We have all heard the advertisements from wireless, cable, and internet providers:  “The only, truly No Limit Plan”.  We have probably all thought the same thing upon hearing that:  sounds too good to be true.  And we are right.

Let’s take a minute and read the fine print that explains these no-limit limits.

Most companies enforce an Acceptable Use Policy, on a shared network.  For instance, Sprints’ no limit policy states the following:

Excessive Utilization of Network Resources: Consuming a disproportionate amount of available Network resources resulting in the potential to disrupt or degrade the Network or Network usage by others. The determination of what constitutes excessive use depends on the specific state of the Network at any given time. Excessive use is determined by resource consumption relative to that of a typical individual user of the Network and not by the use of any particular application.

 If you are in the top 1% of the heaviest users on the Sprint network, they can throttle back the speeds at which you transmit or receive, upload or download data. Verizon and AT&T restrict bandwidth for users in the top 5%. Any electronic  transmission  sent, received, posted, accessed, or stored via ANY network.

One of the most important things the consumer can do to avoid violating an Acceptable Use Policy on a No Limit Plan is be aware of the data we are using, downloading and uploading.  If you use your internet service primarily for video streaming, watching movies or listening to music, pay attention to file size.  A High-Def 2 hour downloaded movie averages about 7 Gigabytes of data.  If you watch two movies a week you are using almost 60gigs of data per month, and that’s BEFORE you even factor in regular internet browsing, Dropbox file sharing, photo sharing and viewing via social media, live streaming, etc.

Awareness of your data usage is a huge benefit, maximizing the quality of your own bandwidth on your communication providers’ network!

If you are tired of bandwidth restrictions and shared network restrictions NIA has dedicated satellite pricing available.  We also provide shared plans with CIR which is ideal for business customers that want to replace Hughesnet, WildBlue and Starband.

-Christi G.
NIA, Inc.

From the archives of another support group comes a conundrum.  Sometimes our support policies hinder our customer service relationships.  Sometimes there is nothing you can do to satisfy a customer.  So was the case with Barry (name changed for privacy):

Upon receiving a call from a customer about their service being down, to my surprise they were telling me that the RX light was green, (verifies receive lock from the satellite to your dish) as was the TX.  Which would imply the modem is acquiring into the network – alas allowing internet browsing. : )

To my dismay the modem would not acquire into the network. After verifying again that the customer did have a solid green RX light I transmitted a carrier to verify connectivity and to my dismay I was not able to see any transmission.  Which would imply:

1. Bad cable or cable end
2. Bad BUC
3. No power coming from the TX port of the modem
4. They aren’t “on” the Satellite.

However, the customer was saying that yes, they had a green RX light. So I continued trouble shooting … I had them roll the cables (switching TX and RX cables at dish and the modem) to verify that that cable going from the modem to the buc was indeed a good cable. After rolling the cabl,  I was informed that yes the customer did again have a solid green RX and TX but it would not acquire into the network.

After more trouble shooting ALL was revealed! The customer after much deliberation, and somewhat reluctantly, told me they are a “little” color blind.  So when he was telling me green lights across the modem they were actually amber!

LED Lesson # 1 make sure the end user isn’t color blind when verifying the colors of the modem LEDs!

-Jacob

            If you are not sure if it is your Internet service dropping vs. a computer problem or local router problem, here is a quick way to check.  The following information is the quickest way to determine if you have lost all internet access at your location, on a Windows 7 PC.

1.      Click the Start Icon

2.      Directly above the Start Button a small dialog box that states “search programs and files” (See Figure 3.1)…Type CMD and press Enter on your keyboard

Figure 3.1

 3.      It will open the Command Prompt Window (See Figure 3.2)

Figure 3.2

 4.      As shown in Figure 3.3, type: Ping 8.8.8.8

Figure 3.3

5.      Press Enter. You should get responses in the dialog window stating Reply from, etc. Please note you may have to try the ping command twice to get all pings successful as the latency over satellite connections may cause the first packet to timeout.

