FCC Chairman Michael Powell has been pushing satellite Internet as a solution for the U.S. But most Direcway subscribers are dissatisfied with their service, Starband is in bankruptcy, and other companies like Teledesic and WildBlue never got off the ground.
Meanwhile, Canada, South Korea, Japan and several other industrialized countries are moving forward with superior wireline and terrestrial wireless systems.
This leaves the U.S. with Michael Powell's other option - reestablishing the Bell monopolies.
The phone call that I got last month from a senior-level telecom executive revolved around the feasibility of using high-altitude robotic blimps (cost: less than $150k each - with less transmission delay, too) in lieu of satellites (cost: upwards of $100 Million each).
I worked on this project for a while, and it was chaos.
First off, they never understood that there's NO MARKET in those places. There are no phone lines there for a reason. The only place there'd be any demand for this system would be in places where people already use things like phones -- and in those places, Teledesic wouldn't have enough market share to survive. (As Iridium and Globalstar already discovered.)
The Teledesic people never did understand how to put together a system. Their requirements had no objective basis, and they were often wedded to really ruinous design choices. A clue to how bad they really were can be gained by looking at how many satellite companies they hired and fired: there were several before us, and several after -- I think the total was something like 10.
This project should have died 5 years ago.
On the plus side, they had this one blonde secretary ... oohhhh, golly what a babe. (Yes, she could type, too.)
I beg to differ. Teledesic was not GEO satellite-based; it was LEO (low earth orbit) based. Unfortunately, Teledesic's constellation plan was way too ambitious, and required TONS of birds (240, I think).
LEO satellite service has relatively low latency due to the short hop (875 miles vs. 22,600 miles for GEO) to the birds.
Alcatel's LEO service, SkyBridge, only requires 67 LEO birds, is still planned for sometime this decade, and is the only way many people (including me), even in the US, where something like 50%+ will NEVER have cable or DSL, will ever get broadband service.
There has been some question as to whether Alcatel is throwing in the towel on SkyBridge, but so far they are denying it.