 
|
|
  
|
|
SIMSON SAYS
`Internet in the sky'' is how Teledesic Corp. president Russ Daggatt describes his company's vision. But if the Kirkland, Wash. -based company is successful, the system will be used for a lot more than just Web surfing. Founded in 1990 by cellular phone billionaire Craig McCaw, Teledesic received additional funding from Microsoft Corp. chief executive Bill Gates in 1994 and from Boeing Co. in April. The company plans to launch a fleet of 288 satellites starting in 2001, and to offer high-speed data communications worldwide by 2002. Total system cost is estimated at $9 billion. (Last month, Motorola Inc. announced that it would build a similar - and competing - system called Celestri at a cost of $12.1 billion.) Unlike most communications satellites, which orbit the Earth at 22,000 miles and require large and expensive ground stations, the Teledesic system is based on low- orbiting satellites that circle the Earth only a few hundred miles above the surface. As a result, the Teledesic ground stati
n will be smaller and less expensive, since less power will be needed to reach orbit, and there will be no transmission delay, as there is with conventional satellite systems. To use the Teledesic system, a business or home office would need a small satellite base station, similar to one of today's television satellite receiver systems but equipped with a flat, 18-inch two-way antenna that is electronically tunable. The base station would locate the nearest orbiting Teledesic satellite and create a two-way communications channel. Messages sent from the base station to the satellite would then hop to another satellite, and perhaps another, until it reached the one that was communicating with the intended destination. At the Teledesic receiving station, the signal would then be connected with an existing wired network. Businesses might use Teledesic to connect their remote worldwide offices to a central location. But most of the connections are going to be into one of the public networks, says Daggatt.
nce operational, Teledesic should be able to provide simultaneous connections for more than a million users. Th ese connections will be fast: 2 megabits per second, roughly 60 times faster than today's standard modems. For a school in Nigeria, a high-tech business in the former Soviet Union, or a work-at-home executive in Maine, a high-speed connection using Teledesic could be a lot cheaper than the alternative of stringing wires down here on planet Earth, says Daggatt. That's because a wire can only serve a single customer. The satellites, on the other hand, can serve thousands of users at the same time. Teledesic could jump-start parts of the global economy, says Traver Kennedy, an analyst who follows the company for the Aberdeen Group in Boston. Today in Ghana, a 9,600-baud wire line costs $7,500 a month, says Kennedy. The services cost so much because the country simply does not have the money to lay the copper wires or fiber optics needed for electronic communications. As a result, many services,
uch as electronic mail, faxes, and credit-card verification, are prohibitively expensive. Teledesic could change that by eliminating the need to string wires in order to have global connectivity. The satellite system could also be used for voice. A single Teledesic ground station could provide 30 long-distance voice telephone circuits. This could be a big boost for the developing world, where companies have been slow to build telephone systems in outlying areas because of the difficulty of connecting these systems globally. Teledesic doesn't plan to be an Internet service provider. Instead, it plans to sell its wireless network to existing companies, such as MCI Communications Corp., Sprint Corp., and national telephone companies in the Third World. It's expected that the system will be priced competitively with the local services it seeks to replace - but hopefully not in Ghana. Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at simsong@vineyard.net. Globe technology columnist Hiawatha Bray will
eturn next week.
This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on 07/03/97.
| ||||||||||
|
|
 |
|
Dow:
