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Teledesic Comes Down to Earth 176

Posted by chrisd from the orbiting-junk dept.
hibachi writes "Teledesic, the ambitious plan to build a constellation of low-earth orbiting satellites for global broadband services, has died on the assembly room floor. According to this press release, "the company does not believe that it is prudent, purely on speculation, to continue the substantial capital expenditures required to construct and launch the satellites consistent with the timing required to meet FCC and ITU regulatory milestones." Brainchild of Bill Gates and Craig McCaw, Teledesic held the promise of globally ubiquitous high speed Internet. It seems Teledesic's plans grew less ambitious over the years until finally the painful lessons of Iridium, and the current telecom climate, drove the last nails in its coffin. I am sad to see this happen."
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Teledesic Comes Down to Earth

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  • right next to a cigarette-stained VAX. When are they gonna update that shit?
    • ...right next to the sign that says eveything in space will run on Oracle and NetWare servers, COINCIDENTALLY two sponsors of the exhibit. They need to update the GPS section, too. It still says consumers can't access the high-resolution positioning, which is no longer the case.

  • Hmmmm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anenga ( 529854 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @02:31AM (#4372050)
    Gives a whole new meaning to "never got off the ground".
    • From the press release:

      "We also believe that providing ubiquitous, quality broadband service to the world, including those three billion people who have never had service, will be a viable business and remains a worthy mission,"

      With a business model like this, it's no wonder they never got off the ground.

      • Well, I can certainly understand how expensive it would be to launch a service like this, and it would probably only be used by Governments. It's ideal for them because satellite is not subject to storms, natural disasters, or localized military actions. It would also provide pretty high-bandwidth audio and video, so it would be ideal in war etc.

        Anyways, I heard the satellite would have a version of Windows in it. So maybe it's good it was never launched, eh?
  • ...by the plot of a little seen movie AntiTrust....not that i saw it or anything...really.

    • Antitrust (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Antitrust was quite possibly the worst movie i have ever seen. I can say with certainty that the worst movie i have ever seen was either Antitrust or The Robe, but i've never been able to decide which was more painful.

      The composition of the film was an absolute joke. The number of plot developments that weren't plot holes can be counted on one hand. None of the actors except the Chinese kid, and the Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer lookalikes, came across as even remotely believable. The sum artistic worth of the movie comes down to some decent imagery in two or three scenes, which is not enough to justify watching the movie.

      The political message of the movie outright offended me, and i am a die-hard macintosh-and-linux user who has been following in great detail the possibly-irreversable damage Microsoft does every day to the art and industry of software since i was 12. I believe that the things Microsoft does are horrible enough they speak for themselves, and exaggerating things the way Antitrust did implies the anti-MS movement has no worthwhile arguments. Antitrust's "message" came down to just yelling "yeah, well you're a mass murderer" at the mean kid on the playground and running away. It invoked some form of Godwin's Law. And yeah, i realize they were just trying to make some generic human epic about the corrupting influence of power and the mercilessly all-for-the-ends drive that motivated the Bill Gates character... but if that was what they wanted, they could have very easily genericized the MS workalike, and divorced the situation just ever so slightly from reality, and they would have been able to make their points without in the process cheapening all those who fight against the injustice of MS.

      Sorry. OT, i know. The parent post simply compelled me to speak.

      -- super ugly ultraman

  • Seems like.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by warmcat ( 3545 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @02:35AM (#4372061)
    ...someone DID imagine a Beowulf cluster of them.

    If they're going cheap, they might make a pretty impressive IEEE 802.11 antenna.
  • Tim Robbins (Antitrust) already did this

  • I could give out one eye just to watch the process... OMG - that's da pr0n :)
  • Heh, I remember when broadband.com was a site pitching a business plan for lightweight aircraft circling a city on overlapping 24hr shifts to provide wireless broadband... Crazy.

    Ah-ha!
    http://angelhalo.com/ [angelhalo.com]
    Kudos to the Wayback Machine for digging up the parent company's url!

  • Simpsons (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pandrew ( 233890 )
    At this rate, I would just as soon expect to see a giant round thing on a stick to block out the sun (ala simpsons)

    though on a more realistic note, wouldn't it be more useful right now to focus on creating some more down to earth services that aren't going to shut down or be bought out every other month?

    or even better yet, have more systems that are interoperable, so if you do have to switch services, you don't have to go through the hell of having to get new hardware as well?
    • wouldn't it be more useful right now to focus on creating some more down to earth services that aren't going to shut down or be bought out every other month?
      I thought Wireless MESH Networks were the next big thing?
      • Of course they are! =)

        <blatant plug>

        http://www.meshnetworks.com [meshnetworks.com]

        In fact, as I'm typing this, my laptop is accessing our network and the internet, hopping through 2 of my coworkers back to an access point. There are about 25 other people using the same access point too, scattered across the 3 offices and 2 floors in this building.

        </blatant plug>

        I had seen some articles about that proposed broadband service using low flying planes. Sounds a bit far fetched to me, though the military apparently uses unmanned drones for reconnaissance. Something along those lines could probably be adapted, and maybe even cost effective.

        Especially if they're meshed =).

    • Re:Simpsons (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by digitalsushi ( 137809 )
      a giant round thing on a stick

      "Me fail english? That's unpossible!" -Ralph Wiggum
  • Kinda reminds me of the movie Antitrust in an eerie way...

  • 3 billion people without electricity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by luzrek ( 570886 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @02:43AM (#4372084) Journal
    I think that a big part of their problems comes from trying to provide internet acess to 3 billion people who previously didn't have it (is it that few?). Not that this goal isn't admirable, but I think it would be better to concentrate on getting consistant electricity, clean water, and high quality food to the world poor, instead of internet access (lack of computers/electricity to run them could also be a problem).
    • Not that this goal isn't admirable, but I think it would be better to concentrate on getting consistant electricity, clean water, and high quality food to the world poor, instead of internet access (lack of computers/electricity to run them could also be a problem).

      It's a common fallacy to ascribe a lack of telephony, electricity/water to a definitive lack of net access. Cybercafes [pawaia.com], I might point out, are leading the way in providing cheap access to those without phones or electricity.

    • of hearing about "billions of people" who don't have water or electricity or somesuch shit. After what I went through to get DSL, I don't feel sorry for anybody.

    • I can see how Bill G would be concerned with getting electricity to these people because they can't run Windows without it. Food, water and all else have nothing to do with spreading the word of Windows.

      Personally, I'm glad Teledesic failed because it frightens me to think Bill G could control a large network. It would have only run with Windows. You know this would have been the case. IMHO.

      LoB
      • I'm kind of glad it failed too.

        I'm rooting for bottom-up wireless networks to displace those who would want to control communication...

        --

      • Locutus wrote:

        > Personally, I'm glad Teledesic failed because it
        > frightens me to think Bill G could control a large
        > network.

        Actually, Gates running global broadband terrifies me. I had no idea he was involved in something like this.

        > It would have only run with Windows.

        No, it would have run Windows' successor: Millennium (not to be confused with Windows ME, aka "The Brat"). Millennium was a Microsoft Research project in the late 1990's that ran a distributed network on top of a JVM called "Borg". The Borg has been replaced by Microsoft's .Net CLR (now using Mono to assimilate Linux and Mac), but otherwise the plan (including such technologies as Palladium and Yukon) is still on track. Read about it here:

        http://research.microsoft.com/research/sn/Millen ni um/mgoals.html
        (Especially "What would such a system be like?")

        http://research.microsoft.com/research/sn/
        (Loo k under "Previous Projects". Mentions the Borg and its friends.)

        Millennium and .Net both need global broadband for Microsoft to acheive world domination. Anything that slows broadband down is to the good for now, because it frustrates Microsoft's plans (I do want broadband to succeed, but in a way that benefits the world, not Microsoft).

        This is good news. We were getting too close for comfort as it was with XP Service Pack 1. It included the .Net CLR and a EULA change enabling Microsoft to upgrade XP computers at whim (say with a sneak distributed network ala Brillant). The Hollings bill, with its potential to bless and enforce a Microsoft monopoly in the US, is still a danger.

        Shinoda: "The age of Millennium."
        Io: "What does that mean?"
        Shinoda: "A thousand year kingdom. It wants to create a home for itself. There is one flaw in its plan: Godzilla."
        "Godzilla 2000 Millennium" (Japanese version)

        G Countdown: 27 days
    • Even though Bill and his wife have donated a lot of money to, and have set up their own charities, that doesn't mean that he is a humanitarian. That just means he has too much friggin money. He is a businessman, period. Don't tell me he is a techie either - he might have started as one, but he is only a businessman now. And a ruthless one at that. Even though this may have been a very good project for humanity *in concept*, knowing that he had his hand in it leads me to believe that it would be best if it never happened.

      Yes, I think that if everyone had internet access it would help humanity, but there are more pressing issues, like the original poster stated. But being a humanitarian will not make you more money, or give you more power. So Mr Bill will not be interested in things like that.

  • Terrestrial broadband providers have a hard enough time making money. i think with the added costs of satellites, its a good thing this company stopped their work before they wasted billions like Iridium. I mean, with cheap fiber already in a glut, who needs to pay big money for satellite bandwidth?
    • I mean, with cheap fiber already in a glut, who needs to pay big money for satellite bandwidth?

      Because that fiber isn't available in all areas. For example, a dream of mine is to move up north to Muskoka, Ontario, Canada and live there permanently (while keeping my current web developer job). This is cottage country, where high speed internet is all but impossible except by satellite.

      I can VPN in to access the code, servers, email etc. But I cannot do that over the crappy dialup that's available there (you won't get 56k - probably won't even get 28.8 either). It'd be nice to have (relatively) cheap satellite service, where fiber/cable/dsl are unavailable because of its remote location. Unfortunately there are few offerings, and competition (slim as it is) is not keeping the prices low at the moment.
      • a dream of mine is to move up north to Muskoka, Ontario, Canada and live there permanently

        Hey, there's a reason that Muskoka is cottage country: it's only habitable in summer. (And that's debatable, depending on how tasty you are to mosquitoes.) You want to live there in winter, too?

        (Just kidding. I spent half my life in various places in southern Ontario. Yeah, there's some pretty country up there. Parts of the year, anyway ;-)
    • I disagree. It would have been better if this company had wasted billions more before dying, since a lot of this money was coming from Bill Gates.

  • I don't understand... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm not sure I understand why the author of this post is sad to see Teledesic shelved. Did he really think that LEO satellites can fulfill the expectations of inexpensive global broadband internet access? We already have Inmarsat. Price that out...

