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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."
Gives a whole new meaning to "never got off the ground".
...someone DID imagine a Beowulf cluster of them.
If they're going cheap, they might make a pretty impressive IEEE 802.11 antenna.
Ah-ha!
http://angelhalo.com/
Kudos to the Wayback Machine for digging up the parent company's url!
Slashdot: rejecting tech news in favor of rubber band guns since 1997.
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?
Kinda reminds me of the movie Antitrust in an eerie way...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
...to have something better than ISDN in my house here in Japan. At least its better than dialup where I paid $300 a month.
Apparently, this country needs to learn what does "national coverage" mean, and that linking two islands with 45mbit link and selling it to 35000 dsl, isdn, and dialup customers is not exactly the correct way of doing things.
Oh, and no signs of current-gen satellite internet in Japan either. DirectPC Japan sells "only to enterprises" with $2000-some for setup and after that billed PER MEGABYTE downloaded.
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.
The Helios project will provide the same functionality, but with cheaper maintenance and launch costs. It is a solar-cell powered flying wing that will soar at about 60000 feet or so, with 200 pounds of payload. It may very well be the specific reason they pulled the plug on Teledisc, since they realize that most satelites will be obsoleted too soon for them to proceed with the project.
Stop the brainwash
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.
Were they supposed to have Mac support?
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
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
-
Just in the US: You got lots of not-so-baby
bells who will challenge you in the courts if
you start competing with them.
Then there's the issue of giving FBI/CIA/NSA
the ability to wiretap the data flow. They
certainly like tapping Osama's satellite calls and they don't want to give up on that when he moves to voice-over-IP!
- Then there's the foreign countries. You know, most of the world. Usually the government is the phone company, and they won't like the competition nor the loss of wiretap ability one bit. So you have literally hundreds of agreements to pound out, in countries that often have barely functioning legal systems. I'm sure some big donations from Bill won't hurt the situation in many countries, but others won't be so easily convinced.
So, in my completely unprofessional opinion: Ignore the technical and financial risks. The legal risks alone will kill the project....that this thing wouldn't be common carrier? Large communication system, with Bill Gates at the helm, and no obligation to be compatible with anything would be a really good vehicle of pushing nasty stuff in protocols.
So IMHO good riddance.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Ever see an Iridium Flare?
Satellite broadband for the masses won't work. Period.
Here's the math to back that up.
Assume a bird at LEO - about 100 miles up, serving about a 500 mile footprint.
Assume said bird is running a 1 GHz wide communications channel (not a 1 GHz center frequency, 1 GHz bandwidth. That puts the center freq around 10 GHz at least, where there are very large space losses - just getting your signal down costs you a lot of signal).
Assume the protocol used by the bird gets about 4 bits per second per Hz (That's a pretty high value - the signal to noise ratio will have to be VERY low for this to work.)
Assume an overhead of 2 bits per byte transmitted. This includes all protocol below TCP/IP, error correction, collisions, retransmits, etc.
OK, given those numbers, you get about 400 Mbytes/sec downlink throughput.
Assume you want to supply everyone with DSL equivelent speeds - 40 kByte/sec.
400 Mbyte/sec divided by 40 kByte/sec = 100 thousand users per bird.
100 thousand users per 500 * pi miles = 64 users/square mile. Anyplace the user density is higher than that would swamp the system.
And remember, I've been using very LARGE (i.e. very favorable to satellite downlink) numbers.
Satellite is GREAT for wide-open, low population density areas. The problem then becomes you cannot get enough people to pay for the birds.
In high density areas, land based wireless and wireline are MUCH more cost effective. In less populated areas, ideas like the solar aircraft are more feasible than satellites. In REALLY unpopulated areas, there just ISN'T a technology that can do the job without some sort of subsidy.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I don't think any commercial broadband wired services would be viable if everyone used all their available bandwidth all the time. For example in the past year or so most cable companies have started putting download caps into effect, for very good reason: you cannot sell bandwidth that costs you, e.g. $600 a month for a T1 to consumers for $30 a month. Never mind that the coax they use cannot supply that much bandwidth to more than a few folks per neighborhood.
