Whoops! - looks like DirecTV's out of the running. I saw in a newspaper that they decided going nose-to-nose with the cable companies was too tough, given the CRTC, etc.
With these services, your set-top box has a connection to your phoneline so that the system can call in your Pay-Per-View accounts automatically. This link is used to send Internet information at some modest baudrate. The satellite channel is used to receive at 400kbp/s. The total bandwidth of the satellite channel is 12Mbps, with the possibility of adding further channels as demand increases. An intersting idea, akin to connecting 10,000 PCs to an Ethernet backbone... We'll see what happens.
It works .. I've seen it running. I gather it can be used with an existing ISP to provide the uplink. CRTC rules mean they can only have one pipe into the US, though, even if it is a T3.