Teledesic, the censored internet in the sky.

["James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>]

Teledesic, the censored internet in the sky.

Late last year the organized violence monopolies of the world 
voted to give Bill Gates 400 Megahertz of bandwidth, at the same 
frequency in each monopoly.  I would guesstimate the value of this 
grant to be around ten billion dollars.  

Don't run out and buy Microsoft shares.  When I said Bill Gates, 
I meant Bill Gates.  I did not mean Microsoft.

Bill Gates intends to build an internet in the sky, eight hundred 
satellites in low earth orbit, each of them with big bandwidth 
connections to its nearest neighbors, and each with a four hundred 
megahertz connection to each of many squares of ground underneath it.

What caused the collected killers of the world to show such unanimous
generosity towards Bill Gates?

Bill Gates proposed a network that would be completely censorable.

He will not sell pipes to his space backbone, he will sell pipes
from a particular rectangle on the ground to its space backbone.

You would buy a right to connect from any place in a single small
area, not any a right to connect from any place in the world, 
and Bill Gates would only sell such rights to government 
approved organizations, which would then presumably resell connections
to private individuals -- connections that would first run through
government controlled pipes to check for politically incorrect bits
before they reached Bill Gates' sky backbone.

Of course we should not condemn him too harshly for this:  He needs
approval from Singapore, Iran, France, Germany, Communist China, and 
the like, in order to get a single uniform world wide frequency band, 
and would be unlikely to get it for any reasonable proposal.

The government pipes in his proposal are as useless as wheels on
a fish, because he promises his ground stations will be quite 
cheap.

Therefore private citizens who are not permitted direct access
to his internet in the sky will feel the impact of tyranny
immediately in their wallets.

Bill Gates internet in the sky will provide short and near
constant latency, therefore telephone connections running
through it should be pretty good, whereas existing internet
phone sucks mightily.

Teledesic is promised to come on line in 2001, though we have
seen how Microsoft meets schedules in the past.  I conjecture 
2006.  I also predict that once the scheme is securely
in place, and jamming it becomes painful, Bill Gates
will find a thousand ways to chisel the government monopoly 
middlemen in his proposal.

I would guess that Motorola's less ambitious Iridium project
will only be a year or two late, but it has little potential
to revolutionize the world the way Bill Gates proposal has.

I expect once the scheme is in place, the government monopolies
in Gate's plan will be under attack both from above and from below.
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