Analysis: Planet earth becomes a satellite state

If you stare into the sky at the fireworks celebrating the failure of one of the world?s unluckiest revolutionaries, you may glimpse an entirely different kind of revolutionary.

The revolutionary in question is a satellite only a few metres across, and 485 miles away. At the moment there are 66 of these satellites.

From now and for at least the next seven years, wherever you are in the world, at whatever time of day or night, one of them will be overhead. If you have the right kind of mobile phone, you will even be able to talk to it.

Chatting to satellites isn?t all that revolutionary. Many of us have heard the tell-tale break in an international telephone call which indicates that our call is being bounced off one of the dozens of geo-stationary ?birds? which are already supplementing the crowded submarine cables that encircle the globe. Some of us may even have talked to a satellite from one of the specialised terminals that provide direct links to inter-governmental networks like Inmarsat, that of the International Maritime Satellite organisation, .

Let?s face it, for most of us satellites are an exotic, expensive and not altogether satisfactory way of communicating with someone who can?t be reached any other way. If we could find another way of doing it, we would.

Now there?s another way of doing it. Last Sunday the Iridium Global Mobile Personal Communications system (GMPCS) officially began offering commercial services across its low-earth orbit constellation system.

Iridium is an international consortium of telcos and industrial companies. It is certainly a modern marvel.

An Iridium handset weighing just 14 ounces can connect directly to one of the satellites and make or receive a call, which can be routed and terminated, completely independently of any terrestrial system.

Iridium is a civilian product born out of the US military?s Star Wars program, and born aloft by rockets whose antecedents were originally built to rain nuclear warheads around the globe.

It is the first to introduce a new breed of so-called constellation systems. Such constellations, composed of dozens or even hundreds of satellites, are able to receive a telephone call from anywhere on earth, identify the whereabouts of the intended recipient, and terminate the call as seamlessly as if both callers were connected to the conventional terrestrial telephone network.

In most cases, the callers will be connected via terrestrial mobile phone networks, with the calls routed where possible over fixed trunk networks. Not all calls will link to the satellite constellation via one of Iridium?s network of earth stations.

Iridium is a dazzling technical feat by any standard, but it is the business nature of how Iridium has achieved its feat that has the implications for the future of both voice and data communications.

Until Iridium went live, the biggest block to establishing a truly global communications network has been the complexity of acquiring capacity from the world?s myriad different telcos.

In recent years major operators, such as BT and AT&T have attempted to streamline this process by forming international alliances, such as Concert communications Services, that offer a one-stop service to major communications buyers.

But as shown by BT?s difficulties making Concert fly, this is a far from perfect solution to the problem of global coverage. The idea is restricted to the physical reach of terrestrial networks. Yet such networks do not cover all the remote areas where executives of multi-national companies such as Shell or Rio Tinto Zinc might be roaming.

For these customers, satellites already play an important role in supplementing the voice and data services bought from conventional carriers. Shell, for instance, makes extensive use of Vsat (very small aperture terminal) satellites, that connect remote operations to their core networks using relatively small, and inexpensive satellite dishes. But even Vsat networks can be prohibitively expensive to set up and operate, beset as they are by complex and bureaucratic international licensing processes and regulations. Last year, for instance, MCI and AT&T both spent $2 million establishing regulatory approval for Vsat networks in South America and the Caribbean. One multi-national company that was considering building a private pan-African Vsat system was told by consultants that the licence application process would cost $1 million, apart from the licence fees themselves.

In one fell swoop, Iridium offers a solution to this problem by allowing a company to link its staff worldwide via one company, with no hidden licence fees or messy bureaucracy to deal with. By the end of the year, Iridium expects to have licence agreements in place for more than 200 countries and territories around the world.

The only countries it will be unable to service will be a handful of states where, as a US company, it is forbidden from trading by US embargo. So you won?t be able to connect to Baghdad or Havana.

