In today’s international business world, communication is key. You may have clients all over the world who send you on jobs all over the world… and in our global society, immediate transfer of data, whether it be the web, voice, fax, or other kinds of information is more than important. That’s why satellite internet providers exist. What a they will do for you is provide you with mobile communications so that you’re never out of touch with your friends, family, or clients.

Maybe you are on a trip to Antarctica searching for meteors, and you need to catalogue them and send the data back to a lab in Boston. Maybe you’re drilling for oil 300 miles off-shore in the middle of the pacific for 6 months straight and you need to stay in touch with your wife and kids. Maybe you’re on a construction site in the middle of California where there isn’t a telephone pole for miles, and you need to be in contact with the superintendent back in LA.

In these important communication situations, a good satellite internet provider is indispensable.

It’s just one of the ways a great satellite internet provider can reduce the problems of satellite communication, like rain fade, latency, and line-of-site issues.

A great satellite IP will purposely place a satellite receiver dish away from any obstructions to handle the high-speed data coming in at radio frequencies around 2gHz (if my knowledge of the metric system serves me, that’s somewhere around 2 billion repetitions per second!) but unfortunately, these high speeds are susceptible to obstructions as minor as leaves, which is why placement is essential.

A finer satellite internet provider will also make sure to use dishes as large as possible in order to minimize the effect of rain fade, where the signal literally “drowns” in the rainfall.

The best IPs will tackle the issue of latency (a delay in time between the receiver and sender, which can become a big problem when data is being sent back and forth several times) … in order to keep latency in line, IPs will use techniques such as HTTP pre-fetching, DNS caching, and TCP accelerators.

Pretty cool.

I need to call my satellite internet provider and figure out why my connection is so slow. I was trying to download the first season of Flight of the Conchords on iTunes the other day, and it took 8 hours per episode here! but when I went to school, they downloaded in about 3 minutes each! Maybe the CSU has some super special satellite internet provider that’s extra fast, or maybe mine’s just slow :-/