Pizza dishes are a great idea for TV reception, where it is one-way broadcast, and the satellites are just serving as a repeater station in the sky. But for interactive use, you quickly run into bandwidth limitations, which is why DirectPC uses phone lines for the upload.
I seriously doubt if AOL would go to such a system, given their 15M and growing number of users. That is why I am speculating if maybe they are intending to use satellites to refresh local caches, to supplement their backbone, in combination with DSL to supply high bandwidth to the home. This would be something like the SkyCache concept. I'm sure Frank or one of the other comm experts here could describe this much better, with the right buzz words, but the SkyCache concept is to use satellites to refresh caches at local ISPs, relieving congestion within the network and allowing the connections between the ISP and the end user to achieve maximum bandwidth. You can read about it here:
skycache.com
Anyway, this is just speculation based on a rumour. |
