Satellite Internet Connection for Rural Broadband

8/13/2019 Satellite Internet Connection for Rural Broadband

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SATELLITE INTERNET CONNECTION

FOR RURAL BROADBAND

Is it a viable alternative to wired and wireless

connectivity for America's rural communities?

A RuMBA White Paper by Stephen Cobb, CISSP

SATELLITE INTERNET FOR RURAL BROADBAND - A RuMBA White Paper - Stephen Cobb, 2011


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A b o u t R uM BA

The Rural Mobile and Broadband Alliance (RuMBA) USA was launched to

encourage and assist rural residents, municipalities, libraries, Internet Service

Providers and other interested parties in establishing full access to high-speed

Internet in un-served and under-served rural communities, thus maximizing

the beneficial effects of broadband on the lives of ordinary Americans. RuMBA

USA is a non-profit corporation registered in the state of Texas. Visit

www.rumbausa.com for more information and to join the Alliance.

A b o u t t h e A u t h o r

Stephen Cobb is a 30-year veteran of the IT industry and a Certified

Information System Security Professional. Stephen began his first IT project in

1980: the creation of a computerized petroleum tax auditing system for the

State of North Dakota. The system recovered millions of dollars in unpaid

taxes during its first six months of operation. By 1988 Stephen was a best-

selling author of computer textbooks. In 1992 he published the first

comprehensive text on PC and LAN security. In 2002 he published the first

primer on privacy issues for ecommerce companies. He has testified before the

Federal Trade Commission on computer security issues and anti-spam

technology. A co-founder of two highly successful hi-tech start-ups, both of

which were acquired by publicly-traded companies, Stephen is also an award-

winning documentary film producer. He lives 50 miles from Albany, the statecapital of New York, America's third largest dairy producing state. For more

information visit: www.linkedin.com/in/stephencobb



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Satellite Internet Connection for Rural Broadband:Is it a viable alternative to wired and wireless connectivity

for America's rural communities?

A RuMBA White Paper by Stephen Cobb, CISSP

Executive Summary:This paper examines the question: Can satellite Internet

connections deliver adequate broadband service to rural America? The answer has

serious social and economic implications because the future of rural communities

in America that lack adequate access to broadband Internet connections does not

look bright. The millions of Americans who live and do business in those

communities are increasingly disadvantaged by the world's growing reliance on

high-speed, high-capacity broadband connections for the delivery of information,

digital work product, communications, healthcare, and education. America's

commercial broadband providers, like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner

Cable, have been slow to extend broadband service to all rural communities and

may never do so unless compelled by a universal broadband service requirement.

If these companies can argue that satellite Internet connections are acceptable as

a broadband option for rural communities they might avoid the universal service

requirements against which they are currently lobbying. Note that this white paper

also looks at some other options for rural broadband access, but not in detail.



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B r o a d b a n d i n Am e r i ca : Th e P r o v i d e r s

Most broadband service in America is provided by large, publicly-traded companies.

Some of these companies have their roots in the telephone industry while others haveevolved from the cable television market. One way to categorize broadband service

providers is to distinguish between terrestrial and non-terrestrial providers.

Terrestrial:The vast majority of the American homes and businesses that have

broadband connections get them from the large commercial broadband providers,

companies such as Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable. We may refer to

these as the terrestrial telcos because the broadband connections they provide are

either wired underground or between poles (as with coaxial cable, fiber optic, or

copper/DSL) or transmitted wirelessly between land-based towers (WiMax, 3g, 4G, LTE).

What all terrestrial telcos have in common is that they do not use space-based satellites

to deliver end-user Internet connections.

Non-terrestrial:For obvious reasons, satellite Internet service providers can be

categorized as non-terrestrial. Customers of satellite Internet service providers receive

and send data using a satellite dish connected to a special modem (the dish is larger and

considerably heavier than those used by satellite TV services such as Dish Network and

DirecTV). The two largest satellite Internet providers in North America today are

HughesNet and WildBlue.1Two other satellite providers exist, StarBand and SkyWay, but

at this time there is no indication that other companies plan to enter this market.

Each bit of Internet

data that a satellite

user requests from any

of their Internet

connected devices has

to travel more than

22,000 miles up into

space where it is

received and processed

by an earth-orbitingsatellite which then

sends it down to a dish

at the satellite Internet

service NOC or network

operations center.



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Sa t e l l i t e S e r v i c e Gap s : T h e B i g 4

Satellite Internet service may sound good in theory but in practice there are four

distinguishing characteristics of a satellite Internet connection, or SIC, that are

problematic for customers. I will refer to these as the big 4 service gaps and describe

them here. Later I will argue that these gaps disqualify SIC from being classified as

broadband, a critical distinction for present or potential satellite Internet users.

1. The Latency Gap

To be clear on how a satellite Internet connection works, any Internet data that a user of

the service asks for, such as search results from Google, has to travel through the

customer's satellite modem to the customer's dish and up

to a satellite in space, then down to a satellite ground

station located at the service provider's Network

Operations Center or NOC. The NOC routes the request tothe appropriate server on the Internet. The response from

that server then travels back to the NOC which beams it

up to the satellite. The satellite sends the data down to

the dish outside the customer's property. From there it

travels through a cable to the satellite modem and across

a wired or wireless network to the user's device.2

The fact that satellite Internet connections work at all could be considered something of

a technology miracle. Unfortunately, it is not enough of a miracle to overcome the laws

of physics. Data cannot travel faster than the speed of light. This imposes a strict limit

on the maximum speed with which any satellite Internet connection can respond to a

data request. This is referred to as the latency of the connection. Here is how Dr. Stuart

Cheshire described latency back in the days of the dial-up modem:

If you want to transfer a large file over your modem it might take several

seconds, or even minutes. The less data you send, the less time it takes, but

there's a limit. No matter how small the amount of data, for any particular

network device there's always a minimum time that you can never beat. That's

called the latency of the device.3

Latency remains a factor in network performance today even though many homes and

businesses now use Internet connections with download speeds 50 times faster than

dial-up modems. Fortunately, latency is one aspect of network performance any

computer user can measure, thanks to thepingcommand, a version of which exists in



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all popular operating systems including Mac, Windows, and Linux. Below you can see

how this works on a Windows XP computer. The ping command sends 32 bytes of data

to the specified website, in this case www.bankofamerica.com, and waits for a reply. The

round trip time is then recorded in milliseconds or one thousandths of a second,

abbreviated as ms. This action is repeated a number of times and an average is

computed, in this case 943 ms.

If you ping a typical wireless access point within a home or small office network you

should see an average latency of about 2 ms. If you are on a cable or DSL connection to

the Internet and ping a commercial website like www.bankofamerica.com, you will see

latency of about 60 ms. Unfortunately, a satellite Internet connection is likely to have a

latency of 600ms or more

when contacting the same

website (the example here wasrecorded over a satellite

connection from New York,

contacting a Bank of America

server in California).

The reason that the satellite

connection is 10X slower in

terms of latency than cable or

DSL is because those 32 bytes

of data have to travel some

22,000 miles up to a satellite

in geostationary orbit and back to the ground. The table on the following page shows

comparative latency recorded from the same geographic location using dial-up, cable,

and satellite connections. As you will see, satellite latency is worse that dial-up.

In practical terms this means a typical Internet activity like logging into a bank account

can take five or six times longer via SIC than with a typical cable, DSL, or wireless

connection. This is because the process of securing an Internet connection for banking

requires multiple rounds of question and response to create an encrypted link. Although

the total amount of data sent and received during this secure handshake is quite

small, the multiple round trips into space slow the process down by a factor that can be

5X or more. This same factor can also impact the performance of Internet-based work-

from-home technology like Virtual Private Networking (VPN) and popular applications

like Google Apps and SalesForce that operate as Software as a Service or SaaS.



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Comparative Latency of Internet Connections

Connection Type Pinging www.bankofamerica.com with 32 bytes of data:

Dial-up: 197ms

Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=201ms TTL=241Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=186ms TTL=241

Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=202ms TTL=241Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=202ms TTL=241Ping statistics for 171.159.228.100: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 186ms, Maximum = 202ms, Average = 97ms

Cable: 46ms

Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=45ms TTL=237Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=47ms TTL=237Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=237Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=45ms TTL=237

Ping statistics for 171.159.228.100: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 45ms, Maximum = 50ms, Average = 6ms

Satellite: 1479 ms

Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=801ms TTL=241Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=849ms TTL=241Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=848ms TTL=241Reply from 171.159.228.100: bytes=32 time=1166ms TTL=241Ping statistics for 171.159.228.100: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 801ms, Maximum = 1166ms, Average = 9 6ms

Satellite latency means that logging into your bank account, which may take 20 seconds

on a cable or DSL connection, can take well over one minute via satellite. This might not

sound like a huge inconvenience but the cumulative impact of latency on a typical

session of online shopping, banking, and bill paying is frustrating to say the least.

Performing work online is where the problem of latency becomes seriously problematic.

The time consumed by satellite latency is a measurable drag on productivity, one that is

getting worse as more companies, schools, medical facilities, and government agencies

transition to Software as a Service (SaaS) for applications from word processing to

spreadsheets, data entry, email, and contact management (as exemplified by Microsoft

SharePoint, Google Apps, and SalesForce).4

2. The Bandwidth Gap

Adding a new satellite to those already in space is not cheap, or quick, or easy. This

means that capacity management is a constant challenge for satellite Internet service

providers as they continue to add customers. If satellite construction and launch

schedules do not keep pace with the demand for service you end up with a very big

capacity gap that manifests itself in one of two ways:



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A. Lack of new service: A satellite provider may choose to stop accepting new

customers in a certain area to prevent over-subscribing the current capacity.5

B. Decline in existing services: customers experience a decline in performance as

new subscribers overburden system capacity until a new satellite comes online.

While some people with a satellite Internet connection may not be directly affected by

these issues, everyone with a SIC is impacted by the strategy satellite service providers

use to apportion their limited bandwidth: the download cap. For example, if you have

the HughesNet ProPlus plan, which currently costs $80 per month, the cap, called the

Daily Download Allowance, is 425 megabytes per day. To put that in perspective, it is

about one twentieth the size of the cap for Comcast cable customers.6In other words,

the average cable user gets 20X the capacity of the typical SIC user, often for a lower

price. One hour of streaming Internet audio can consume 50 megabytes. A set of slidesused for work could be more than 40 megabytes. Synchronizing a cloud-based storage

folder for a remote worker can easily consume 500 megabytes in a day. A standard

definition 90 minute movie delivered on-demand over the Internet from NetFlix or

iTunes takes roughly 2,000 megabytes.7

So, unlike cable and DSL users, SIC users cannot watch movies on demand over the

Internet. Businesses cannot realistically host web sites over satellite Internet

connections. And those are just a few of the activities on which the download cap has a

negative impact. An iPod or iPhone software update may be 300 megabytes. Updating

an application such as iTunes can consume 100 megabytes. Downloading an album of

music from Amazon.com or iTunes can use over 100 megabytes.8Operating system

security updates from Microsoft and Apple may be 400 megabytes or more. In short, the

providers of digital goods and services in America today assume that consumers and

businesses have immediate access to low latency, high capacity broadband. They no

longer make allowances for people with limited capacity.

What happens when a satellite Internet service user exceeds the download cap? In the

case of HughesNet the account is subject to the Fair Access Policy or FAP. The FAP

restricts the speed of the connection to about 40 Kbps (kilobits per second), roughly the

same as that of an old dial-up modem. This restriction lasts for 24 hours, essentially

rendering the connection useless (other satellite providers have similar systems).

Recently, HughesNet made it possible for the account owner to go online and get that

restriction lifted.9However, lifting the restriction is not quick and it is not always free.

There is a price to pay if the Daily Download Allowance is exceeded more than once per



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month. A system of FAP tokens is used, with one FAP token required to lift one

restriction. You get one free FAP token per month but additional tokens costs $10 each

(or 3 for $25). However, you cannot apply tokens in advance. You have to wait for the

restriction to be imposed, so you still cannot watch a streaming movie without serious

interruption.10

Just to be clear, this daily satellite bandwidth

allowance is per day, not averaged over a longer

period of time like a week or month. These megabytes

are not like mobile phone minutes, they do not

rollover. You do not get 12,750 megabytes in a month

(30 x 425). You cannot save up your megabytes to

watch a movie. And there is no credit for failed

downloads. If you start to download a 25 megabyte

file and a service interruption after 18 megabytes

forces a repeated attempt, you may consume 43

megabytes, or roughly one tenth of your 425

megabyte allowance, to get that one file.

The bottom line for people working from home,

traditionally a mainstay of the rural economy, is either

a very big monthly bill for repeatedly exceeding the

daily allowance or leaving their community.11

HughesNet and other satellite providers do allow unlimited downloads during the night,

for example between the hours of 2:00AM and 7:00AM. This makes it possible to

schedule software downloads which may be essential to preserving the security of end-

user systems.12However, there is no guarantee of network performance during this time

so users find it hard to know in advance if downloads scheduled for this period will be

completed before restrictions come back into force and further download charges are

incurred.

Furthermore, software vendors do not make it easy to schedule downloads, preferring to

send them automatically. This means satellite capacity limits are not just a seriousinconvenience, they have serious implications for computer security. Satellite Internet

users have to turn off automated updating of operating systems and applications to

prevent incurring costs and usage restrictions arising from bandwidth caps. However,

computer and software makers increasingly rely on these automated processes to



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distribute the security patches required to prevent exploitation of computers by

criminal hackers. Computers with unpatched operating systems and applications are a

prime target for hackers and these machines are more easily turned into zombies

under the control of attackers. Zombies are then

orchestrated into botnets that are used to attack other

systems, from commercial and government websites to

utility systems and entire sections of the Internet

itself.13The Department of Homeland Security today

considers unpatched consumer computers a threat to

national security and the problem has been openly

discussed by cyber-security officials at the federal level

since at least 2002.14

3. The Price/Performance GapAs you may have noticed in the previous section,

satellite Internet service costs a lot more than

terrestrial broadband. The HughesNet ProPlus satellite

Internet service plan costs $80 per month and comes

with a usage cap of 425 megabytes per day. The

headline performance of this plan is a download speed

of 1.6 Mbps (megabits per second or 1,600 Kbps) and

an upload speed of 200 Kbps, however, there is no

guarantee that users will ever experience these speeds.

Indeed, based on customer reports and field testing by

the author, such speeds are seldom experienced in

practice.15

The chart on the right is a test history showing

randomly-timed upload and download operations

conducted on HughesNet ProPlus over a 48-hour period.

The darker numbers show average speed during

download and upload of files; lighter numbers are the

maximum speed recorded during each test. Darkernumbers are the more accurate reflection of actual

speeds experienced by the customer during normal

Internet activities.16



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So W h a t i s B r o a d b a n d A n y w a y ?

To ask What is broadband? might seem like an innocent question, and to contest the

claim that satellite Internet service is broadband might seem like no big deal. In reality,

these are matters of vital importance to the thousands of American communities thatlack access to broadband. No longer a mere inconvenience, lack of access to broadband

now constitutes a potential death sentence for rural communities thus afflicted.20

Most attempts to answer the question What is broadband focus on defining a minimum

transmission speedat which an Internet connection can download and upload data. This

might be stated as something like 1.2 Mbps up, 384 Kbps down. However, these

numbers themselves are largely irrelevant to the average Internet user who simply

defines broadband in terms of the activities that it enables. In other words, the average

Internet user is likely to agree that an Internet connection is broadband if they can:

1. Work from home using a VPN to access their employer's network

2. Trade stocks and commodities in real time

3. Make telephone calls over the Internet (VoIP)

4. Watch streaming video from services like YouTube, NetFlix or iTunes

5. Keep operating system and applications secure with automatic updates

Fortunately, defining broadband in this way takes us to the heart of this whitepaper

because:

A satellite Internet connection does not support 5 basic broadband functions.

You might have reached this conclusion already, based on the gaps outlined above, but

strong evidence supporting this statement also comes direct from the satellite Internet

service providers themselves. Consider these 5 statements from the HughesNet FAQ:

1. Virtual Private Networks do not work well over satellite....HughesNet Technical

Support does not provide help with...problems associated with VPN clients.21

2. Time-sensitive applications...such as...real-time equities trading are not

recommended with HughesNet.

3. The HughesNet Home Service plan is not recommended for heavy downloading.

4. Voice over IP doesnt work well on a residential Hughes system with satellite.

5. If you intend to watch videos you may exceed your download threshold.22



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One surely has to ask what kind of broadband service satellite could be if it is not

suitable for streaming video, large file downloads, VPNs, real-time trading, or VoIP? The

logical answer is no kind of broadband at all, an assertion supported by the fact that

the word broadband does

not appear anywhere on thepages that HughesNet and

WildBlue use to describe their

services to potential

customers.23

Of course, there are other

ways to define broadband.

For example, you could say

broadband is a high speed,

low latency, high availability

Internet connection with

appropriate bandwidth

allocation. This last item,

appropriate bandwidth allocation, refers to how much data the user of the connection

can download in a certain period of time. As we have seen, this needs to be a fairly large

number because the term at issue here is b r o a d band and that has always implied high

capacity as well high speed.

If you want to apply specific numbers to the definition you might say: Broadband is an

Internet connection that delivers 99.9% availability of at least 1Mbps sustained

download speed and 768Kbps upload speed with an average latency of less than 100

ms, permitting at least 500 gigabytes of traffic per month without cap or added charges.

Most American consumers of broadband would probably agree with this definition, even

though some of the parameters might be considered conservative. For example, 75% of

Internet users in Korea connect at 5 Mbps or higher and more than 45% connect at

more than 10 Mbps. And it is not just urbanized countries that are achieving ubiquitous

broadband deployment. In the relatively rural country of Finland, 96 percent of homes

have access at 1Mbps or above. Whatever your thoughts on specific numbers, what canbe stated as fact and not opinion is that satellite Internet service, such as you can get

from HughesNet and WildBlue, falls far short of any reasonable definition of broadband.24



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T h e U n i v e r s a l S e r v i c e Gap

Despite all of the facts stated above, which are not seriously contested by the satellite

Internet service providers themselves, satellite Internet service is being presented to the

American peopleand to some of their elected representativesas broadband.

For example, at the

federal government

site broadband.gov,

run by the FCC, you

can see Satellite listed

as a type of

broadband, despite the

fact that the two main

providers of such

service avoid using the

word "broadband"

when they are pitching

their service.

So why include satellite alongside DSL, cable, wireless, and fiber? The answer may lie in

pro-satellite lobbying. The logic for such lobbying is simple: If it can be said that satellite

is a broadband option for rural communities, as listed by the FCC, then terrestrial telcos

can argue there is no compelling need to provide those communities with alternatives.

Consider this scenario: If political pressure to provide all Americans with access to

proper broadband connectivity continues to grow, that could lead to legislation imposing

a universal service requirement for broadband, just as political pressure 75 years ago

led the American government to create universal telephone service through the

Communications Act of 1934.25That legislation was aimed at making available, so far as

possible, to all the people of the United States a rapid, efficient, nationwide and

worldwide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable

charges. In effect, our forefathers passed a law enshrining the idea that phone

companies doing business in America had an obligation to serve all Americans, anobligation that was felt to be entirely reasonable, given that all Americans had to look

at, and make way for, the wires and poles and towers and other elements of

infrastructure by which service was delivered. In other words, those wires criss-crossing

the country should serve everyone because they impact everyone. In the 1930s many

Americans felt there was something UN-American about not extending to all Americans



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the opportunity to use a telephone to call for help or advice, or to engage in trade or

conduct business, for about the same price, regardless of where in America you lived.

Today we have copper, coaxial, and fiber optic cables running all across rural America

without providing service to all the communities they pass through. Why? The terrestrialtelcos do not want to build out their systems to supply broadband services to areas

below a certain population density. Their objection? One has to assume it is based on the

calculation that the return on their investment (ROI) would be slower than for other

projects, ones that serve higher density areas, namely cities and suburbs. If you spend

any time at all watching TV or surfing the web you know that the terrestrial telcos are in

fierce competition with each other to deliver broadband service to the wealthiest

markets at the lowest prices. Not serving all markets equally appears to be a clear

example of the market forces producing disparity of opportunity based on geography.

Consider the example shown below, where Verizon is offering phone service and 4 Mbps

Internet service for $55 per month. A rural Verizon customer may have to pay as much

as $55 per month for Verizon phone service alone. To recap, that's $55 per month for

phone and great bandwidth for a

suburban household, while the

rural household pays almost

three times as much for phone

service and very slow,

bandwidth capped satellite

Internet service ($55 Verizon

phone service + $80 HughesNet

Pro Plus + $20 overage = $155).

Consider another example:

homes in a target rich

metropolitan area such as New

York City can currently get very

fast broadband Internet plus

hundreds of channels of high definition TV, plus unlimited long distance phone service for

about $80 a month (Verizon FIOS). However, less than 50 miles from the capital of NewYork State there are scores of communities that have no access to real broadband at any

price and little hope of that changing, despite recent efforts by the federal government.



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People who want or need to live and do business in these rural communities are paying a

total of around $250 per month for high speed Internet+ television+ telephone. These

services have to be purchased from three different vendors and they add up to twice or

three times the price paid by suburban fiber optic customers or even cable subscribers in

small towns that happen to have cable service. And the high-speed Internet service you

get with that $250 per month is satellite, with its high latency, relatively low speed, daily

bandwidth caps, and frequent outages.

Thus you have the irony of farmers producing milk and other staples that the FIOS

customers consume, yet unable to become FIOS consumers themselves. On top of that,

these farmers have to abide by the warnings on the big red signs dotting their fields,

cautioning them not to work the land where the fiber optic cable is buried.

In 2008, Senator Obama ran for president on a platform that included expandedbroadband access for rural areas (he actually raised the topic in the first presidential

debate). True to his word, President Obama has committed tens of billions of dollars to

extend access to broadband to more Americans. Unfortunately, it is becoming clear that

there are thousands of communities in America today that will not benefit from these

efforts, places that have no prospect of getting access to broadband this year, or next

year, or even 5 years from now, effectively excluding them from twenty-first century

communication resources that are to critical to economic survival, educational

opportunity, and social equality.26

There is considerable irony in the fact that a White House which has placed major

emphasis on the need for universal broadband access now has over 1,300 videos on

YouTube, none of which can be watched in the millions of rural homes that lack access to

broadband. And there should be serious social concern that those same homes do not

have access to videos from Health & Human Services (532), FEMA (411), CDC (171),

the IRS (126), the Department of State (1,843). the Agriculture Department (230), the

Census Bureau (210), the EPA (94), the TSA (62), and the FTC (54).27

B r o a d b a n d i s N o t O p t i o n a l

During the last five years the nature of the Internet has changed dramatically. Instantaccess to uncapped, low-latency broadband is assumed by most websites and most

Americans. Most businesses rely on such broadband to do business and most jobs

require the use of uncapped, low-latency broadband. More and more government

agencies rely on such broadband to disseminate important public information and,

increasingly, to provide the public services that they are tasked to deliver.



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An example of the degree to which these changes penetrate and impact rural life can be

found, perhaps surprisingly, in the business of automotive repair. Many vital functions in

today's cars and trucks are controlled by computer chips. Reliably fixing today's cars and

trucks requires frequent access to a vast database of diagnostic codes. This is notfeasible via dial-up modem. Database suppliers

offer either broadband access (instant updates)

or a DVD subscription (slower and more

expensive updates). At least one supplier is

considering going to broadband-only access. In

other words, the days of auto repair shops in

broadband dead zones may be numbered.

From database access to voice calls, from TV

programming to movies, from rich content email

to online education, from tele-commuting to tele-

medicine, broadband is considered by most

Americans to be an essential service, as

ubiquitous as dial tone, as reliable as electricity.

And therein lies the problem for rural

communities that lack broadband: Fewer and

fewer Americans want to live without broadband.

Forget for a moment the studies and experiments that show rural communities fare

much better if they have broadband. Set aside for a moment the preferences of current

residents of rural communities with respect to broadband. The fact is, the future of rural

communities depends on people wanting to live there. So who will want to live there

without broadband?

Bleak as things are for places that lack broadband today, they are about to get worse.

Despite the upheaval in the real estate market in the first decade of this century, home

ownership continues to be the cornerstone of the American way of life and the

touchstone of local tax revenues. The relative value of residential and commercial

property, expressed as either selling price or rental income, is key to the vitality of acommunity. If values go down, so do property taxes and the ability of the community to

maintain infrastructure and amenities. A decline in infrastructure and amenities leads to

a reduction in the desirability of a location, either as a place to live or a place to do

business. The schools suffer, roads suffer, more people move away. This is the death



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spiral that leads to ghost towns and it has begun to afflict rural communities that do not

have access to broadband service.

Properties in broadband-free communities are perceived to be worth less, either on the

market or as rentals, than otherwise comparable properties in communities that do have

broadband. The phenomenon of bandwidth deflationis already manifesting itself in a

reduction in the tax base of these dial-up desertsas people move out because they must

have access to reliable, uncapped, low-latency broadband. Many young people leave

rural communities to go to college but hope to return and live and work where their

families are located. Today their hopes are stymied by the lack of broadband. Homes

without broadband linger longer on the market, rentals without broadband sit empty.

C o n c l u s i o n s

Satellite Internet service is an amazing technological achievement but it is not

broadband. The author has found no recorded instance of a consumer or company

choosing satellite Internet service when access to terrestrial broadband is available.

Even the providers of satellite

Internet service themselves

are clear that satellite Internet

service does not fit any

commonsense or commonly

accepted definition of

broadband, and it never can. It

would appear that the only

voices raised in support of the

claim that satellite Internet

connections are broadband are

the terrestrial telcos seeking to

avoid regulatory requirements

that they serve low-latency,

high capacity broadband to

America's rural communities.

Unless there is a fundamental change in the way we handle access to communication

technologies in this country, thousands of our communities will be frozen out of

mainstream America, destined to become economic backwaters, bereft of opportunity,

blighted by failing and under-funded infrastructure, increasingly cut off from government



19/22

services and advances in health care, slowly emptying of residents. Conversely, the well-

documented long-term economic benefits of rural broadband are potentially enormous,

and not just for rural Americans, but for America as a whole.

Surely America, with its history of ingenuity and its fundamental belief in fairness andjustice, can find a way to deliver true broadband access to all Americans, including those

who choose to work the land and give us reliable and timely access to our daily bread.

While a satellite Internet connection is a technical marvel, the evidence presented here

shows conclusively that satellite Internet service is not the solution to the rural

broadband challenge.



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End Notes

1 Independent statistics on market share are hard to find but HughesNet claims it has over

500,000 subscribers and in email to the author WildBlue states it has "over 425,000

subscribers." Numbers for StarBand and SkyWay could not be located. Note that on February

14, 2011, it was announced that HughesNet is being acquired by EchoStar.

2 Note that the first satellite Internet connection systems used a landline to send the request for

data (uplink) to the Internet but sent the response via satellite (downlink). The SkyWayservice still works in this manner. Note that the SkyWay website states: "Skyway USA Internet

service is intended as residential service, You may use it for a Business, but it is not designed

to be a business class product. We also do not offer support for business services."

3 See http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.htmland also The Quest for

Interactivity at http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/LatencyQuest.html. Stuart Cheshire,

PhD. is currently Wizard Without Portfolio at Apple.

4 Software as a Service is technology by which applications, such as word processing or data

entry, are hosted on a remote server accessed by the user over the Internet. For example,

SalesForce.com is used to potential clients and support customers. Price quotes may be

calculated, and contracts edited, on Google Docs. This technology is very powerful but to

function efficiently it requires low latency connections.

5 See letter to the editor, Oneonta Daily Star, February 15, 2010:http://thedailystar.com/letters/x1413000993/Letters-to-the-Editor-February-15-2010.

6 In 2008, Comcast imposed a cap of 250 Gigabytes a month (upload and download included),

per residential customer account under the companies new Acceptable Use Policy. The

HughesNet 425 megabyte per day plan = 12.75 gigabytes per month.

7 See http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/03/estimates-on-what-

it-costs-netflixs-to-stream-movies.html

8 See screenshots below for examples of this problem.

9 Ironically, getting the restriction lifted takes a long timefive minutes or moredue to the

slow speed of the restricted connection.

10 Even without daily bandwidth caps, movies over satellite are not watchable by most satellite

customers due to download speeds that are dramatically lower than advertised.

11 The author recently calculated the cost of "normal" telecommuting via satellite to be $200 per

month versus $40 for cable. This was based on a monthly rate of $80 for a satellite connection

that includes 425 megabytes plus 15 instances of exceeding daily allowance during the month.

12 Scheduling downloads can be complex and requires the use of special software. Setting up an

unattended download requires configuring a computer to stay awake or wake up for the

event as well as, in some cases, the storing of passwords for site access.

13 See Emerging Cyber Threats Report 2011, The Georgia Tech Information Security Center

(GTISC): Organizations including Google, Adobe and a few dozen others in the commercial

sector acknowledged that they had been the victims of a highly targeted attack known as

Aurora. According to Gunter Ollmann, VP of research at Damballa, the Aurora botnet was

targeted against large international businesses with the goals of network infiltration, theft ofbusiness secrets and modification of critical system data.

14 The emergence of widespread always on computing, in the form of consumer computing

devices connected to high speed Internet connections, created the potential for large-scale

attacks on corporate and government systems through compromised hosts (zombies)

organized into malicious networks (botnets) by criminal hackers or cyber-terrorists. A prime

strategy for turning personal computing devices into zombies is to exploit software

vulnerabilities before they are fixed or patched by users downloading and installing updates.