Figure 3.4

 6.      If you do get successful results (four replies as seen in figure 3.4), that means you are technically connected to the Internet.  If you do not receive four replies, it could also be your router, computer, ethernet cable, wireless connection and/or more .  If you are able to ping but another application or your web browser is not functioning, then you may have a problem with other LAN networking devices or your PC.

This has been posted to provide useful information about what is or is not functioning in your network environment.

Thank you
Ryan

It’s All about Latency

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to move out of our apartment and into a house about 4 miles away.  We owned a 1999 GMC Jimmy SUV at the time and figured we could move all of our boxes using the Jimmy without renting a U-haul.  The move took about 10 round trips and 10 hours.  We used a very terrestrial-like means of moving: logging short round trip mileage!  If we had moved to another city about 300 miles away or so it would have take the same amount of trips (10), but much longer than 10 hours (probably weeks using the GMC Jimmy method).  And there lies the rub.  The Jimmy represents your bandwidth/speed and your capability of carrying and delivering data packets.  The mileage, however, represents part of what effects latency (round trip time or distance).  The speed of the Jimmy is the same either way, the capability to carry boxes (data packets) is the same, but the distance travelled is the difference.   Satellite links have huge travel time and terrestrial networks have very low travel time by comparison.

Now lets talk about the boxes or data packets.  They contain information critical to a client and the host.  For example, when you type in the web address for yahoo.com, data packet is sent to Yahoo’s servers requesting their main website.  In return, Yahoo sends links, images, and formatting back to your computer, allowing you to view their web page.  Unfortunately, it is not one transmission back and forth but many smaller transactions so that your computer and Yahoo’s server can manage the data and keep track of the data in an efficient manner.  The Jimmy could have moved us into our new place in one trip, if we had just a few boxes, but since we had many boxes, it took multiple deliveries and round trips.  So latency is not only effected by mileage but the amount of data packets and deliveries (IP transactions) that occur in a given route between your computer and the host (in the previous example Yahoo was the host).  The more handshakes a host requires due to the protocol being used, the higher the latency and the more lag you experience.

A very solid explanation about latency and application testing

Satellite networks are considered high-latency networks because the round trip distance exceeds 100,000 miles for a single data packet transaction.  Most terrestrial based networks never exceed 5,000 miles for a single data packet transaction.  The good news is that satellite communication technology has come a long way to lower latency through spoofing, caching, and TCP/IP acceleration.  Your Internet applications will still work over satellite but they will just have more lag time, but only in seconds, not minutes for most applications.  If you have a specific Internet application that is proprietary to your business or personal needs, we recommend testing the application or protocol using one of NIASAT’s demo/trial programs or by contacting NIA and setting up testing at one of our satellite service testing offices.

-Josh Golding
NIA, Inc.

Did you know?: The first geosynchronous communication satellite, Syncom 2, was launched in 1963. The world’s first commercial communication satellite, called Intelsat I (nicknamed Early Bird), was launched into synchronous orbit on April 6, 1965 (Excerpt from Wikipedia).

Further Reading:

http://www.starlancs.com/EducateMe/educate_vsat_latency.html

http://compnetworking.about.com/od/speedtests/a/network_latency.htm

The footprint of a communications satellite is the ground area that its transmitter/receiver offers coverage, and determines the satellite dish diameter required to receive each transmitter/receiver’s, or transponder, signal. There is usually a different map for each transponder (or group of transponders) as each may be aimed to cover different areas of the ground. Footprint maps usually show either the estimated minimal satellite dish diameter required or the signal strength in each area measured in decibel Watts, or dBW. (Wikipedia)

What is the easy answer?  Satellite Signal Coverage Area, or where the signal “touches down”.  Here are some sample maps of satellite coverage areas, or FOOTPRINTS, from Intelsat and iDirect.

http://www.intelsat.com/flash/coverage-maps/covmaphome.htm

Horizons-1 @ 127.0 Degrees East

IS-25 @ 328.5 Degrees East