One of the latest trends in telecommunications is to bundle together the services that people use most prevalently in their homes. Generally one company will provide cable TV, high speed Internet access, and home phone service; and then combine all three of those services into a single monthly bill. This offers consumers greater convenience by only having one bill to pay, and savings because the company providing the services will often provide a discount because all three of the services are being offered together.
One of the companies that's doing this is Comcast. Comcast has always been known for it's cable TV service, but more recently it's also branched out to provide broadband Internet service and digital phone service. The cable TV service offered by Comcast has evolved in many ways over the years thanks to the prevalence of digital TV technology, video on demand (VOD) technology, HDTV, and digital video recording (DVR). Besides the obvious technological upgrades, Camcast's digital cable TV service also offers upwards of two hundred and seventy five channels in its largest programming package.
All of this means that Comcast's digital cable TV service is very competitive in terms of features with the satellite TV services that have been eroding its subscriber base in recent years. But one thing that Comcast can offer that satellite TV companies can't offer (at least not nearly as well) is land based telecommunication. Land based telecommunication comes in the forms of high speed Internet access and a digital phone line. While we've all heard of satellite phones and satellite based high speed Internet service, both tend to be prohibitively expensive both in terms of equipment and monthly fees, and both have certain technical characteristics that limit how useful they are. The fact that Comcast provides ground based alternatives to those services that are both cheaper and more effective, makes Comcast's services much more attractive than a lot of what satellite technology has to offer.
Of course there are plenty of examples of why land based phone and Internet access make more sense than their equivalents that use satellite technology. First of all, because the satellites that are used in telecommunications are mostly in geosynchronous orbit, that means that they're really far away from the surface of the Earth. They're so far away in fact that, even though the transmissions that they carry travel at the speed of light, there's a noticeable time lag for those signals. When it comes to satellite based Internet technology this time lag is largely offset by the large amount of data that can be transmitted all at once, but the time lag will be noticeable for any voice communications like with a satellite phone.
The other problem is the expense associated with satellite based technology. For example, because the Internet works in both directions a satellite based Internet connection needs to be able to transmit signals up to the satellite in order to request information to be send over the Internet as well as send emails, text messages, or to upload other data onto the Internet. This goes beyond the capabilities of a normal satellite dish that would be used to receive TV signals and the extra equipment is expensive.
All of these technical considerations translate into savings when you look at how all of your telecommunications services- digital cable TV, high speed Internet, and phone service- can be bundled together by Comcast.