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They're jusr repeaters that run on solar energy ...

Teledesic's website is interesting; none of the links (not even the Terms of Use) work, yet they still claim to be building an "Internet in the Sky".... lol

A Stratellite is similar to a satellite, but is stationed in the stratosphere rather than in orbit

Sounds like an attempt to overcome the runaway expenditures of Teledesic's failed LEO project. The problem with these high-altitude sender/receivers is that--while they offer a technology solution--there is a corresponding weakness in application.

For example, latency in these systems make it unattractive for many internet applications (who wants to play FPS's over a spread-slotted Aloha CDMA system?).

And then there is the monstrous launch and maintenance expense...

Bruce Sterling once referred to the ill-fated Teledesic low earth orbit satellite system as "Microsoft Windows for Spaceships."

"Windows for Supercomputers" probably makes about as much sense and has about as good a chance of succeeding.

Didn't Teledesic fail?

Wonder what this is going to do to the Teledesic project that Bill has been quietly funding for the past few years?

Yes, and how much cheaper than 280 geosync satellites. Teledesic

One way to ease the latency of satellite networks is to use low earth orbit (LEO) satellites.

Teledesic plans to do just that (if they ever get off the ground).

Any one else know of other LEO internet startups?

Sigh.

Still waiting for decent, interactive internet access anywhere on the globe.

-c

Being out in the boonies, I gave Starband a try. I struggled with it for a couple of months. It doesn't work.

My biggest complaint was the constant disconnections. I would disconnect around 10-20 times per day from 30 seconds to 4 hours. The best ping time I ever recorded was around 650 ms, making telnet and gaming unbearable. The customer support was useless.

When I cancelled the service, I was charged $499 just for canceling, not counting the many hundreds I paid for the installation and equipment! I refused to pay the cancellation fee. After 3-4 months and letters back and forth, VISA reversed the charge.

Hopefully fixed wireless or low-earth orbit satellites will be available someday. Until then, I'm paying through the nose for a T1.

Realistically, though, I don't think there's a real market for it. Deploying 844 satellites (or whatever it is) is prohibitively expensive for covering that 1% of the population of people that can afford this stuff.

There are ISPs who will sell you a residential class DSL service, with a static IP address, and let you run servers.

We were so happy when AT&T bought TCI and put some money into the cable system, and were overjoyed when they brought us @Home. Now they want to sell out to Cox or Comcast, the two Scrooges who would ban our telecommuting.

I can't wait for Teledesic to offer some competition. I'd gladly pay them $100 a month for modest service if I could use it anywhere on the planet.

Come to think of it why doesn't Microsoft with all its money not dabble more in the communication industry, particularily satellites and other space ventures, if they really want to be innovative I think this is where its at...

Bill Gates and his "rich buddies" *are* dabbling in the communication industry -- specifically satellites.

I know this has been covered by Slashdot several times in the past, but I guess it can't hurt to bring it up again:
Teledesic is the company that Gates, McCaw, Motorola and several others started to build a global satellite system, similar to what Iridium tried to do. The Teledesic FAQ has a little information about Gates's investment. The FAQ doesn't mention how much money he invested, but I seem to remember reading that it was something like 12 billion of his personal dollars...

Come to think of it why doesn't Microsoft with all its money not dabble more in the communication industry, particularily satellites and other space ventures, if they really want to be innovative I think this is where its at...

Bill Gates and his "rich buddies" *are* dabbling in the communication industry -- specifically satellites.

I know this has been covered by Slashdot several times in the past, but I guess it can't hurt to bring it up again:
Teledesic is the company that Gates, McCaw, Motorola and several others started to build a global satellite system, similar to what Iridium tried to do. The Teledesic FAQ has a little information about Gates's investment. The FAQ doesn't mention how much money he invested, but I seem to remember reading that it was something like 12 billion of his personal dollars...

Someone mentioned MS wanting to take over broadband through Windows. I agree to come extent and I think that Teledesic is how they plan on doing it.

Though MS isn't driectly involved look at the investers: Craig McCaw, Bill Gates, Motorola, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, the Abu Dhabi Investment Company and Boeing.

What will they offer? 64mbps downlink and 2 mbps uplink for home service. More for business.

I am sure that billg realizes that for .net to work well he needs a fast way to put lots of data into the home. If, and when, this makes it to market it will make a huge splash.

On the most basic level, you would need to write your own software to crack into FHSS. I don't know of any cards running FHSS supported by standard WEP crackers (which are mostly for PrismII based DSSS cards).

Even with 802.11b WEP DSSS not all companies use WEP the same way. The more ISP-oriented equipment works with different keys for each user, which makes the job much more difficult. Even with the normal consumer kit, rebooting the access point every day to restart WEP would make a cracker's job much harder.

And at the moment, there's a bit of a problem with current satellite systems. The delay. Geosynchronous satellites are rather a long way away and the latency is a bit of a killer - you'll be lucky if it's better than a modem. It's the bandwidth vs. speed thing mentioned in the article: with satellite, even if you've got the bandwidth, you don't have the speed. (Plus, I'd be interested to hear if these are secure anyway. Certainly you can sniff a downlink signal and forge an uplink signal from a much larger area than a system which is covered by ground-based antennas which gives a lot more people the opportunity to play around :-) The only good thing about geosynchronous satellite is the coverage area.

In a few years, maybe satellite will be useful: but it's going to take LEOS to sort out the latency problem, and then you need an awful lot of birds to provide the type of coverage needed to offer a commercial service (info here).

You know you're screwed when the only internet access available to you is from Ma Bell, because the other Ma Bell refuses to serve you. That's me, screwed! And Teledesic won't be available for years...

When will unmetered low-earth satellite coverage get here instead?

Teledesic is trying. Doesn't look like until 2005 though. They must have pushed it back because it used to say it would be available in 2003. I wonder how this is going to affect radio astronomy, the Iridium satellites already pose a big enough problem.

Teledesic to the rescue! And Hughes, Motorola, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Loral, Alcatel, Orbital Sciences, etc.

Has everyone forgotten Teledesic? It's well-funded, affordable, and going into operation in 2005.

If Teledesic keeps its promise, 56KB dial-up will be as obsolete as gopher and Lynx.

Web sites should be preparing for universal broadband access the way software developers rely on faster processors and cheap RAM and disk storage. If the history of software is any indication, there is less risk in betting on the future than in clinging to today's technology.

I used to work for a tech company that evaluated these systems. Back in the day Irridium was thought to be a total joke - the idea was (apparently, correctly) that MEO (medium earth orbit) satellites were just too difficult and expensive to use for profitable telecom.

However, all the heat went off Irridium and its 60+ MEO satellites when Gates and McCaw backed Teledesic, which called for something like 200+ LEO satellites to deliver broadband Internet worldwide. Obivously, LEO satellites are even more complex and difficult to manage (handoffs, launches, etc.) that MEO.

I just look up Teledesic, though, and it is still going strong. Clearly still vaporware, but it is interesting that they have not given up in light of Irridium's continuing woes.

This can't be good to get high speed access to the masses. If you can't get cable and Covad goes under, then there may be no real alternative short of expensive ISDN or T1 circuts.

I hope that wireless solutions like Starband and Teledesic can come through to offer a decent performing and priced solution.

Until then, we wait...

Brian
http://www.assortedinternet.com

That "Rocket a Day" plan reminds me of what Craig McCaw et al plan for the Teledesic network. They plan to launch 288 satellites, and McCaw talks about treating it more like a mass-production scenario than has been the case for other satellites and their launches.

> I hate to say it, but the microsoft backed Teledesic system is a much better system (many satellites in low earth orbit- kinda
> like a cellular system) the satellites are closer and cover smaller areas, so the amount of bandwidth/satellite is much smaller.

Teledesic says in their FAQ that "Mr. Gates's investment is a personal one not associated with Microsoft."

-b

You're thinking geostationary orbit which is 22,000 miles over the equator. I'm thinking less than 1,000 miles (low to medium earth orbit) which has round trip times of around 10ms.

This is where the Teledesic system (that I referenced in the linked article) would orbit.

Here is what the Teledesic site has to say:

User Equipment
The Teledesic Network's low orbit eliminates the long signal delays normally experienced in satellite communications and enables the use of small, low-power user equipment to send and receive data. The fixed user equipment will mount on a rooftop and connect inside to a computer network or PC.

Cost
End-user rates will be set by service providers, but Teledesic expects rates to be comparable to those of future urban wireline options for broadband service.

A satellite in geosynchronous orbit is 22,300 mi away, minimum (at least according to the linked article). According to my math, that's about .12 light-seconds. In other words, it takes a signal 120 milliseconds to get from the satellite to the earth.

Think about telnet, or quake, or something like that. You press a key, and a packet gets sent. 120ms later, it reaches the sat. The sat sends it back down to a station, that takes another 120ms. Ignoring any latency on the ground, the ack for that packet takes 120ms to reach the sat and another 120ms to get to you. We're up to nearly half a second. Now add any ground-based latency, and you are one sorry-ass High Ping Bastard.

