"Dubbed Freesat - the same name, incidentally, as Sky's free package - the service is set to go live in Spring 2008."
This 'coincidence' is in fact not so much of a coincidence, the BBC actually owns the trade mark for Freesat (has done for some time) and the Sky service is called "Freesat From Sky", wisely neither party has interfered with the other, because both benefit from each others marketing efforts.
Steve,
For a while I was responsible for most of the transmission of BBC services over satellite, the transmissions are over 99.99% reliable and from a consumer point of view the reception in the UK is intended to be 99.97% at worst case. If you are getting a service worse than this then you need to look at your installation.
Those people who are in the far extremities of the UK, however, are advised to have a larger dish to maintain quality of reception. There is no conspiracy to con people with the satellite transmissions, they are formed to the highest standards by a group of highly experienced and skilled engineers. They are proud that most months they are able to report reliability figures of 100%.
On the other side, there are occasions when reception will fail, it is in the lap of the gods as to the environment and as these are microwave transmissions of a small fraction of a Watt coming from space. The clouds will absorb this and there is nothing we in the industry can do about that.
It is a shame there is a monopoly on DTH services in the UK for satellite, but the world is changing fast.
Register
Factuality
"Dubbed Freesat - the same name, incidentally, as Sky's free package - the service is set to go live in Spring 2008."
This 'coincidence' is in fact not so much of a coincidence, the BBC actually owns the trade mark for Freesat (has done for some time) and the Sky service is called "Freesat From Sky", wisely neither party has interfered with the other, because both benefit from each others marketing efforts.
Steve,
For a while I was responsible for most of the transmission of BBC services over satellite, the transmissions are over 99.99% reliable and from a consumer point of view the reception in the UK is intended to be 99.97% at worst case. If you are getting a service worse than this then you need to look at your installation.
Those people who are in the far extremities of the UK, however, are advised to have a larger dish to maintain quality of reception. There is no conspiracy to con people with the satellite transmissions, they are formed to the highest standards by a group of highly experienced and skilled engineers. They are proud that most months they are able to report reliability figures of 100%.
On the other side, there are occasions when reception will fail, it is in the lap of the gods as to the environment and as these are microwave transmissions of a small fraction of a Watt coming from space. The clouds will absorb this and there is nothing we in the industry can do about that.
It is a shame there is a monopoly on DTH services in the UK for satellite, but the world is changing fast.
Bob