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Unfold that teeny-weeny phone and call Mogadishu. Stuck in a Tokyo traffic
jam, log on your car to see exactly where you are. Send a fax from your
laptop while sitting on a dune in the Gobi. Catch a page on your bleeper
in a worker’s shack in the oilfields of Baku. Get a second opinion from
Edinburgh on that heart murmur in Lusaka. Watch the latest TV soap on a
receiver in Alice Springs. Call Mum from tourist class on a crystal-clear
line to let her know when you’re landing.

The next few years will see great advances in telecommunications – global
cellular phones, information systems and pagers, medical networks that link
doctors in developing countries with their colleagues in the developed world,
broadcasting systems that bring television and radio to the farthest-flung
villages, and airline phones that work reliably. Some of this technology
is already available; soon there will be more, and it will be cheaper and
easier to use.

This technology will use many more satellites than today’s telecommunications
systems, and take advantage of the recent strides made in electronic miniaturisation.
And it will bring, for instance, a global satellite phone system that will
allow you to use a single pocket phone with a single phone number anywhere
on the globe, whether it be New York, Tierra del Fuego, Calcutta or Tonga.
The pocket phone will also transmit fax, data and control signals, as well
as speech, all in digital code.

Five American companies are vying before the US Federal Communications
Commission for the de facto worldwide rights to bands of frequencies they
would dedicate to a global satellite phone system – some would be satisfied
with just the band between 1610 and 1626.5 megahertz; others want that between
2483.5 and 2500 megahertz as well. The competing companies range from newcomers,
such as Ellipsat with its Ellipso system and Constellation Communications
(Aries), to subsidiaries of military-industrial and communications giants
such as Loral/Qualcomm (GlobalStar) and TRW (Odyssey), to established telecommunications
giants, such as Motorola (Iridium). They aim to start operations between
1996 and 1998.

These are big systems. They involve between 12 to 66 low Earth-orbit
satellites – one additional contender even calls for 840 satellites. The
geostationary communications satellites used for telecommunications traffic
today orbit the Earth at an altitude of around 36 000 kilometres. In contrast,
a low Earth-orbit satellite (LEOS) flies just a few hundred kilometres up.
The exception is TRW’s Odyssey system, which plans to use orbits just over
10 000 kilometres from the Earth’s surface.

Neither the phones nor the satellites will need much power. LEOS handsets,
for instance, will use as little as half a watt. And though a LEOS has a
working life of only five to seven years, against the 10 to 14 years of
a geostationary satellite, a LEOS system should, in theory, be less expensive
to operate. Also, the system does not suffer time delay.

But a LEOS also has disadvantages. One of these is its footprint, the
area of the Earth over which a satellite’s signals can be received. Because
a LEOS is low-flying, its footprint is small (between 700 and 5000 kilometres
in diameter) and moves rapidly over the ground (a LEOS at an altitude of
500 kilometres takes just 95 minutes to orbit the Earth, compared with a
geostationary satellite whose relative position is fixed). As a result,
complex devices will be needed to ensure continuity of communications as,
comparatively frequently, one satellite of a LEOS system drops towards the
horizon and another appears. But the five contenders are not bothered to
the same degree. As far as Loral/Qualcomm’s Globalstar system is concerned,
for instance, the footprint will take between 10 and 12 minutes to pass
a point on the ground, which the company says is long enough for the average
telephone conversation.

Another disadvantage of the LEOS approach is that each company’s system
will be incompatible with those of other companies. And the technical differences
between them will have great practical consequences.

One telecommunications scheme that dwarfs all others, both technically
and financially, is the Iridium system, which has considerable backing from
Motorola. The Iridium company is spending between $3 billion and $4 billion
on its system, against the $300 000 to $2 billion being invested by its
four main American rivals. And Iridium has chosen to adopt a different
coding strategy from its competitors.

All the other applicants have agreed on a coding strategy known as Code
Division Multiple Access. CDMA allows operators to share the available spectrum
of frequencies, because the coding of each message keeps it separate from
all other messages: picture a dozen people at a dinner party, holding six
simultaneous conversations, quietly, in six different languages, and you’ll
get the idea.

Motorola’s system, however, has adopted Time Division Multiple Access,
which divides the signal into tiny fractions of a second. It’s as though
the pairs of dinner guests, unwilling or unable to talk in different languages,
take it in turns to converse. A significant distinction of TDMA is that
it requires more power to operate than CDMA. The advantage is that Iridium
signals will be powerful enough to penetrate buildings; the disadvantage
is that the dinner party now has one pair of guests who are talking so loudly
they drown out the conversations of all the others, no matter which language
they are using. The other systems are much lower powered, partly because
they are designed around a coding strategy that involves sharing the available
spectrum. In practice, these systems will depend on their users walking
to a window, going outside or even down the block to get a better signal.
Experts are divided over which is the better approach. While Iridium may
be the most technically advanced system, it also smothers rival systems
that might otherwise help to keep prices to consumers competitive.

