"NEW YORK, Dec 13 (Reuters) - Hughes Electronics Corp. (NYSE:GMH - News), the top U.S. satellite television operator, said on Friday it would shut down its loss-making high-speed Internet business, three days after it and No. 2 rival EchoStar Communications Corp. (NasdaqNM:DISH - News) pulled the plug on their proposed $18 billion merger."

Many have been laid off, all their 400 employees will be too.

Click to continue with the Yahoo story

Wednesday's Wall Street Journal reported News Corporation raised roughly $1.3 billion through a secondary stock offering in its Fox Entertainment Group Inc. unit, signaling that Rupert Murdoch may be laying the groundwork for a second run at satellite broadcaster and the DirecTV DSL unit.

Click here for the article

Staff members of the Justice Department have recommended that the government block the proposed $11.2 billion merger of DirecTV and EchoStar. The move would be anti-competitive according to lawyers involved in the review.

If approved by Charles James, the head of the antitrust division, the decision would be a major victory for Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corp. Murdoch has waged an expensive and elaborate campaign to stop the deal so he can buy DirecTV.

Seattle PI

Yahoo column

After months of comments DTV lacking an internal network status and scheduled outage page it is finally here, it is official. This is a members only page.

"Effective June 26, 2002, Verizon Online will begin offering the Verizon Online DSL products, currently available in all other states, in New Jersey. The separate product speeds offered in New Jersey will no longer exist.

NOTE: Customers placing DSL orders on pending POTS service from 6/ 26 to 7/3 will require 15 business days to install.

NOTE: Customer placing DSL orders for existing POTS lines from 6/26 to 7/7 will require 12 business days to install."

DirecTV will be offering Voice over IP phone service as early as 2003. They intend to market this service as a cheap secondary phone line. The technology that will be needed will be supplied by Texas Instruments and will the embedded on the modems shipping in September.

Full Story

NEW YORK (Reuters) - General Motors Corp. on Sunday agreed to sell its satellite television unit Hughes Electronics Corp. for $25.8 billion in cash and shares to EchoStar Communications Corp., sources familiar with the negotiations told Reuters.

Click here for the entire article.

Internal DTV memo from head office in Cupertino:

"Bandwidth for accessing news has been throttled down to 128 Kbps per customer. Total bandwidth limit for news has been set to 20 Mbps for all the customers.

The DIRECTV DSL service had third quarter 2001 revenues of $9 million and negative EBITDA [ed note: click for definition] of $33 million.
Approximately 5,000 net customers were added to the DIRECTV DSL service in the quarter. Subscriber additions in the quarter were negatively impacted by the bankruptcy of Rhythms NetConnections, formerly a wholesale provider of broadband services. As of September 30, 2001, DIRECTV DSL had about 73,000 residential broadband customers in the United States compared to about 23,000 customers as of September 30, 2000."

Read the entire official press release here.

"SUNNYVALE, Calif. - October 10, 2001 - Juniper Networks, Inc.

To Usenet Users:

DIRECTV Broadband is currently experiencing abnormally high traffic utilization on our network backbone, which affects users across our entire network. In order to ensure that all users have connectivity, we are enforcing a temporary throughput limit on connections to our Usenet server.

Now that WorldCom has picked up a portion of the Rhythms Network, will your line be saved? DirecTV Broadband is supposedly in talks with WorldCom to keep customers up and running.

How to find out:

1) Find out your Rhythms customer identification number (SID)
2) Check at the MCI WorldCom site here!