A rocket launch tonight from Central Asia will bring Motorola and its partners in the Iridium satellite project within sight of attaining their ambitious goal of running a global voice-data network from the sky.
The Iridium system, a constellation of 66 satellites that orbit the globe at 240 miles above Earth, will be completed over the course of the next month with three more launches. The first of the final launches is scheduled at 6:41 p.m. PDT from Kazakhstan.
Iridium has 56 satellites in orbit already. With the final launches, engineers will test the network by sending enough pages and calls to simulate the communications load it's designed to carry. The final exam will come in September with the system's planned inaugural.
"Once that last launch goes up, the pressure will really be on Motorola," said David Cooperstein, analyst in telecommunications strategies for Forrester Research. "It’s the first real test case of whether voice and data services will work."
If Iridium works as planned, clients will be able to make voice, data, fax, and pager transmissions from anywhere, to anywhere - a European hotel, the summit of Mount Everest, or aboard a ship in the middle of the Black Sea. The service targets business travelers, mobile workers, and those who reside in areas not served by land-based networks.
Getting to the brink of launching this type of service is no small feat for any project.
Earlier this year, one of Iridium’s would-be competitors, TRW's US$3.2 billion Odyssey project, was derailed by financial difficulties. Odyssey aimed to deploy a constellation of satellites 5,580 miles above Earth to deliver fixed and mobile voice and data at a cost to the consumer of roughly 65 to 95 cents per minute. The system was intended to augment earthbound communications networks by connecting to various local loops as well as far-reaching territories.
Iridium is a more complex and ambitious project.
The $4.4 billion system aims voice, data, fax, and pager transmissions. It will use both the terrestrial communications network through gateways it has constructed in 11 countries as well as intersatellite connections to send calls through the stratosphere. This latter task is a complex relay in which one satellite hands off its load to another when the first satellite approaches the horizon for a given coverage area. It's a feat never before attempted, let alone accomplished.
"Can you get interconnections going between satellites to work? I’d like to see," said Cooperstein.
The transfer requires a piece of the radio spectrum beyond what all satellite systems use. All satellite communications systems require two distinct avenues for transmissions between the heavens and Earth, and these are commonly called uplink and downlink frequencies. These additional crosslinks add to the complexity of the system but also enhance the speed, said Durrell Hillis, senior vice president and general manager of Motorola’s space and systems technology group.
Speed and convenience is just what Iridium and future systems want to sell consumers. Niceties such as simplified billing might be part of the marketing.
"You don’t have any hidden charges with the satellite phone," explained Cooperstein. "You know how much calls cost" -- not always the case with hotel phones on which access charges can be tacked onto the cost of a local or long-distance call.
But before the system really gets off the ground, Motorola will have to sell customers on the idea of having to buy yet another device to use yet another communications service. For calling to be truly ubiquitous, though, some wrinkles must be ironed out.
Integration with existing cellular networks is a good example.
The cellular picture is already complicated by the fact systems in Europe and Asia use one type of wireless protocol while those in the United States employ another. The reality for travelers: Their phones won't work in certain areas. The cellular industry is trying to fix this problem with multiple-mode phones that can use all the protocols.
Iridium's answer to the problem is the terrestrial radio cassettes, a device that enables the Iridium phones to speak a variety of wireless protocols. This interoperability led Cooperstein to sound a bullish note on a system he once doubted.
The Iridium phone, he said, "will be the last phone you have to buy."