Celestial bypass

The other major difference is of equal political and financial importance.
In the CDMA systems, the satellites are little more than repeaters. The
signal travels from the handset to the satellite, then down to a ground
station in the satellite’s footprint, and into the normal terrestrial system.
Each system must build up to 200 ground stations around the globe.

Motorola’s Iridium, however, can pass the signal from satellite to satellite
around the globe, completely bypassing terrestrial systems. Though this
means that the computers on board Iridium’s satellites will have to be larger,
heavier and more expensive than those of their rivals because they have
to decide which satellite each message has to be sent to, it makes Iridium
the most technologically advanced solution. And yet to win the support of
governments fearful of diminishing revenues from their telecommunications
networks, Motorola has had to redesign its system to less demanding specifications
so that it will be able to use terrestrial and cellular links whenever possible.

So far, this is all theory. Ellipsat has launched a few experimental
satellites, but no one has a system in place. Besides, these American ‘Big
LEOS’ ventures face competition from systems proposed by companies from
Mexico, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, plus two from Russia and
four from the tiny Pacific kingdom of Tonga. The Russian Gonets consortium,
which already has several satellites flying, plans to provide a global telephone
service by 1997. However, the biggest competition is from Inmarsat, the
73-nation satellite consortium formed to provide maritime communications.
The organisation, whose headquarters are in London, already offers a global
phone, but the device costs $25 000, plus $5.50 per minute to operate,
and is the size of a briefcase. Inmarsat plans to put all that capability
in a handset.

In the shadow of Big LEOS systems such as Iridium stand Little LEOS
systems: cheap, low-power satellites that may eventually find a much wider
use than their larger cousins, chiefly for global paging systems that send
and receive short messages and tell you exactly where on the Earth’s surface
you are. Such satellites cost between £4 million and £6 million
each, while the receivers will cost only £30 to £250. The
satellites are only 1.5 metres tall and weigh only 40 kilograms. Some experimental
Little LEOS systems already in place are finding new, unexpected uses. According
to Salah Mandil of the WHO, doctors at 10 hospitals in Zambia are already
using these satellites to consult databases, send e-mail messages to colleagues
and despatch images such as electrocardiograms to the developed world for
a second opinion.

Beyond LEOS systems, which are generally used for one-to-one links (phones,
pagers, message receivers) or to take part in many-to-many tie-ups (computer
networks such as Internet), higher constellations of geostationary satellites
hold great promise for new types of one-to-many (broadcast) systems. Analogue
TV networks such as BSkyB in Britain and StarTV in east Asia already broadcast
from geostationary satellites. In the US, as many as nine of these direct
broadcast satellite (DBS) systems are due to begin operation within the
next few years; until now, except for well-off hobbyists, only cable companies
have picked up analogue TV signals from satellites for terrestrial transmissions
to customers. And there is already in the US a small digital system, Primestar,
that has 65 000 customers after three years of operation. The first large
American digital system, Hughes Aircraft’s $1 billion DirecTV, expects
to begin oper-ating from a geostationary satellite over the next few months.

American cable TV companies will face stiff competition when consumers
can receive a hundred or more satellite channels, at a cost of just $700
(or $1250 for two TVs). The 16 120-watt transponders on the satellite sent
up last December will eventually carry up to 180 DirecTV channels, plus
another dozen for a smaller company, United States Satellite Broadcasting.

Couch potato heaven it may be, but the monthly fees for each of the
systems will be about the same as those charged by cable companies. And
the satellite systems won’t carry local channels, which cable viewers watch
60 per cent of the time. Many movie channels and sporting events will be
‘pay per view’. And the systems won’t have any of the interactive games,
polls, talk shows or virtual shopping malls that many cable systems are
planning. Except for the two on the Hughes satellite, the planned systems
are technically incompatible, and require separate receivers.

The first systems of a simpler technology, direct broadcast radio,
are nearing the market in the US. Broadcasting-Satellite Service Sound (BSS
Sound) will bring digital, near-CD quality audio broadcasting to radios
across whole continents. The system will transmit signals either from satellites
or terrestrial towers to offer unprecedented quality – but people will need
new digital receivers to pick up the signals. One American system, Satellite
CD Radio, projects that its satellite’s 50-watt transponder will broadcast
30 channels of music at 2300 megahertz to radios that cost less than $200,
with flat, 2-square-inch (13-square-centimetre) antennas. The service should
cost less than $50 per year. Five competing systems promise from 15 to
512 channels.

