Thanks for that find, Mike. Don't know how I missed it back in April. I've hinted that I am somewhat dubious about the Telecrossing venture too, simply because of the previous history and the rapid fire announcements which seemed to come out with no cohesive theme behind it. They appear to be doing, claiming to do, too much too soon. 400 Hubs is not hamburger meat.
Re PCDirect, I don't know. I tend to give better odds to a satellite to hub to wireless to end user scheme, making some use of some terrestrial fiber routes and intra-hub dissipation, instead of using down and uplinks exclusively to wevery home.
There is more opportunity to dissipate traffic regionally, within hub areas, say, without exhausting precious satellite bandwidth, than if every home had to go up and down in order to link to a site next door. I'm sure there is a more elegant way of putting this, but you get what I mean.
Tachyon is another satellite organization that is doing the same thing, incidentally. Their hub based operations, using spread spectrum in some of the unlicensed bands to residences, is not publicized yet for some reason, but they're doing it, just the same. I'll look up the specs on this tomorrow, please remind me if you are interested.
I didn't favor wireless low speed ceilings in the past (I believe they top out at 2 Mb/s, but can go higher to 10 Mb/s Ethernet in time... these are between the residence and the hub, satellite uplinks are slower), but in boon dock regions where there is no way in hell to get dsl or cable modem, much less ftth, I think it's a great idea. The more I think of this, however, the more I happen to like it. I can envisage a hybridization of all media types in certain circumstances.
I would be interested in reading the views of some of our wireless mavens on this.
FAC |
