stoke said:
The figures I'm hearing are 45 Mbps to 65 Mbps
No, you get microwave gear capable up to 960Mbps...
A microwave can do about 50 KM MAX before you need to repeat it.
Fibre optic can do about 250KM max and then needs to be re-amplified, or 500KM max one shot, no re-amplification.
But it's really expensive to lay fibre, I was wondering if sets of Microwave retransmitters every 40KM would be cheaper than the filbe option to maintain and install.
Well firstly the sat-3 uses repeaters at a maximum length of 80Km...
It is expensive to lay fibre yes. Microwave however doesnt offer the same throughput capabilities and upgrade potential. It's cheaper to add new wavelengths to a submarine cable than it is to lay an entire new path for microwave. It's also alot less harmfull to the environment.
You'd say need 350 tranciever pairs per hop (given your estimate of one repeater per 40Km at 14000km for the SAT-3). At a cost of about $38,000 per tranciever which is $26,600,000 per 1GBps circuit (or R159,600,000).
For the equivelant capacity of the Sat-3 (Which is quoted at a cost of $600 million) of 150Gb, you'd need 150 circuits, which would cost $3,990,000,000. Its starting to look rather unfeasible now... and thats excluding the cost of the towers, power, other equipment etc...
Also you're going to get a much higher path latency (and effects from weather). And of course then the whiny gamer kids are going to bitch again...