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End Notes

Software companies responded to this threat by developing automated distribution systems

for security updates. Turning off automated patching increases the risk that consumer Internet

devices will be used in botnet attacks, a threat discussed in FTC hearings on computer security

in 2002: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/security. Many people don't even know when

their computer has become a zombie. Dick Clarke, President's Special Advisor on Cyber

Security issues, Chair of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection.

15 See HughesNet customer comments on the web:

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/internet/hughes.html

16 These tests were performed using an Apple iPhone 3G in WiFi mode using Xtreme Labs

Speedtest app, benchmarked against testing tools at www.dslreports.comused on a variety of

Windows and Mac OS X systems.

17 In the author's conversations with customers of WildBlue a similar pattern of under-

performance and speed degradation over time were reported.

18 See http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/HughesNet-Sued-For-Poor-Service-102542.

Interestingly, the Federal Trade Commission has not yet investigated HughesNet for unfair

business practices despite the fact that consumers tempted by those headline rates often have

to sign a contract that carries severe penalties for early termination. Would the FTC allow Ford

to advertise a car that gets 160 miles to the gallon when the reality was 20mpg? FedEx is notallowed to advertise a 2-day delivery service that routinely takes 16 days. Consumers are

accustomed to discounting claims made by manufacturers and service providers, but it is hard

to find precedent for an 8X shortfall in advertised performance going unchallenged by the FTC.

See also: http://www.ripoffreport.com/Search/Company/Hughes-Net.aspx

19 The overwhelming evidence of poor service provided by sites like DSLReports is sharply at

odds with the recent statement of Pradman Kaul, President and CEO of Hughes, when he

talked of combining "Hughes' operational strength and proven record of customer satisfaction

with EchoStar's expertise in cutting edge satellite video technology."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/EchoStar-Corporation-to-iw-2068080937.html?x=0

20 We intend to elaborate upon this assertion in a future whitepaper but it is obvious that easy

and affordable access to good broadband service is now one of the defining characteristics of

desirable real estate, much like good roads, good schools, and a low crime rate. Lack of easyand affordable access to good broadband service lowers the value of otherwise comparable

property and migration away from broadband dead zones is already taking place.

21 VPNs are currently the dominant method of corporate telecommuting, so communities whose

only broadband option is satellite Internet service are effectively black-listed from tele-

commuting and its attendant economic and environmental benefits.

22 See Are there activities that are not recommended for use with a Satellite Connection?

http://consumer.hughesnet.com/faq/satellite-connection-activities.cfmas of 8/20/2010. Note

the use of the phrase you may exceed your download threshold in reference to watching

movies. This form of under-statement is found throughout HughesNet's website and corporate

literature. The plain fact is that watching a NetFlix movie via HughesNet is virtually impossible.

(If any readers have managed to do this, the author invites you to contact him with details of

how this was accomplished.)23 WildBlue makes disclaimers about what is possible on its service, similar to HughesNet:

http://www.wildblue.com/aboutWildblue/qaa.jsp. Note that HughesNet uses the term

"broadband" when talking to the business press, as in the news release about the EchoStar

acquisition, suggesting that omission of the term from the consumer site is intentional.

24 Note that in this context the terms "Internet service" and "broadband service" refer to the

ability of individuals and organizations to access information on the Internet. When it comes to

delivering services over the Internet, like hosting commercial websites and online services, a


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End Notes

potentially lucrative source of income for rural communities, satellite is not an option. This

vital area of commerce is off limits in communities that are not wired with DSL, fiber, or cable.

25 See http://agrilan.com/documents/Communications-Act-of-1934.htmland also

http://www.ntca.org/index.php?view=article&id=51%3Ahistory-of-rural-

telecommunications&option=com_content&Itemid=279.

26 As of July, 2010, half of the federal broadband stimulus money had been committed and from

the list of projects approved by that point it was clear that many rural communities were not

on anyone's list for expanded broadband access.

27 Numbers represent official videos placed on YouTube by various federal government agencies,

as of 9/6/2010. See http://www.youtube.com/user/USGovernment. For an example of how

hard it is to watch YouTube videos on a satellite Internet connection, see The 4 Minute USDA

Video which documents watching a 90 second USDA video http://agrilan.com/documents.

Satellite Internet Connection for Rural Broadband

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