"R J Carpenter" wrote in message
...

"Stephen Shaffer" wrote in message
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All,

I have a friend that is an advid adventure racer. He is getting ready
to outfit a small RV for a race later this year, and told me that he
is getting XM installed because "they are going to offer a data
channel so you can get Internet Access."

Sounds fishy to me...

Can anyone verify or deny?

I cannot verify nor deny, but I smell the fish as well.

It doesn't seem technically possible. They do not any significant
bandwidth
to dedicate to non-broadcast uses. What about 100 "digital" customers who
wanted 56 kilobits at the same time - that's 5.6 megabits per second -
about
equal their whole program bandwidth, I suspect.

Are you saying each channel is only 56kbit? I thought both XM & Sirius were
64kbit?

Yea, they don't have enough bandwidth for decent stereo, much less
datacasting.

Is that why XM sounds worse than FM?