justone, while many of your observations are IMO pointed in the right direction, keep in mind that these folks, like Tachyon, are providing links to/from wireless hubs. This is a different scheme, with a different transmission transaction profile, than direct satellite to the home.
When there is an ISP providing hubbing, then there is also an increased probability that some portion of the traffic coming from local providers traversing those hubs will remain local to the ISP's autonomous network (i.e., within their border).
And as relates to the uplink, there are also statistical possibilities for improved efficiencies through statistically stacking multiple users instead of encountering idle times (and there is also the increased potential for periods of heightened congestion, as well) that are not experienced with direct links from the bird to the home, when comparing hubbed vs. direct. Of course, those backbone related occurrences could also take place on terrestrial lines (upstream T1/T3 links to the core), as well.
When terrestrial hubbing is employed, with the uplink serving only as the aggregation pipe, the domain of contention is "shifted" from the bird's backbone to the local hubmeister. I believe that it is a more efficient approach for the following reason: Ack-nak turnaround times to and from the bird are for many sessions eliminated when they are local, or greatly reduced, in the case where a local hub is doing traffic cop.
Whether this type of architecture makes sense or not really depends on the ways local ISPs deploy it in rural and stranded areas. If they can gain access to the Internet's core more efficiently via satellite than they can by buying very expensive Fractional T3 (F/T3) transit to a national backbone and NAP (and the latter is actually the real selling point for those ISPs), then I'd say that it has merit. But in dense urban areas where T1s and T3s are now being sold like popcorn, I'd have to wonder about just what it is that would incent an ISP to take this route.
In the case of Tachyon (who does not seem to be making a lot of noise over this, I might add), it appeared to make sense to me from what I read in the Cook Report, based on what I inferred from prospective ISPs who planned to use their upstream services. Go to the tachyon.net site and click on partners. These are two of Tachyon's "partners:"
discover-net.net
aplus.net
I don't know enough about TeleCrossings, though. I remain cautious, as you can see, to express judgement about their claims. Let's see if they deliver, and where.
BTW, when I saw them frontrunning the claim of supporting NY in a way that now seems almost obligatory, I had to wonder. The first thing I thought about was early spectrum exhaust. Let's wait and see.
FAC |
