Satellite Center visit

After subscribing to Smart Malaysia's satellite broadband service, a buddy of mine who worked for company invited me their satellite receiving center in Bukit Jalil for a visit.

The center itself is located in Technology Park Malaysia in Bukit Jalil. The place wasn't as big as I expected. But, it was quite fun to get to walk around and looking at the BIG ass satellite dishes.

Some of the biggest measures about 9 metres in diameter, some of smaller ones are probably 1.8 metres.

Basically , how the satellite broadband works is like this:
1) The Internet user types in the website address , eg. donkeykong.com
2) The satellite modem receives the signal from the computer and beams the signals via the satellite dish installed on-site Internet user's home.
3) The satellite in (space?) will receive the signal and beams it back down the satellite receiving center in Bukit Jalil.
4) The satellite receiving center will receives the signals from satellite and goes through its myriad of equipment and 3 major pipelines (which they leased from 3 companies, Jaring, Paneagle and .....?)
5) Once the data related to donkeykong.com is found, it is sent back to the satellite, and the satellite sends it back to the satellite dish installed in the user's home.

The conclusion, it still needs to go thru wires at sometime (step 4). But, most of the transmissions are wireless. So, unless there's heavy rain (or something that disrupts the ISP network that is on land), then basically there's no problem at all.

Overall, this has been 25th day I've been using satellite broadband. The service has been quite satisfying. Though there were occasionally downtime during the early March, but the quick response from their support centre indeed impressed me.