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This bill and bills like it are a horrible idea. The power and success of the Internet is that it's lightly regulated and robustly competitive, especially for hosting services

Hosting, yes, but not isps. Lets see what my choice for broadband is: Comcast or Satellite. Wow, that is extremely competitive.

I have to use Comcast, as satellite is throttled to the point of being useless. All the sattelite providers I've seen have a "fair access policy". With that you can't download more than 169megs in a four hour period, at which point your connection is throttled to dialup speed. Forget about streaming audio or video. Forget about downloading a Linux ISO. Forget about being able to update Fedora. If I have to bother with throttleing my downloads or scheduling them, then fuck it. I'll do it with dialup and save the extra $80/mo.

The re-tasking of the sats had less to do with broadband viability and MUCH MORE to do with Rupert Murdoch wanting to control DirecTV and make it competitive with other TV offerings like cable. At best you might say that NewsCorp/Murdoch didn't see broadband via sat. as viable but even that is pure supposition. By buying HNS, Murdoch got DTV and 2 satellite assets (including the orbit slots) that could be quickly converted to provide HD programming. From a business perspective this was a very smart move to give DTV a competitive offering now instead of in another couple years once they built their own satellites. Let me be clear though that to say Hughes gave up on broadband by satellite is an ignorant statement to make.

The current offering from Hughes, DIRECWAY, has over 250,000 broadband customers. They are getting new customers with home users as well as businesses (think chain stores with 1,000s of outlets, many of them out of reach of other broadband solutions). Our European division was recently signed to provide broadband for a leading credit company. All of this information is available at www.hns.com.

Also, the planned Spaceway offering, even with delays, will still be available well before this Japanese offering. Good luck to them getting all of the pieces together by 2015.

Obviously, I am being careful about what I say since I don't want to get in trouble with our corporate folks while trying to defend my company. The truth is that everything I know and see indicates a committment to satellite broadband by HNS.

Hughes, parent company to DirecTV, also owns DirecWay. DirecWay is one of the major players when it comes to high-speed internet. The problem with satellite Internet though is the latency. Speeds are great it's just the latency that kills you. This satellite that they're using for MPEG4 was originally going to be used to introduce the KA band for the ultimate high-speed Internet (think beyond T-1 speeds) with a lower latency. Unfortunatly they scrapped the idea for more HD channels, in which you see now. None the less, DirecWay and DirecTV can integrate together onto the same bill and use the same dish (the larger one with a add-on module for T.V.) If you want speed using the KA band though I believe that right now only WildBlue offers it. They launched their satellite last year and are beta testing it with a handful of people around the U.S. but it is scheduled for full deployment later this year. Not to mention they advertise it at only $49/month. They're only using a set spectrem for the residential community and you can expect speeds around 1.5down and 384?up. Not sure on what the up is.

I know the original was a humor post but here is some info to consider:

The speed of light and position of a geo-synchronous sat make it impossible to achive anything less than ~500ms. It takes time to get up to space and back, even for light.

The SPACEWAY system developed by Hughes Network Systems is ALREADY a router (switch really) in the sky. However, DirecTV group is going to get the first two spacecraft to use for DirecTV and not SPACEWAY. So it will be a little longer before SPACEWAY is available. NOTE: I don't fault the decision to use the satellites this way, it makes very good business sense for DirecTV.

DISCLAIMER: I work for HNS and all information I have listed is public knowledge, not proprietary. Even so, I'm not going to list my user ID for this.

Broadband is not available everywhere in the US.

Yes it is.

I was under the impression that Netscape was on the local drive in this particular NC.

Also, broad-band Internet is fast becoming the standard, whether it be Cable Modem, DSL, ISDN, or satellite ( see HNS' web site).

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