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February 6, 2001
Satellite
By Frank
J. Derfler, Jr.
For the vast majority of Internet users in the U.S.,
all the talk about high-speed cable and DSL connectivity
is just that: talk. It will take the better part
of a decade for such service to be available to
a majority of U.S. homes and businesses, and many
rural communities may never be wired for broadband.
If you live in one of those areas, or if you just
don't want to wait until 2003 for the cable rebuild
to reach your subdivision, there is an alternative:
satellite Internet service. The ranks of satellite
broadband users are expected to swell to 2.4 million
users in the U.S. by 2004, according to GartnerGroup.
And that's despite the fact that satellite is hardly
a perfect solution.
For starters, satellite service is more expensive
than either cable or DSL: $60 to $70 a month, compared
with around $40 or $50. The dish adds around $300
plus installation costs. Also, a satellite link
can be degraded by heavy rain or high wind. As for
the service, the 0.7-second transmission delay necessitated
by the 44,000-mile round trip from you to the orbiting
satellite makes such systems impractical for VoIP
(Voice over IP) telephone connections. And forget
interactive gaming!
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TWO-WAY
SATELLITE
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$60-$70
a month
$300-$500 installation cost |
Pros:
Good for those who cannot get broadband any
other way
Cons:
Shared bandwidth; the transmission distance
(44,000 miles round-trip) means some latency;
occasional weather and solar interference;
unobstructed view of the southern sky required;
long service waits possible
Estimated
subscribers in 2000:
75,000
Projected
subscribers in 2004:
2.4
million
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The
best-known satellite Internet player is four-year-old
Hughes Network Systems, which has around 200,000 subscribers
for its DirecPC service. Hughes's design is known as the
"fast-download" model: When you access the Web,
your data request is sent to Hughes's Maryland network
operations center over a phone line. Responses from Web
sites return to your desktop via the satellite connection.
Thus, you need both the 18-inch DirecPC dish and a traditional
dial-up line. This approach delivers great streaming audio
and video and allows fast (400-Kbps) file downloads for
about $60 a month. But page requests are routed the old-fashioned
way, so surfing Web sites doesn't feel that much quicker
than on a standard dial-up connection.
DirecPC is also not suited to business customers who want
to share a broadband connection among a network of users:
They would have to install a complex router in a dedicated
computer. And even then, the slow uplink would limit them
to just a few simultaneous users.
[read
more...] |
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