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Already, traditional players like Intelsat, the world’s largest satellite company by market capitalization, is using the capabilities of its next-generation geostationary satellites to deliver Internet connectivity to airplanes, cruise ships, the world’s merchant marine fleet, all markets that “basically didn’t exist five to seven years ago,” says David McGlade, CEO of Intelsat.
Geostationary Satellites (GSO)
ViaSat appear to be getting round the problem of request/responses taking ~ 0.5 second on geostationary satellite links (and hence leading to long delays to complete loading of web pages) by aggregating the multiple request/reponses for the web objects in a page. However this will not assist for real time applications such as gaming or haptic surgery or Voice over IP. For VoIP the concern is the RTT delays of 500ms for geostationary satellite plus any delays between the ground stations and the conversants, plus de-jitter buffer etc. exceeds the recommended specifications for VoIP (see for example http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/QoS and ITU-T G.114). In particular long delays result in difficulty for the conversants to know when the speaker is done.
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