I also do not think satellite ISP are dying. But Strato has recently increased the price per MB from 0,5 ct to 2 ct.
Romania is only covered to 50% by Astra. But Astra is too expensive anyway. Hotbird costs half as much and other satellite positions even less. You need a 100-120 cm dish in transilvania (middle/mid-northwest of romania). http://www.technisat.de/de/sat-infos/footprints.php?view=detail But maybe this is not the whole truth and it's possible to receiver Astra in Romania (e.g. in Medias, which is nearly in the middel of that country) with a 60 cm dish and with a bigger one even on the black sea's cost? Does anyone know that or even live there? The capacity per transponder is 38 Mbps and I guess there are 20-50 unused transponders. But most of them are only for backup purposes. And it costs ~7 Million EUR to lease a complete Astra transponder or 3,5 Millions to lease one of Hotbird. Beseides: Strato does not PROMISE 4 Mbit/s - the only ADVERTISE with this number. In the "rush hour" the sat downlink ist already slower than 2 ISDN channels. 4 Mbit/s they definitely fool their not-yet-customers in their ads! Internet via satellite is very unsatisfying! High costs and sometimes low performance and you need to pay phone line connection as return channel anyway. And no flatrate. Maybe at least the return channel issue can be fixed. Astra is currently developing a cheap low speed return channel technology for set-top-boxes. They think of ordering PPV movies or even instant messaging and E-Mailing. http://ix.de/newsticker/data/tol-27.01.03-003 (german) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Torsten Schlabach" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, January 31, 2003 9:24 AM Subject: [linux-dvb] AW: Re: DVB driver for B2C2 based budget cards (such as Technisat SkyStar 2) Are they? It was my impression that they just started all over the place and I see new ones every day. My guess was that in places especially like the booming economies of eastern Europe (at least 50% of them are within the footprint of Astra) this service was rocketing. I would not want to try to get DSL in a country like the Ukraine or Romania unless I live in the capital, probably in a district where international companies or the government is located nearby But even in Germany Deutsche Telekom and Teles AG (Strato) are heavily promoting the service to people in the eastern parts of Germany. The -- Info: To unsubscribe send a mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe linux-dvb" as subject.
