<A> "Oxygen" and other bandwidth techs <sic> considered:
WSJ: A Highflying Angel Sees a Market in the Sky
By Quentin Hardy
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
MOJAVE, Calif. -- Marc Arnold looks at a high-altitude jet being glued together in an airplane hangar deep in the California desert and sees a potential fortune. The profits wouldn't come from carrying passengers or packages. Mr. Arnold wants the elongated epoxy-hulled craft to haul information.
"We're envisioning a data airline," says Mr. Arnold, chairman and chief executive officer of Angel Technologies Corp. of St. Louis. It would be something like a flying cellular phone tower, he explains, continually circling a city while handling Web pages, video conferences and electronic mail. "Nobody knows what highspeed data delivery will ultimately look like," he adds over the whir of saws and buffers shaping the plane's four wings. "We think this is the cheapest way to go."
The need to move cascades of digital information at blistering speed is spurring an array of ingenious, sometimes oddball schemes. Angel's "Internet in the clouds" is just one of many brainstorms for supplementing the world's overflowing phone lines, cable and satellites. Also in the works: a fleet of high-altitude "data blimps," a massive fiber-optic cable network circling the globe and a system of low-orbit satellites that are touted as cheaper to make and launch than conventional high-flying birds.
All these ideas spring from the explosion in Internet usage, especially the growth of data-dense graphic, video and sound possibilities. MCI Communications Corp., one of the country's largest data carriers, is now hauling 580 trillion bytes of information a month, a number it says is doubling every year. (Each byte contains eight bits of data.)
The data deluge conceivably could be handled by existing technologies, but it would be a costly, logistic nightmare. Laying a single fiber-optic line across the Pacific can cost $2 billion. Bringing fiber into homes means tearing up roadways, while wireless carriers are finding it increasingly difficult to get local zoning authorization to put up their radio towers. As a result, alternative data delivery methods are getting a serious look in some quarters.
Angel's idea "is interesting, and very cheap," says Richard Siber, a telecommunications consultant with Andersen Consulting in Boston. "It now takes $1 million to put up a cellular tower, including hardware, software, zoning and real estate, and Boston has over 300 cell sites. It's not crazy to try something more cost-effective."
Angel's "Halo" (high altitude long operation) aircraft looks like a large albatross on a small surfboard. The company says it will continuously fly in five-mile-diameter circles 50,000 to 60,000 feet above large cities. Packed with powerful computers and radio-transmission gear, it could transfer data to 50,000 users on the ground at least 26 times faster than conventional modem connections, Mr. Arnold says.
Three planes with two pilots each will offer 24-hour service by trading off eight-hour flying shifts, Mr. Arnold says. He envisions beginning service in the year 2000, at a projected monthly cost to users of $250 for 10 megabits of data a second, or $40 a month for 1.5 megabits. Currently, a 1.5-megabit connection into the home costs anywhere from $300 to $1,000 a month.
Angel's plan is still somewhat ethereal. It already has spent about $10 million, and figures it will need about $140 million to get the Halo prototype certified by the Federal Aviation Administration and fully loaded with communications gear. Each metropolitan area it serves can then be fitted out with planes and high-speed data devices for $110 million.
Another would-be data hauler, Skystation International Inc., aims even higher than Angel, with unmanned data blimps cruising at 70,000 feet. Founded by former White House Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig, Jr. and headed by his son Alex P. Haig, the Washington, D.C., company proposes to deliver data at two megabits to 10 megabits a second, from blimps one and a half times the size of a football field.
If a blimp collapses, Skystation says, its own helicopters would fetch it before it hit the ground. The company's Web site says it has secured investment bankers for the project. Company officials didn't return calls requesting more details.
Then there's Project Oxygen, which proposes to build a "super-Internet" by stringing some 192,000 miles of fiber-optic cable in 38 large loops around the planet, at a cost of $14.7 billion. Project Oxygen's backer is CTR Group Ltd. in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., a group of consultants and technologists who have worked on other high-speed data projects. It hopes to begin service in 2003, but a spokesman says significant funds aren't likely to be committed for another year.
Does any of this stand a chance of working? "They're cool and they're interesting, but you wonder about the reliability," says David Cooperstein, a telecommunications-strategies analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. He says Angel's plan to have pilots on continual revolving shifts "borders on improbability." Some of these ideas, he adds, "are so ridiculous that Teledesic starts to make sense."
Teledesic LLC, backed by wireless pioneer Craig McCaw and Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, is a $9 billion highspeed data service based on 288 low-orbit satellites. It proposes to begin service in 2002. The project, which originally called for 840 satellites, drew ridicule when it was announced a few years ago. Now, it has imitators. Other proposed satellite data services include Motorola Corp.'s $12.9 billion, 64-satellite Celestri system, and SkyBridge, a $3.5 billion, 64-satellite system backed by Alcatel-Alsthom SA of France.
Anthony Arrot, a telecommunications consultant with Arthur D. Little in Boston who has done work for Angel Technologies, thinks demand for more speed will abate only when homes and offices can send and receive about 5 megabits of data a second. "That's about the rate of high-definition television, with stereo sound and everything else thrown in," he says.
Angel's project has aroused some interest in the communications and aerospace industries. Raytheon Co. of Lexington, Mass., performed preliminary work on the aircraft's antenna, a large dish that hangs below the plane. Angel executives recently spent three days talking to venture-capital firms, telecommunications-equipment companies and service providers.
Potential investors who attended these presentations committed neither money nor technology, but they didn't dismiss the project out of hand. Angel "is hitting its technical milestones," says Sam May, a wireless communications specialist at Pacific Growth Equities Inc., a San Francisco investment bank. But he warns that financing may prove difficult because "it's so audacious."
Angel's plane, called a Proteus, is being built by Scaled Composites Inc., a Mojave-based subsidiary of Wyman-Gordon Co., a North Grafton, Mass., maker of forged and cast-metal parts. Scaled Composites is run by Burt Rutan, a prominent designer of experimental aircraft, including the Voyager, which in 1986 flew around the world on a single tank of gas.
"Dow Jones News Service"
"Copyright(c) 1997, Dow Jones & Company, Inc." |
