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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (921)	10/2/2000 5:03:27 PM
From: justone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

CobaltBlue: Thanks for the links; I really enjoyed ee.surrey.ac.uk and found it great fun. The map there seems to show that 15 satellites cover the us in a moving pattern. My favorite quote from this site is at the bottom of this post. Now I wasn't trying to describe all satellite communications as impossible, only doing a first order check on a press release- which is probably an exercise in engineering futility in any case; sort of like pounding a bowl of jello with a hammer: it is fun but you end up with a mess and haven't really proved much. Satellite offers the best chance for rural communities to get on the internet, but in the past they have been subject to grand claims and low bandwidth realities and high costs. Now Satellites: 1) work well for broadcast video 2) work poorly (delay is a problem) for real time voice 3) should work quite well for bursty data, if there is enough shared bandwidth. It is 3) that merits a closer look. There are interesting ideas about using laser cross link systems (vacuums in the core!) to mesh satellites, but this makes the satellite more costly and you still have the home to satellite uplink bandwidth issues. I went quickly though my old issues of IEEE Communications, but didn't see anything on cost vs. bandwidth. Mind you building a LEO system is a mobility problem, since both the satellites and earth are moving, so there are some fun issues to handle. It seems to me the best idea is to put dumb satellites up and build (or use) a fiber network in the country. Now it seems Teledsic (http://www.teledesic.com/about/faqs.htm) is building a satellite network focused on data, not voice. One of Iridium's problems was they thought the problem was to launch satellites, when the real problem was to build a network; they got the launch to work, but not the network. A data network is easier to build, and internet gateways easier then telecommunication gateways. But we must look at the cost of bandwidth, and Teledesic's service launch date has now slipped to 2004. Let's look at the problem again around the next Olympics. "Teledesic is the kind of thing that James Bond used to have to stop."- Matt Bacon, former member of the ICO Global Balloon Challenge webteam.