many times faster than what is now available over residential cable or DSL services.

The Associated Press said the satellite would offer speeds of up to 1.2 gigabytes per second.



Does it bother anyone else that we have abdicated this technology as well??

More at http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/23/japan.satellite/index.html

[SKKY]

1. At those speeds...

...this is where the internet will get really interesting! I hope it works as advertised.

[papau]

2. just how does this help if on the ends of the lines the hard disk is limited to 10000 rpm and R/W

speeds that can't keep up with FIOS/cable now?

[ProdigalJunkMail]

4. hard drive will always be the slowest link

gotta come up with new storage medium that can cope with the demands...

sP

[Pavulon]

12. hybrid solid state and 15k scsi or solid state

offer massive speeds. The latency is (and always will be) in the switching fabric to carry the load.

this is in datacenter storage grids. PC technology flows down from this technology.

[Tesha]

5. Not all data is cached on disk. And it's now easy to buy a system with 2+ GB of RAM.

Hell, this four-year old PowerBook I'm typing on
has a gigabyte!

Tesha

[Pavulon]

11. No more..Dual Loop

scsi 15k has massive io capability. Now I am talking about storage arrays, not your mac or desktop. A single 4gps card will pull 150,000 iops per second across glass.

The SAN switch in the middle can process Tbs. That is the wiki database in seconds.

Million plus iop arrays are the norm in scientific computing.

In 3 years we will be using hybrid solid state/platter disk.

In 5 we will be on solid state drives. 100Gbs E is in the works as well as faster technology. This will give order of magnitude improvement.

You can piggyback fc over ip.

Bottom line disk is no longer a choke point.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

18. maybe I am misunderstanding your terms...

but a simple Cisco Catalyst 6 series switch can pass (at max scalability) 256Gbps across its backplane. The SCSI interface and the fibre channel interface are MUCH slower than that...and that interface can carry more data than can be offloaded from the platters. You start working into carrier class switches you are easily into the Tb range. So I can still move data through my network faster than you can put it onto or take it off a disk...

And, just a note...solid state disks are available already. Haven't read much about them...but they are out there.

sP

[Pavulon]

21. Cisco 9500 , silkworms, and Nexus 7000

all have very fast backplanes. Depending on how you slice it 384 Gbps to 2.4 Tbps. FC tolerates ZERO packet loss and microsecond latency.

Most of these oversubscribe. The internals of many arrays are using infiniband to move data to many disks.

So the writes are spread out, random reads are still tricky but get faster. Each disk caches and has a 2Gps interface.

An array can easily consist of hundreds of these.

400 Gps thruput. 4 infiniband connections.
http://www.superssd.com/products/ramsan-400/indexb.htm

[ProdigalJunkMail]

22. i remember reading about infinband years ago...

thought it was sort of left to languish...guess it got picked up and put to good use. and i can see where striping the data across many disks can have an advantage...but do any web servers out there sport this kind of stuff? most of my work is in the networking world...i have worked on large SAN arrays but nothing quite so speedy as 400Gbps on the throughput side...that must be fun!

Thanks for the info, fellow geek...

sP

[slackmaster]

14. Your midget porn downloads will always be bottlenecked at your hard drive

For anything other than transferring very large files, greater bandwidth is always a good thing.

[CRF450]

15. It also depends on the bandwidth of the server hosting the pages.

[Warren DeMontague]

17. That was why I got into midget porn in the first place.

Smaller files.

...sorry. couldn't resist. going to hell. I know.

[EOTE]

28. Current SATA drives have bandwidth up to 3 Gbps.

That's orders of magnitude faster than the fastest FIOS available now. Hard drives are definitely not the weak link with broadband.

[Wcross]

3. Latency will still make useless for gaming/trading stocks.

That is the problem with satellite internet & there is no way around it.

[CRF450]

6. Agreed

Its sure fast as hell, but there'd still be a delay in the signal that makes it no good for gaming. My brother has the fastest internet speed available to him at 8mb/s, but when it comes to loading up regular web pages, its no faster than my internet speed at 800kb/s. I think thats mainly because of the bandwith limit from the servers running x webpages, and also the fact that the pc will have to load and display the contents of the page. But when downloading big files, it does download much faster than my connection most of the time.

[originalpckelly]

7. Indeed!

I'm glad someone else picked up on that. How the hell is this even useful? I guess if you're downloading like a movie or something, but games and stocks and other real-time information will not do well over satellite.

[DS1]

27. route UDP such as gaming and other peer systems through the land-based systems

put youtube and http up through the sat.

[Orsino]

16. Yes. "Speed" is a misleading term.

Their gigabit-per-second throughput can't get around the forty-thousand-mile round-trip through the satellite.

[fascisthunter]

8. Hurry Up... I Want to Get Rid of Comcast

that company disgusts me

[Wcross]

9. I'm waiting for internet over power lines.

They have a test going on right now in I think Pittsburgh (not sure). The only drawback is it interferes with ham radio transmissions.

[fascisthunter]

10. No Kidding.... Do You Have a Link?

I'm interested..

[Wcross]

19. I just did this google search, take your pick.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GWYE_enUS258US258&q=internet+over+power+lines

It isn't developing as fast as I thought it would unfortunatly. I am currently using wildblue satellite internet, it is expensive & slow compared to cable internet. It is either a phone connection at 26kbps or satellite.

[fascisthunter]

23. I'll Check it Out... thanks (nt)

[Canuckistanian]

25. I know what you mean

I live in the country and I have a choice between satellite (expensive, slow-responding) and a far-off wireless provider that wants me to build a new 85' tower in order to get their faint signal.

So, I'm stuck with dial-up.

The irony as I see it is that I live 1/2 hour from the technology mecca of Canada (Kanata) and I'm still stuck with an Internet technology that basically hasn't changed since the early 1990's.

Ridiculous.

[Wcross]

26. I feel your pain.

I am about 12 miles outside of the closest town with cable internet. They will never run cable out here as there are to few people to make it worth their while.

[CRF450]

13. My dad has a ham radio setup too.

No problems with power lines here, but what interferes with his radio is a hunting dog tracking collar thats sometimes left running from a neighbors house. It operates on the same frequency as our local repeater's freq.

[KharmaTrain]

20. Wireless National Cheap Internet

The Japanese, Koreans and Taiwan Chinese have been miles ahead of us in Internet development for years now. They're moving forward with what is termed "convergence"...melding its Internet, cellphones, broadcast and other communications. We're just starting to enter that world with the I-Phone...they're already able to listen to radio via their cellphones or mixing broadcast television with computers...making a fully interactive system. This satellite creates the bandwidth that will make these systems work effectively.

There are groups trying to get the same types of services here, but have meet resistance from both "old technology" that has their own "solutions" which generally are some proprietory system...such as HD Radio or Satellite Radio...along with a very poor economy that has taken most the cash out of the U.S. tech market. It never recovered after the NASDAQ crash in 2000.

[ldf]

24. if it will allow me to tell time warner (cable modem) to kiss my ass

i am SOOOOO there....

:thumbsup: