Re: [Bloat] We are having it all upside down...

[Jonathan Morton <chromatix99@gmail.com>]

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More of that quote:

> Dankberg and ViaSat disagree and point to Exede in the Air, the company’s
broadband service for commercial airlines, as an example of a geostationary
satellite system being given higher marks by consumers than systems using
air-to-ground terrestrial technologies, which offer reduced latency.
>
> “There is a common misperception that latency is a dominant technical
measure of performance for broadband,” Dankberg said. “Yes, latency is
important, but for the vast majority of Internet traffic, speed and
bandwidth are what’s decisive. This captures our technology strategy in a
nutshell.”

I think he's managing to confuse coverage and reliability with speed.
That's a really serious blind spot. A system based only on ground stations
is going to have a lot of dead spots on it, even at 30000ft where line of
sight is much further than at ground level; most notably all those pesky
oceans where passengers have nothing to look out of the window at.

So of course they're going to be more satisfied with a system that works
anywhere than one that drops out seemingly at random - even if it does add
a full second of round trip latency. A system that manages to work
anywhere, reliably, AND with lower latency is going to be preferred over
that.

I did note Dave's ping trace from GoGo, with its interplanetary-scale
latencies. I can't believe that anyone on board would have a functioning
service under such conditions - I hope they weren't paying for it!

- Jonathan Morton

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