    The scheme is about as hare-brained as putting solar panels in space to generate electricity for earth needs. It costs something like $200 an ounce just to launch something in low-earth orbit and that doesn't include cost of R&D, construction, and maintaining a large constellation of satellites on station. Better to spend the dollars on improving terrestrial internet infrastructure than to clutter up space even more.
    • I ask the same question. You'd think his well-being depended solely on this half-baked idea. If that makes him sad, think how he's going to cave when gates kicks.
    • Well, if it had actually gotten off the ground, Mr. Gates would have completely wasted several billions of dollars and had nothing but an expensive heap of spacejunk to show for it. Visionary, indeed.

      I'm a bit sad too. I'd been looking forward to laughing myself blue in the face at the debacle.
    • Even ignoring the cost, Inmarsat's too high ~10km, the big thing that Teledesic had is that the latency is so much lower (pings in the region of 35ms rather than 350ms) which is the biggest problem with the current satellite internet access (DVB and VSAT).

      There's an awful lot of terrestrial infrastructure that would need to be built to get even 10% of what Teledesic would offer.

    • I'm sad that Bill didn't get an opportunity to blow 10+ billion building a system that might have failed, but I'm also glad that he didn't *succeed*. Who wants to live in a world with desktops and the network they might connect on wholly dominated by Gates?
  • I hope this wouldn't affect the McCaw's OneWorld [oneworldchallenge.com] that's now partecipating to the America's Cup [americascup.co.nz] ; )
    • Nope. McCaw's a billionaire whose net worth goes way beyond Teledesic.
    • Not in the slightest:
      "McCaw...outmaneuvered the competition early on by buying up the high-capacity wireless LAN spectrum that covers Auckland and its waters, leaving Ellison and the other teams with the indignity of communicating by much slower radio and cell phone."
      from WIRED [wired.com]

  • Global Economy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Diabolical ( 2110 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @02:54AM (#4372106) Homepage
    Unfortunatly we see this kind of thing happening everywhere. Telecom companies devaluating their recent investments for UMTS licenses, Companies like Worldcom and KPN QWEST in serieus trouble (right to the point that at least KPN QWEST goes bankrupt). It is no surprise that Teledesic does not want to venture into a territory which is hostile to say the least at this moment. To uphold their promise they must not only build, launch and exploit the satelites but they must also create the groundstations and maintain them for the governments and regional governments. Otherwise those satelites would be very expensive space junk.
    So they are looking at a very substantial investment in a time where no-one would invest because of unstable markets.

    Unfortunatly there is no forseeable uplift for the telecom sector. It's a wise decision to stop now and to evaluate the situation. Perhaps when the worldeconomy is seeing some uplift the company can start again with its original plans. Until then i'm afraid those 3 billion people will still not have access. Although they will never miss it by the way, nor am i afraid that they are worse off then those who do have access.

  • god, and this was my last hope... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by timecop ( 16217 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @03:02AM (#4372116) Homepage
    ...to have something better than ISDN in my house here in Japan. At least its better than dialup where I paid $300 a month.

    Apparently, this country needs to learn what does "national coverage" mean, and that linking two islands with 45mbit link and selling it to 35000 dsl, isdn, and dialup customers is not exactly the correct way of doing things.

    Oh, and no signs of current-gen satellite internet in Japan either. DirectPC Japan sells "only to enterprises" with $2000-some for setup and after that billed PER MEGABYTE downloaded.

  • We can all thank God (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These sinners were hoping to make filth (money) from the Heavens, surely a blasphemous plan of the Evil One. It is too much to be hoped that these sinners repented of their ways and chose to follow His guidance. Instead it is probably the fumbling of Mr Naughty that tripped up this evil plan. Praise be to God for saving us from Teledisc!

  • We should mourn! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @03:22AM (#4372160)
    No, seriously, I don't want any project of Bill Gates to succeed, but this thing could have been a good thing. With cable companies about to charge per byte transferred and DSL still sucking in my area, I think these "wire" companies need a good kick in the butt from outside competition. Seriously, I would have signed the contract with BillG the minute AOL/TW started charging per byte. Yeah, cut my palm, use my blood, whatever.

    Does anyone know what the bandwith would have been? I dread to ask about ping...

    • The USA is hampered by regulation, not lack of technology. Other countries are laying fiber and getting on the net without the domestic issues found in the US....think about it, pls.

      Ideas like this die everyday as part of the process. Get a perspective, please.
      • The USA is hampered by regulation, not lack of technology.

        Excuse me? The US has the least regulated telecom market in the world. Our problem is that we don't have enough regulation to push the slow moving monopolies forward. Instead we allow them to stifle competition and to keep offering the same old sub-standard service.

        • Umnh... A lot of the monopolies are created and guaranteed existence by the regulations. We don't have the least regulations, we merely have different regulations. And not all to our benefit, by any means.

          This is partially because Western Union and Bell Telephone started up in the US before there was significant government interest. So it's partially happenstance. And it's also partially because the Puritans believed that economic success was the worldly sign that god loved you. So people who were economically successful shouldn't be unduly hampered in doing what they wanted. This is usually implicit rather than explict, but it underlies many of the US customs and habits of governance to this day. And because it's implicit, it's impossible to challenge in court under the separation of church and state provisions. (Much of culture is like that, when you think about it.)

