I have been following this thread with some interest. A few months ago a friend of mine from Fore Systems told me about the 'ACTS' project. NASA and Ohio-State and quite a few others were doing research into the Gigabit Satelite Network.
ACTS has been used for a bunch of stuff, but you're probably thinking of the high data rate experiments. The home page for ACTS HDR is http://mrpink.lerc.nasa.gov/gsnhome.html
There was a test between Sony in Japan and I 'BELIEVE' JPL in Pasadena of hight def video transmissions over an OC-3 circuit.
You'll find this on on the Experiments page, number 101.
Anybody heard anything about this? If enough birds like ACTS were sent up, this could be a boon for ISP's maybe.
Well, maybe. ACTS is a GEO satellite, and interactive use is painful. On the other hand, it's enabled people to do interesting things with bulk data transfer, and it was probably the first system that got you OC-12 across any significant distance. There's an IETF WG working on the issues posed by IP over satellites, whose home page is http://www.isr.umd.edu/CSHCN/Links/IPoS/ ...arun --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Arun Welch 5000 Britton Rd Lead Engineer, Internet R&D Hilliard, OH 43026 CompuServe Network Services awelch@compuserve.net