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To: djane who wrote (5635)	7/9/1999 8:01:00 PM
From: Rocket Scientist	Respond to of 29987

Regional MSS service via GEO will compete with G* starting late next year, so I've done a little DD on the leading entity, Thuraya, to share with the thread & solicit your comments... Thuraya's home page is at thuraya.com There's quite a lot of useful info, summarized below: For 1B$ they say they will build two and launch one Hughes GEO to 44E, from which they will provide over 13K voice channels via 250+ spot beams to an area encompassing Europe south of the Baltic, Africa/middle East north of 2 degr S, and southern Asia as far east as India. 99 countries in all supposedly. They launch the s/c in May2000, start service in September; satellite life is 12-15 years. The handset power is as high as 2 watts (5 X Gs) but its said they have "10 dB margin for shadowing." They acknowledge the phone won't work in voice mode indoors, but will ring when called, whereupon user goes outside to speak. I believe they're dual mode GSM phones operating (in space mode) at about 1.5 GHz. My thoughts: 1. I was quite surprised at the service area which is said to go from 20W to 100E and 60N to 2S. The elevation angle of the satellites at the edges of coverage will be quite low and what kind of manmade or natural "shadows" 10dB can overcome isn't very clear. 2. The economics of the system aren't bad, based on dividing the capex times life by call capacity. By that metric, it beats G by a factor of several. 3. Presumably at some point they launch the ground spare and make it an in-orbit spare but it's not clear when; 4. Of course they will have the famous GEO latency to deal with, but if the service is enough cheaper, I believe a substantial market could be found for it. Comments anyone?