International satellite companies

[captainwifi]

International satellite companies:
http://www.bcsatellite.net
http://www.intersatafrica.com/xstream.html
http://www.satsig.net/ivsat-africa.htm
http://www.globaltt.com/
http://www.gb-solution.com/
http://www.bentleywalker.net/

Has anybody had any experience with any of these companies ?
Bcsatellite seems to be the way to go. Telkom can't take civil action
against you if you setup a Wisp with Bcsatellite as your content provider.
Bcsat claims that you can make VOIP calls over their link, they have solved
the latency issues. Bentleywalker ignores my questions.

[noswal]

http://www.intersatafrica.com/contacts.html says "South Africa Office (Please note that Duplex VSAT services are NOT available in S.Africa)" so I assume that is true for the other sites offering 2 way

[captainwifi]

" noswal http://www.intersatafrica.com/contacts.html says "South Africa Office (Please note that Duplex VSAT services are NOT available in S.Africa)" so I assume that is true for the other sites offering 2 way"

No, Bently told me that they do provide 2-way, they were not responsive
on the bandwidth cap though. I would avoid Bentley. Intersatafrica has a JHB office, so they probably can't afford to advertise something which Icasa won't like. I have e-mailed Bcsat, will provide feedback ASAP. We need to find out how many satellites are there and to whom they belong.
Why is it so difficult to get the relevant information?

[noswal]

As to local, from sentechs site, vstar:
Sentech has turned the traditional model o*n its head, using the latest in bi-directional satellite communications technology and taking advantage of a new regulatory framework. Sentech offers unrestricted, high-speed, always-on Internet access at a far more affordable, fixed price, anywhere in Southern Africa.

Does anyone know how much this is and what speed you get?

[noswal]

To answer my own question, one of the prices I got from sentech was R3818 (I assume per month) for 128kbps, still to clairify if equipment is included.

[SSK]

To answer my own question, one of the prices I got from sentech was R3818 (I assume per month) for 128kbps, still to clairify if equipment is included.

Is that dedicated 128kbps?

Can you please provide more details of 256 and 512 coz our requests have all been unattended till now.

thx

[Celemasiko]

How expensive would be a satellite connection?

[captainwifi]

What ever you do, just don't use Sentech. They are total bafoons.
The salesman could not refer me to a single demo site of their satellite link.
I mean could they not sponsor an Internet cafe where we could at least test out
their service?

[Celemasiko]

I would never use Sentech. They have a bad reputation...

[Crash]

Okay... so why the hell is the BusinessCom - Vsat 95 Euro a month, 128K 1:25 (so about R800) and bloody Sentechs VStar is R5000 per month for 128K 1:15 ???? Okay so the contention ratio is higher, but R4200 difference? The equipment costs about R4000 once off (Assumed from Sentechs Prices).

Urrrrrrrr....... <plop>. Another braindead South African rip off merchant.

[captainwifi]

I really hope BCsat will sell to South-Africans. I presume they will sell to mocambique, and since their equipment is portable, their two-way signal will work if you cross the border back into SA?
Or take IntersatAfrica. Are they so terrified of 'baas' Icasa that their
satellite will at the exact GPS coordinates of the mocambique/SA border
disable the two-way service? I presume not then just get your equipment
activated in mocambique and cross back into SA.

[captainwifi]

Finally got hold of the person which requested that I don't reveal his company by
name, but anybody reading this thread should deduce who I am refering to.
Where there is a will there is way. Those Vsat's above our continent are streaming
massive amounts of two-way data to South-Africa. Isp's use them, Wisp's use them,
it's just not openly advertised. That little stunt of mine concerning Mocambique will work, he confirmed. The billing will be done from Kenya in US dollar. They can't
accept rands in South-Africa. Their minimum package is 256k. For VOIP you must ask for the C-band. Be assertive when talking to these Sat companies.
You are almost guarenteed to be provided with a two-way link if you want
to start a Wisp. In such a case the Mocambique stunt won't be required.
Sorry if this post is a bit cryptic.

