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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Murrey Walker who wrote (41591)	9/14/2001 10:59:19 AM
From: Jim Willie CB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

spell it out, Murrey (capability is my main concern) / jw

To: Murrey Walker who wrote (41591)	9/14/2001 11:26:03 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Satellite Delivers Internet By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 14, 2001 I'm sitting on a Blue Ridge mountain in North Carolina without cable TV or cable modems. DSL in this part of the woods is a mystery that BellSouth is still trying to figure out. Despite that, I'm downloading from the Internet at sustained speeds as high as 400,000 bits per second — eight times as fast as a dial-up modem on a very good day. And data uploads click along at 128 kbps. How? A Hughes Network DirecPC system that sends and receives data via a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. DirecPC — or, as Hughes is rebranding it, DirecWay — uses an antenna that looks like a satellite TV dish but receives only Internet data. ("DirecDuo" dishes also pull in Hughes's DirecTV). Inside your home, you get two hardbound-book-size boxes that connect together, then plug in to a Windows PC with a USB cable. The hardware costs $199 to $649, depending on your choice of Internet provider; service costs $44 to $70 a month. See direcpc.com for details. Unlike DirecPC's earlier satellite Internet service, this technology — and a similar system offered by McLean-based StarBand — requires no modem to initiate a connection and upload data. Unlike cable, it doesn't demand that your neighborhood system be upgraded. Unlike DSL, you need not live close to a phone company's "central office." That's the promise, and much — but not all — of the reality of satellite Internet, as I've found over three months of DirecPC use. What can go wrong? Start with setup itself. You will almost certainly need a professional installer, for about $100, to put the dish up and make sure it's aimed properly at the satellite. Then there's the long route your data has to take — a 22,300-mile trip up to the satellite and the same distance down to a Hughes network operations center. Even at the speed of light, going 44,600 miles takes a little time. So while file transfers fly along, sometimes peaking at 800 kbps, you must wait between typing in a Web address and the site starting to show up. This latency, even in the best conditions, takes about half a second, a lag that makes the Internet seem strangely herky-jerky. Those download speeds can also drop by two-thirds on occasion. Downloading at 150 kbps is still a lot faster than with dial-up, but it's as annoying as having to slow down for a work zone on the Beltway. And on the road, at least you'd get a few signs of warning. DirecPC offers no heads-up. To make sure all users get decent bandwidth, Hughes applies a "Fair Access Policy" brake on Internet use, automatically restricting users' bandwidth if they exceed what Hughes calls maximum typical usage rates. This number changes based on everyone else's use. In my experience, I've seen performance drop to a crawl after a few minutes of using the Net lightly. But at other times, I'll be left untouched after downloading tens of megabytes of songs. Company officials say that while system performance problems can make it seem that the policy was being unfairly applied, Hughes applies it equally to all. Part of this problem may be growing pains. In August, DirecPC suffered terrible performance problems; there were too many users trying to use the same satellite. Since then, Hughes has quadrupled its user capacity and the system is running much more smoothly. Company sources and experience showed that the newly expanded system could handle even the backbone-breaking stress of Sept. 11. If your idea of a good Net time is watching video over the Web or downloading large files every day, you're likely to find DirecPC more annoying than amusing. But if you're living in the woods or are just out of range for DSL or cable, DirecPC is a clear step up from conventional modems. It may not really be broadband, but it's a lot better than dial-up.