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Friday, March 27, 2009

WildBlue Communications, Inc.


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

WildBlue Communications, Inc. is a corporation based in Greenwood Village, Colorado. The company offers satellite broadband Internet services to both home and business customers. WildBlue is one of the newer satellite Internet services, having begun operating in June 2005.

After nationwide beta testing, the first residential retail customers had WildBlue service installed at their home in June 2005. During the summer of 2005 a dealer network was established to provide installation and customer service to clients throughout the 48 contiguous United States.

WildBlue claims superior performance both in terms of upload and download speed through its use of newer satellite technology. Specifically, WildBlue uses the Ka band instead of the Ku band used by established competitors. For improved performance, it covers the U.S. and most of populated Canada with many "spot beams" instead of a single, broad beam covering the entire market. It has adopted DOCSIS technology to reduce costs while maintaining quality of service[1].

The maximum advertised transmission speed with the premium subscription is 1.5 megabits per second download and 256 kilobits per second upload. The satellite equipment costs approximately US$299, exclusive of the mandatory professional installation service. They have in place a Fair Access Policy that slows bandwidth to less than 150kbit/s for users who reach predetermined bandwidth caps on usage.

In late 2006, WildBlue modified their calculation of network activity. This change was intended to allow for more accurate measurement of data usage, but it appeared to more than double calculated usage, causing routine usage of some customers to unexpectedly exceed WildBlue's imposed 30-day usage limits. As a result, WildBlue ignored two weeks of bandwidth usage from November 27 through December 11, 2006.

Satellites

WildBlue uses the Ka-band exclusively for both the receiving end and the return path on two satellites using VSAT technology.

Anik-F2

This Telesat Canada-owned Boeing 702 Anik-F2 satellite has a Ka-band payload designed for and leased by WildBlue. It has four spot beams for a total of 38 transponders in the Ka-band. It also has C-band and Ku-band payloads for other customers.[2] It is located at the 111.1° W, geostationary orbit slot.[3]

WildBlue-1

WildBlue-1 is a purpose-built satellite built for use by the WildBlue service exclusively. It has 35 spot beams in the Ka-band.[4]. WildBlue-1, was launched on December 8, 2006 at 22:07 GMT aboard an Arianespace Ariane 5. WildBlue-1 is an LS-1300 was built by Space Systems/Loral and occupies the 111.0° W slot.[5] WildBlue-1, while co-located with Anik-F2, requires subscribers to have separate accounts and different equipment than subscribers to Anik-F2.

Equipment

WildBlue uses a 28 × 26 in (508 × 660 mm) mini-dish and external satellite modem to bring their service to subscribers nearly anywhere in the 48 contiguous states. The modem connects to a PC's or Apple Macintosh's network card via 10BASE-T (RJ-45) cables, much in the way a cable or DSL modem would. The modem updates its firmware automatically.


Subscribers' WildBlue mini-dish antenna.

WildBlue satellite modem.

The back panel of a WildBlue satellite modem. The coaxial connections for incoming and outgoing signals can be seen, as well as the Ethernet port for the rest of the network.


Competitors

WildBlue competes with satellite Internet service providers Starband and Hughesnet (and O3b soon). WildBlue distinguishes itself by exclusively using the Ka-band and a comparatively large amount of regionalized, high-power spot beams which both transmit and receive to more customers by re-using the same frequency ranges in different geographic regions.

Real-time interactive applications sometimes perform poorly through WildBlue internet connections (or any GEO satellite connection) because the satellite signal travel distance of 140,000 km (88,000 miles) for a round trip (user to ISP, and then back to user) is very long. Atmospheric conditions such as thunderstorms reduce satellite signal, resulting in less speed and a higher latency. A 0.12 second latency between satellite and ground stations results in an actual end-to-end latency of at least 650 milliseconds (ms) and more typically 900ms to 1200ms end-to-end latency. Latency is measured by the "ping" utility. While web browsing can work fine with this level of latency, many online games and interactive network applications do not.

External links

References

  1. ^ http://www.wildblue.com/aboutWildblue/equipment.jsp WildBlue Equipment Specifications
  2. ^ http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/bss/factsheets/702/anik_f2/anik_f2.html#specs Anik F2 Specifications
  3. ^ http://www.lyngsat.com/anikf2.html Lyngsat.com data on Anik F2
  4. ^ http://space.skyrocket.de/index_frame.htm?http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/wildblue-1.htm WildBlue-1 Specifications
  5. ^ http://www.lyngsat.com/wildblue1.html Lyngsat.com data for WildBlue-1
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WildBlue"

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