The service is new and not my preference for telephone link.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/29/satellite_broadband/
Posted in Broadband, 29th September 2012 08:29 GMT
Dish, the US satellite provider, has switched on its home domestic
broadband service, but while Americans embrace satellite Europeans don't
seem interested in talking to their birds.
dishNET is offering 5Mb/s down, 1Mb/s up, for $40 to anywhere in the USA, via the Jupiter-1 bird. That will compete with HughesNet, which has already got 700,000 connections in America, and ViaSat, some of whose 500,000 customers are signed up through Dish's existing broadband offering (which resells capacity on ViaSat-1 and Hughes Satellite).
But while Americans are lapping up satellite broadband, here in
Europe it's perceived as a stop-gap at best - certainly not for the long
term despite the fact that just about every UK lottery ticket is
authorised over satellite and there's enough capacity to supply
broadband to the remotest regions of the British isles.
Chris Britton, MD of Hughes Network Systems Europe, is pretty clear
why that is: historical prejudice and lack of government investment,
combined with protectionist telcos more worried about squeezing their
copper than providing connectivity to the boondocks.
The arguments against satellite broadband are twofold: the inevitable latency involved in bouncing a signal up to geostationary orbit, and the inherent inefficiency in broadcasting the downstream signal to the whole footprint. The latency is still there, but these days satellites use the same beam-forming tech which makes wi-fi so much better, enabling directional spot beams at frequencies high enough to permit simultaneous connections without interference.
The higher frequencies (Ka, starting at 26GHz) also mean a smaller dish. HYLAS-2, the Avanti bird which went into orbit last month and should complete testing in the next few weeks, can use a dish less than 70cm across - a shade bigger than the 50cm Sky Minidish, but with similar requirements for fitting, which should make it an easy sell to residential customers if only the channel existed to do that.
Avanti has, we're told, been talking to the telcos about reselling HYLAS connections. HYLAS-1, the operational bird which does TV as well as broadband, is filling up at an acceptable rate, but ordinary customers are often put off by the necessity of dealing with unknown resellers operating out of light industrial units: filling HYLAS-2 will require a better route to market.
Enterprise users are better served - Hughes likes to highlight the UK's National Lottery, which uses more than thirty thousand satellite connections to authorise every ticket sold. DSL is used for a few sites, but the vast majority use a dedicated satellite connection for the reliability and independence it offers - justifications that are repeated at other deployments.
Another good satellite customer is out-of-town shops, which don't want to be beholden to the developer's connectivity. But for European end users satellite is still perceived as expensive: a temporary solution at best.
Britton would like to see more government subsidy for satellite installations - some of that £150m broadband pot - but the EU has already stumped up half the cost of developing the first HYLAS bird and if the UK government were to start subsidising ground stations then BT would want equivalent funding for putting wires and fibres in the ground.
And it's hard not to see their point - fibre, ultimately, provides greater capacity and lower latency, and an investment which will never be redundant. Your correspondent has two satellite earth stations, both capable of connecting to services which went bankrupt years ago. HYLAS-2 should be good for 15 years, but buying connectivity that way requires a trust which doesn't exist in Europe just yet, and won't until our version of Dish or similar gets behind the idea. ®"
dishNET is offering 5Mb/s down, 1Mb/s up, for $40 to anywhere in the USA, via the Jupiter-1 bird. That will compete with HughesNet, which has already got 700,000 connections in America, and ViaSat, some of whose 500,000 customers are signed up through Dish's existing broadband offering (which resells capacity on ViaSat-1 and Hughes Satellite).
The arguments against satellite broadband are twofold: the inevitable latency involved in bouncing a signal up to geostationary orbit, and the inherent inefficiency in broadcasting the downstream signal to the whole footprint. The latency is still there, but these days satellites use the same beam-forming tech which makes wi-fi so much better, enabling directional spot beams at frequencies high enough to permit simultaneous connections without interference.
The higher frequencies (Ka, starting at 26GHz) also mean a smaller dish. HYLAS-2, the Avanti bird which went into orbit last month and should complete testing in the next few weeks, can use a dish less than 70cm across - a shade bigger than the 50cm Sky Minidish, but with similar requirements for fitting, which should make it an easy sell to residential customers if only the channel existed to do that.
Avanti has, we're told, been talking to the telcos about reselling HYLAS connections. HYLAS-1, the operational bird which does TV as well as broadband, is filling up at an acceptable rate, but ordinary customers are often put off by the necessity of dealing with unknown resellers operating out of light industrial units: filling HYLAS-2 will require a better route to market.
Enterprise users are better served - Hughes likes to highlight the UK's National Lottery, which uses more than thirty thousand satellite connections to authorise every ticket sold. DSL is used for a few sites, but the vast majority use a dedicated satellite connection for the reliability and independence it offers - justifications that are repeated at other deployments.
Another good satellite customer is out-of-town shops, which don't want to be beholden to the developer's connectivity. But for European end users satellite is still perceived as expensive: a temporary solution at best.
Britton would like to see more government subsidy for satellite installations - some of that £150m broadband pot - but the EU has already stumped up half the cost of developing the first HYLAS bird and if the UK government were to start subsidising ground stations then BT would want equivalent funding for putting wires and fibres in the ground.
And it's hard not to see their point - fibre, ultimately, provides greater capacity and lower latency, and an investment which will never be redundant. Your correspondent has two satellite earth stations, both capable of connecting to services which went bankrupt years ago. HYLAS-2 should be good for 15 years, but buying connectivity that way requires a trust which doesn't exist in Europe just yet, and won't until our version of Dish or similar gets behind the idea. ®"
I like The Register and do not spend enough time with it.
Nothing caught my attention at slash-dot.
Krugman on Monday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/opinion/krugman-the-real-referendum.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
"Republicans came into this campaign believing that it would be a
referendum on President Obama, and that still-high unemployment would
hand them victory on a silver platter. But given the usual caveats — a
month can be a long time in politics, it’s not over until the votes are
actually counted, and so on — it doesn’t seem to be turning out that
way.
Yet there is a sense in which the election is indeed a referendum, but
of a different kind. Voters are, in effect, being asked to deliver a
verdict on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, on Social
Security, Medicare and, yes, Obamacare, which represents an extension of
that legacy. Will they vote for politicians who want to replace
Medicare with Vouchercare, who denounce Social Security as
“collectivist” (as Paul Ryan once did), who dismiss those who turn to
social insurance programs as people unwilling to take responsibility for
their lives?
If the polls are any indication, the result of that referendum will be a
clear reassertion of support for the safety net, and a clear rejection
of politicians who want to return us to the Gilded Age. But here’s the
question: Will that election result be honored?
I ask that question because we already know what Mr. Obama will face if
re-elected: a clamor from Beltway insiders demanding that he immediately
return to his failed political strategy of 2011, in which he made a
Grand Bargain over the budget deficit his overriding priority. Now is
the time, he’ll be told, to fix America’s entitlement problem once and
for all. There will be calls — as there were at the time of the
Democratic National Convention — for him to officially endorse
Simpson-Bowles, the budget proposal issued by the co-chairmen of his
deficit commission (although never accepted by the commission as a
whole).
And Mr. Obama should just say no, for three reasons.
First, despite years of dire warnings from people like, well, Alan
Simpson and Erskine Bowles, we are not facing any kind of fiscal crisis.
Indeed, U.S. borrowing costs are at historic lows, with investors
actually willing to pay the government for the privilege of owning
inflation-protected bonds. So reducing the budget deficit just isn’t the
top priority for America at the moment; creating jobs is. For now, the
administration’s political capital should be devoted to passing
something like last year’s American Jobs Act and providing effective
mortgage debt relief.
Second, contrary to Beltway conventional wisdom, America does not have
an “entitlements problem.” Mainly, it has a health cost problem, private
as well as public, which must be addressed (and which the Affordable
Care Act at least starts to address). It’s true that there’s also, even
aside from health care, a gap between the services we’re promising and
the taxes we’re collecting — but to call that gap an “entitlements”
issue is already to accept the very right-wing frame that voters appear
to be in the process of rejecting.
