Voice
Communication in Business Volume 2
Essays on telecommunications,
1981-2002
Just about the time I
bought a 14.4 modem (1995), talk started about Digital Subscriber
Lines (DSL) and high speed cable modems. The satellite people had
ideas, too.
Birds Of A Feather
(1995)
Can Hughes
DirecPC do for data what its DirecTV is doing for television?
Probably not
as much, but what it can do is interesting.
At the moment, everybody is carried away by
packet technologies, reveling in LANs, ATM, surfing the Internet,
etc. Message switching has a long and interesting history, and its
current place in the sun is more than justified. However, it is also
important to remember that some shiny new toys like Viewdata or
Teletex, in spite of enthusiastic predictions, went nowhere, while
others such as computer time-sharing, CB radio, the S-100 bus, daisy
wheel printers and microwave achieved considerable success for a
time, but are now pretty much history. Things seldom work out as we
hope, and even when they do, the world changes and leaves them
behind.
Consider satellites. Back in the 60's and
70's, whatever the problem was, they were the answer. And indeed,
they had a great deal of potential. But optical fiber, when it
finally worked properly, did to satellites what PCs did to mainframe
computers. Terrestrial transmission made a roaring comeback on
glass, even for crossing the Atlantic and Pacific where satellites
had pretty much ruled the roost. For point-to-point connections,
satellites could hardly compete.
But just as mainframe computers and minis
still exist and work well handling large data bases, so satellites
have hung on, finding tasks where their real advantages give them an
edge: distributing television programs from one program source to
many cable heads is the classic example.
The next step appears to be TV distribution
direct to the home (DBS, or direct broadcast satellite),
eliminating, as it were, the CATV middleman. When millions of people
want access to something like one or two hundred signals, radio
broadcasting, particularly from a satellite which covers the whole
country, has much to recommend it. Perhaps Nicholas Negroponte is
right when he advocates reservation of radio for connecting
telephones to central offices, but broadcasting, particularly when,
using DBS, it makes economical use of spectrum, seems equally
worthy.
Hughes Electronics, a subsidiary of Hughes
Aircraft which, in turn, is a subsidiary of General Motors, is a
leader in the DBS field. Its DirecTV subsidiary and another company,
USSB, deliver programming via new Hughes high-powered satellites to
Thomson's RCA DSS (direct satellite system) home earth stations
which use an 18" fixed-position dish (Reference 1). DSS earth
stations are selling like hotcakes all over the country to customers
who are now enjoying 100 or more TV channels at a lower monthly
rate, in both dollars and aggravation, than they had been paying for
cable.
But Hughes has a lot of birds in orbit, and
there are signals other than TV which are of interest to many. Thus
another subsidiary, Hughes Network Systems, has announced DirecPC,
something quite different from DirecTV. It still broadcasts one-way
broadband signals from a central point to an unlimited number of
earth stations, but the DirecPC dish is 24 inches across, and the
receiver is a plug-in adapter card for a PC. The general idea is to
distribute information to all, to some or to selected individual
earth stations as the customers desire.
A file is not broken up into packets, but it
does start with a header containing the called party address which
selects the individual or group for which the file is intended. When
the adapter card sees an address to which it is to respond, it tells
its PC to copy the following message to its hard disk for future
use. Forward error correction insures data accuracy, with additional
procedures for more critical files. DES encryption, unscrambled by
the card, prevents unauthorized listening.
One application which Hughes sees for DirecPC
is "Digital Package Delivery" which might be used for the delivery
of large, complex programs to computer and software stores. When
today's programs for PCs are packaged in a shrink-wrapped box
containing 10 to 20 floppy disks, the cost of copying, packaging and
shipping, inventory at the manufacturer's as well as the seller's
location, shelf-space, etc., is not inconsiderable. Via satellite,
the entire program can be delivered simultaneously and in parallel
to sales outlets all over the country in two minutes or so. Each
seller will then have a master copy from which copies can be made
for customers as they buy them; no shelf space, no inventory, no
outdated releases, and no threat of running out of a hot new program
when customers want it.
Clearly, Digital Package Delivery can work
economically for any file too large to use present modem speeds: an
automobile manufacturer could send each year's tech manuals to all
dealerships simultaneously and instantaneously; a telephone company
could send updated copies of its tariff to all its sales offices; a
business could send any sort of company information to its far flung
empire anywhere within range of the satellite.
