I lived in a Caribbean country where, at the time, most of their LD traffic was over satellite. While people didn't like it, there were times that there was no public off-island access for a few hours at a time. It's just a fact of life, and people get used to it. Those who don't buy a satellite phone.
Frank -----Original Message----- From: Paul Donner [mailto:pdon...@cisco.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 2:00 AM To: Sean Donelan Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Estimate of satellite vs. Land-based traffic Satellites often sit at the edge of the network. The "orbital last mile" for individual users as well as in-country (Africa for e.g.) ISPs and Enterprise networks. When they go, often there is no backup (except maybe another satellite connection). Sean Donelan wrote: > On Tue, 6 Jan 2009, Paul Donner wrote: >> WRT Kevin's query, if you are concerned about a solar incident and >> it's affects on satcom, you might want to take a look at what user >> base (e.g. which mobile users and what impact loss of comm will have >> on what they are doing) is affected rather than understanding the >> volumes that are affected as this might provide a much more thorough >> understanding of any impact. But that is merely my two cents worth. > > Yep, consider the Galaxy IV satellite incident. The loss of a single > satellite had a significant impact on its user population for several > days/month. Other satellites can be moved into an orbital slot, and > dishes can be re-pointed; but Galaxy IV lead to some interesting (i.e. > unexpected to some users) failures. I'm not sure how many hospitals > realized their "in-house" pager systems relied on a satellite. > >