    • Re:We should mourn! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Moonshadow ( 84117 )
      No, seriously, I don't want any project of Bill Gates to succeed, but this thing could have been a good thing

      Wow, how petty is that? You don't want this project to succeed simply because you dislike the products made by the company that one of the founders of said project owns? I don't like a lot about Microsoft products either, but like it or not, they've brought the usable desktop computer to the masses. I imagine that this product would have benefitted a lot of people in a very big way. Wishing it to fail simply because the brains behind it happens to be Billy G. is just plain shortsighted.

      • Ahem...don't you know? Haven't you seen AntiTrust the movie? BillG will 4ule the w041d!!!, when the global communications platform "Synapse" (geekspeak for: "Teledesic") is completed...

        Thankfully, there is apparently a nameless beaurocrat somewhere deep in Washington, D.C. who rented this video last night, and has put a stop to Dr. Evil^WBillGates' plans for world domination!

        "...You can all relax now, the crisis has been averted.."
      • Petty? No, I think Bill Gates uses his money for evil. I mean, I think this literally. That's why I don't want anything he does to succeed. I don't think that's petty or even strange.

        I just happen to have come to the surprising conclusion that satellite competitors to broadband providers would have been a greater good than the extra evil generated by the extra money in Bill Gates's bank account.

        Actually, I think that anyone who fails to see danger that BillG presents to society must be morally blind. I mean, a real pervert, the sort that ends up working in a concentration camp. And yes, I really do see him as someone who is evil, probably more so than Hitler, because Hitler at least had a vision of the greater good which is supposed to come out of all the suffering he inflicted (a perverted vision, but still, at least he had one). BillG can't even pretend. He is an openly self-serving evil person, in the way that Hitler wasn't.

        Now that I think about it, maybe I woldn't have bought his stupid satellite subscription. Fuck that bastard!

    • Re:We should mourn! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Znork ( 31774 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @05:07AM (#4372360)
      Global 'consumer' two-way satellite networks will never ever make it. It's simply an extremely bad idea.

      The reason it's an extremely bad idea is that the majority of people who have an interest in highspeed two-way communications live in urban areas with a sufficient population to support ground based technology. The groundbased technology will be cheaper and easier to install and upgrade, and it will have a lower latency, and it will have a far lower initial investment cost, laying the ground for more competition.

      This means that the whole cost of the global satellite network will have to be covered by the customers who cannot obtain the ground based two-way communications; the people who live out of range from a >3K people population center. Not very many people. That in turn means the prices per in-the-woods-hermit-connection are going to be so prohibitively high that very few could afford it. Probably so high that you could pay for your own fibre connection for the yearly charges if you're living in a civilized country. Which in turn leaves the people living on antarctica, the middle of the jungles in south america, in tibet or in the middle of africa being the only ones who could get access via satellite cheaper than by buying their own fibre.

      I dont think that the customer base of billionaires in the middle of african nowhere is going to be sufficient.
      • Probably so high that you could pay for your own fibre connection for the yearly charges if you're living in a civilized country. Which in turn leaves the people living on antarctica, the middle of the jungles in south america, in tibet or in the middle of africa being the only ones who could get access via satellite cheaper than by buying their own fibre.

        You can probably discount the first one, since it's still cheaper to lay fibre across the ice than to have enough satellites in orbit to cover the poles.
      • Take a map of...say for example...Alaska. One state in a "civilized" country. Make sure it's a really big map. One that covers a wall. Now draw a pencil line on it. One line. I'll even let you curve it as much as you want.

        There's your fiber. Don't forget that you are paying for it by the foot. And you have to secure right of ways. Oh, yeah. Watch out for mountains. And unstable terrain (permafrost, bogs, flood plains).

        The whole state (and Canada, and most of the rest of the United States) can be covered with one (1) satellite (many earth stations, but that's another story). I'll grant that the bandwidth on the satellite is less (how much so depends on how may transponders you dedicate), but so is the maintenance (per square mile covered) and it's far more backhoe resistant.

        Satellite is a boon to areas with low population density. Don't write it off out of hand.
        • Indeed that's the reasoning for satellite coverage; the problem as I see it is that even in Alaska and Canada people tend to gravitate towards population centers. 2-3k people are more than enough to support ground based fibre connections; where I live we're even starting to get fibre to villages 50-200 people in size.

          And when your only potential customers end up being the ones that live outside range of even such remote locations, the people who have pretty much rejected being 'part' of ordinary society, you dont have much of a customer base.
          • Certainly fiber is good for intra-village connections. But how are you going to get that signal out to the rest of the world? Inter-village options are limited by terrain, weather, land ownership, etc. Microwave can only get you so far before it needs repeaters.

            A hybrid mix (fiber or wireless within, connections to the outside world via satellite) is still, as I see it, the most viable, cost-effective option.
            • That is true; which is why I qualified it in my original comment with 'consumer' two-way networks. Buisness and infrastructure provider communications are a different matter; if they make money from the connection or save money by using it, they'll pay for it. It's just difficult getting the prices down to consumer level. It didnt work with Iridium for mobile phones, and it wont work for new such ideas either.

              Many remote locations will get fibre anyway, despite the problems; if someone has already laid phone wires, they'll be able to lay fibre. Not necessarily today, but in a few years.

  • Killed by flying wing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jeppe Salvesen ( 101622 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @03:36AM (#4372192)
    The Helios [nasa.gov] project will provide the same functionality, but with cheaper maintenance and launch costs. It is a solar-cell powered flying wing that will soar at about 60000 feet or so, with 200 pounds of payload. It may very well be the specific reason they pulled the plug on Teledisc, since they realize that most satelites will be obsoleted too soon for them to proceed with the project.
    • Also does the duration of the flight only last for a couple of months WITH fuel cel. The Helios project is only usefull for situations where communication is only necessary for a short period of time i.e. military actions or rescue actions.

    • Good title in more ways than one.

      The thing that always worry me about such projects is what happens when (and they will) fail Is it a good thing to be hanging over your city. The nice thing about satellites is they don't often come down in pieces big enough to do damage.
      • They're basically gliders, made just as lightly as they can make them. They could probably hit a terrier without hurting it. (Well, a Saint Bernard, anyway.)

        Also they're gliders. I.e., fancy kites. Their terminal velocity would be quite low, even in the event of total systems failure. And they aren't carrying any fuel to catch fire. Not even much in the way of batteries.

        I could be wrong, but I think these things are more like the Gossamar Condor than like a Piper Cub.

        So I don't feel that we need to worry overly about them falling out of the sky.
        • Are you people forgetting about the 200 lbs cargo? Do you think this will be spread out over the length of of the air craft. Not likely. THAT'S that part that's gonna hurt when it comes down. A parachuted cargo compartment could help here.

          LoB
          • I work less than 2 miles from RDU airport, which is a reasonably busy regional hub. A few dozen times a day, commercial jetliners such as 737s or MD-80s take off or land at this airport. Depending on wind conditions, these aircraft frequently pass within 4000 feet of where I am sitting right now. These aircraft weigh about 50 tons each, and may be carrying up 5000 gallons of jet fuel. Not to mention 100+ people, many of whom weigh 200 lbs or more.

            None of these people have parachutes.

            -Graham
            • Tell that to the Challenger crew. I think the point is that this new communications platform would be brand new and kinks are going to be found. When you combine super light weight with long term( 2+ months ) use, there are going to be problems. Parts will fall from the sky and people are going to get hurt. Especially if these are for supporting high density areas.

              LoB
    • There is a lot of interest recently in stratosphereric platforms as an alternative to satellites, both heavier and lighter than air.

      Geostationary satellites are too far to support high data rates to mobile terminals and also suffer from high latency. LEO satellites require an entire constellation covering most of the Earth before there is continous coverage in any part of the Earth. This all-or-nothing property makes it a dangerous business proposition.

      Some links:
      StratSat [airship.com]
      CargoLifter and Boeing [cargolifter.de]
      Yokosuka [crl.go.jp]
      AeroVironment [skytowerglobal.com]

  • The painfully stupid lesson of Iridium (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rufusdufus ( 450462 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @03:38AM (#4372195)
    Iridium bugs me. I've seen a lot of people claim it failed because of the technology. But this just isn't the case! It *might* have failed based on the technical [de]merits, but it never made it that far.
    I know this because I tried to buy an Iridium phone. I spent months and months trying. I tell you they WOULD NOT SELL ME ONE. It was a joke! No resellers had them, and there was no plan. The best I ever did was find a fly-by-night in Taiwan who would sell me a phone, but not a service plan. Who would buy a phone with no service plan?
    It was frustrating too, reading their glossy pamphlets and their web sites. They actually gave you (the customer) examples of what type of people would use an Iridium phone. Topping the list was Saudi Oil Sheiks! I'm not kidding! I tried to tell them, im not an oil sheik, but I HAVE MONEY and I want to BUY.
    Iridium failed because of internal failures inside the company (and motorola). They got caught up in internal politics and self-absorbsion. Apparently they forget to do marketing and build distribution channels.

    • A couple of my clients had Iridium phones. It couldn't have been that hard to get them. Or were you trying to buy from outside the US? In that case, you probably just ran into the typical ramp-up issues, where the domestic market gets first priority.

      The Iridium technology and pricing were both a little on the iffy side. There were a lot of things wrong with the model, afaict.

    • The real Iridium problem (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rcs1000 ( 462363 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <0001scr>> on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @05:19AM (#4372384)
      Here in the UK it was perfectly possible to buy an Iridium phone. Almost every electronics shop on Tottenham Court Road stocked them. I even once saw someone buy one.

      The problem Iridium had was deeped. When the economics were first calculated in the mid-1980s, nobody envisaged a ubiquitious cell phone service and global roaming. (Nor did they imagine that cell phone services would price their minutes at $0.20 or less.) The key demographic of Iridium users - i.e. travelling businessmen - already had cell phones, and weren't prepared to swap them for larger devices, with lower quality sound, and which cost 30x as much per minute.
      • When the economics were first calculated in the mid-1980s, nobody envisaged a ubiquitious cell phone service and global roaming. (Nor did they imagine that cell phone services would price their minutes at $0.20 or less.) The key demographic of Iridium users - i.e. travelling businessmen - already had cell phones, and weren't prepared to swap them for larger devices, with lower quality sound, and which cost 30x as much per minute.

        Your statments may be true, but I think the REAL problem lies within them:

        The economics were calculated in the mid-80s, yet the damn thing never got anywhere until the 90s. It took way too long to get implemented. Granted, it was ambitious, but I think a lot of the delay had to do with the way Moto did things.

        Nobody did any re-calculations in 10 years?

        Motorola wasn't able to foresee the cellphone use explosion. This is very ironic, don't you think, considering that they pretty much had the market cornered at that point in time.

        I think the whole thing was a huge failure for very good reasons, and they probably could have been avoided. I worked at Moto in the early to mid 90s, and the way things worked there, I am not surprised at the outcome of Iridium. Well, I am surprised that they finally bailed on it instead of riding it out to a very slow death.

    • Ever see an Iridium Flare [heavens-above.com]?

    • Iridium failed because of the nightmare maze of regulation and red tape they had to fight through.

      Consider, an Iridium phone is usable from potentially any place on the planet (minor technical exceptions aside). That means they had to deal with every radio frequency and telco regulating agency on the planet, practically. And everybody wants their cut, er, license fees and tarriffs. (Not to mention the sheer nightmare of wading through all those application processes, and the lawyers' fees involved.)

      It was a great idea, but government bureaucracy killed it just as much (or more) as any internal politics.
    • know this because I tried to buy an Iridium phone. I spent months and months trying. I tell you they WOULD NOT SELL ME ONE. It was a joke!

      You basically had to know someone in the company to get one. I had the same experience trying to buy CDPD service a few years back. I could not find the damn product on their Web site or through their customer service line - even though it had existed for several years.

      In the end I called up one of their senior VPs, and not just an ordinary senior VP. I explained who I am, stuff I did, company I work for and why it would be in their interests to let me get the service (we were doing eight figures worth of business with them at the time). So he says he will get on it and then a couple of weeks later he sends me an email saying that he tried to get it for himself and they could not get it to happen. Also the business unit in question could not understand why it was failing to sell...

      I know someone who did get one of the Iridium phones, he was a VP of technology at Visa (see the sort of place you have to be). The phone was the size and weight of a brick.

      Basically what killed Iridium was the announcement of Iridium. The whole value proposition was to be able to talk anywhere. Great, only you can get cell service almost anywhere you are likely to be. Certainly in every major city. The problem was not the lack of connectivity it was the ability to connect and the ridiculous use fees. Once iridium appeared the providers had a huge incentive to fix those things fast. So I can know make cell calls from pretty much anywhere I am likely to go for $1 a minute or less.

      According to reports something like 40% of the iridium phones that were actually used were sold to Taleban and then Opposition forces in Afghanistan.

  • Were they supposed to have Mac support [slashdot.org]?

  • Italians aren't stupid... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They probably kept getting blue-screened while trying to install the satelite's OS (Gee, with Bill Gates at the helm, wonder which OS it was using). Either that, or they wanted to use another OS, and Bill wasn't having any of that.

    I'm glad it's grounded. One less thing for Microsoft to try and monopolize. And before you mod me troll, think about it. It's the truth. He wants his hands in everything. Anything that he doesn't get is a good thing. No one person should have THAT much power and control. Especially not Gates...

  • Telecom dip/hype (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pooh22 ( 145970 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @05:38AM (#4372406)
    Being a "victim" of the telecom crash myself, I feel like speaking freely about the not so positive parts here...

    In the last 5-10 years, there's been a constant push to develop more and newer technology to sell to willing customers (in the highly developed parts of the planet). This was in blind disregard of then common sense that enough is enough, if you don't need more features you're not going to buy it.

    Meanwhile, the amount of technology standards and "blueprints" for communication systems is advanced enough to last quite a while without new developments. Some refinement is good, but wider implementation of this technology would do much more good in the world, for peace and equality (thereby reducing risks of conflict between nations and peoples!). If every moderately developed country would have basic internet and telephony services available for 80-90% of the people for reasonable prices. The world would be much better off than with another way to get broadband for a few above average rich people.

    Of course, the need for food, shelter, education and freedom rises far above the need for communication and internet facilities. Also 3 million people a year are dying of aids, and so on and so forth... Life is not about more bandwidth (really!)

    Simon
    • The world would be much better off than with another way to get broadband for a few above average rich people.

      The goal is not get broadband for a few above-average rich people. However, in telecom and an in the computer industry, this *does* tend to be your first target market.

      Why? Because if it becomes popular with those above-average rich people, then eventually economies of scale kick in and it becomes affordable for more people.
  • Let's ignore the technical and financial issues about running a satellite network and look at the legal hurdles:
    1. Just in the US: You got lots of not-so-baby bells who will challenge you in the courts if you start competing with them. Then there's the issue of giving FBI/CIA/NSA the ability to wiretap the data flow. They certainly like tapping Osama's satellite calls and they don't want to give up on that when he moves to voice-over-IP!
    2. Then there's the foreign countries. You know, most of the world. Usually the government is the phone company, and they won't like the competition nor the loss of wiretap ability one bit. So you have literally hundreds of agreements to pound out, in countries that often have barely functioning legal systems. I'm sure some big donations from Bill won't hurt the situation in many countries, but others won't be so easily convinced.
    So, in my completely unprofessional opinion: Ignore the technical and financial risks. The legal risks alone will kill the project.
    • The thing is, they worked out all the legal risks. The FCC already approved, so the baby bells are SoL, besides the fact that to cover launch/o&m (operations ant maintenance) costs, you'll have to price yourself outside the market of said baby bells. Finally, if you don't, the telcos can use you to provide service to remote areas, picking up a nice federal subsidy, while allowing you to sell service that you couldn't otherwise sell (due to the remoteness of the location).

      Wiretap. I think to get China to approve this, they already have this down cold. I can assure you that the architecture is quite... robust for wiretappers. Of course, once people start using end-to-end encryption...

      If you want to talk about global issues, wiretap is one thing, but spectrum usage is another. You cannot operate where you cannot get spectrum.

      Frankly, the technical risks are the ones that sunk Teledesic. They had an awesome legal team and lots of money to burn on regulatory issues, and they did a bang-up job of it.
  • ...that this thing wouldn't be common carrier? Large communication system, with Bill Gates at the helm, and no obligation to be compatible with anything would be a really good vehicle of pushing nasty stuff in protocols.

    So IMHO good riddance.

  • Satellite broadband for the masses won't work (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @08:05AM (#4372634) Homepage Journal
    Satellite broadband for the masses won't work. Period.

    Here's the math to back that up.

    Assume a bird at LEO - about 100 miles up, serving about a 500 mile footprint.

    Assume said bird is running a 1 GHz wide communications channel (not a 1 GHz center frequency, 1 GHz bandwidth. That puts the center freq around 10 GHz at least, where there are very large space losses - just getting your signal down costs you a lot of signal).

    Assume the protocol used by the bird gets about 4 bits per second per Hz (That's a pretty high value - the signal to noise ratio will have to be VERY low for this to work.)

    Assume an overhead of 2 bits per byte transmitted. This includes all protocol below TCP/IP, error correction, collisions, retransmits, etc.

    OK, given those numbers, you get about 400 Mbytes/sec downlink throughput.

    Assume you want to supply everyone with DSL equivelent speeds - 40 kByte/sec.

    400 Mbyte/sec divided by 40 kByte/sec = 100 thousand users per bird.

    100 thousand users per 500 * pi miles = 64 users/square mile. Anyplace the user density is higher than that would swamp the system.

    And remember, I've been using very LARGE (i.e. very favorable to satellite downlink) numbers.

    Satellite is GREAT for wide-open, low population density areas. The problem then becomes you cannot get enough people to pay for the birds.

    In high density areas, land based wireless and wireline are MUCH more cost effective. In less populated areas, ideas like the solar aircraft are more feasible than satellites. In REALLY unpopulated areas, there just ISN'T a technology that can do the job without some sort of subsidy.
    • Assume you want to supply everyone with DSL equivelent speeds - 40 kByte/sec....

      I don't think any commercial broadband wired services would be viable if everyone used all their available bandwidth all the time. For example in the past year or so most cable companies have started putting download caps into effect, for very good reason: you cannot sell bandwidth that costs you, e.g. $600 a month for a T1 to consumers for $30 a month. Never mind that the coax they use cannot supply that much bandwidth to more than a few folks per neighborhood.

      A more realistic TCP/IP-by-satellite involves intermittent (on-the-go) usage or more efficient multicast broadcasts [digitalfountain.com]. No, it's not a T1-type tarrifed service anymore!

      • Not quite - in a cable modem system, you can increase bandwidth by subdividing the area with additional cable runs.

        You cannot subdivide a satellite system except by reducing the footprint of the bird - which you can do ONLY by lowering the orbit.

        And there is only so low you can go before you are no longer an orbital bird but an atmospheric one.
    • To follow up Mr. AC's comments:

      You've ignored spatial mux: how many beams do you think you get per antenna? How many antennas do you think are on each bird? Look at the inter-satellite link capacity, and you'll see that the system is engineered for a whole lot more capacity. You're also assuming each place has one bird in view; dense areas can load-balance, and you need lots of birds in view anyways to get smooth handoff. (And you can solve interference using directional gain).

      Finally, yes, you can provide DSL-quality, _simultaneously_, to all users, unless you intend to pay for the link to the Internet. If I just connect you to a service provider, then my costs are quite limited, since it only traverses my backhaul, which is already in the sky...
      • You can create spots on the DOWNLINK side - after all, that's what the TV birds do. However, the spot size is still very large, so my arguement still stands.

        However, you CANNOT do the same on the uplink without putting a dish on the person's house|hut|car|camel|...

        So you are STILL limited on the upstream bandwidth.
        • Your argument stands given your assumptions which are firmly anchored on your ignorance of the design (no offense).

          Yes, you need a directional antenna at the user, which could be phase array or a dish. TV birds don't need fine-grained beamsize, so they don't. The spot size in the Teledesic Network isn't very large (probably at least a couple orders of magnitude smaller than your back-of-the-envelope calculations); look at the design documents for details :) (no, you can't get them from anywhere public, and I can't say much more about such details...)

          Having audited the system design, I buy the numbers, notwithstanding the fact that they're not going to launch, for financial reasons alone.
          • So, you criticise my calculations, saying that I am off by a couple of orders of magnitude. You cannot back up your assertions about beamsize, saying only "Trust me". You don't talk about the bandwidth of the system, which I am also probably off by a couple of orders of magnitude, so that would tend to cancel out your assertion. You also don't address my point about the uplink.

