Per Silicon ad Astra

Company Silicon - Sharp & Strong from Sremska Mitrovica is well known to us since 4-5 years ago representing famous Europe Online Networks, when they offered to the market first satellite Internet service. Silicon has renewed their offer in this field, offering this time it"s own satellite transponder access. With company SES-Astra, operator of the best known satellite group which are broadcasting Europe wide, Silicon signed long term satellite internet access reseller agreement and now offering AstraSat - actually their own satellite internet access service.

As a short remainder, for using this type of service you must have installed satellite DVB card and of course satellite antenna dish. Service is functioning through terrestrial local provider (dial-up modem, leased line, GPRS mobile phone or through any other connection you are sending to satellite provider all your requests for data from the internet, provider get demanded data from the Net, sending it to the satellite and than all this data comes directly to your ,,dish", through your satellite equipment.

Bandwidth which can be achieved while sending data through satellite transponder it"s rather wide and it can be measured in gigabits per second. But, in all this flow of the bits which are coming from the sky, just piece of them are for you (those which you are requested), while others belong to other users on line. Just because of that, at the majority of satellite internet services real bandwidth of the reception is very variable depending of the number of simultaneous users on line at the time.
Silicon"s AstraSat is made to be service with limited but stabile bandwidth, so that to each user speed is not in connection of number of users online or service overload.

Offer of Silicon company nowadays have two subscription packages: download speed 256 and 512 Kbit/s monthly flat fee. For those which don"t have satellite DVB card Silicon offers Technisats Sky Star 2 card which is very well known to our readers. For users with even bigger demands Silicon announces wider bandwidths in near future.

Under condition that you have all needed equipment, installation of the software understands standard drivers for Sky Star card, with all belonging software for reception of the digital data and for watching TV channels. Software core of the system is program Astra Net Proxy which introduces you to the server with your user name and password and then all traffic from the card redirects to software which asked this content from the net. This version of proxy client enables that all data via satellite is delivered to all users in local area network, in which case all users in LAN share the one subscribed bandwidth. Installation routine aiming to set all installed browsers by default to ask traffic from Astra net proxy, which is very convenient for users which don"t know how or don"t want to waste time on manually setting of ports, protocols and other parameters. More experienced users will find reproach that proxy software have absolutely no settings, only logging and statistics which is checked from the browser. They have drivers and proxy for Linux also.

AstraSat service we had a chance to test in relatively short period before this issue was printed and our experiences are very positive. In period of ,,heavy download" without efforts we had subscribed speed about 60 KB/s at service of 512 Kbit/s. But it is necessary to say that the speed of connection or download depends a lot of the speed of the server from which you are downloading your data. All this sounds nice, in theory with bandwidth of 64 KB/sec (512 kbits) in one month you"ll be able to download about 150 GB of data. That"s why in practice, subscribed bandwidth is guaranteed only for a GB in respective month. And when you are over this quote, in peak overload moments bandwidth is reduced first of all to heavy users which are expecting too much of this service....

Tihomir STANCEVIC Oct./04

Internet from the sky

Access to Internet via satellite is not a new thing any more. To all of us is well known service EuropeOnline, several years ago with good number of subscribers. Geostationary satellites for accessing world network can be used in many ways, but most common way of service is to redirects all coming traffic to satellite downlink and for uplink is used usual connections - dial up to your local ISP, or cable,Wireless even in last time GPRS

AstraSat (www.astrasat.net), Actually company Silicon Networks, offer in this moment subscriptions of 256 Kb/s and 512 Kb/s flat, and announced wider bandwidths also. To use this subscriptions, it is necessary to have PC equipped with DVB card which is cabled and connected to satellite antenna dish pointed to Astra satellite and any kind of local connection to Internet for uplink. For testing purposes we used DVB card Hauppauge Nexus-S older generation, but we did also test the system with two cards newer generation both based on chips b2c2. All three “satellite modems” showed good results.

System installation is relatively easy. First step is that you configure your data service software of the card with all given parameters of satellite provider. (this kind of software you always get with DVB hardware installation disc). When you get the confirmation that you have the traffic data flow, then you should proceed with installing of Astra net proxy client which you can download from www.astrasat.net company web site. During installation, proxy software offers possibility that all your browsers should be set to this kind of connection – actually, it is proxy connection instead of direct connection. Astra-Net Proxy without problems supports e mail software, FTP protocols, and also software like Flash-Get and P2P programs like Napster and eMule. Beginners will be happy that they don"t have to set anything when installing - only thing is to enter their user name and password which they get from the Astrasat provider.

Service works extremely good. We tested subscription package 512 Kb/s and average bandwidth speed was little bit above 60 KB/s (500 kbit/sec), which is result worth of praise for it. Particularly we liked that with little effort you can set your PC, for example, to redirect all download via satellite link and all other traffic via your standard connection. During our testing for our uplink connection we used dial up, cable connection and also GPRS – and everything was running smoothly without any obstacles. Minor problems can happen when you try to resume broken downloads in FTP, but overall impression is good. Only visible limitation of the service offered by Astrasat is that your subscribed bandwidth is guaranteed for first GB in respective month. Shortly, this type of service is intended first of all, to users which are not firstly heavy downloader from the Internet, because this type of service with it"s quality is more than enough for all common end users.

– Relja Jovic Micro Nov./04