Comment Re:I worked on this a bit (Score 1) 109
Around 1 mbps, but with *huge* round-trip times (over 1000 ms). Additionally, geosync sats are below the horizon (their coverage is only from ~80N-80S and nobody else in the world lives between 80-90), so they have to use deprecated sats that aren't in the "groove" anymore, Iridium sats, and NASA's TDRSS network. Those old sats and the TDRSS birds are only above the horizon for a few hours at a time, but Iridium is a full constellation, providing 24/7 coverage. The costs are such that Iridium is used for textual emails when the other sats are not visible (there's a filter on the mail server and messages of a few K bytes are pushed over the Iridium equivalent of SMS via several modems in parallel) but the phone bill would be too expensive for megabit service 24/7.
I also worked for UW between 2003-2009, for the same department, and was on the other end of those racks (among other things, I spec'ed out and ordered the individual shipping crates for the HP servers), and installed equipment, and ran the detector for two winters. If Gherald's immediate boss was Australian, we worked for the same guy. I mention the dates because over that time frame, while I was there, the drive mechanism on the 10m comms dish broke multiple times (which affected bandwidth and uptime because they couldn't track on the sats), two birds were splashed (MARISAT-2 and one of the oldest TDRSS birds) and one reallocated by the DoD (LES9). We had wild flucuations of how many hours per day we were online, sometimes as little as 2-3, sometimes as much as 10-11.
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