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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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Satellite

Satellite connections to the Internet get the data beamed to a satellite dish on

your house or office; a receiver handles the flow of data, eventually sending

it through an Ethernet cable to the NIC in your computer. I can already sense

people’s eyebrows raising. The early days of satellite required you to connect

via a modem. You would upload at the slow 26- to 48-Kbps modem speed,

but then get speedier downloads from the dish. It worked, so why complain?

You really can move to that shack on the side of the Himalayas to write the

great Tibetan novel and still have DSL-speed Internet connectivity. Sweet!

Satellite might be the most intriguing of all the technologies used to

connect to the Internet today. As with satellite television, though, you need to

make sure the satellite dish points toward the satellites (generally toward the

south if you live in the northern hemisphere). Satellite starts with a dish,

professionally installed with line-of-sight to the satellite. A coax cable runs

from the dish to your satellite modem. The satellite modem has an RJ-45

connection, which you may then connect directly to your computer or to a

router. Current offerings from HughesNet (the biggest player in the satellite

market) feature up to 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds.

Getting your Internet from the stars has a few downsides. The first

significant issue is the upfront cost of the dish and installation. Then there’s

the distance the signal must travel to the satellite, creating a delay called the

satellite latency. This latency is usually unnoticeable for general Web use,

but can make any real-time activity such as gaming or voice/video chat

difficult in the best of circumstances. It can get worse when the signal

degrades in foul weather such as rain and snow. Finally, most satellite

operators implement various usage caps to keep the system from getting

overloaded. These caps have names such as HughesNet’s fair access policy

and often come with not only blanket caps but more limitations during peak

usage hours.

Connection to the Internet

So you went out and signed up for an Internet connection. Now it’s time to

get connected. You basically have two choices:

1. Connect a single computer to your Internet connection

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