Science and Future Technology

What Should You Look For In A Satellite Internet Provider Posted on  February 11, 2014, 10:25 pm  By  admin Satellite Internet providers can be categorized based on the download capacity and speed, customer service and the overall customer experience. The following are some of the prolific internet providers used all over the world: Download Speed Satellite Internet service can vary greatly in speed. Some go barely 5Mbps, while others are as fast as 15 Mbps. In fact the same company can even deliver both speeds because some tie speed to the price of your plan. Data Plan The data plan you choose dictates how much data you can download per month. You can get as little as 5GB per month up to 30 GB per month. You should also be on the look out for companies that offer unlimited free data access overnight. Especially if you or another web user in your house is a night owl, this can save you greatly on the cost of your plan. Quality Service Check out the reputa...

The Boston City Council today passed a plan to cut satellite dish clutter. The proposal, which is supported by Mayor Thomas M. Menino, would require removal of all obsolete dishes. It would also ban new installations from facades and other walls facing the street, unless an installer can prove there is no other place to get a signal. Dishes would have to be placed on roofs, in the rear, or on the sides of buildings. “It’s a good start to cleaning up the neighborhoods,” said Councilor Salvatore LaMattina of East Boston, who spearheaded the effort. “It’s fair. If you’re a user with a dish, its gets grandfathered in,” he said. “Any new installations, it requires that the satellite installers have to remove any dishes aren’t being used.” If the ordinance passes, it will raise the ante in a growing national fight between densely populated cities and DIRECTV, DISH, and other satellite companies, the Globe reported last week. An industry trade group told the Globe last week...

Hong Kong currently boasts the fastest Internet speeds on Earth. However, Internet speeds on the moon are as much as 10 times faster than those found in Hong Kong. The key behind the large difference in speeds is the lasers that are being used to carry Internet from Earth to ships exploring the moon. NASA and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) worked together on this project, called the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) in MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass. The project attempted to beam data via lasers to and from the moon in the interest of significantly decreasing the amount of time it would take for satellites exploring space to communicate with scientists back on Earth. The LLCD project has been extremely successful. The laser signals carrying Internet were recorded at a maximum speed of 622 Megabits per second (Mbps), significantly faster than Hong Kong’s average connection speed of 63.6 Mbps, which is the best connection speed on Eart...

A new Internet communications system for space has been tested for the second time, paving the way for faster extraterrestrial communication.  (Photo : NASA) An Internet Wi-Fi system for the moon is significantly faster than home connections here on Earth.   The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) uses lasers to send Internet service around 239,000 miles from the Earth hto our lunar companion. Investigators were able to upload data at top speeds over 19 megabytes per second (Mbps), and download information at 600 Mbps. This would allow users on the lunar surface to copy more than 100 average songs every second.  NASA uses radio waves to carry data to and from satellites, observatories and the International Space Station. As the need to transmit vast quantities of data becomes more common, this method of communication is less able to meet demands.  Photographs and videos can already be transmitted on the test system, and developers are ...

Kansas City, both the one in Missouri and the smaller one in Kansas, has an unusual Internet problem — the Google Fiber network they fought to get is too fast, and nobody is really sure what to do with all that power. Neither city is considered a prime location for technology company start-ups, reports The New York Times, and the average household doesn't need online speeds that can run at one gigabit a second, or about 100 times faster than the average connection elsewhere in the United States. Alert:  IRS Insider Reveals How to Save as Much as $355,000  Google Fiber set up its fiber-optic network, which includes cable television and the super high-speed Internet, just over three years ago.  According to Google,  its high speed service offers "Instant downloads" and "crystal clear high definition TV." Just how fast is Google Fiber? Computer programmers testing the service set up a project to determine how many photos of cute kittens could be downl...

The internet, so ubiquitous on earth, is now challenging the final frontier. Nasa astronaut Soichi Noguchi became a Twitter superstar during this stay on the International Space Station. But the internet in space is not just being used for social media stunts. It is also being used to control unmanned craft, like those made here in Surrey. From Surrey Satellite Technology they are beaming the existing terrestrial internet into space, to control 14 satellites currently orbiting the earth. But the capability only extends so far because the internet we all know relies on a constant connection - something that is just not possible once a spacecraft leaves the earth's orbit. Interplanetary internet But that is now changing with a new interplanetary internet system being developed. The man who invented the internet on earth is now pioneering the internet in space. Computer scientist Vint Cerf told  Channel 4 News : "It's very early days yet, but the protocols...

SAN FRANCISCO – On the eve of Independence Day, a who's who of computer experts say that government control, consumer distrust and corporate greed threaten the future of the Internet as we know it, In a  report   released Thursday, the Pew Research Center distilled the concerns of over 1,400 computer experts, Internet visionaries and researchers canvassed earlier this year. They were asked whether people will be more or less able to freely share information online in the year 2025. Sixty-five percent said the web of the future would be more open, 35% less. The good news is that by 2025 "every human being on the planet will be online. The collision of ideas through the sharing network will lead to explosive innovation and creativity," said filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby awards. But the open structure that has made the Internet so powerful is under threat, say the experts. "What the carriers actually want—badly—is to move television to...

Sometime in 2015, the number of works licensed under Creative Commons agreements will surpass the 1-billion mark, the organization which stewards the licenses announced Thursday. The prediction came in  a “State of the Commons” report  , the first issued by that organization—which is also called Creative Commons—in four years. As of November 2014, it said, there are roughly 882 million works licensed under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. That’s more than double the number when the last report was issued in 2010. “I was surprised at the number,” said Ryan Merkley, who started as CEO of Creative Commons this summer. And he called the approaching 1-billion mark “an exciting milestone for a 12-year-old organization.” The previous two reports—released in 2006 and 2010—estimated the number of CC-licensed works at 50 million and 400 million, respectively. Merkley said that he hopes to release these reports annually starting this year. On Monday, there were at lea...

  Google is buying Titan Aerospace, a solar-powered drone company. The purchase – for an undisclosed sum – is part of the internet giant’s strategy of delivering access to the web to remote parts of the world. Titan is developing drones as big as a commercial airliner, which fly at a height of almost 20,000 metres (65,000 feet) and can stay up for as long as five years without ever having to land and refuel. They can then be landed and reused. Google has already experimented with balloons designed to beam internet access to underdeveloped parts of the world. Last August New Mexico-based Titan unveiled its Solara 50 and 60 unmanned aircraft. Powered by the sun they have a mission range of more than four million kilometres. The drones, which are are known as atmospheric satellites, can conduct many of the operations performed by an orbital satellite but are much cheaper and more versatile. “Atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of peo...

Surfing the Internet using light waves as easily as with Wi-Fi is not just a dream any longer. A group of Chinese scientists recently succeeded in accelerating the speed of Internet access through light waves to a record high in a lab experiment. According to the School of Information Science and Technology at Fudan University, researchers modulated Internet signals to a 1watt LED lamp. Under the light, four computers were able to access the Internet. The offline maximum speed reached 3.7 Gb per second which, scientists said, is the world's fastest Internet access speed by LED light, while the average speed of a real-time system is up to 150 Mb/s. "A video program was successfully delivered between two computers at this speed in our experiment," said Chi Nan, a professor from the University, who led the research. The LED-based alternative to Wi-Fi, dubbed Li-Fi, or Light Fidelity, refers to a type of visible light communication technology that delivers a n...