Two way(uplink and downlink) Cyberstar service will be demo'd in late 98, and available commercially in 1999, at an equipment price of $1000. There will not be a need for the LEO system to provide this service. So, to answer your question, G* says there is 7.2 kbps throughput with built in modem where provided by the network.
The real joy in all this will come when all the web sites so near and dear to us will already be on our hard drives, updated via satellite at any interval we specify. As new posts arrive on our selected threads here at SI, they will be pushed to our hard drives, or maybe every hour they are sent out. We can respond to all we desire and then send them back on the uplink in one chunk of data. Stock news will magically appear on the stocks we closely follow--no dial up required. Sports scores, highlights(full video), e-mail, portfolio updates, news, newspapers, etc. can all be fed to your hard drive very efficiently via satellite, cutting that telephone line umbilicus that so limits us now. That is what I am looking to get out of this "revolution." POS(plain old surfing) will still probably be done most efficiently in an asymmetric manner--that is, wire uplink, sat downlink such as DirecPC now. But, we shall see how it evolves. |
