BIG Bird... VERY BIG Bird....

[Richard King]

http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=33862074

world's largest commercial communications satellite with a launch
weight of 14,900 pounds.... With eighty-four spot beams....
will
support individual user data rates of up to eight megabytes per second
forward link and four megabytes per second return link to as many as
eight million users.

[Sherlock]

What are they going to launch it with, a Saturn 5? ;)

[Cheyenne]

I think the Arian 5 from French Guiana will have to this beast. I think the Arian 5 would normally be used to launch two spacecraft simultaneously, or one heavy lift.
This spacecraft seems to be very risky, all your eggs in one basket. Why wouldn't two smaller payloads work better?

[Neil Derryberry]

The service capability of this thing could be a dsl killer... or at least force dsl providers to provide better speeds for the money.

[Richard King]

It's still going to have latency though, so for some it is not the ideal situation. Posted with Starband, latency and all.

[Jacob S]

Is this what is going at 121? 61.5?

[firephoto]

Well hopefully it makes it to orbit and has enough fuel to be moved over north america in the future if it goes up for sale. :)

I wonder if it's yellow? :lol:

[mjz]

Hold it 40 gigabytes per second; HDTV is 19.2 mbps
40000/19.2=2083 HDTV channels

/8 channels per market=260dmas

one satellite could do HDTV locals in every market!

[waydwolf]

    8Mbps by 4Mbps times 8 million users is 64Tbps by 32Tbps for an aggregate bandwidth of 96Tbps. That is 96 TERABITS per second. A far cry from the throughput of 40Gbps. 2400 TIMES that lower figure, direct from the article.

    In essence, they're claiming that they can load it with 2400 times the users it would take to max out the throughput and not worry that it will happen. They are betting that so few people will be on at any given moment that this can work. I guarantee they will see problems by the time they hit five thousand users.

    They sound like the morons at @Home who said that we could load each node on cable with five or six hundred users with 6Mbps by 4Mbps(pre-DOCSIS) unthrottled unbridled pure speed.

    Anyone have modem since the early TCI@Home days who remembers when the speeds would drop to dial-up levels every day after school? This is why we see fewer and fewer modem users per node and are headed to having ten users per node in the next few years. Gambles with overloading like this start out okay, but as you add users...

 

[Win Joy Jr]

My question is, how big of an antenna is needed at the controlling groundstation?

NASA's TDRSS required a 60 footer...

This thing?????

Also, I would love to learn more on how attitude control on this beast is handled... Must be some big a** reaction wheels...

[Cheyenne]

Bingo, Waydwolf !
Not a realistic technology at this time. Too expensive, risky and
with marginal return thru 10 years, at best.

Uplink ant/hpa would be a 13 meter w/ redundant (N+1).
TCC spacecraft control expected to be similar (tight) to existing spotbeam spacecraft, BUT payload is exponential !

This one is to watch.