Dave, this scheme by Telecrossing.net is reminiscent of the Tachyon scheme in the July 2000 Cook Report.
While I am always skeptical about the ability of a satellite provider's ability to satisfy residential 'Net access requirements, it's occurred to me that the Telecrossing scheme may enjoy a perceived "gain" of sorts, in this respect, by virtue of the hub access point arrangement. The presence of a local node (the hub) will, by definition, allow for a certain amount of terrestrial any-to-any wireless connectivity between end points in the same hub reach, without the need for uplinking and downlinking and wasting precious satellite spectrum.
Stated another way, a goodly number of end point pairs will be within the same hub serving area, and can communicate with one another via relay, as opposed to up/down * 2, as many others have worked in the past. Localized (hub-colo'ed) caching will also play into this, if they know what they are doing, which will further add to the economizing of satellite link usage.
Tachyon's network scheme, in contrast, is set up today as an ISP backbone feed, for the most part. In turn, those ISPs service their local subscribers through conventional means. I've inferred from reading the Cook article, however, that they too are poised to do what Telecrossing is doing, especially in extreme boon dock areas.
Now let's see if they can deliver as advertized. Once the likelihood of that has been ascertained, then Id be eager to know whose gear they are using, and what their access and utilization pricing structures will look like.
FAC |