Greg
http://www.salon.com/tech/view/1999/12/13/tachyon/index.html
High-speed Net access that's out of this
world
John Koehler retired from a career at Hughes Electronics and the
CIA to build fast Net connections on satellites already in orbit.
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By Mark Compton
Dec. 13, 1999 | Even though Tachyon.net's
satellite-based Internet access service won't
formally launch until the New Year, it's already
creating some buzz -- the sort of buzz that
download rates of 45 Mbps can inspire. For those of us who are
a little slow at math, that comes out to something around, oh, 30
times faster than T-1 access.
That alone is pretty spiffy -- but what may be even more
interesting is that Tachyon claims to have figured out how to
deliver this, along with a superfast 256 Kbps upload path, via
high-flying geosynchronous satellites. Stationed some 22,300
miles above the equator, these so-called "high-flying birds" have
historically been considered a poor match for TCP/IP-based
Internet traffic because of the considerable time required for
signals to travel all that way. (That partly explains why investors
like Bill Gates are backing Teledesic -- a $9 billion network of
288 low-orbit satellites, scheduled to launch in 2004.)
But John Koehler, an economist by training (with a Yale Ph.D. to
prove it), could see that the demand for fast Internet access, at
least at the enterprise level, probably wasn't going to wait that
long. And when he did the math, he figured that the pricing for
access services could be made a heck of a lot more attractive if a
company didn't first have to amortize a $9 billion infrastructure
investment. So he formed Tachyon, on the premise that a way
could be found to deliver two-way Internet communications via
hardware already in orbit.
-- Greg Bolcer email: gbolcer@endtech.com web: http://www.endtech.com work: 714.505.4970 cell: 714.928.5476 fax: 603.994.0516