Holden, i might as well add, just to give you more sense of scale.
Mozcom used to have a full transponder on PAS-8. it cost $80k/month (back when the peso-dollar was 40). it's MUCH more expensive when you only get part of the transponder. i also talked to a chinese company that was selling transponder space on Sinosat-II (a Thomson bird, the chinese don't make their own commercial satellites, yet). The price was around $5000 for a 512kbps SCPC link. now what's this SCPC and other? SCPC is the "clear channel" type of service, think leased line. the other time is MPEG-encapsulated IP. you're thinking, WTF is MPEG? well it's MPEG as in the video algorithm. the satellites are designed to transmit MPEG frames directly for DVB (direct video broadcast) purposes. that's why you see pixelation on rapid movements when you watch AXN or StarTV -- the satellites are not transmitting analog video, but digital MPEG-compressed video, and the pixelation is due to shortcomings in the algorithm. now some really smart people wrote an RFC where you can actually encapsulate IP frames inside an MPEG frame. after all an MPEG frame is a header, followed by some sequence info, and a video payload. what they did is carry IP frames inside the MPEG payload. anyway, it's a cheaper way to carry IP rather than use clear channel. because the transponder footprint is large, lots of people (e.g. Dream VSAT internet subscribers) in an area pick up the MPEG-DVB data, then just filter the packets meant for them (it's REALLY like an Ethernet broadcast domain!) -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
