last mile (high) technologies ...
A High-Flying Communications Idea
Angel Technologies Plans to Use Planes to Deliver Wireless Service
By Mike Mills
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 21, 1998; Page F27
There's a new airline in the making that would offer three flights daily, nonstop.
But these would be planes to nowhere: Each would reach a stratospheric altitude of 51,000 feet, circle around for eight hours, then land as another took off to replace it. The pilot and co-pilot would be the only ones aboard. And instead of pretzels, this airline would serve high-speed Internet access to paying customers in major urban areas.
It's the creation of Angel Technologies Corp., a St. Louis company that plans to entertain potential investors, suppliers and customers tomorrow with a demonstration of its new aircraft as it flies over the Mojave Desert.
With 2,000 pounds of communications gear as payload and a large antenna strapped to the fuselage, the Angel HALO (high-altitude, long-operation) planes would run tag-team missions above selected cities, serving as many as 50,000 subscribers in coverage circles of 50 to 75 miles in diameter.
Anyone in those circles who was equipped with a small. dome-shaped receiving antenna would be able to send and receive full-motion video, Internet material and phone calls.
Angel is the brainchild of Marc Arnold, Peter Diamandis and David Wine, three aerospace and communications entrepreneurs who cooked up the idea during a weekend retreat at Wine's home in the Colorado foothills. "We were looking at a cover of Popular Science, which showed the Pathfinder aircraft setting altitude records, and said, 'Wouldn't it be great if you could use something like that to send a communications system 10 miles above a city?' " Diamandis said.
To design and build the plane, the trio tapped aircraft designer Burt Rutan, part of the family team that built and flew the Voyager aircraft that in 1986 circled the world in nine days without refueling.
Wyman-Gordon Co., the parent company of Rutan's design firm, Scaled Composites, plans to announce a deal to build HALO planes, perhaps as many as 100, at a total cost of $760 million. Thirty cities would be served, the first being Los Angeles. When the service might begin is unclear; the company is still raising money.
Angel's plan is not exactly a conventional way to build a communications system. That gives rise to the venture's biggest obstacle: persuading the telecom industry, particularly service providers who would lease antenna capacity, to believe in Angel.
Angel's founders would like their idea to be taken as seriously as other wireless Internet projects that are more expensive and better known. Among them is Teledesic, a venture backed by cellular pioneer Craig McCaw and Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates that would ring the world with hundreds of low-orbiting satellites. Two land-based ventures, Teligent and WinStar, are building networks of transmission towers to carry Internet signals.
But industry analysts tend to compare Angel with Sky Station International, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig's lofty project to beam Internet transmissions down to cities via football field-sized balloons that would hover in the stratosphere.
"I have significant concerns about a telecommunications infrastructure that has to fly and be refueled," said Daniel Ernst, a senior analyst at Strategis Group, a research firm in the District. "To use planes for someone's core communications needs sounds like a risky venture. They may have a tough time convincing customers that it's a service they can absolutely rely on."
Angel's chief technology officer, Nicholas Colella, responds that HALO planes are more reliable than satellites and have much better coverage than land-based wireless systems.
FedEx, he points out, has proved that aircraft are trustworthy carriers of timely data. Angel's planes would fly far above commercial air space and bad weather and could land at either small or large airports.
And unlike satellite systems, the communications payload on Angel's planes could be upgraded as new technology became available. There also is no danger of an expensive launch failure such as the one two weeks ago, in which would-be wireless satellite phone provider Globalstar lost 12 satellites when a Ukrainian rocket blew up.
And instead of spending billions of dollars upfront to create the instant infrastructure of a global satellite constellation, Angel could deploy its system as markets materialized.
Service for 50,000 customers in a large city would cost about $75 million to put in place, Diamandis estimates. It's hard to say precisely how that figure stacks up against a land-based system. But Angel's proponents say that the service would be better -- it would give ubiquitous coverage without the problems of buildings getting in the way of signals and without the weather interference that can trouble land-based wireless systems."
But Angel's guardians don't want to be dismissive of the land-based services -- they need them as customers. Because Angel doesn't own the rights to any airwaves (the company decided to stay out of recent auctions for high-frequency licenses) it would have to form alliances with ground-based services or satellite operators who own the licenses.
Diamandis contends that Angel would be a perfect way for companies such as Teligent and Winstar to gain instant market presence in a city while they built their land-based antenna systems. Angel also could aid satellite systems by acting as a collection point for a city's data before the information was shot up to a satellite network.
There also are possible military applications -- which is not surprising, because Angel's planes are in many ways an upgrade of the trusty old U-2 spy planes that collect intelligence, jam signals and communicate from high altitudes. The Pentagon already has expressed keen interest, Colella said.
But what about the pilots? Would anyone who spent years in the Air Force or with an airline want to take on the mission of circling around for eight hours at the same boring altitude, then landing in the same place day after day?
"The pilots we've spoken to love the job opportunity," Diamandis said. "The shift is three flights a week. You're not waking up in Houston and ending up in Seattle. And when you get to altitude, the airplane is flying on autopilot."
Besides, Diamandis joked, "you would have access to a huge data flow. The fattest pipe in the world. You'd have the ultimate opportunity."
On a Wing and . . .
Angel Technologies Corp. plans to use high-altitude aircraft, circling over cities, to supply high-speed Internet access, two-way video and phone calls. The company is aiming primarily for the business market, though consumer subscribers could follow. Here's how it would work:
1 User logs onto the Internet. The signal travels through a small, dome-shaped, rooftop antenna up to an antenna attached to a circling Angel HALO (high-altitude, long-operation) airplane.
2 Switching gear inside the plane sends the signal either:
--directly to another Angel user in town, such as the home office through the company intranet, or
--to an Angel "gateway" that sends data to an Internet service provider.
3 The Internet provider hands off data to the public switch telephone network to complete its journey.
Business users will be offered connection speeds ranging from 5 to 12.5 megabits per second. Consumers will have access rates of 1 to 5 Mbps.
Angel's owners won't disclose pricing, but President Peter Diamandis says the company will offer "substantial savings over what's out there or likely to be out there."
Each HALO site will be serviced by three piloted HALO aircraft that operate in overlapping shifts around the clock.
SOURCE: Angel Technologies Corp.
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