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To: Geoff who wrote (2462)	4/3/1998 3:18:00 PM
From: Dragonfly	Respond to of 10852

Encryption will always be (and probably has to be) an end user thing. Too many govts will want to stick their nose in. The solution is to encrypt the packets yourself, before they leave your end of the connection. This has nothing to do with your bandwidth provider. "Accordingly, the genuine question for investors in satcom broadband systems today seems more to be the encryption issue, as we see it, and not so much anymore the one of latency. " This is an opinion, but it is based on a lot of puffery on readwares part. Or, more specifically, he's relying on people he trusts. I would call myself an expert on very very few things, but latency in real-time communications is one of them. The two solutions that Readware discusses- larger buffers and TCP "spoofing" do not address the real issue. The fact is that latency exists in this system, and only by going to a shorter physical hop can you eliminate it. Larger Buffers and spoofing go hand in hand, and I would consider them an obvious requirement for using a sat based wide area link. However, the effects on the latency inherent in the link are not mitigated-- in other words, a terrestrial link with the same inherent latency will have the same effective latency as a sat link WITH spoofing and buffers. The spoofing and buffers simply make it so that the sat link is not effectively worse than a terrestrial link with the same latency. Unfortunately, though, most terrestrial wide area links have signficantly less inherent latency than a sat link (even LEO, but especially GEO). I'll be happy to go into these issues in more detail in another post if people are interested. The net result is this: latency in the last mile is going to go down significantly in the next 5 years. So, the latency of a purely terrestrial network will go down. However, since a sat network will likely provide significantly more bandwidth, the effective latency in a sat based network will be acceptable because of the increased bandwidth. In other words, BW will grow in sats faster than it will terrestrially, I beleive, and therefore sat networks are a viable business-- in fact, I think 10 years from now it will be a lot more profitable than sat telephony-- despite the latency. Dragonfly copyright march 1998, all rights reserved, do not repost without permission. (Somebody apparently mis-related an earlier post of mine to Readware, which he then flamed without understanding what was said.)