Broadband Access Via Digital TV Signal?

SlashChick asks: "My mother saw a TV commercial the other night about a new form of broadband access which works via a digital TV signal. You place a digital TV antenna on your desk and it receives broadband data at up to 768K/sec. Uploading is accomplished via a dial-up modem. The company mentioned on the TV spot is Web Hopper, which is available in Cincinnati, OH. Are any Slashdot readers familiar with this service or other similar ones? Is this a good option for those who still can't get DSL or a cable modem?"

Comments

Just Like Using a Dish

[MBCook]

Well, I have no expirence with this, but it obviously works the same way as DirecPC. These services may have fast downloads, but the uploads are obviously very slow. For people doing e-mail and surfing the web, this is just fine.

But for people like me (and I'd guess most /.ers), this wouldn't work well. I'd rather be stuck behind an ISDN line than use something like that (which I did for about 2 years). The big difference is the ping time. Using a dish has very high latency for obvious reasons, and radio would only be a bit better. So while this works for downloads, when you want to do anything with uploads or where pings matter (such as online gaming, which is one of my favorite things) you wouldn't get much of a ping (10,000,000,000 msec maybe ;)