By Felicity Ussher, 24 July 1998 18:15
NEWS Push technology was not a success as a Web streaming technology, but it has been reborn as the basis of a global infrastructure for satellite broadcasts. Satellite service provider, Intelsat is to pilot the first commercial multicasting service from hubs in Brazil, Cyprus, Egypt, South Africaand the US. Teleglobe, the Internet backbone company that won the US contract, will store satellite broadcasts locally and push them to Internet service providers (ISP) as a value-added service. Teleglobe VP Bob Collett told SiliconNews: "This is real push. Compared to this, PointCast and Marimba are semi-intelligent pull technologies. Satellites can simultaneously transmit popular Web pages on demand, all around the globe." Collett explained how satellite multicasting, developed by A&T Systems of Maryland, is a new way of using the Starburst multicast protocol. "Each warehouse has a layer 4 switch that handles requests from ISPs - either caching content locally, or transmitting it over the Web." The warehouses, which each store up to 1 Terabyte data, will be operated as Intelsat earth stations. Collett expects a full service to be up and running by June 1999, following this autumn's beta testing. Teleglobe will then sell the service to its ISP customers, which include the UK's SuperJanet, Telecom Italia, PGA Austria, Spain's Telefonica and France's Viventi.
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