I-4 satellite

Three I-4 satellites make up the INMARSAT BGAN, FleetBroadband and SwiftBroadband communications network. They provide Internet and telephony connections anywhere on Earth, except the polar regions.

Data services

Two general types of data service are currently provided:

  1. Streaming
  2. Background

Streaming

Streaming is a guaranteed delivery style of service. A terminal requests a context of X bandwidth (currently 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, or 256kbit/s) and, if the current spot beam has enough resources available, it is allocated a guaranteed chunk of the available bandwidth. So if it asks for an 8k streaming context, the terminal will at all times be able to send data at 8kbit/s.

Streaming contexts are billed by time.

Background

Background is a best effort style of service. Each spot beam provides a certain amount of usable bandwidth. The bandwidth which is not in use by Streaming contexts is used for Background contexts. This means that the actual amount of bandwidth you receive with a background context will vary over time. The theoretical maximum bandwidth available is ~400kbit/s.

Background contexts are billed by volume.


gollark: <@301477111229841410> Do you need to *entirely* reboot or just restart some service or other?
gollark: I don't follow the laptop market much. But apparently notebookcheck is good for reviews.
gollark: ... other laptops with whatever specs you require? There are lots of laptops.
gollark: Very expensive, and probably going to overheat if you do anything intensive on it.
gollark: All the software will need recompiling, or they'll have to use emulation, which will be very slow.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.