To get a clear picture of the landscape, imagine a speed race for world domination. One company, Seattle-based Teledesic Corp. , commands a daunting lead as it speeds toward victory and the attendant spoils. Wired News delivered to your inbox or hand-held device. Wired Covering only a sliver of the communications spectrum, the license nevertheless gives Teledesic control of the bandwidth of what it calls the Internet in the Sky - a cheap way to send huge amounts of data as much as 2,000 times faster than a 28.8 Kbps modem among millions of netizens in every corner of the world at the same time. True to the scale of ambitions shown by its founders, Craig McCaw and Bill Gates, Teledesic's plan is to throw a net around the globe, a geodesic weave of 288 inter-communicating satellites that move in 21 circular orbit planes about Earth's poles, staggered at altitudes between 434 and 441 miles high.
Time delay is a problem - it wreaks havoc with interactive services.
The focus on cutting delays is the crux of Teledesic's strategy. In low-earth orbit, Teledesic reasons, it can transmit data more efficiently than it could from the GEO band. 64 Mbps on the downlink, up to 2 Mbps on the uplinks, and the ability to support more than 2 million simultaneous 16 Kbps connections. And the company faces more competition - Motorola's Celestri and the international venture SkyBridge are working on similar if younger projects. For now, Teledesic has a tremendous advantage thanks to the spectrum license it worked hard to win.