captainwifi said:
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
[email protected]
WWW
http://www.bcsatellite.net/
