Forum Discussion

gaines_wright's avatar
gaines_wright
Tutor
7 years ago

Data Limits again

  Some of you may seen my earlier posts about why are there data limits? I've been thinking about this subject again. Especially about Hughes vs Dishnet.     I'm aware of all the arguments about, b...
Data Management
  • debbie.jean.bro's avatar
    debbie.jean.bro
    7 years ago
    Hi gaines_wright,

    I would think at least a partial explanation would be that TV is a simple one-way communication, whereas internet is a complex back-and-forth two-way communication with each of millions of customers.

    For DISH network, their broadcast hub receives signals from content providers, i.e. ESPN, HGTV, Disney, HBO, etc. It then sends those signals to geosynchronous satellites, which rebroadcast them to Earth. Back here on earth, your dish (and everybody else's) pick up the SAME signal and passes it to your receiver and then to your TV.

    For Hughesnet, when you access a webpage, a signal is sent from your computer to the satellite, which beams your request to your service hub (i.e. gateway). There, the webpage is located and beamed back up to the geostationary satellite, whereupon it is then beamed back down to your satellite and appears on your computer screen via your modem.

    These are the processes, basically, in a nutshell. You can see that the two things, TV and Internet, are very different processes. The internet communication process is not one way, and it has to handle millions of requests from individual users at the same time.

    More people using more data obviously clogs the system because the system can only handle "x" number of requests at any given time. The long range solutions probably include more satellites, more gateways, and advances in technology. All extremely expensive. The short term solution is either limit the number of users, the amount of data per user, or both.

    Other folks on here may have other knowledge about the difference between satellite TV and satellite internet.

    Hope this helps!
    Sincerely,
    Debbie
Amanda's avatar
Amanda
Moderator
7 years ago

Hello,

 

I think that the best way to explain the differences between satellite TV capacity needs vs internet is by looking at the way data is collected and moved.

 

Satellite TV mainly goes in one direction (downlink), with the exception of you changing the channel. All of the content is delivered by the provider (whether it be HBO, the History Channel or a local news station) to a central hub (broadcast center). 

 

A TV user decides they want to watch Peaky Blinders, and then later, some local news.

 

Turnaround channels > satellite 1 > broadcast center > satellite 2 > you

Local channels > fiber optic > broadcast center > satellite 2 > you

The broadcast center does all of the computing: compression, encoding, encryption and transmission

 

All of the above is limited to a pre-set number of channels, limited further by how many channels are in your package. If Dish offers 1,000 channels (not sure of the real number) and nothing more, they already know how much data to expect at any given time on a already known amount of devices in the home. 

 

Satellite Internet flows in two directions (downlink and uplink). 

 

An internet user decides they would like to search "cats" on Google.com using their iPad

 

Uplink path: User on their iPad > HughesNet modem, dish > HughesNet satellite > gateway (ground station) > outside data server > Google's server

 

Downlink path: Google's server > outside data server  > gateway > satellite > HughesNet modem, dish > iPad cat lover

 

Let's cut this generally across a subset of 50,000 HughesNet customers living in California pointed to Echostar 19 (another estimate, probably way under)

  • Not all 50,000 customers are cat lovers, so they might want to look up dogs.
  • 25,000 cat lovers want pictures of Himalayan or Siamese or Tabby or Scottish Fold cats
  • 25,000 dog lovers want pictures of English bulldog or Terrier or Labrador or Poodle dogs.
  • Perhaps part of each 25,000 like both cats and dogs, so they open a second browser tab to search for both at the same time. 
  • The cat lovers are not always at home during the day, so they mostly search in the late afternoon
  • The dog lovers work until 5PM, so they search later at night
  • Half of the dog lovers have 4 people at home using the internet, while half cat lovers have 2 people at home, a mixture of both like a combination of cats and dogs (2 tabs now)
  • Not all 50k want to look at the SAME picture, despite seeing the same results, so now the satellite is receiving a request to look at 2 different pictures and subsequently sends down 2 different pictures to the viewer.

Hughes utilizes different technologies to maximize bandwidth to deliver this array of never-ending content. One of them is Web Acceleration.

  • Our Web Acceleration technology has now cached both pictures. Later in the day, Cat lover's daughter wants to see one of the pictures the satellite grabbed earlier. It's going to be delivered to her faster, because some of that data is already available. 

This is just cat lovers and dog lovers in one part of the country. Some people are into lizards, birds, horses, llamas, reptiles, deer and fish. We've added more requests into the mix. All the animal kingdom is just an itsy bitsy teeny tiny piece of the internet that can be requested at any time of the day, by anyone, in any form and get delivered on-demand through ONE satellite. And I haven't even gotten into file sizes, sustained downloads/requests, uploads or bit rate. 

 

Throw in Hulu, Netflix, Spotify, iTunes, Pandora (with all their different shows, stations and content), plus everyone's Facebook, Instagram or Twitter friends' profiles, the videos and pictures on their profiles, thousands of games on Steam, Origin, Windows Store... I don't even want to get into YouTube. 

 

Multiply this further by household size: Cat lover mom, deer hunter dad, bird watcher daughter who also likes to upload pictures of her sightings to Facebook by the way, at-home budding scientist son watching "how to make flour bomb balloons to throw at my sister" on YouTube while shopping for supplies on Amazon...

 

In short:

 

Satellite TV: pre-set amount of content as super compressed MPEG going to pre-set amount of places in one direction.

 

Satellite Internet: a combination of everything you can possibly wrap your mind around that exists, has ever existed, or coming into existence passing through 1 satellite at any given time, everyday, all day in two directions. 

 

~Amanda