THE "World Wide Wait" could come to an end an when more users art to get Internet data direct from satellites that deliver information 10 to 40 times faster than traditional phone lines.
The first of a new breed of European satellite operator Eutelsat's satellite Internet services was launched earlier this month, and a British service will be announced within the next two months.
The new services follow last month's adoption of MPEG-2 DVB (Motion Pictures Experts Group Direct Video Broadcasting) as the European standard for digital television.
This agreement has given suppliers the confidence to order the plug in PC cards and set top television boxes needed to decode the satellite transmissions.
Antonio Arcidiacono, the head of Eutelsat's multimedia and new products section, says two firms have already submitted prototype PC cards for testing. Another 10 firms are preparing cards, including Philips, Italy's Italtel, France's Dassault, and Pace from Britain. The first cards are expected to cost about £450, but prices should fall as production ramps up.
The first customers for MPEG DVB services will be Internet service providers (ISPs) and cable companies, which will be able to download material such as Usenet news group postings then supply it to users an a local basis.
Arcidiacono says: "We've already reduced the traffic on the French Internet backbone `cable' by 31 per cent just by doing this." Eutelsat is also broadcasting weather information and selected Web pages. The system could also deliver so called "push" services such as PointCast, which now use a disproportionate amount of the Internet's capacity.
The volume of data makes these services unsuitable for use with simple network computers (NCs) attached to TV sets, rather than PCs. Arcidiacono says: "In the end you will need the memory, you will need the hard disk, so I personally do not believe the NC will work."
Broadcasting data is cheap when there are many users. If a transmission costs five cents a megabyte, then it costs 530 to send the contents of a CDRom disc and $400 to send a 90 minute film. If there are 1,000 users, sending the CDRom costs them only three cents each and the movie costs 40 cents.
The next step is to have a "back channel" so that users can request Web pages and files when they want them. DirecPC, one of the companies providing Net access via Eutelsat's satellites, does this via a modem: you send the address of a Web page by phone and the page is returned by satellite. The advantage is that satellite delivery is faster; the drawback is that you're still paying far a local telephone call.
Arcidiacono claims a satellite service can be economical if it reduces time spent online, but delivery speed is limited by the fact that pages are still being fetched via the existing Net, not sent to Eutelsat's "birds" direct from (say) Yahoo or Netscape in the US. Speeds of up to 400 kilo bits per second are only possible when downloading files rather than Web pages.
It's also relatively expensive to broadcast Web pages to individuals. Enduser fees are not set by Eutelsat but by service providers, so it's impossible to say what these will be until the first MPEG DVB services are announced.
This kind of service becomes much more attractive when supplied by cable TV firms that already download satellite TV channels.