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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.news.stargate
Subject: Re: Stargate Questions
Message-ID: <6858@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Jun-86 18:58:02 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.6858
Posted: Tue Jun 24 18:58:02 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 24-Jun-86 18:58:02 EDT
References: <355@omen.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
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Disclaimer:  I am not an official representative of Stargate and have no
special inside knowledge.  I think I know the correct answers to Chuck's
questions, though.

> 1) How will Stargate accomodate sites that are cut off from the link for
> several hours or a couple of days do to storms, cable outages, or system
> crashes?

Since in any case there is no guarantee that any given single byte will
be received successfully -- noise, flow control, and system downtime all
take their toll -- there is planned to be considerable repetition of
material so that modest outages don't result in lost traffic.  This is
one of the reasons why there has to be a smart buffer box between the
decoder and your system, so you don't get inundated with multiple copies.

> 2) How will Stargate affect those sites that cannot obtain cable TV or
> a TVRO viz a] news feed b]article reply/followup

If you can't receive it, you can't receive it.  Either you need to get the
video signal somehow -- cable or dish -- or you have to get the contents
from someone who does.  Reply and followup in any case go out via phone
lines, since the satellite end of things is unidirectional for all practical
purposes.  (Replies go via mail as always; followups go via mail to the
Stargate uplink point, via moderators probably.)

> 3) Will it be possible to cheaply implement "local Stargates" based on
> local TV stations for those in condition (2) above, in terms of a head-end
> encoder and decoder boxes?

Getting the cooperation of your TV station will probably be much the hardest
part of doing such a thing.  Data-transmission space in the vertical interval
is VALUABLE.  Lauren was originally thinking of people like the religious
channels, who aren't really in it for a profit, but even they turn out
to be acutely aware that vertical-interval space commands a high price.
He lucked out and found an outfit (Southern Satellite Systems, I think it is)
which was genuinely interested in the Stargate project.

So long as you pay your rental fee on time, I don't suppose Stargate will
much care whether you're feeding their video or some local station's video
into the box.  The head-end gear might be more of a problem, although I
wouldn't be surprised if the Stargate signal can simply be transferred
from one video signal to another without ever having to understand it.
This seems a reasonable sort of thing to expect from commercial video gear.

Setting up "your own Stargate" in the sense of actually being able to
originate your own content might be complicated.  Since there is some
proprietary technology involved, the head-end equipment might not be
generally available.

> 4) Could such a local system retransmit Stargate traffic?

This would presumably depend on the details of how Stargate gets set up
as an organization, which (a) I'm not in a position to comment on, and
(b) hadn't been settled yet anyway last I heard.
-- 
Usenet(n): AT&T scheme to earn
revenue from otherwise-unused	Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
late-night phone capacity.	{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry