ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 17, 1997 TAG: 9703170126
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: KIRKLAND, WASH.
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Bill Gates and Craig McCaw are putting their fortunes where their future seems to be - making the Web truly World Wide.
Beginning in 2000, rockets all over the world will carry Volkswagen-sized satellites about 435 miles above the Earth. Over the course of two years, 840 of them will be gently dropped into place, fanning out to form a constellation that covers the globe.
No government planned this venture. At a final price tag of $9 billion, it's unlikely any would. Instead, two of the world's richest and smartest men have put their personal fortunes behind a long-shot proposition - bringing fast Internet access to the entire world.
The company is called Teledesic Corp., and its two primary investors are Bill Gates of Microsoft and Craig McCaw, who vaulted to near the top of the most-money list in 1994 when he sold McCaw Cellular Communications to AT&T for a cool $11.5 billion.
It would take more than a crystal ball to know whether the venture will truly let high schools in Africa roam the Net and businesses in Tibet flourish come the millennium. At this point, it's unclear whether the technology will even work. But if it does, Gates and McCaw will own a piece of the future.
The idea behind Teledesic is simple. Although big cities in North America and Europe are wired for fast, heavy-data traffic, most of the world isn't - and the cost of digging up Asia and Africa to lay millions of miles of wire would be absurd. But there's another way: Using satellites, messages can bounce into space and then back down to receivers.
Until recently, the only satellites that got much commercial use were for weather and television. They all are geostationary, which means they're very high up and stay over the same, large area, so it doesn't take many to blanket the globe.
That was a good thing when the technology was hideously expensive; a big communications satellite easily can cost $100 million. But with the commercialization of space programs worldwide and the beginnings of mass-produced satellites, the technology now is only wildly expensive.
That's why Teledesic can afford to ship more than 800 of the things into space, at the bargain-basement price of only $5.2 million each.
Why so many?
Like almost everything to do with this market, it's a question of physics - in this case, the pesky problem of the speed of light.
Put a geostationary satellite high enough and it takes only one to beam television to all of Asia. The signal takes a half-second to bounce to a satellite and then find its way back to Earth, but that's fine. A half-second delay works for a television signal, because it's continuous and the viewer doesn't know or care when the original picture was sent.
But on the Internet, it's a nightmare. That's because the basic building block for the Net is something called TCP-IP, or Transmission Control Protocol-Internet Protocol. It's the set of standards that lets any Internet message be read by any computer.
The Net works so well precisely because of the TCP, or control, part. As a message is sent, each bit of information is checked to make sure it got to where it was going.
Pulling up a page on the World Wide Web means thousands of messages sent back and forth, with the computers having a conversation something like ``I just sent 15 bytes of data. Did you get them?'' ``Yeah, I got them,'' over and over.
It works when the connection is fast. It falls apart, however, with a half-second delay between those checkbacks, which is why the Teledesic satellites have to be so close to the ground.
Geostationary satellites orbit at 22,300 miles up. At 430 miles up, which is called a low-Earth orbit, Teledesic's birds won't have to worry about the time delay, which means they can provide really fast Internet connections to people from Addis Ababa to Anhui.
To get the service, users will buy or rent antennas about the size of a pizza dish and signal decoders that plug into their computers or telephones. With that setup, they'll be able to do high-speed data transfers such as video-conferencing from anywhere in the world.
The folks putting up these satellites don't pretend it's solely a humanitarian effort: They want to make money.
But by a nice coincidence, the basic physics of the universe dictate that if you set out to provide low-Earth-orbital satellite links to places where there are lots of rich people, you end up making it available to everyone.
``If we give it to Madrid, we have to give it to Africa. And, in Antarctica, the penguins will be well served,'' said Russell Daggatt, Teledesic's president.
Teledesic isn't the only company to see the possibilities brought on by cheaper satellites. An astounding 1,700 or so are expected to be launched in the next decade.
``They're sending up more in the next 10 years than they have in the whole history of the satellite industry,'' said Wen Liao, a senior analyst with Jupiter Communications in New York.
Most are for the global cellular phone and paging markets, and, for all these companies - Teledesic most certainly not excluded - several huge issues loom down the road.
First, rocket launches themselves are dicey things. Iridium is now behind schedule, for example, because one of Cape Canaveral's Delta rockets blew up last month trying to launch a biomedical satellite.
Second, the ventures are enormously expensive and, in an era when Wall Street wants returns this quarter, building infrastructures that can take years is a hard sell.
And, finally, no one's really sure the technology to get all those satellites operating in perfect synchronization will work.
``It's insanely expensive, it's insanely risky, it's insanely unmanageable,'' in the words of Robert Egan, research director for satellite technology at the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn.
Which might make it a good gamble after all. Thus far, no one has made a grab for Teledesic's Internet market, though the company doesn't expect it will remain untouched.
And with the deep pockets of McCaw and Gates, vision might count for more than instant return on investment. Who else is willing to bet that kind of money?
``This final issue is: Is there a need, given what we know about the Internet? Today, the answer is no,'' Egan said. ``But how the Internet evolves, that's key. It might end up being yes.''
LENGTH: Long : 117 linesby CNB