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Three months! You're kidding!" This cry is commonly heard in Los Angeles, New York and most other North American metropolitan areas from IT managers trying to get highspeed connections for Internet or intranet access.
A new service from Hughes Network Systems, Inc. (HNS) could considerably shorten that waiting period. The service, called DirecPC Commercial, is handled by satellite-based connections.
DirecPC Commercial builds on the Personal Earth Station (PES) very small aperture terminal system HNS has been offering since 1986 to handle voice, video and LAN traffic. It adds much higher bandwidth IP transport to the HNS satellite service portfolio.
In the U.S., the HNS network consists of three company-owned geosynchronous satellites. HNS has relationships with other satellite operators so it can provide seamless, worldwide coverage.
DirecPC Commercial is the industrialstrength version of DirecPC, a consumer-oriented Internet access product. With DirecPC, requests are sent via a local Internet service provider and responses are received over the satellite. With the commercial version, data is sent (the uplink) and received (downlink) over the satellite connection.
DirecPC and DirecPC Commercial use IP tunneling technology and special software that appears as an IP gateway to the local computer. The software actually creates a data pipe through which all packets to the HNS network are routed.
When accessing a service at an IP address via your local gateway, your request is sent down the IP tunnel to the HNS hub, where a proxy server handles...