DirecPC, another Hughes' unit, has for some time beamed Net data back to Earth, but the transmissions sent out by customers were usually routed over phone lines via dial-up connections. Dish size was another obstacle. Early dishes were huge, heavy and unstable. Walczak said that the multitude of routing points in terrestrial systems bottlenecks the Web. It wasn't designed for multicasting streaming data or streaming media to a lot of people.
Satellite solves that equation.