Finally, despite the bizarre reverence it inspires in Beltway insiders —
the same people, by the way, who assured us that Paul Ryan was a brave
truth-teller — the fact is that Simpson-Bowles is a really bad plan, one
that would undermine some key pieces of our safety net. And if a
re-elected president were to endorse it, he would be betraying the trust
of the voters who returned him to office.
Consider, in particular, the proposal to raise the Social Security
retirement age, supposedly to reflect rising life expectancy. This is an
idea Washington loves — but it’s also totally at odds with the reality
of an America in which rising inequality is reflected not just in the
quality of life but in its duration. For while average life expectancy
has indeed risen, that increase is confined to the relatively well-off
and well-educated — the very people who need Social Security least.
Meanwhile, life expectancy is actually falling for a substantial part of
the nation.
Now, there’s no mystery about why Simpson-Bowles looks the way it does.
It was put together in a political environment in which progressives,
and even supporters of the safety net as we know it, were very much on
the defensive — an environment in which conservatives were presumed to
be in the ascendant, and in which bipartisanship was effectively defined
as the effort to broker deals between the center-right and the hard
right.
Barring an upset, however, that environment will come to an end on Nov.
6. This election is, as I said, shaping up as a referendum on our social
insurance system, and it looks as if Mr. Obama will emerge with a clear
mandate for preserving and extending that system. It would be a
terrible mistake, both politically and for the nation’s future, for him
to let himself be talked into snatching defeat from the jaws of victory."
Sensible for Germany to leave euro, but they're not ready
30 Sep 2012
| 53 Comments
Germany told to 'come clean’ over Greece
30 Sep 2012
| 106 Comments
Hollande faces protest over fiscal pact
30 Sep 2012
| 47 Comments
€1.2bn and still rising: cost of 'icon’ towers for EU’s bankers
30 Sep 2012
-
30 Sep 2012: Thousands take to the streets of Paris in move described by government minister as 'fundamental error'
-
30 Sep 2012: Pierre Haski: In his 2013 budget the president's ambitious plan is to reform French finances while avoiding the pain of cuts like Spain's
-
30 Sep 2012: John Carlin: The country needs more than a bailout. It needs a revolutionary change in its hidebound social structures
-
30 Sep 2012: The single currency continues to be rocked by market turmoil, and there are five good reasons why things could get much worse before they get any better, writes Heather Stewart
I spent a few minutes at intrade.com today. Informed opinion is that the Euro will be with us for at least another year.
The same opinion has the government locked financially for two more years.
Not good.
Vote your interest.
I am an agnostic atheist. I found what I am looking for.
Windows can be a problem.
Microsoft installs them broken.
Glass is the material of choice. Triple glazed is about optimal. Good seals keep out drafts. The result is a thermal gain even from a north light.
I think this is the flowering vine specified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campsis
| Campsis | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Campsis radicans | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Plantae |
| (unranked): | Angiosperms |
| (unranked): | Eudicots |
| (unranked): | Asterids |
| Order: | Lamiales |
| Family: | Bignoniaceae |
| Tribe: | Tecomeae |
| Genus: | Campsis Lour. |
| Species | |
Contents |
Species
- Campsis grandiflora K.Schum. – Chinese Trumpet Vine (East Asia)
- Campsis radicans Seem. – American Trumpet Vine (Southeastern United States)
Hybrids
- Campsis × tagliabuana (Madame Galen), a mid-19th century hybrid between Campsis grandiflora (Chinese Trumpet Vine) and Campsis radicans (American trumpet vine).
References
- ^ RHS A-Z encyclopedia of garden plants. United Kingdom: Dorling Kindersley. 2008. pp. 1136. ISBN 1405332964.
External links
Media related to Campsis at Wikimedia Commons 
Data related to Campsis at WikispeciesGoogle search: trumpet vine
Not everyone likes it. The North American species, Campsis Radicans,
probably does better with humming birds.White light emitting diodes are getting more common.
I have seen various formats. Christmas lights are prevalent.
The color balance varies. I have not seen one I like.
I worked out an adjustable color balance unit. It might be salable.
Coal oil lanterns are not a good thing.
I have no objection to paying less for a computer.
Sooner is better. As soon as you can is best.
.
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