Economist on Data Deluge (NewsClip)

[nobody@valhalla.phoenix.net (Anonymous)]

The Economist, July 22, 1995, pp. 77-78.


Data communications: Deluged


The World Wide Web, as its fans will tell you, lives up to its
name. This realm of the Internet lets you visit "home pages"
in Bangkok one moment and Bridlington the next. Yet bringing
home souvenirs is another matter. To pull all the nice goodies
on offer back to his own machine, the home Internaut must
squeeze them down a telephone wire. That slows things down,
sometimes a lot; this correspondent took two hours to download
100 seconds of the film "Interview with a Vampire". There must
be better ways to bring home the data.

There are. One is the cables that deliver television to two
out of three American homes. Companies such as Intel, General
Instruments and Zenith Electronics have been rushing to
perfect "cable modems" that squirt data into a personal
computer at speeds up to 4m bits per second -- 140 times
faster than the speediest telephone modems (28,800 bits per
second) used with PCs. But cable modems must wait for the
cable-TV companies to rewire their networks with two-way
connections; at the moment, cable TV is largely one way. Cable
companies such as Tele-Communications Inc, Viacom and Cox
expect to offer data connections with TV services within a
year.

Some Internet surfers are not prepared to wait that long. For
the past three months, some data-junkies in America have been
downloading from the sky. Hughes, having laid down a challenge
to the cable companies with its DirecTV satellite broadcasting
system, which is currently providing 150 channels to 500,000
subscribers, is now laying down another. Hughes Network
Systems of Germantown, Maryland, is offering a satellite
service called Direcrc that can beam down data to a subscriber
at a rate of 400,000 bits a second -- enough to transmit a
400-page document in less than a minute. With moderate
compression techniques, that would easily allow real-time
video.

For $995, the DirecPC customer gets a 61-centimetre (24-inch)
satellite dish, a coaxial cable, an adapter that fits inside
an IBM-type PC and the relevant software. Once installed,
subscribers pay $15.95 to download up to 30 megabytes of data
a month (which is a lot of text, but not much video). The
speed is many times faster than a special digital ISDN line
from the telephone company, and the initial cost less (though
with the ISDN line time is the only limit on the amount of
data downloaded). For an extra $24 a DirecPC customer can get
up to 130 megabytes a month.

The cable-TV companies are spending $7,000 or more a mile
(over $4,000 a kilometre) to make their cables funnel data out
as well as television in. Hughes has sidestepped this problem.
Subscribers send data out -- generally small bursts to request
information, transmit messages and the like -- through a
normal telephone modem. These few bytes can trigger a torrent
of returned data, taking the fast route to a Hughes ground
station, which beams it to a Galaxy IV communications
satellite in geosynchronous orbit. From there it is
retransmitted to the subscriber's mini-dish.

Apart from reaching the Internet and other online services
such as news, electronic shopping, stockmarket prices and
sports results, Hughes plans to use DirecPC and its successors
to distribute large packages of data on behalf of commercial
customers -- acting, in effect, as the Federal Express of the
digital world. The company has already signed a deal with IBM
to deliver software by satellite direct to shops, where it
will be replicated on disks or CD-ROMS at the customer's
request. Using better equipment, Hughes reckons it should have
no difficulty delivering digital packages at up to 2m bits a
second.

Sooner or later, the cable-TV companies will lick the "back
haul" problem. Then, one-way satellite systems such as DirecPC
may find themselves squeezed out of the business -- unless
they, too, offer subscribers the chance to talk back with a
mouth as big as their ears. Hughes has plans to allow such
interchanges through a system called Spaceway. Satellites with
huge antennae would pick up messages from little dishes and
relay them to other little dishes, allowing high
data-transmission rates all over the world. The company, with
a touch of hype, calls it an "information super skyway".

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