And of course your actual rate of download will depend on how large the TCP window is, 'cause it takes the same half a second for you to ack that MP3 file being beamed to you from outer space...

Low earth orbit satellites make *much* more sense for Internet because of this problem. Too bad no one could redo Iridium satellites to route IP! Of course, your favorite billionaires, Bill Gates and Craig McCaw, are collaborating on an outfit called Teledesic to do LEO sat Internet, but they are targeting 2004 for service start... which probably means more like 2006+, if ever.

Well, it sad to see Iridium go. I've followed is progress over the last several years and thought the concept really had a chance. Unfortunately, market tides and marketing foulups shifted under Iridum's feet, and they fell on their face. Let me tackle a few of the questions here.

The time hasn't come yet.

The time came five years ago even more than now. Iridium could have been used to bootstrap phone networks up in developing countries until regular cellular towers were available. One of the concepts was also a form of "village phone" that was basicly a phone booth with a sat antenna on top.

Expensive bulky phones that didn't work indoors?

The phones did have problems indoors. They really needed a line of site in order to connect up to the sats. It would have worked fine for a roof mounted antenna on a truck, ship, or plane. For some reason, the marketing brain power at Iridium decided to target mobile executives rather than commercial industry. Instead of trying to get a Fortune 500 CEO to carry one in a briefcase, they could have targeted trucking companies who do cross country runs, shipping that is in the middle of the ocean, and airlines who could use a cost effective replacement for those "Airphones" they try and charge $3/minute for. Iridium failed to target the tech to the market is was sufficient for.

Why not just auction the suckers?

Won't work. First, there is a lot of ground support involved. I believe the cost is at somewhere around $1M/day to operate the sats. Next, you have to send up replacements too often. This is not a geosync sat that just hangs out. This is five dozen plus sats in low orbit experiencing constant drag. Within a few years, the first generation sats will start coming home on their own. With a controlled deorbit, you can at least make sure they all end up in the ocean instead of having chunks of metal land in New York and Tokyo.

Iridium completely missed the boat on data service. The system is designed around voice and low-bandwidth pager data. This was a major design flaw with the move to an information society over the last few years. If Teledesic gets off the ground, maybe my faith in these sat clusters will be renewed, but it will take a lot.

The failure of these first generation sat clusters has hurt more than just the sat companies themselves. Several companies were developing new low cost launching technologies intended to support this market. You can write off Rotary Rocket and serverl other companies because they saw their potential customer go away before they were even out the door.

Such is life...

If you want to see an early realization of this 'air fibre' technology, visit Lucent's page: WaveStar Optic Air system. 2.5Gbps is delivered through the a laser beam through the air. Designed for telco hops in cities and enterprise. Also -- about sat links: Teledesic promises to have a worldwide network capable of supporting 1 mil simultaneous broadband users by 2004. We're not talking about wimpy Iridium's pitifull 66 birds here -- their plan calls for 300. This is a fixed wireless solution, not mobile. It's designed to deliver very high speed connections to homes and businesses providing voice, video, and data at speeds between 2Mbps and 64Mbps. I don't think it's hype, seeing as though it has big backers (of course Bill G is famous for stupid hotair, look @ the X-box). Teledesic will have a few features similar to Iridium, like intra-satilite communication and routing. No, I'm not an investor -- I only wish I was.

Now call me a cynic but doesn't this tell you something about the immediate future of LEO communications? Craig McCaw efectivelly controls all the cards now that Iridium is gone He was there from the beginning in Teledesic and has stepped into ICO effectively making the market a monopoly. In my experience monopolies do nothing to drive prices down so ICO and Teledesic are going to be far from affordable for a good long while - and what if both fail to meet expectations?

I just don't want to see 100 odd LEO birds up in the sky with no one paying for them to be brought to earth safely and their orbits decaying and either disrupting other services or burning up in the outer atmosphere. I saw a quote saying that these satellites are the size of a Volkswagen Beetle so that's quite a lot to burn up safely.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for wireless fast Internet access but I feel strongly that earth based UMTS or 3rd Generation GSM is going to be the way to go - it offers speeds around 3 times that of ISDN while moving and upto 2Mbps while stationary and doesn't need handsets that take us back to the old Motorola brick phones.

