Communications in the global village

Around 10 years ago, it was a big hype around satellite based mobile communications and internet access.
The big 3 names were Iridium , Globalstar and Teledesic. You can check the Wikipedia articles about what happened with them. Is less important what happened is more important what can be done to avoid the mistakes. Short story below:

All 3 were planning to launch many satellites (Iridium 77, Globalstar 48 and Teledesic initially 840 and then 288) into low earth orbit.
All 3 failed more or less. Teledesic did not launched anything, Globalstar is closing down operations slowly but surely, Iridium is still operational, but mostly serving the US government.

Is interesting to note that except the communications satellites which are in geostationary orbit around the earth, the only group of satellites which are doing some public service is in medium earth orbit (GPS satellites). Probably there are the Keyhole satellites and other spies in the sky in low earth orbit but they are off limit for the general public.

Why the constellations failed?

There are technical reasons, business reasons and l assume unknown reasons . Below in no particular order some considerations.

• They weren’t able to deploy the satellites fast enough and the ground based communication technologies eliminated the need up to a point.
• The GSM networks allowed roaming.
• Cost per minute too high due to operational costs which were high
• Lack of viable and cheap launch vehicles.
• In some aspects they were ahead of time. The mobile phones did not reached at that time the critical mass.
• They were providing mobile phone access to remote locations on earth, but is important to ask, how many possible clients would you have in that remote location?
• The phones were bulky, heavy and difficult to take it with you.
• Sometime I wonder if these companies weren’t help to fail by some obscure forces. Because if they would have succeed, the standard communication companies would have lost customers, the access to information all over the globe would have been a little easier (not cheaper).

GPS success story

On the other hand the GPS constellation is alive and kicking. This is due to the fact that the US military is the main beneficiary of the system, but the important part for the scope of the discussion, is the acceptance of the services by almost everybody in the world. Because it allows you to things that you wouldn’t be able to do without the GPS; from navigation for aircrafts, cars, ships to help locating a person in distress. Also should be noted that is the same GPS which guides the missiles, military aircrafts and ships and so on. And actually with much better precision than the general public is allowed.
Now Galileo project is taking shape trying to get a piece of the market owned by the GPS, and also trying to make the EU a little more independent. Is basically the same concept like the American GPS but owned by private European industry instead of the American military.

Final ingredients to the story

• Stratellites is a project, is a buzz word, it’s a lot of hype around it in the specialized blogs, but if you go around the hype maybe there is something here.
• Wimax is a lot more known. I really hope it won’t have the same “success” like the ATM which was supposed to replace all protocols before year 2000
• VOIP which is one step towards service convergence.
• Lossy codecs for audio and video as in ogg, mp3, aac+, xvid, divx, H264 you pick one or more.

Let’s start dreaming

What do I want from a service like the one envisioned 10 years ago?

• I wish to be able to call anyone and be called for a very reasonable price per minute.
• I wish to be able to use that device as a “modem” for my laptop (maybe the 100$ laptop but this is another dream).
• I wish to have enough download and upload speed for a video conference (no HDTV quality needed, VGA will do just fine)
• I wish to be able to be located if needed by using the GPS, GALILEO constellations.

And that’s pretty much it.

Now, assuming that the strattelites are working as promised, the VOIP and WIMAX devices are working perfectly without any servicing needed what would be the strategy to implement a service like this.

Ideally you could get all the big gsm telcos at one table: the European ones (Vodafone, Orange), the Japanese NTT, the US TMobile and Verizon and so on and they should put their financing power behind a project like this.
I wonder how many calls are placed simultaneously in a 6 millions subscribers network. 100000? 200000? 1000000? Do not know. But according with the guys with the stratellites, one airship will cover a lot of space (average european country). Is it possible to have a “PABX” inside an airship like this which should deal with the average number of calls using VOIP and Wimax? Anyway I do not have the necessary data or experience to make the right assumptions here, but I am allowed to dream.
I am sure that if the project is possible the operating costs for an airship like this would be cheaper than the cost of maintaining the ground network for any GSM or CDMA operator. And the end I would have only a VOIP phone which I can use with Skype or Vonage at home and then if I am on top of the mountain I can still use it

I am waiting for your 2 cents, to help me improve the dream.