A more realistic TCP/IP-by-satellite involves intermittent (on-the-go) usage or more efficient multicast broadcasts. No, it's not a T1-type tarrifed service anymore!
There is a lot of interest recently in stratosphereric platforms as an alternative to satellites, both heavier and lighter than air.
Geostationary satellites are too far to support high data rates to mobile terminals and also suffer from high latency. LEO satellites require an entire constellation covering most of the Earth before there is continous coverage in any part of the Earth. This all-or-nothing property makes it a dangerous business proposition.
Some links:
StratSat
CargoLifter and Boeing
Yokosuka
AeroVironment
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
When I first heard about Bill Gates' involvement in this project, I was a little worried that he'd use it to try to lock up the telecommunications market. But the project's failure just proves one thing: Bill Gates does not know how to design stuff. All of Microsoft's best-selling products are based on designs ripped off from others -- the general-purpose desktop OS (Digital Research), the GUI (Xerox/Apple), the web browser (Netscape) ... the list goes on and on. Can you recall anything that originated in Redmond that people actually wanted?
His Billness is now the "chief software architect" in Redmond, heading up the design of a "revolutionary" new product line. This is supposedly the Windows version that has databases embedded everywhere, and a line of applications that use these new API's. This isn't something customers are asking for, and it isn't something their competitors are delivering. Perhaps, by chance, it's something nobody wants? Perhaps it's just an attempt to foist ever more complex API's on the world, so both app and OS competitors will be challenged to keep up? Or perhaps Bill is just a little too overconfident?
I'm happy to see the Teledesic project die. Hopefully Bill will die soon too.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Excuse me? The US has the least regulated telecom market in the world. Our problem is that we don't have enough regulation to push the slow moving monopolies forward. Instead we allow them to stifle competition and to keep offering the same old sub-standard service.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Umnh... A lot of the monopolies are created and guaranteed existence by the regulations. We don't have the least regulations, we merely have different regulations. And not all to our benefit, by any means.
This is partially because Western Union and Bell Telephone started up in the US before there was significant government interest. So it's partially happenstance. And it's also partially because the Puritans believed that economic success was the worldly sign that god loved you. So people who were economically successful shouldn't be unduly hampered in doing what they wanted. This is usually implicit rather than explict, but it underlies many of the US customs and habits of governance to this day. And because it's implicit, it's impossible to challenge in court under the separation of church and state provisions. (Much of culture is like that, when you think about it.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson:
"I myself do not want to go to bed by the light of a Microsoft moon."
Evil is the money of root.
If the West aren't careful, India could end up owning worldwide broadband multimedia on demand.
Seastead this.
Take a map of...say for example...Alaska. One state in a "civilized" country. Make sure it's a really big map. One that covers a wall. Now draw a pencil line on it. One line. I'll even let you curve it as much as you want.
There's your fiber. Don't forget that you are paying for it by the foot. And you have to secure right of ways. Oh, yeah. Watch out for mountains. And unstable terrain (permafrost, bogs, flood plains).
The whole state (and Canada, and most of the rest of the United States) can be covered with one (1) satellite (many earth stations, but that's another story). I'll grant that the bandwidth on the satellite is less (how much so depends on how may transponders you dedicate), but so is the maintenance (per square mile covered) and it's far more backhoe resistant.
Satellite is a boon to areas with low population density. Don't write it off out of hand.
Yes, I think that if everyone had internet access it would help humanity, but there are more pressing issues, like the original poster stated. But being a humanitarian will not make you more money, or give you more power. So Mr Bill will not be interested in things like that.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
the specs probably changed considerably from when i was doing this, but at that time, they were considering a network of 840 satellites! in some areas of the world you had maybe 10 or 20 satellites visible at once. if this thing had ever got off the ground, you'd have had some pretty spectacular displays around dawn and dusk.
what an amazing waste of money. personally i think that high altitude balloons sound like an excellent idea as a cheap alternative to behemoths like teledesic.
What will Bill gates do now with those ex-Russian rockets he bought for Teledesic?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu