Telecom Informer
by The Prophet
Hello, and greetings from the Central Office!
My gleaming new facility is finally online, busily routing all manner of traffic throughout Asia at volumes I've never seen before. The number of Internet users in China is roughly double the population of the United States, and with a daily population in Beijing at times exceeding 40 million (in between residents and visitors), demand for bandwidth greatly exceeds supply. Suffice it to say that Internet users here eat STM-64s for breakfast, and this is before you even begin to factor voice traffic. I have never seen anything like this in my life, but I could say that about hundreds of things in China. This is one truly amazing place.
Summer is one of my favorite times of the year in Beijing, and this is likely to be my last summer here as my time in China draws to a close. I live in the old city of Beijing, an area of temples and traditional courtyard homes. Many things here were built before Columbus discovered America. Hot summer evenings are great for enjoying sticks of roasted lamb chuan'r, drinking big bottles of Yanjing pi jiu, and watching the world go by.
Payphones are still the primary method of communication for many of the elderly residents of this hutong neighborhood, and cheap GSM mobile phones are used by the many workers here. Old men ride tricycles stacked with cardboard for recycling, chattering loudly on their shou ji (English translation: "mobile phone") while weaving in and out of traffic. All of these scenes look like they belong in a movie, but for the last two years, they've been my daily life.
What's next? I'm really not sure. I left my comfortable union job in the U.S., and don't have a new job lined up yet when this one concludes at the end of this year, so I leapt at the opportunity to book a trip on WorldToor to Antarctica. It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the most remote place on earth, but I'll still have job responsibilities up until the day I leave.
Going "off the grid" is possible for a few hours, but not for a few weeks - and penguins don't have cell phones. The solution? Iridium, a global constellation of 66 Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. The network offers connectivity between virtually any two points on the globe, but at the turn of the century it was nearly taken off the grid.
Iridium was the brainchild of globetrotting Motorola executives who saw an opportunity amid the frustrating and fragmented landscape of cellular and satellite providers of the early- to mid-1990s. At the time, global roaming was generally not possible, and even domestic roaming was complicated (sometimes requiring preregistration and three dollars a day plus 99 cent per minute fees).
Satellite phones from Inmarsat weren't a good solution either. They literally came in a briefcase with a pizza box sized antenna and a full-size telephone handset reminiscent of bag phones. Airtime cost $10 per minute. Motorola researchers developed a handheld satellite phone that was small enough to wear on a belt clip, and then designed a cellular network in the sky to go with it. Six billion dollars (3.5 billion of which came from Motorola) and a whole lot of Chinese rockets later, and Iridium was born. The first call was placed by Vice President Al Gore on August 13, 1998.
And then, just nine months later, Iridium was bankrupt.
Between the early- and late-1990s, GSM rolled out in major U.S. markets (with VoiceStream and Omnipoint), tri-band GSM handsets capable of global roaming became available, and international roaming rates averaged $1.50 per minute. Meanwhile, the mass market that Iridium anticipated never materialized.
For starters, the $2,000 Iridium handsets were bulky and already dated at launch time. They also didn't work indoors, in cars, in tunnels, or even outdoors in areas where tall buildings or trees or mountains or virtually anything else blocked an unobstructed view of the sky. It also didn't help that airtime cost seven dollars per minute, and that the sales staff was generally viewed as unhelpful and unresponsive. At bankruptcy, Iridium had only 15,000 customers with a total of 55,000 handsets.
Its shareholders furious at the continued bleeding of cash, Motorola sought to divest itself of Iridium as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, it was left holding the bag as the operator of the Iridium network, having given earnest guarantees to various agencies of the U.S. government that the satellites would be decommissioned in an orderly manner if service was discontinued. Barely a year after launch, Motorola began making plans to de-orbit the entire constellation, an endeavor that was estimated to cost between $30 and $50 million, and which NASA estimated carried a 1-in-279 chance of killing someone due to falling debris.
Numerous potential suitors bid in bankruptcy court, but none had either a credible plan to operate the business or to indemnify Motorola from responsibility to decommission the satellites (which Motorola reasonably insisted on being a condition of sale).
After numerous failed bids, Iridium handsets lost connectivity to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) on August 25th 2000, when the gateways were decommissioned and it really looked like it was over. With only a few days until the stratosphere would begin raining satellites, a consortium called Iridium Satellite led by former Pan Am executive Dan Colussy entered a credible bid in bankruptcy court.
In effect, it was a three-way deal between Iridium Satellite, Boeing, and the U.S. government. Iridium Satellite would provide a seasoned management team and $25 million in investment. Boeing would take over operating the satellite constellation from Motorola. And finally, Uncle Sam was standing with his checkbook open, ready to sign a sweetheart contract worth three million dollars per month, buying unlimited minutes on up to 20,000 handsets for two years. The bankruptcy judge agreed, original investors lost their shirts, and Iridium quickly restored service.
Under the Colussy regime, customers were no longer globetrotting executives needing to be reached on the beach. Presumably, Pan Am had taught him about the importance of connectivity in remote parts of the world, and Iridium began focusing on customers who needed coverage that simply wasn't available anywhere else.
What's more, rates dropped by substantial margins, to as low as $1 per minute. Iridium's new customers were in places like the South Pole, where Iridium is the only working service, or mountaineers climbing in the Himalayas, or oceanographic telemetry. The technology allows for Iridium to be used at any point on the globe, but some countries (such as North Korea) have requested that Iridium block the service - and Iridium honors such requests.
Call and service quality on Iridium is generally poor. Voice channels run at a maximum data rate of 3.3 kbps (by comparison, a standard GSM voice channel is 64 kbps), using the Advanced Multi-Band Excitation (AMBE) codec. Although the Iridium system technically supports handoffs, dropped calls are common - the ideal usage scenario is in a completely flat location with no obstructions on the horizon above 15 degrees. Anecdotally, if these conditions aren't met, the call is likely to drop (making Iridium best suitable for occasional short duration calls).
Data service is available at 2400 bps. You can terminate to either a dial-up modem or to the Internet via the Iridium gateway. While Iridium claims "up to 10 kbps Internet," this claim is based on V.42bis compression. You're likely to see compression on text or HTML, but not on compressed data such as image files. At the South Pole, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station has twelve Iridium handsets operating in bonded dialup, giving the station a theoretical maximum 28.8 kbps of bandwidth.
Handset development is slow.
The first handsets were manufactured by Kyocera, but only Motorola makes current handsets. The models that are now in production are the 9555 and 9575. These are simple feature phones with no smartphone features and with no third-party applications. Either handset can be connected to a PC with a USB cable. Alternatively, an "AxxessPoint" mobile hotspot device is available.
All billing is in terms of airtime minutes, which are generally prepaid.
The price is variable depending on your subscription package and the number of minutes you buy. Some airtime packages are geographically limited (and billed at a lower rate) while airtime usable worldwide is more expensive. Incoming SMS is free and there is a web interface for sending SMS to an Iridium phone.
Outgoing SMS is billed at 0.33 minutes per message. Iridium accounts have a telephone number in the +8816 country code (generally in the 31X-XXXXX range), and can also be assigned a number in the +1 480 NXX.
Incoming calls to the +8816 number are free, while incoming calls to the +1 480 number and outgoing calls to landlines worldwide are billed at 1:1 parity.
Calls to other Iridium handsets are billed at half-rate, and data calls are billed by the minute (the same as voice calls).
And with that, it's time for me to enjoy an evening walk past the Confucius Temple.
Enjoy your summer, and never stop exploring!