For anyone running a multi-national corporate network, Iridium offers a unique opportunity. By its own estimations, Iridium should win 200,000 subscribers by the end of its first year of operation.

Its business plan is to win as many as five million customers ? or 35% of the total world market for global GMPCS services ? by 2005. But if Iridium is to be the perfect partner for a private global network user, it must offer comprehensive data services as well as voice.

Corporate communications managers may have to wait a little longer to buy single-source global data communications services.

From day one, Iridium handsets will be able to receive data messages at 2.4Kbps, fast enough to support services such as Short Message System (SMS), and possibly good enough to allow some kind of rudimentary access to email as well. Late next year, this data capability will be supplemented by an additional paging facility, although this will need a separate pager.

This will offer an extra data dimension that will support all the services now becoming popular on interactive paging networks in the US, and in parts of Europe, such as company specific news headlines, stock quotes and other categories of automated information feeds.

With a little ingenuity and imagination, even these very basic data capabilities offer IT managers the chance to link remote users to the corporate information network. If the world?s personal digital assistant manufacturers take an interest, Iridium may yet have a role to play in extending the virtual office to middle of the Sahara, and the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

However, Irridium is essentially narrowband. For heavy duty data applications, and in particular for global multimedia conferencing and Internet connection, we will have to wait for the next generation of broadband constellation systems targeted at roaming road warriors. This should be a short wait and it promises to be worth it.

Waiting in the wings with data-centric constellations are two operators who will offer all of Iridium?s distance and bureaucracy-busting reach, but with much greater capacity. The most well known of these is undoubtedly the monstrously ambitious Teledesic constellation, which promises to put almost 300 satellites in orbit, specifically to offer an ?Internet-in-the-sky? access network aimed at users of mobile devices. If it works, Teledesic will be able to offer users connection to the Internet at speeds of as much as 57.6 Mbps, some 2,000 times faster than a conventional V.34 modem.

But even this phenomenal capacity may be eclipsed by the broadband system planned by Skybridge, an offshoot of the French electronics giant, Alcatel. Unlike Iridium or Teledesic, Skybridge will not offer services to mobile users because its high-capacity terminals will be too large to be mobile.

Instead, its tranches of capacity will be offered to both consumers and corporate customers as a fixed high-speed alternative to the ?local loop? services of conventional telcos, and as the only fixed option for broadband links to remote sites not connected to a terrestrial network.

Skybridge will begin launching satellites next year, and expects to be in service by January 2001. At that point, the satellite business model pioneered by Iridium will begin to affect the world of data as well as voice communications applications.

Much will depend on pricing, but with data traffic volumes catching up with voice traffic even on terrestrial mobile networks, it seems that in 2001 network managers will be freed from the constraints of terrestrial networking. This should offer them the opportunity to bring a new range of individuals and devices within range of the corporate information network.

For networked intelligence, even the sky will no longer be the limit.

Iridium?s rivals Teledesic and Skybridge

Teledesic is the most ambitious of all the constellation systems. The $15 billion network comprises 288 (compared to Iridium?s 66) low earth orbit (Leo) satellites, flying at altitidue of around 440 miles. It has achieved notoriety as the brain child of Craig McCaw, the US mobile phone pioneer, and Bill Gates. Both own 31% stakes in the company. Motorola has agreed that satellite technology it is developing will be used by Teledesic. The $4.2 billion Skybridge Leo constellation is possibly the most pragmatic of the big constellation proposals. The 80 satellites, orbiting at around 900 miles, use a conventional ?bent-pipe? architecture in which all are satellite to earth to satellite, with no satellite to satellite links. Skybridges? partners, lead by Alcatel, are positioning the network as an opportunity for terrestrial carriers, and especially start-up operators, to offer global broadband capacity without having to pull fibre through the local loop. Skybridge claims the cost per connection for carriers may be only $250 per subscriber, in which case it could even head off ADSL and other fixed line technologies as the means by which multi-megabit capacity is driven.