Time to move to Asia.....

Japan launches high-speed internet satellite
Posted on 24.02.2008 at 11:58 in Tech News by MartinJapan successfully launched Saturday an experimental satellite aimed at providing high-speed Internet access across Asia, even when terrestrial infrastructure goes down, the space agency said. The domestically developed H-2A rocket carrying the Kizuna satellite was launched at 17:55 pm (0855 GMT) with no glitches from the Space Centre on Tanegashima island off the southern tip of Kyushu Island, southern Japan. The communications satellite, expected to be in use for five years, separated from the rocket approximately 35 minutes after the launch, said an official of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) during a live broadcast. The 342 million dollar-Kizuna will allow super-high speed data communications of up to 1.2 Gbps, which would make it the fastest in the world, the agency said.That rate would translate to 150 times that of the average high-speed ADSL connection rate of 8 Mbps, or 12 times the speed of a fibre-optic communication delivery to a person’s premises (FTTP). The “Kizuna,” which also means “bond” in Japanese, is expected to begin transmitting and receiving data with terrestrial infrastructures in July after completing preparations and confirming the satellite’s safety. The satellite will enable students in Asian countries to communicate smoothly and with no time lag among one another, as if they were in the same classroom, it said. The satellite will to last five years, an agency spokeswoman said. The launch was delayed by one week after JAXA said it had discovered a problem with the gas jet thruster for its launch rocket.

Wow that's fast :o And is there going to be more of these for other countries etc? Like NZ? ;D

LMAO with Helen Clarkes budget I highly doubt that :P

pfff no lag? so the signal doesn't have to travel 300,000KM between them?

Maybe no lag, or maybe some areas will be open at certain points, due to the satellite's orbit..

there is an inherent lag of 500ms in ALL satellite technology, due to the distance the signal has to travel between earth and the satellite transponder. I highly doubt they have managed to eliminate that.

Hey loony, can you make it easy enoguh for us to understand...Whats Ms? and they may fly it low orbit inorder to reduce lag..

ms = milliseconds. 500ms is half a second.

japan has a very high speed internet access compared to any other parts of the world. i wonder how much is the cost for subscription for the satellite service as well as their non-satellite [on-earth] service. btw, what equipment do you need for this to work?

ku-band VSAT dish and modem, and you need to be within the satellite footprint.

no wonder there are no complaints from the japanese people when sony and other online companies decided to have huge data to be downloaded from the net for them to play and use on their consoles and pc and such. especially xbox games, knowing that microsoft are releaseing virtual xbox games as a downloadable game and can be played on the 360. those games are huge [4gb+] and for the japanese it only takes several minutes while the other regions of the world lags behind their speed in downloads.

you can't game on a satellite connection, the latency is too high. MMORPG players might get away with it, but online FPS players will not.

Replying to #12

i'm not talking about the satellite only, but in general [japan has a very high speed internet access compared to other parts of the world].

The article is wrong.The Bird can handle a MAX of 1.2 Gbps, not to each client.So, with it shared among the country, it will suck.-Patton

Darn you Japanese and your superior technology!!! :(

Almo · #3LMAO with Helen Clarkes budget I highly doubt that :P

Yeah, she probably wouldn't even know what that is :P Japanese's Technology is far more advanced.

1.2 Gbps? In South Korea and India the connection almost reaches 3 Gbps.I'm not impressed.faster internet for what iMacs? If your looking for "high speed internet" and "in Asia" in one sentence don't look to Japan. South Korea(more hi-tech than Japan but not as good as promoting tech), India, Pakistan and Dubai have them beat. Also when's the last time anybody's been to a Japanese site(but to look at pictures)? If Japan comes up with a site like Google or Yahoo or an OS or program everyone would use, then i'd look to Japan for high tech.I keep hearing/reading about: Japan's technology this and Japan's technology that. What's with everybody these days being soooo in love with Japan. I know its the wrong place to put this but if Japan is so high tech how come the next-gen(Japanese)consoles(not a fanboy just saying, check whats in those wiis and ps3s,I prefer PC gaming)all run on good old US technology(Nvidia, IBM, ATI?, U.S.A. U.S.A.!)?

Seriously. How many people in South Korea and India have a 3 Gbps connection?

To make it clear connections with these 3gbps speeds are not for consumers. Same with this sattelite.SK telecom offers higher than 2Gbs service to smaller providers subscribers. Most of this service is for big businesses and cellphone companies(there wasa report on this on BBC news,that "Click" show, hell Japan doesn't even have "real" 3g phone service yet, they still use something called imode). As for India and Pakistan, it's obvious, all those companies providing outsourcing for many (US based) companies(Dell, HP,MS,AT&T)use these really high speed internet connectons.

I wouldn't say Japan 'doesn't even have a "real" 3g phone service'. They will never have what we call '3G' purely because they like using different technology to the rest of the world, so they will not implement UMTS (technical name for 3g), instead they will develop and implement their own equivalent technology.