Ray Van Eng (10/15/96)             

Remember it was only two years ago that the Stentor Group announced the ambitious Beacon Initiative in which the Canadian telecommunication consortium envisioned a future where there would be one data transmitting fiber pipeline to every home in Canada to deliver interactive multimedia services in ten years time and at an investment cost of about $8 billion.

Look what happen now, nobody talks about the Beacon grand plans anymore. Some of the earlier projects such as those public access interactive kiosks built by BC Tel are still standing in some lonely corners in frequently traveled drugstores gathering dust.

In the two years since the announcement, technology has changed so much that it is now possible to use ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) modems and ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) switching over existing copper wiring to achieve speeds that were once thought to be only achievable with fiber optics.

It is hard to plan for the future when you do not know what the future brings.

Well, technologies may have changed but the focus has not. The aim has always been to provide the general public with new media services that incorporate text, images, sound, pictures, animation, video etc. for a new form of experssion and communication. It does not matter whether the delivery mode would be via the Internet, interactive TV, touch screen kiosks, cable TV, satellite or what not.

Right now the Internet is certainly the medium of choice for sharing multimedia information. On the other hand, it is also true that there is no shortage of esoteric technologies developed just to serve this global networking phenomenon.

While WebTV, ADSL and cable modems are gathering media attention these days, the DirecPC, a satellite based Internet access technology is quietly gaining market acceptance around the country. Telesat Canada has been offering the DirecPC service for about a year now that would allow Canadians to access the Internet at speeds up to 400Kbps. However, the service does not come cheap.

The user would have to purchase a satellite dish (about 21" in diameter) packaged with the associated software and hardware, a regular landline (modem) Internet access with an Internet Service Provider and a monthly satellite access charge which ranges from $19.95 to $55.95 a month or more depending on how much information (measured in megabytes) is being downloaded from an Anik-E2 satellite. Incidentally, the upload or web server requests is still done through the regular phone line at whatever speed your modem is running at.

At that price, it is easy to understand that most of the DirecPC customers are business users who could hook up two 486-66 Mhz or better PCs to a single dish. Telesat plans to offer expansion kits that would allow multiple PCs to be linked to one dish. A network version of DirecPC is available for Novell NetWare 3.12 and 4.1.

Telesat Canada offers the DirecPC service in Canada, but they also partner with Hughes Network System to service customers in other parts of North America.

So, what about the other high speed alternatives, such as cable modems and ADSLs? Well, both technologies are being tested right now in Canada.

Rogers Cablesystems is running a cable modem market test in (where else?) Newmarket, ON providing unlimited Internet access at about $40 a month. If things were fine there, Rogers may have to shell out some serious money to convert its cross-country infrastructure to handle bi-directional traffic. So don't hold you breath for this one, it may take years before Rogers would be able to offer a nationwide service.

However, there is another angle that the cable guys can play. They could use their existing network to provide data broadcasting services by allocating a dedicated channel for broadcasting a 30 Mbps signal to all subscribers.

This data channel could contain anything from news stories, software applications, video or audio clips, entire web sites, stock quotes, specialized content etc. Intelligent agents in our PCs could be programmed to selectively pick out the information that we need from this cable downstream. In this scenario, cable broadcasting may become a useful supplement to regular Internet services rather than a being a direct competitor to it.

As far as ADSL is concern, the picture seems a little brighter than cable modems. Bell Canada is now conducting test in Kanata, ON and another location in Quebec. The nice thing about ADSL is that it can run on existing telephone wiring and the network upgrade cost is possibly less than that for the cable modem system. Please read our other article - Alcatel's ADSL/ATM Super Modem - for more details.

Telesat Canada's home page is: http://www.telesat.ca.

DirecPC's home page: http://www.direcpc.com