Oh, about video streams: those are designed to download at a certain speed. The speed is set by the stream. No matter how fast your connection, a video stream that's built to download at 100 k/sec will download at 100k/sec. As it should, else it would play too fast!

And I forgot to say why a satellite connection has a slow response time. It's because your request has to travel up to the satellite (36,000 kms), down to the central dish at DIRECWAY (another 36,000 km), then do the 'normal' travel over the Internet backbone (fast), and travel back to you via satellite, (another two trips of 36,000 km). That's 144,000 km of travel for the satellite track alone. Since electronic signals travel at the speed of light, 300,000 km/sec, you will have a delay of at least 0.5 seconds due to the satellite track alone.

This delay is no problem at all when watching TV or Internet video streams. But when you have two-way traffic, as in browsing web sites, you'll feel the delays.

DSL works over terrestrial phone lines. The same kind of signal could easily be sent over coaxial cable or even satellite, but AFAIK it is not being done.

And that modem thingy: the satellite dish is nothing more and nothing less than a specialized antenna. The signal coming from the dish has to be converted to a signal your PC understands. That's what the modem is doing. Cable, DSL and dialup also need modems to convert the signals. Dialup modems are often built into the computer, cable modems, DSL modems and satellite modems are usually separate boxes.

This thread has gone rather OT, hasn't it? (smile).

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