Military precision

In Europe, a digital radio service is due to make its debut. The system
is known as digital audio broadcasting (DAB) because it uses terrestrial
transmitters rather than satellites. Last month, after the British government
said it would release a band of VHF frequencies for the new system, the
BBC announced that it planned to begin a service next year (‘Britain clears
the airwaves for digital radio’, This Week, 29 January).

Another consumer and business use of satellites is a direct spin-off
from the military. During the Gulf War, many allied troops asked their families
and friends to send them commercially available Global Positioning System
hand-held receivers. These can tell you instantly just where on the face
of the Earth you are, to an accuracy of about 15 metres. The US Department
of Defense built the 20-satellite GPS network for its own uses, but the
public is allowed to use receivers that have been ‘detuned’ to make them
less accurate than the military ones. The troops could have requested more
accurate GPS devices through their commanders but the war would have been
over by the time they arrived and, for most people, 15 metres is precise
enough. Now the use of GPS and similar commercial systems has spread in
consumer markets. Some 100 000 yachts and motor cruisers around the world
already use GPS.

Russia is halfway through the launching of some 24 satellites for Glonass,
its global navigation system. Eventually, international receivers will be
able to take signals from both systems and compare them for accuracy. In
Tokyo, one of the world’s most bewildering cities, taxi drivers navigate
using a device that combines digital maps with information from GPS to flash
the vehicle’s position on a screen mounted on the dashboard. Now these navigation
units are appearing as accessories at the top end of the domestic Japanese
car market.

American companies are using other constellations of satellites for
similar purposes. For instance, Mapsys uses the Starsys positioning system
in software it calls Auto-Pilot and Truck-Pilot, to guide car and lorry
drivers. Some American long-distance cargo companies now track their trucks
through Qualcomm’s OmniTracs system. And Interstate Electronics is developing
a satellite-based sys-tem to track aircraft landings. Orbital Communications
plans a 20-satellite system that will also deliver short messages to units
the size of pagers.

Just like phones, fax machines and computers before them, satellites
are ready to become a part of daily life. The technology is already here.
The only barriers are market, regulatory, political and financial ones.

Joe Flower runs The Change Project, a think-tank based in Larkspur,
California, members of which write, speak and consult about the nature of
change for high technology and health industries.

* * *

Hurdles, regulators and multinational corporations . . .

Every telecommunication service must have a portion of the radio spectrum
reserved for it. The use of radio frequencies worldwide is set by the International
Telecommunications Union, and much of the bargaining over who gets what
takes place in the World Administrative Radio Conferences, which are held
every few years. The last one, in 1992, handed out frequencies for all kinds
of LEOS communications, but left many questions unresolved or tangled in
obscure and complex footnote regulations, exceptions and limits.

Some projects, such as global phone systems, will work only if they
have the same spectrum in every corner of the globe. Motorola’s Iridium
can’t share frequencies with anyone else. Five companies, including Motorola,
are fighting before the US Federal Communications Commission over the spectrum
the WARC set aside for global phone services. Insiders do not expect any
licences to be granted this year or maybe even next. Any attempt by the
FCC to simply divide up the spectrum may render the space technically useless.

Once they get the spectrum they need, most services have to be licensed
in every country in which they operate. If your satellite has a 1500-kilometre
footprint, it’s not an easy task to miss, say, Belgium, while you cover
France, the Netherlands and Britain.

The struggle pits not only companies but also industries, nations and
regions against each other. Almost every company involved is suing or filing
regulatory petitions against almost every other company. And conventional
broadcasters fight any new technology that they can’t squeeze into the hardware
and into the spectrum that they already own.

Global corporations such as Motorola try to influence international
agreements by getting representatives onto the delegations of half a dozen
different nations. But this has made problems for Motorola in the US, as
some corporations claim that its widespread interests and the foreign investors
in Iridium should bar the company from receiving FCC licences, because those
licences are reserved for US-owned companies.

Developed nations, particularly the US, want to expand their technological
and commercial dominance. Less-developed nations don’t have the capital
to change their infrastructure – and the national phone company’s control
of telecommunications is often one of their few sources of hard currencies.
As a result, they are unwilling to see any Western company cream off the
most lucrative international long-distance calls.

For vast developing countries like Indonesia, the Sudan and India, however,
some of these technologies can provide a cheap way to build infrastructure.
A self-sufficient satellite uplink in a remote village might cost thousands
of dollars, but laying twisted-pair copper wires or fibre-optic cables
could cost millions.