Then in 1991, following on my legislative successes in space commercialization I went to work with E'Prime Aerospace as Vice President of Public Affairs. I took on that job because they had a potential customer (Norris Satellite Communications -- run by a Dutch Amish expatriate from my ancestral county of Lancaster Pennsylvania) who wanted to launch a geostationary Ka Band satellite called "Norstar", but he couldn't get the license thorugh the FCC. There had never been a Ka Band satellite licensed and there was a lot of conflict over letting this Amish character have the first crack at commercializing the Milstar technology (NASA likes people to think ACTS was the pioneer in Ka band, but even thought ACTS was launched first, the Harris ECL satellite switching guys Norris used did their pioneering work with Milstar, not ACTS). Anyway, to make a long story short, we managed to get the FCC licensing dislodged and the first Ka band satellite license was awarded to Norris, the Amish dude. The satellite specifications called for multiple geostationary Ka band satellites with onboard switching of time division multiplexed spot beams that would allow you to adaptively switch the power (both informational and energetic) to various geographic hotspots as needed. This was getting close to what I had predicted as a geostationary computer network, because the ECL switches were systems that Seymour Cray himself would have respected, and the spot beams made it feasible to load-level much more effectively to stationary ground dishes only inches in diameter. If Cray's gallium arsenide switches, developed for the Cray-4, had made it into production, I think the systems could have been a lot high capacity at lower power while retaining their radiation hard characteristics.

Unfortunately, Norris's satellite system was to go the way of another Norris's (William) Plato system -- to the "before its time" scrap heap of history. The Calling Communications Corporation guys who were cursing me at the 1993 Small Satellite Conference in Logan, UT for grabbing their coveted Ka band first eventually, along with Iridium, got it reallocated. Calling Communications Corporation eventually went away from voice communications to computer networking and changed their name to Teledesic. Everyone seemed to forget about geostationary Ka band computer networking.

Even so, I still think there is enormous opportunity for a geostationary orbital computation satellite network based on phased-array spot beam switching and intersatellite optical links.

Microsoft Jumpstarts Subsaharan Africa

Seattle, WA (UIP)
In a startling business move with profound geopolitial ramifications, Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, today announced a moratorium on the enforcement of Microsoft's copyrights within Subsaharan Africa for at least the next 10 years. "The struggling nations of Subsaharan Africa need to leapfrog into the global internet economy and bypass the stages of economic development that have, historically, destroyed indigenous cultures and their ecologies." said Mr. Gates as his wife, former President Bill Clinton, Craig McCaw, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, South African President Nelson Mandella and Zulu historian Credo Muthwa looked on. He continued, "The wanton rape of the environment and tribal societies is perhaps beyond hope elsewhere in the world, but Africa still possesses much of the deepest heritage of mankind. It is not too late to protect it from modernization. Postmodern economies can leapfrog and preempt such destruction."

Craig McCaw also announced, "We are pleased to announce unlimited access to Iridium/Teledesic internet satellites within Subsaharan Africa for the duration of Mr. Gate's moratorium. Our satellite infrastructure is underutilized in the Southern Hemisphere generally, and Subsaharan Africa in particular. This will be a small investment with tremendous global benefits."

Mr. Gates announced additional endowments from the his private foundation to provide ground stations for McCaw's internet satellites and thin client PC's with access to computer-based training for African school districts. In a move labeled by many pundits as "eccentric" Gates targeted his largest endowment, $1 billion to The Bonobo Protection Fund. The Bonobo Protection fund will install an enormous array of cameras and microphones throughout the entire ecological range of the Bonobos in the Congo and Zaire. Real time unedited multimedia feeds of Bonobo social dynamics will become available around the world on the internet. These raw data streams are expected to make their way into academic institutions, but also the entertainment industry. Bids are already coming in from various internet pay per view channels on the theory that natural Bonobo social behavior will serve a viewing public that has come to expect primitive primate behavior on everything from talk shows to political debate. The profits of "Bonobo TV" are expected to pay for policing of the habitat as well as maintaining the array of sensors. The policing will be aided by the video cameras which are expected to provide unprecedented security for the Bonobo habitat against intrusion by careless or hostile humans.

If you can stand to wait until 2004, a copany called TeleDesic will be providing high speed, 2 way satellite Inet access at an affordable price. They are using a network of low earth orbitting (LEO) satellites that they say will serve several simulatenous users, also giving speeds of up to 64mbit. Anyway, check out their website, www.teledesic.com

I'm waiting with baited breath for Teledesic myself.

...are in way too many pies. I wonder when we'll hear about the involvment in this company. I know the rumors I've heard are very interesting (and, for all you astro-turfers, yes, the source was reliable.... don't be fooled by the lack of mention on the site, and don't be blinded just because they sign your paycheck...)