• Satellite services cost more.
• Satellite latency kills VPNs, VoIP, many games, and more.
• Rain and snow are a big problem.
• Exceed their monthly caps on data transfers, and satellite providers throttle your speeds to a crawl.
• Upload speeds are slow.
• When satellites reach capacity, they can’t be upgraded.

Satellite service costs more.

Because of the hundreds of millions of dollars required to launch and maintain satellites, providers charge considerably higher than normal rates for service.

CloudBurst™ broadband rates are very competitive especially when combined with the savings of VoIP telephone service. See a comparison of CA’s and the satellite providers’ rates here.

Satellite latency kills VPNs, VoIP, many games, and more.

In a network, latency, a synonym for delay, is an expression of how much time it takes for a packet of data to get from one designated point to another. The main culprit causing satellite service latency is the 88,944-mile, double roundtrip the Internet signals must travel from the user to the company’s network operations center and back, via geostationary satellites.

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and other remote access applications and applications that use non-TCP/IP protocols do not function properly via satellite. As a result, VPN client software suffers from speeds similar to that of a dial-up connection.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone service, (such as Skype or Vonage), video over IP, certain online interactive games (particularly “shooter” games that depend on split-second responsiveness for the “survival” of the player), and financial market trading rely on instantaneous feedback, and the extreme latency is too great for satisfactory performance.

Since CloudBurst™ terrestial-based wireless signals only have to travel a few miles on a single roundtrip, we can easily provide VPN, VoIP, and gaming capabilities.

Rain and snow are a big problem.

Like satellite television services, satellite Internet service can be affected by rain. During heavy rain, there is degraded performance, and the service can stop altogether during downpours. The reason for this is that, here in the North, the dish antennas are pointed low in the sky, so they must see through many miles of wet atmosphere, before the signals can escape to space on their way to and from the satellite.

CloudBurst™ wireless signals are not typically affected by weather.

Exceed their monthly caps on data transfers, and satellite providers throttle your speeds to a crawl.

In order to conserve their precious bandwidth capacity, satellite service providers set monthly data transfer limits often very restrictive ones, too! Exceed them, and your service is throttled down to dial-up speeds until the next month!

Cloud Alliance imposes no monthly limits to normal use.

Upload speeds are slow.

Also, to conserve bandwidth capacity, satellite service providers significantly limit upload access to their subscribers often with speeds nearly as slow as dial-up.

Cloud Alliance offers generous upload speeds, so that our subscribers’ photos, music, videos, and other large files will speed their way to their recipients.

When satellites reach capacity, they can’t be upgraded.

All wireless equipment has finite capacity, but land-based ones are easily accessible and easily upgraded. As more and more subscribers are assigned to a satellite, there is less and less bandwidth to share. The subscribers must all experience slower connections and lower throughput. It is extemely costly and time-consuming to launch new satellites to increase capacity.

Cloud Alliance regularly monitors network capacity. If capacity begins to be challenged, it is relatively simple and inexpensive for us to purchase more bandwidth and add new transceivers and antennas to our land-based network stations.