Larry, There are going to be lots of suppliers of satellite services for data and voice, but I agree with you, that the first systems will have an advantage. This will be a business which depends on unit costs - the biggest and lowest cost with high technical performance and customer benefits will increasingly dominate.
The data market is too hard for me to pick a winner, but voice is certainly going to go Globalstar's way rather than Iridium's or the smaller or later suppliers. Globalstar's costs are too low and benefits too substantial for Iridium or others to beat them.
Later, W-CDMAOne systems which can supply video along with voice should have an advantage. Qualcomm has just announced in their Eudora division agreements for encryption and video, along with PureVoice TM attachments to Eudora email. Presumably they will be able to upgrade Globalstar to provide these services by plugging in the appropriate electronics on ground stations and designing 2nd or 3rd constellations to include the processing to handle these.
I'm not aware of any benefits subscribers will get by using Iridium other than those minor ones I mentioned. For example, out on or over oceans where a remote island has the nearest earth station, the signal will have to go to a geostationary satellite for forwarding to the recipient. That will cause voice delay. What a pain! But that will affect very few users despite the vast expanse of ocean. There are more and more cables under the ocean and there are islands all over the place.
I don't know what the earth station plans are - maybe it will be a while before they go to the expense of putting earth stations on remote islands for a few yachties and the odd passing plane, so there might be some gaps initially. I expect they will aim to provide very complete coverage so they can claim service everywhere between the Arctic and Antarctic circles. You might be surprised how many islands there are out in the oceans!
As for fast-moving planes, they are actually slow compared with satellites and stay in view. Planes don't provide any special problem other than the need to agree service with airlines. Terrestrial CDMA is much more difficult because vehicles suddenly go behind a hill or some such, meaning fast handoff and power adjustments are needed.
An indication of Iridium's technological blind alley is that Motorola makes no mention of second constellations etc but is putting all their effort into CDMA based new and very large satellite systems. While they say they won't be voice related, it is difficult to see why they wouldn't include voice. Of course, it wouldn't be politic to mention voice when they are still raising money for Iridium. They have now arranged another $750 million credit line for Iridium conditional on technical progress and other funding being obtained.
Yes, Iridium is a sophisticated, technically excellent idea - handing the signal around satellites to the recipient, but there are insufficient benefits and substantial costs which make the simpler bent-pipe Globalstar solution better.
5 or 10 years from now, as the skies darken with satellites during the day, and the night sky is pyrotechnic with older satellites falling back to earth, prices will fall, competition will be vigorous and the winner will be the lowest cost supplier who provides the benefits which customers will pay for. Same old story from horseshoes to cars. Maybe there will be a few customers who demand no voice delay anywhere on earth. They will perhaps go for Iridium. But they'll have to forego email, email voice and email video.
But for the next 4 years, Iridium and Globalstar should each have LOTS of customers. After that, the differentiation between voice and data systems will be irrelevant. Systems will need to provide both. And very cheaply. The idea of $1 per minute is not going to last many years.
The C A Technology guy is right in that big and fast R&D is needed to be successful in this super-hot and very big investment area. But there will be very big losers too. Those who get their technical road ahead off on the wrong foot.
Iridium is already too late to change their system. Five satellites are already in the air and another 7 go up tomorrow. All they can do is keep developing better ones and launch some extras at the end of their launch program to replace these first few.
Maurice |