[Maxim Usatov]

I really hope BCsat will sell to South-Africans. I presume they will sell to mocambique, and since their equipment is portable, their two-way signal will work if you cross the border back into SA?
Or take IntersatAfrica. Are they so terrified of 'baas' Icasa that their
satellite will at the exact GPS coordinates of the mocambique/SA border
disable the two-way service? I presume not then just get your equipment
activated in mocambique and cross back into SA.

We have no problems to service customers in South Africa, however most of the WISPs deployed on our services are coming from the Middle East and Europe area. The licensing and import issues are of course customer's responsibility. I am glad to notice that all of our customers who have set up their WISPs with us are successful and their customers are happy. I would explain how we have achieved this below in my reply.

Before I proceed I would like to mention that the VSAT service you mention above (95 Euro/mo one), called D-Star, is mostly oriented for occasional Internet usage, for example Home and SOHO type customers. D-Star is no good to go when you setup an ISP, much like any other MF-TDMA based VSAT system.

Usually, when an ISP or Hot Spot is being set up, a dedicated connectivity solution is being recommended, such as SCPC (Single Channel Per Carrier) VSAT systems. In brief, SCPC specifies that you own your part of the satellite and there is no TDMA sharing (FDMA is used instead) and that particular range of frequencies on the transponder is being reserved solely for your needs. This provides you with a completely dedicated circuit which can be measured as CIR (Committed Information Rate). CIR rate, usually guaranteed via the SLA (Service Level Agreement) signed by the ISP, specifies the minimal amount of bandwidth the VSAT link will provide 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. SCPC links with 100% CIR bandwidth have been here from the early 90's and mostly were used for Global Service Provider business, streaming transport, broadcasting, particulary any full duplex communications.
Since satellite space segment itself is very expensive, SCPC links are very expensive as well. In most of the cases, this makes the start-up ISP or Hot Spot customers to run away looking for cheaper solutions with BIR bandwidth (shared, burstable bandwidth) and this is where the most of underwater stones appear.

First, and the most problematic one is the sharing ratio (contention ratio). As from my own personal experience, the recommendation of most of the satellite ISPs nowadays are too optimistic. 1:20 and more contended services are being recommended for Enterprise, ISP and Hot Spot type of customers. This leaves the customer happy upon purchasing the service however once the transponder gets crowded, the service will start to crawl. What we offer for ISPs is a low congested service (1:4 and 1:8 is maximum). We have had our transponders full already and practically nobody complains on the lack of bandwidth. The model works.

Second is the choice of the media access, i.e. the mechanism remote stations (remotes) share the single dedicated satellite segment. There are a couple of choices on the market, starting from a low end legacy TDMA, including MF-TDMA and going to D-TDMA. Just as an example, in brief, the standard TDMA give remotes the ability to transmit data at any time. When two or more remotes transmit at the same time, all the packets are being discarded. Then each remote waits it's own random period of time and tries again. Such a concept leads to that more than 70% of bandwidth is simply lost to maintain the connection alive. A step forward was MF-TDMA when a separate RF channel was added to control transmissions, however MF-TDMA uplink traffic still looks rather chaotic. Most of the satellite providers never mention this, but if you will take a look on any MF-TDMA or TDMA running system (even our own D-Star), you will see that in best cases the uplink is providing up to a half of the burstable bandwidth specified. This is normal if a customer is a home user or small office but if it comes to service an ISP with hundreds of subscribers, this creates the dead end problems. BusinessCom always recommends a D-TDMA system such as our PEP-iDirect solution or an SCPC system if your plans are to unfold an ISP or a Hot Spot. You can read more about our D-TDMA system at http://www.bcsatellite.net/eng_dtdma.html

Third, the QoS setup. QoS is a cruicial mechanism to protect and proritize various types of traffic which are being squeezed in a single pipe. For example, the ISP is assumed to provide voice (VoIP) and data (Internet) services to it's customers. If there is no QoS set up, the data traffic will overlap the voice traffic and the quality of the voice call will be rapidly degrading once the data traffic kicks in - jitter and chops will appear. This results in unhappy VoIP users abandonding their subscriptions. Most of the service providers offer a single QoS setup for all their customers. This means that you can't ask your satellite ISP to tweak something in the QoS setup of your VSAT system - you can't prioritize traffic type A over type B, etc. For some reason very little amount of companies practice individual QoS setups on the market. Well, in SCPC you can of course purchase 1U hosting space on the teleport, buy a pair of Ciscos and make your own QoS setup however this is a little bit overcomplicated (and expensive!) for an enterpreneur starting his ISP business from scratch. With our PEP-iDirect solution the one can set up his very own QoS model and we assist every customer individually determining his traffic patterns and advising the optimal configuration.

And fourth is the SLA. Some people say SLA is a hype and sometimes I agree. Read SLAs with attention. Normal SLA should offer a valuable credit back if ISP fails to provide the service. If there is no SLA or the terms of the SLA are unclear (SLA is a legal document) then it means that the service can be down at any time with no responsibility taken by the ISP. No SLA means that ISP won't be obliged to inform you on the scheduled maintenance jobs as well. Most of the TDMA and MF-TDMA systems come with no SLA. If you are setting up an ISP or a Hot Spot, always go for a service which is covered by SLA.

So far this is the most important things which come to my mind first. There are lots of companies on the market offering high quality satellite Internet service, however the buyer should be very sceptical with advertisement and I would always recommend to use all the available technical knowledge to compare.

Maxim Usatov
BusinessCom Internet via Satellite
Office +38 (056) 788 3544
E-Mail maxim.usatov@bcsatellite.net
WWW http://www.bcsatellite.net/

[LoneGunman]

in this modern age of electronic banking and transfers, its no biggie to have a monthly transfer to company X, regardless of where they are in the world, and how the money auto-converts for them - so the payment side of things is no problem whatsoever..

[Jon Snow]

So has anyone gone with any of the mentioned sat providers. Since the 1st of November is getting closer I would like to look at other options.

[LoneGunman]

I'm gonna be doing gadget & pc shopping in the US in a couple of months, I'm gonna see if I run across any sat companies while I'm there, with Africa coverage, and physically go see them..
here's some of the sat guys - http://www.satsig.net/ivsat-africa.htm

[Karnaugh]

Bcsat claims that you can make VOIP calls over their link, they have solved
the latency issues.

They increased the speed of light?

[daysleeper]

Everything in africa is high latency from the municipal workers to the telkom call center. Why should satellites be any different?

[arf9999]

We have no problems to service customers in South Africa, however most of the WISPs deployed on our services are coming from the Middle East and Europe area. The licensing and import issues are of course customer's responsibility. I am glad to notice that all of our customers who have set up their WISPs with us are successful and their customers are happy. I would explain how we have achieved this below in my reply.

......snip...
Maxim Usatov
BusinessCom Internet via Satellite
Office +38 (056) 788 3544
E-Mail maxim.usatov@bcsatellite.net
WWW http://www.bcsatellite.net/

I usually skim thru the capt's threads 'cos there is just so much second hand googling that I can take...But this is a really good post, and quite interesting. I visited their site and there is plenty of info, not only on the advantages of their systems but also on the disadvantages...

[Roman4604]

Bcsat claims that you can make VOIP calls over their link, they have solved the latency issues.

They increased the speed of light?
If you've had any experience with VoIP over satellite, you'd know that latency, within reason (~800ms), is not a problem for VoIP. Latency has little effect on speech quality, except for introducing delay which up to a certain level is acceptable to most ears.

The big killers for VoIP are packet loss & jitter ... so if you have a clean, steady satellite connection, your VoIP will be fine.

