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Teledesic Comes Down to Earth
hibachi writes "Teledesic, the ambitious plan to build a constellation of low-earth orbiting satellites for global broadband services, has died on the assembly room floor. According to this press release, "the company does not believe that it is prudent, purely on speculation, to continue the substantial capital expenditures required to construct and launch the satellites consistent with the timing required to meet FCC and ITU regulatory milestones." Brainchild of Bill Gates and Craig McCaw, Teledesic held the promise of globally ubiquitous high speed Internet. It seems Teledesic's plans grew less ambitious over the years until finally the painful lessons of Iridium, and the current telecom climate, drove the last nails in its coffin. I am sad to see this happen."
right next to a cigarette-stained VAX. When are they gonna update that shit?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
At this rate, I would just as soon expect to see a giant round thing on a stick to block out the sun (ala simpsons)
though on a more realistic note, wouldn't it be more useful right now to focus on creating some more down to earth services that aren't going to shut down or be bought out every other month?
or even better yet, have more systems that are interoperable, so if you do have to switch services, you don't have to go through the hell of having to get new hardware as well?
I think that a big part of their problems comes from trying to provide internet acess to 3 billion people who previously didn't have it (is it that few?). Not that this goal isn't admirable, but I think it would be better to concentrate on getting consistant electricity, clean water, and high quality food to the world poor, instead of internet access (lack of computers/electricity to run them could also be a problem).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Terrestrial broadband providers have a hard enough time making money. i think with the added costs of satellites, its a good thing this company stopped their work before they wasted billions like Iridium. I mean, with cheap fiber already in a glut, who needs to pay big money for satellite bandwidth?
------- sig goes here
I'm not sure I understand why the author of this post is sad to see Teledesic shelved. Did he really think that LEO satellites can fulfill the expectations of inexpensive global broadband internet access? We already have Inmarsat. Price that out...
The scheme is about as hare-brained as putting solar panels in space to generate electricity for earth needs. It costs something like $200 an ounce just to launch something in low-earth orbit and that doesn't include cost of R&D, construction, and maintaining a large constellation of satellites on station. Better to spend the dollars on improving terrestrial internet infrastructure than to clutter up space even more.
Unfortunatly we see this kind of thing happening everywhere. Telecom companies devaluating their recent investments for UMTS licenses, Companies like Worldcom and KPN QWEST in serieus trouble (right to the point that at least KPN QWEST goes bankrupt). It is no surprise that Teledesic does not want to venture into a territory which is hostile to say the least at this moment. To uphold their promise they must not only build, launch and exploit the satelites but they must also create the groundstations and maintain them for the governments and regional governments. Otherwise those satelites would be very expensive space junk.
So they are looking at a very substantial investment in a time where no-one would invest because of unstable markets.
Unfortunatly there is no forseeable uplift for the telecom sector. It's a wise decision to stop now and to evaluate the situation. Perhaps when the worldeconomy is seeing some uplift the company can start again with its original plans. Until then i'm afraid those 3 billion people will still not have access. Although they will never miss it by the way, nor am i afraid that they are worse off then those who do have access.
Does anyone know what the bandwith would have been? I dread to ask about ping...
It's a common fallacy to ascribe a lack of telephony, electricity/water to a definitive lack of net access. Cybercafes, I might point out, are leading the way in providing cheap access to those without phones or electricity.
More than mere navel gazing.
Iridium bugs me. I've seen a lot of people claim it failed because of the technology. But this just isn't the case! It *might* have failed based on the technical [de]merits, but it never made it that far.
I know this because I tried to buy an Iridium phone. I spent months and months trying. I tell you they WOULD NOT SELL ME ONE. It was a joke! No resellers had them, and there was no plan. The best I ever did was find a fly-by-night in Taiwan who would sell me a phone, but not a service plan. Who would buy a phone with no service plan?
It was frustrating too, reading their glossy pamphlets and their web sites. They actually gave you (the customer) examples of what type of people would use an Iridium phone. Topping the list was Saudi Oil Sheiks! I'm not kidding! I tried to tell them, im not an oil sheik, but I HAVE MONEY and I want to BUY.
Iridium failed because of internal failures inside the company (and motorola). They got caught up in internal politics and self-absorbsion. Apparently they forget to do marketing and build distribution channels.
Here in the UK it was perfectly possible to buy an Iridium phone. Almost every electronics shop on Tottenham Court Road stocked them. I even once saw someone buy one.
The problem Iridium had was deeped. When the economics were first calculated in the mid-1980s, nobody envisaged a ubiquitious cell phone service and global roaming. (Nor did they imagine that cell phone services would price their minutes at $0.20 or less.) The key demographic of Iridium users - i.e. travelling businessmen - already had cell phones, and weren't prepared to swap them for larger devices, with lower quality sound, and which cost 30x as much per minute.
--- My dad's political betting
Being a "victim" of the telecom crash myself, I feel like speaking freely about the not so positive parts here...
In the last 5-10 years, there's been a constant push to develop more and newer technology to sell to willing customers (in the highly developed parts of the planet). This was in blind disregard of then common sense that enough is enough, if you don't need more features you're not going to buy it.
Meanwhile, the amount of technology standards and "blueprints" for communication systems is advanced enough to last quite a while without new developments. Some refinement is good, but wider implementation of this technology would do much more good in the world, for peace and equality (thereby reducing risks of conflict between nations and peoples!). If every moderately developed country would have basic internet and telephony services available for 80-90% of the people for reasonable prices. The world would be much better off than with another way to get broadband for a few above average rich people.
Of course, the need for food, shelter, education and freedom rises far above the need for communication and internet facilities. Also 3 million people a year are dying of aids, and so on and so forth... Life is not about more bandwidth (really!)
Simon
To follow up Mr. AC's comments:
You've ignored spatial mux: how many beams do you think you get per antenna? How many antennas do you think are on each bird? Look at the inter-satellite link capacity, and you'll see that the system is engineered for a whole lot more capacity. You're also assuming each place has one bird in view; dense areas can load-balance, and you need lots of birds in view anyways to get smooth handoff. (And you can solve interference using directional gain).
Finally, yes, you can provide DSL-quality, _simultaneously_, to all users, unless you intend to pay for the link to the Internet. If I just connect you to a service provider, then my costs are quite limited, since it only traverses my backhaul, which is already in the sky...
because what Teledesic could have offered has so much potential.
Apart from the fact that you save wiring up hundreds of countries that cannot afford it - and hence provide internet access to millions upon millions of people that previously could not get online - but what's more, for those of us road warriors, it could have been a godsend.
Yeah, it's all very well to have broadband internet - but it's only available at your desk! What happens if you're out in the field and you want to send/stream a movie back to base? At the moment, it's damn hard (and expensive) to do it... but allow for this to take off, everywhere you go, fast internet. Teledesic is to the internet what the mobile phone is to voice telephony.
I know there are still latency issues to work out, but eventually it could become like many households (especially students) where there are no landline phones, just mobiles - instead of having a fixed, wired access point, everybody has wireless, move anywhere mobile access... anywhere in the world.
I'm sure it'll happen, but minus the backing of the big guns like Gates et co, it may take a while longer.
-- james
This project was BillGatus's dream of having ubiquitous internet access for _windoze_users_only_ It was going to be a way to push Palladium off onto the rest of the world by being the only way to access the internet globally.
That the project died is a very great thing for Freedom. We should be happy because now Gates can't force people to use _his_ internet.
Do you seriously think that Gates would have allowed open source software to access his internet? Do you think we'd be able to access slashdot? Of course not.
If the West aren't careful, India could end up owning worldwide broadband multimedia on demand.
Seastead this.