Ban geostationary satellites from the NBN, says O3b

Stuart Corner
Monday, 05 October 2009 05:05

IT Industry - Strategy

Greg Wyler, founder and CEO of future low earth orbit satellite operator, O3b Networks, will address the Senate Enquiry into the NBN to push his company's claims that the round trip delay inherent in geostationary satellite systems makes them unsuitable for providing broadband services to those Australians beyond the reach of the National Broadband Network's fibre.

He is expected to tell the enquiry to demand that latency (the time it takes data to travel from Internet user to host system and back again) for NBN services be required to be less than 180ms.

O3b's interest in the NBN co-incides with comments made recently by NBN Co CEO, Mike Quigley, who acknowledged the latency problem with geostationary satellites , saying: "These satellites are up there at 36,000 kilometres which means it takes light some time to get up there and back."

Wyler will address, by teleconference link, the NBN enquiry hearing to be held in Melbourne on Wednesday 7 October to flesh out his submission lodged earlier with the enquiry.

In that submission, Wyler claimed that "12Mbps is adequate throughput, but the latency must be kept low. With high latency web pages will load slowly, videoconferencing will be stuttered with unnatural gaps and web 2.0 desktop applications will not function well."

He explains that, while there are technologies that help improve the download speed over high latency links by modifying the way the TCP/IP interactions work, these have minimal impact on interactive rich dynamic content where there are lots of server/PC interactions such as web 2.0 applications, gaming or videoconferencing.

His submission cites O3b's tests on the time taken to load the Wall Street Journal's web page over a 10Mbps link when latency is artificially increased: as latency ramps up from less than 50ms to more than 700ms, load time increases linearly from seven to 45 seconds.

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