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To: ccryder who wrote (10192)	2/19/2000 7:30:00 PM
From: Sawtooth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29987

<<If McCaw wants to use Iridium to build a customer base and then switch them to ICO, it would be expensive for him. He would have to maintain Iridium in good to perfect working order until ICO is ready. A very expensive proposition....Although CDMA gives G* an edge, an even greater edge is in G* lower cost of constellation and service maintenance.>> Great point, ccryder. So, what do you suppose McCaw's strategy is; sharp cookie that he's proven himself to be? .......VVVVVVVVVVVVV

To: ccryder who wrote (10192)	2/22/2000 10:44:00 PM
From: Mr. Adrenaline	Respond to of 29987

Re: Maybe Mr A could comment but I suspect if 10 percent of the Iridium sats fail, the system performance would degrade 30 to 50 percent I'm not privy to the specifics about how Iridium's capacity drops off as satellites fail. But I can make some educated guesses. A phone call's routing from satellite to satellite is done mostly within a orbital plane. Once the call is routed to a satellite at an optimum latitude, it then transferred to another plane. For example, if you are in Hong Kong and calling New York, your call goes up to a satellite, gets passed from satellite to satellite within one orbital plane, until it gets to about 45 deg lattitude, and then it jumps from plane to plane until it gets the to plane of satellites that will pass over New York. This is probably very confusing to those who don't understand orbital mechanics, but the bottom line is if a satellite goes out, calls can't be routed through it anymore. So, your call may not make the shortest trip -- it may need to be routed via a longer path over the poles. As a very rough guide, consider one satellite in a plane down takes half of that planes capabilities to route calls (but just that plane experiences the constipation, for lack of a better word). But if you lose two satellites in one plane, that plane essentially can't be used to route traffic anymore because you'd have two isolated groups of satellites that couldn't talk to each other. System capacity is affected by about 1/6 as my educated guess. In addition, you've got a hole that is the entire plane making a lap around the Earth about once per 100 minutes. Here's a link to a paper about the Iridium satellite network: comsoc.org My background is satellites, not networks. Perhaps Engineer on the Q! thread could make use of this paper and make a better guess as to capacity as I* satellites fail. Best