Hello Readers, back again! Dubbo, Australia actually has the first of five satellite tracking dishes installed. Dubbo is one of the first 4 earth station locations, the others being Korea, France and USA.
I had the great pleasure of standing on-site, talking to Bob of Lockheed Martin, [ex Loral] who is handling installation. Dubbo is 300 km north west of Sydney, with horizons that go forever. Bob thought it a bit of a quiet place, being a pretty small town. It is at the junction of two optical fibres going to Melbourne and Sydney, so they have some redundancy. They are small dishes, only a couple of metres across. They will look quite eerie, tracking several satellites across the sky then in less than a minute swinging back to pick up the next satellite as it comes over the horizon.
All seems to be going well. The earth stations are quite simple affairs really. Just a small building to hold the gizzards, 5 tracking dishes and some gizzards inside. They look as though they can roll those off the production line quite cheaply and upgrading electronics and software will be a simple matter of opening the hatch and plugging it in. It beats bringing satellites back to earth for a new set of chips to be installed every other year.
It is disappointing that the first launch has been set back due to the backlog of Delta launches following the first Iridium launch failure. Perhaps the Globalstar people are grateful for the extra time to make sure everything is ready to go. There will also be an earth station near Auckland, so I'll have the pleasure of watching that being built probably next year sometime. I spoke to Telstra people today [they are the Australian telecom company who are in the process of moving into New Zealand]. They are in the process of considering ways to introduce a cellular service - maybe they will offer CDMA in competition with the GSM, analogue and TDMA systems which have been in operation for several years. That would give a full range of cellular options! Hyundai is the Globalstar wholesaler for New Zealand and they are in discussion with companies such as Clear, Bellsouth and Telstra to contract the retail service and earth station provision.
Iridium is not off to a good start with 5% [1 out of 17] satellites defunct on launch and a 6 month delay from the original schedule. They seem happy with their testing program so far though.
India is going to love Globalstar, Wireless Local Loop and Mobile Phones. They pay way too much for STD calls at payboxes. Globalstar will be able to undercut them easily with international calls being cheaper than a local call. Of course, there is a monopoly situation at present, though India is in the process of agonizing over abandoning their decades long attempt at communism which has left their government businesses in a pretty derelict state. Rundown and unprofitable. The debate continues over government ownership versus private; wicked foreigners and evil foreign investment versus the need for global integration and international technology. The internationalists are winning. Hardly surprising when the poverty and backwardness resulting from their 50 years of Glorious Independence from the evil British has left them in a parlous socialist state. In fact, it is 50 years today!
Especially for Ramsey: a political diatribe. They went from the dictatorial useless Maharajahs, to the dictatorial British who at least poured in heaps of capital, education, democracy, the English language, but unfortunately socialism, bureaucracy, unionism. The Indians kept too little of the good and too much of the bad when they kicked the British out. But the times are changing and CDMA is on its way in already. Globalstar won't be far behind.
But they have got a LOT of people. Boy have they got a LOT of people. The government census figure of 950 million must be about right or maybe even low. There aren't that many of them can afford a phone yet, but if the current rate of internationalisation continues, there are going to be a hundred million cellphones/WLL and a million Globalstar phones within 5 years [except that there won't be enough Globalstar service available by then unless Globalstar are already preparing the next constellation].
Qualcomm has been advertising in India for staff. They are scouring the world for wizardly engineers who can move photons and electrons in cunning patterns. Indians are cheap [for now!] and there are hundreds of thousands of super smart underemployed people there.
They are also running an unofficial eugenics program, so the quality of Indians is rapidly increasing too. They do this by killing lots of female foetuses. In some areas, there is a 20% deficit in females it seems. Now most people simply climb on their high horse and say how bad this is. Be that as it may, there is a consequence. Females have a low value in India, basically because of subsistence living over maybe a 1000 or several years. So they nix the females. There used to be dowries necessary to get rid of the wrong gender offspring. Still they prefer male children. So now, guess what! Yep, the value of females will have rapidly risen as the young males get picked over carefully by the far fewer females. Do you think they pick the deadbeat, unintelligent, sickly or otherwise defective guys who could in the past demand a goodly dowry to take some poor trapped female off the family farm? The rate of evolution will be getting a very fast kick along with this sort of eugenics program. Once they kick their last 50 years of going nowhere into touch, they could make some very rapid progress in other respects too. There is still "dowry murder" whereby the husband or his family kill an unwanted wife thereby getting the dowry without having to put up with the superfluous female. This is grotesque, criminal, punished and actually tiny compared with the massive killing of foetuses. So although it implies females are not very valued yet, as does the relative illiteracy of females, it doesn't overcome the effect of the eugenics program.
If we take a broader view of "human progress", India is way ahead of any country except maybe China. Their gene pool must be enormous and they sure have the numbers. Now they just need to ditch a few political ideas. They have English as their main language, which is a big advantage over China.
Okay, that's enough for now!
Mqurice
PS: Countries are never far behind the leaders. Each new child looks at the world as it is, not as it was. Maybe the NZ, Japan, USA are "ahead", but a young Indian steps right from never having used a phone to the latest and greatest technology. No progress from Bell grinding phones, to wired, to this to that to GSM etc. Straight to the best. Progress should be amazing. The half life of "leading nation" is pretty short these days. |
