The role of satellites in global IT: trends and implications

Satellites will continue to be an essential element in the establishment of long-distance telecommunications for many years, and it will have a major role in the implementation of the so-called global information infrastructure in the future. This is because of the particular feature of the satellite that can provide wide coverage independent of the actual land distance between any pair of communicating entities. The new generation of broadband satellite systems, which can provide high-speed data transmission and connectivity to terrestrial data networks, will create profound changes in all aspects of the emerging data communications applications such as the Internet and electronic commerce. We explore characteristics of the future satellite networks and their interoperability with terrestrial wireless and wired networks. The emerging data and IP applications impose new implementation issues on the long-latency and restricted satellite channel that must be resolved before such interoperability between satellite and terrestrial networks takes place