[LoneGunman]

I see the BusinessCom home & soho solutions start from around 95 euro (R738) a month for a 128 kbit/s - given the current costs of internet+telephone+ISP costs and capping, it might be a viable alternative..
Anyone been in touch with them to ask if its unlimited upload/download?
Maxing out a connection 24/7, for a fixed fee, without any restriction, regardless of how 'slow' it might seem in comparison to the capped and 'faster' connections, seems a better deal..

[Gaz_za]

There are a number of companies that deploy Vsat conectivity in South africa and Africa. the problem in south africa is that in order to provide Vsat connectivity a license is required the cost of this license is around the region of R50K / year. this is more than 5 x as much as other african countries, further more our good old Communications regulator when questioned on how many additional liceses it has granted other than our good old parastatals the answer is 0.

certain companies provide a number of different Vsat services , from an entry level 64/128kb connection up to a 256/512 solution. more bandwidth can be purchased but a larger antenna will be needed.

SA is covered via Cband from the NSS7 sat. and obviously you would need a 1.8m or 2.4 metr antenna for this. I am not a Vsat tech but if you require more information I can get out Vsat engineer to post additional information

[Gaz_za]

latency over the nss7 sat is arount 650 to 750 ms

[cazal]

Hi Guys,
I'm a VSAT tecnician, and have built many VSATS for Sentech on a contract basis over the years. There logistics are to say the least pathetic.
The staff at the HUB have very little experience in Satellite communications, and the inspectors they sent to verify my installations were tech students that have never built aVSAT in their lives before.

When we approached them to sell VSAT in SA, we had meeting after meeting with them. Each time the buck was passed to another "executive decision maker" and after weeks of discussions no one at Sentech head office in Fourways could give us a price on Bandwidth.

Go Sentech !!!, carry on beating down the competition, its the only way they will survive.

[captainwifi]

There are a number of companies that deploy Vsat conectivity in South africa and Africa. the problem in south africa is that in order to provide Vsat connectivity a license is required the cost of this license is around the region of R50K / year. this is more than 5 x as much as other african countries, further more our good old Communications regulator when questioned on how many additional liceses it has granted other than our good old parastatals the answer is 0.

www.bentleywalker.net told me that they don't have a single client in
South-Africa, but were more then willing to sign me up for two-way
connectivity. I can't imagine that they would fork out R50000 just to have
me as their client. What can Icasa do to Bcsatellite if they simply
refuse to pay?

[noswal]

Their site seem to say that a bronze package only gives you 1gig/month download, which is useless.

[plugger123]

By looking through the offerings the pricing seems un-affordable. I will look around and if I find something that looks like it is worth it I will post here in this thread.

[noswal]

One place I found for 256k is R1300/month plus R3000 set up

[plugger123]

Can you perhaps remember where?

Thanks

[matt156]

Isn't this illegal tho? Only Telkrap and Sentech can bring bandwidth in and out of SA :(

[captainwifi]

matt156 see http://icasa.blogspot.com scroll down to read the first post. Basically Vans or no Vans license, data is not allowed to cross the street according to mr.phikoli from Icasa's legal department.
All a Vans license does is through some legal stunt/loophole prevent Telkom from taking you to Civil court for reselling Telkom data. If you resell satellite data, they can't touch you. Criminally there is nothing to fear no matter what the law says. In our legal system, criminal law is only used against you if you do something unethical. There is nothing unethical about sending data across the street via any communications device, using either the ATM or ethernet protocol or any physical or wireless medium.
The debate concerning this has been framed in terms of Wi-fi. The 'data crossing the street' is the only issue not the medium or device used to send such data across the street. Vans license holders, out of purely a business perspective have chosen to only use Wi-fi and no other communications devices. It enables them to maintain absolute control of their data network. In contrast Telkom uses fixed wire communication because by law they can gain access to your property. ;)

By law every farmer in South-Africa should be in Jail for allowing alien species on their farms. The laws concerning this are very strict on paper. It will only
be enforced against you though, if you commit some act of environmental terrorism, like loading an airplane with millions of seeds and dispersing it over a wide area.

This forum started out in 2004. You should see some of the fearful posts concerning the 'dangers' of sending data across the street back then. More than a year later everybody is openly advertising their Wi-fi links! This forum was instrumental in dispelling the myths concerning our criminal justice system and our beloved/bemused police, who has not said a single word
concerning all of this.

I can clearly remember a report I read from ISPA in 2003/2004 concerning
the legality of Wi-fi. They used such colourfull phrases as:"..the situation
is grim indeed". And the 'grimmer' the better for our Wisp's who knew the facts and had their competition eliminated by having ISPA/Icasa/Telkom blow smoke. Icasa for example recommended that the police prosecute Megawan who paved the way for the 'data crossing the street business'. Icasa was the
best possible thing that could have happend to Wisp's.

[captainwifi]

I missed this company

www.intelsat.com
So we have www.intersatafrica.com
www.bcsatellite.net
and
www.intelsat.com to choose from.

[noswal]

www.intelsat.com - hopeless website to navigate to find what they offer and for how much

[captainwifi]

www.intelsat.com - hopeless website to navigate to find what they offer and for how much

They are like Intersatafrica, they prefer to deal with resellers of internet data and not the general public. There is no such thing as intelsat not being allowed to resell data by Icasa. This is just the story they tell to people who are wasting their time. :cool:
How about the www.nodedb.com links actually start doing something usefull and cooperate on a satellite uplink via a fronting
company? We could even have a Vans license holder help us, whatever....

[daffy]

How about the Jawug links actually start doing something usefull and resell satellite data via a fronting
company. Rodent what do you say?

We are doing something useful. The entire world doesn't revolve around Internet access. How many times do we have to tell you.
Jawug is not about Internet access? It says so right on the front page of the jawug website.

I'll pre-empt Rodent here.. I'll bet his reply goes something along the lines of "shove it" (only.. his words wont be suitable for family viewing)

[riggs_9mmp]

I think we should explore this in more detail. I have also heard of a French Sat servicing Madagascar - can anyone comment?

[sofi]

I have French Satellite Canal+ Satellite, not all the bouquet but not bad. If you want more info PM or email me

[captainwifi]

Distributing SAtellite Internet data is problematic. Icasa will eventually find out where your expensive sat receiver is and simply confiscate it. To prevent this connect 50 houses via fixed wired copper and redistribute from each of these via mesh the data.
Combining wireless and www.zyxel.colm Dslam in a hybrid way will
enable us to escape the clutches of Icasa's enforcement division. It's
unrealistic to expect that Icasa will raid a block of 50 houses cooperativly shareing a satellite link.
Every house connected to the copper backbone is in essence a highsite
redistribution point. It's simply impossible to form a backbone via
vanilla AP's, on the 3rd hop your down to 200k.
Some people trying to clear their stock of 100+ linksys AP's are'nt to
happy with me making technically correct statements concerning the most
efficient way of distributing signals: Hybrid combination of
fixed wire/wireless. ;)

[daffy]

It's simply impossible to form a backbone via
vanilla AP's, on the 3rd hop your down to 200k.
Some people trying to clear their stock of 100+ linksys AP's are'nt to
happy with me making technically correct statements concerning the most
efficient way of distributing signals: Hybrid combination of
fixed wire/wireless. ;)

If you're only getting 200k after 3 hops, then you have only yourself to blame, and not the hardware/technology.

Try not to let your personal failure impact on your advice to others.

[Flame]

Any luck on sat. int. yet? Who have sat int at their homes atm? And at what price.

Thx
Regards
Flame

[AnonymousCoward]

We had a big mission to install a vsat setup in Mozambique in March. It was for a big resort that could afford the R35k hardware+setup fees and R18k a month for 10GB/256kbit.

A bit of a joke, really, when you can buy CDMA (150kbit) internet from TDM (Telecom de Mocambique) at $1/hour.