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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FR1 who wrote (63424)	11/26/2001 8:33:25 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

"I know the Microsoft project will not have the delay problem and it is LEO." The current offering is GEO. The current "Microsoft project" is with Gilat, microsoft.com gilat.com That became what is known as Starband today gilat.com Gilat is a joint venture partner, with EchoStar Communications Corp., Microsoft Corp gilat.com EchoStar's Sats are geostationary... searchwebmanagement.techtarget.com Because StarBand uses a satellite for both the upstream and the downstream links, the latency is considerable. A geostationary satellite orbits 22,300 miles above the Earth's equator. For a user at a temperate latitude, signals must make four trips through space, each of approximately 23,000 miles, between a mouse click and the appearance of Web site data on the display. This introduces a delay of 0.5 second, because the speed of electromagnetic (EM) radiation is finite. But that is the mathematical minimum. In reality, the latency is usually longer. The upstream data must travel from the user's dish to the satellite, and then back down to the StarBand hub, where it is transmitted over land-based media. The downstream data must travel from the Web site under observation to the StarBand hub over land-based media, then up to the satellite, and back down to the user. The result is latency that sometimes exceeds 1 second. This is not a system defect, but technical reality. Is Starband for me? starbandusers.com