Thaicom company launched a new communication-satellite in the space on thursday morning. As the biggest satellite ever built, it will enable internet access for Asia (pacific region), Australia and New Zeland.

Launch of the new sattelite was sucessful after a hour and a half delay. On the website of Arianespace (company, resonsible for the launch) they say, that the reason for almost 2 hour delay is their checking of the telemetry on the lanuch-pad.

Shin Satellite comany will be in control of this satellite, named Thaicom 4. This company is owned by the thai minister Thaksin Shinawatr and is the forth satellite owned by his family! It is 7 tons heavy and worth "only" 400 million dollars. It was built by the SpaceSystems/Loral group and Palo Alto from California.

The sattelite is capable of transimiting 45GB per second and is goin to use 18 gateways.

If you want to watch the video, visit: CNN.com

Greetz

Asia, Australia, and New Zealand use satelitte internet! While I use the lowly ADSL copper wire internet. >.> Seriously, I think that something of that size and magnitude was sent up to spy >.> and "internet access" is the cover up.

LOL, why would they spy on something and what would they be spying on? I think this is quiet interesting. So now Asia, New Zealand, and Aussie, can be able to have faster internet access than before? I wonder how much it'll cost, because they say Netscape is the best down there, but it sucks in the USA. Plus it's mighty exspensive too...

Hmm ... they spy because they wanted to spy .. Maybe you didnt know you have been spied on ... but u might have been ...

I think the cost will be quite high ... but who will use that? a wire with ADSL is good enough i think ... The thing i dont understand is that what is the cost to do with Netscape ? Isn't it an internet browser? how does it related to internet cost? Never heard of Netscape dominating the browser market over here (asia)

Ell guys this sattelite internet is acctually not that good, because in most cases sattelite connection is only one way, which means that you can download but cannot upload and need some other way to send your data - gprs or something...

so if you only have sattelite internet that means upload does not exist or is really bad - most p2p sharing stuff doesnt work and you can hardly download anything because you always have to send data when you download...

I think that this whole sattelite mania is for now only in wraps and maybe someday it will be better than most of the other interent options...

Well..just thought it would be interesting to add!

Credit, Thailand, hey what about Thailand guys! Thaksin is from Thai and that is my country. Since I am living in Australian and did not know what was going on in Thailand and about the president of Thailand doing, so sad and happy at the same time.

So question is that is the speed of the satellite connection is fast? I wonder how fast it is though and I though that it would be really expensive if we have one in our house

Wow, satelite internet.....that is the fastest internet ever. Why I'm not living in Australia? lol
I hope that Europe gets that kind of the satelite soon, cause I have the slowest version of ADSL and...well is not that slow really, but for downloading you have to wait to much.

Well the idea of launching the biggest communications satellite to space is always a good achievement.

While people can indeed use it to spy, I highly doubt about it, cause the least that a spy satellite may want is full TV cover about being the biggest there is Of course i may be wrong..

Internet access over those countries is very nice, though i always think those countries had already a well, somewhat good ADSL connection available. And i'm not so sure that you can't upload when you're using a satellite connection. Correct me if i'm wrong..