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TELE-audiovision.com—
05-06/2015 —
TELE-audiovision International —
全球发行量最大的数字电视杂志
Jim Edstein first constructed a
reliable roof on which he could
then set up his typhoon-proof
antennas. Here he is seen next
to one of his 3-metre antennas.
Both antennas are aligned
towards THAICOM at 78.5°E,
with the dish in front picking up
C band signals and the second
one behind taking care of the Ku
band. “I can receive 20 free-to-
air channels from the C band,
which are then taken over by a
customer in the United States
who in turn offers the program
lineup in the Roku box. In
addition, I pick up the Truevision
package on the Ku band, which
consists of ten sports channels
that are in very high demand by
customers in the Philippines.”
then, one of Jim’s clients told TELE-sat-
ellite that “Jim solved the problem by
streaming European channels via the
Internet.”
A few years have passed since then,
and it appears that Jim has upped the
ante. In no small part this was helped
by a peculiar characteristic of almost
all Internet service providers in Tai-
wan, whose plans in most cases in-
clude unlimited Internet traffic. It’s no
secret that video streaming requires
considerable bandwidth resources, but
it you know no limits that’s not a big
deal. Not only does Jim use unlimited
Internet traffic, he also managed to get
hooked up to a fibre-optic line with vir-
tually no other users to share capacity
with. We wanted to find out how all this
came about and visited Jim deep in the
mountains of the Taiwanese country-
side. He lives in a place called Alishan,
which might be a very small town by
anybody’s standards, but one that eve-
ry speaker of Chinese surely has heard
of: There is a very popular Chinese folk
song celebrating the sheer beauty of
the girls of Alishan.
Actually, that is exactly how Jim’s
story began in the first place, since his
wife is an Alishan girl. Jim Edstein is
originally from Australia and he walks
down memory lane with us. “I first ar-
rived in Taiwan in 1988 and it was at a
friend’s party that I met my future wife.
She’s from Alishan.” Up until 2010 this
village was more or less cut off from the
outside world, since it is located deep
in the mountains of Taiwan’s Chiayi
county. The drive from Chiayi City alone
takes almost two hours along twisting
mountain roads. It was this remoteness
that triggered Jim’s interest in satellite
reception technology. “I phoned around
quite a bit on my hunt for an installer
who would be ready to set up a satellite
antenna with me in Alishan.” But to no
avail: None of them would bother driv-
ing all the way up to Alishan. It just did
not seem to be worth their while. “So I
was left with only one option: To do the