Another DirecPC offering is Multimedia
Service which delivers audio, video, news, sports and other
information "to the desktop" on a time-specified basis. This seems
to be designed to encourage individual customers to subscribe to
DirecPC access for $15.95 a month, a fee which will include a
selection of such information. However, the future will obviously
bring "premium channels" from Information Providers hoping to offer
their services for an extra sum, and private channels allowing the
sales manager of a large company, for instance, to look out at her
widely dispersed troops from their own computers in the weekly sales
meeting from 9 to 9:15 each Monday morning.
Both Digital Package Delivery and Multimedia
Service are described as "push" services where the central point
dispatches the information. Although DirecPC is one-way through the
satellite, there are occasions where an individual customer may want
to "pull" a specific piece of information from some distant data
base, perhaps discovered while surfing the Internet. At modem
speeds, a 400 page document takes a while to deliver; thus "Turbo
Internet Service" allows a customer to order documents via the PC's
modem, accessed by the Direc- PC adapter card via its 16 bit ISA
interface. Such documents are then delivered at a much higher speed
via the satellite, essentially in real time, assuming the data base
has an arrangement with DirecPC so that its files are available at
the up-link.
Many other DirecPC services will be developed
as time goes by, but you can take advantage of the system today.
Just plant a dish outside your window, insert the adapter card in
your PC, run the coax between them, and you're in business (an
introductory price of about $1000 for this hardware and its
supporting software has been mentioned. Call 1-800-DIRECPC for
further information). Perhaps ATM will be better and faster and
available at some time in the future, but in the meantime, DirecPC
is something to consider in the areas where its particular
capabilities are applicable.
Whether or not DirecPC will take off like
DirecTV remains to be seen, but there are some possibilities that
boggle the mind. For instance, Digital Package Delivery could work
for books as well as programs, and the new mega-bookstores boasting
100,000 titles on display could eliminate this inventory and offer
every book ever printed. In such a future book store, I would expect
to go in with my library in my pocket on two or three CD ROMS (one
for science fiction, one for detective stories, one for technical
books, etc.), order the book of my choice, and have the check-out
counter copy it instantly on the particular CD where it belonged. At
home, I would down-load the chapter I wanted to read onto some
device about the shape of a book with a flat-screen display (sort of
like a "palm-top" computer), go out on the patio, loll back in my
chair, and read. Something the multi-media mavens will have to learn
is that nobody is going to sit hunched over a computer to read a
book or look at still or moving pictures. Somebody better get busy
and make a really good electronic book.
But there is another application that demands
something like DirecPC: monthly and weekly magazines and, most
important, the daily newspaper. The price of newsprint just took a
major leap upward, and the newspaper people are screaming bloody
murder. But their readers are also being turned off by increasing
production costs passed on to them, while other factors recommend
electronic delivery: I broke my leg a couple of years ago picking up
a 4 pound New York Times from my icy driveway.
What DirecPC seems to suggest is newspaper
(and magazine) delivery to the home, so that I, along with everybody
else who subscribed, could capture a late edition of the Times (or
USA Today or the Wall Street Journal) in a couple of minutes just in
time for breakfast. I could down-load it into my electronic book and
maybe, if the book contained a text-to-speech conversion program, it
could read me the headlines while I sipped my coffee. For those poor
souls who have to commute, the daily traffic jam would become an
opportunity to follow out more complex stories in newspaper detail,
far beyond the sound-bytes of all-news radio.
Satellites may not be the solution to every
problem, but Hughes is making an effort to devise some interesting
possibilities which can benefit a wide variety of interests besides
themselves. In the process, they are demonstrating rather well a
basic principle: while we don't shave with a chain saw or cut down
trees with a razor, both chain saws and razors are very useful
tools.
The arrival of the
Internet, about this time, pushed dial-up modems to 28.8 and then
finally to 56 Kb/s, almost as fast as an ISDN B channel (which
people failed to order in droves). But beautifully illustrated "web
sites," designed primarily for marketing, video games and porno,
created a whole new demand for bandwidth which, as of 2002, is
slowly being supplied by DSL in competition with cable modems. And
the NY Times advertises regular delivery via the Internet for those
with high-speed access. DirecPC is still being developed, apparently
like a VSAT, to offer 2-way high speed Internet interfaces
independent of telephone wires or CATV cable.
References:
1. Goeller: Satellites Launch
Renewed Attack on Cable. Business Communications Review,
December, 1994. Previous article in this book.
Source material: Hughes
Network Systems news release dated April 10, 1995. Telephone
interviews with Judy Blake and Jack Malone at Hughes. Hughes press
kit on DirecPC.
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