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". -----