            If you can point me to where the design parameters of the system are, I will gladly educate myself. However, I have all too often seen people saying "I cannot show you the design, but this will work. Honest!" Forgive me if I choose not to trust such individuals.
            • Let's run some numbers. http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/S.Bhatti/D51-notes/n ode24.html
              gives a spot beam size of 0.01 degrees (up, but we'll assume you can get the same down) with old technology (INTELSAT). Looking at Teledesic's 288 satellite constellation, you get maybe 400-700 mi up, so using the sin x=x approximation, we get a beamsize of 0.07mi diameter to 0.12mi. Several square miles is off by two to three orders of magnitude. Any further questions?
  • "I am sad to see this happen"

    Considering Bill Gates had his greedy little paw in it, I am far from sad. Does anyone here really want to see worldwide broadband in the hands of this same ethically challenged crew?
  • It's a shame that all satellite ventures of this sort look to the Iridium failure, and do not follow through with their plans. I worked for Motorola at the Iridium operations center. Motorola's satellite construction and launches worked great. In fact they set several records for number of satellites launched in a given period of time. The hardware worked great and operations were smooth. Iridium was a BUSINESS FAILURE. The technology provided by Motorola worked but Iridium could not sell the service to enough people. They were marketing to the rich jetset crowd, when they should have been marketing to international corporations and governments. Sadly they realized this too late, and the idea of worldwide satellite communications for the masses died. :(
  • When I first heard about Bill Gates' involvement in this project, I was a little worried that he'd use it to try to lock up the telecommunications market. But the project's failure just proves one thing: Bill Gates does not know how to design stuff. All of Microsoft's best-selling products are based on designs ripped off from others -- the general-purpose desktop OS (Digital Research), the GUI (Xerox/Apple), the web browser (Netscape) ... the list goes on and on. Can you recall anything that originated in Redmond that people actually wanted?

    His Billness is now the "chief software architect" in Redmond, heading up the design of a "revolutionary" new product line. This is supposedly the Windows version that has databases embedded everywhere, and a line of applications that use these new API's. This isn't something customers are asking for, and it isn't something their competitors are delivering. Perhaps, by chance, it's something nobody wants? Perhaps it's just an attempt to foist ever more complex API's on the world, so both app and OS competitors will be challenged to keep up? Or perhaps Bill is just a little too overconfident?

    I'm happy to see the Teledesic project die. Hopefully Bill will die soon too.
  • use Airships (Blimps) instead? or weather balloons?

  • this is a real shame (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hype7 ( 239530 ) <u3295110.anu@edu@au> on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @10:50AM (#4373490) Journal
    because what Teledesic could have offered has so much potential.

    Apart from the fact that you save wiring up hundreds of countries that cannot afford it - and hence provide internet access to millions upon millions of people that previously could not get online - but what's more, for those of us road warriors, it could have been a godsend.

    Yeah, it's all very well to have broadband internet - but it's only available at your desk! What happens if you're out in the field and you want to send/stream a movie back to base? At the moment, it's damn hard (and expensive) to do it... but allow for this to take off, everywhere you go, fast internet. Teledesic is to the internet what the mobile phone is to voice telephony.

    I know there are still latency issues to work out, but eventually it could become like many households (especially students) where there are no landline phones, just mobiles - instead of having a fixed, wired access point, everybody has wireless, move anywhere mobile access... anywhere in the world.

    I'm sure it'll happen, but minus the backing of the big guns like Gates et co, it may take a while longer.

    -- james

  • Is no one happy about this? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tony Hammitt ( 73675 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @11:11AM (#4373625)
    This project was BillGatus's dream of having ubiquitous internet access for _windoze_users_only_ It was going to be a way to push Palladium off onto the rest of the world by being the only way to access the internet globally.

    That the project died is a very great thing for Freedom. We should be happy because now Gates can't force people to use _his_ internet.

    Do you seriously think that Gates would have allowed open source software to access his internet? Do you think we'd be able to access slashdot? Of course not.

  • Brainchild of Bill Gates... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Scratch-O-Matic ( 245992 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @11:28AM (#4373732)
    To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson:

    "I myself do not want to go to bed by the light of a Microsoft moon."

  • Broadband Goes to India? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @12:12PM (#4374029) Homepage Journal
    The cheap launch service from India [slashdot.org] is opening this market potential again in a major way. I can believe the shift in launch service cost has had a big impact on the viability of the Teledesic technology which was designed for much higher cost-per-lb-to-LEO.

    If the West aren't careful, India could end up owning worldwide broadband multimedia on demand.

  • i did some of the modelling for teledesic (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rpeppe ( 198035 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @02:04PM (#4375046)
    it was a few years back, but i still have a copy of the software (it still seems to work, amazing). i hooked it to a graphical display, so you could get an idea of what satellites were visible at what time... what an amazing system it was.

    the specs probably changed considerably from when i was doing this, but at that time, they were considering a network of 840 satellites! in some areas of the world you had maybe 10 or 20 satellites visible at once. if this thing had ever got off the ground, you'd have had some pretty spectacular displays around dawn and dusk.

    what an amazing waste of money. personally i think that high altitude balloons sound like an excellent idea as a cheap alternative to behemoths like teledesic.

  • What will Bill gates do now with those ex-Russian rockets he bought for Teledesic?

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