The prospects for global multimedia services via satellite made strides this week as a Motorola Corp. subsidiary quietly let on that it has filed a license application with the FCC to put up 63 low-Earth-orbit birds during the next five years.
The US$12.9 billion system - dubbed "Celestri Multimedia LEO System" - would enter an already crowded field of planned "multimedia satellite" players that includes Teledesic Corp. and Loral Space & Communications Ltd. This new raft of companies is hoping to make money with a new generation of two-way satellite communications in the Ka-band frequency range.
Interestingly enough, Motorola just lost out to Boeing Co. in a bid to build Teledesic's planned satellite network. Whether it's sour grapes or just good business, Motorola is vying to go toe-to-toe with its erstwhile customer to offer an array of wireless multimedia services that theoretically would work in "virtually all of the populated land masses in the world," according to its application.
The nascent nature of multimedia Ka-band satellite systems makes it difficult to predict exactly what services will win consumer acceptance and survive the marketplace. But Motorola, for its part, was quite specific in its filing last week. For one thing, it said Celestri services would include point-to-point, real-time symmetric connection services at speeds ranging from 64 Kbps to 155 Mbps.
The fact that the connection would be symmetric means that - unlike many wireline high-speed data technologies such as digital subscriber lines and cable modems that provide slower upstream pipes - users would be able to download and upload information at the same lightning speeds. That would allow people to send large files back and forth quickly to and from just about anywhere on the planet.
Motorola also said it would provide broadcasting and multicasting services at varied data rates, as well as "interactive" services. Who are the customers? Motorola says just about everybody from residential consumers to businesses of every size. In addition to work-at-home functions, Motorola said it would offer services targeting "personal productivity, entertainment, education, health care, and security purposes" as well.
Motorola also said it would lease its huge wireless pipeline to other telecommunications companies looking to expand their bandwidth offerings. Despite its estimated $12.9 billion cost, Motorola told the FCC that "a comparable terrestrial network infrastructure would be over a trillion dollars." So from the perspective of Motorola and other companies banking on global multimedia services, space may have become the cheaper frontier.
Motorola's plans, as gleaned from the filing, could change, but the company's apparent embrace of global multimedia satellite services couldn't have come at a more appropriate time. Long-distance powerhouse AT&T just withdrew its application to launch its "VoiceSpan" global satellite network last month, scrapping its once ambitious satellite plans. And that was right before AT&T agreed to sell its "very small aperture terminal" (VSAT) satellite unit to GE Capital Spacenet Services in April. A month before that, it completed the sale of its Skynet system of C-band and Ka-band domestic satellites for $712.5 million to Loral.
Even more interesting is that AT&T remains a steadfast backer of DirecTV Inc., a direct broadcast satellite provider owned by the Hughes division of General Motors Inc. AT&T now owns a 2.5 percent stake in DirecTV, for which it agreed to pay about $137.5 million early last year. The connection is important because DirecTV only last week filed its own license application to put up six more DBS satellites in an effort to beef up its service to compete in the increasingly crowded satellite business.
