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align="right" hspace="4" vspace="4">Bill Owens, vice-chairman
of the board, Teledesic.
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Bill Owens,
Teledesic’s executive team, but in terms of experience, he is not new. Before joining
Teledesic, Owens was the president of the Science Applications International Corp.
Owens has got the prime responsibility
of domestic and international regulations and government relations, on which the
foundation of Teledesic services would rest. In his first exclusive interview to any
publication in Asia after taking charge, Owens comes out extensively on the Teledesic
project and its strategies to Voice
& Data. Excerpts of the e-mail interview done by
Pravin Prashant.
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With Teledesic system slated for launch in 2003, what is
its current status?
We have been working closely with our
prime contractor Motorola and other international industrial team members, including
Boeing. We are making good progress finalizing design elements of our system and plan to
name additional industrial partners in the near future. We are bringing together the best
resources of our collaborative industrial team to build the Teledesic network.
How do you plan to manage the technology in your system
design that would be changing during this period?
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In the past year, we have been focusing on
pulling together the best industrial partners from around the world to develop our system.
Motorola is the only company in the world to have successfully developed and launched a
commercial LEO satellite communications system–Iridium–and Teledesic will
benefit from Iridium’s experience.
We are finalizing details of our design
now, where we have successfully incorporated technological advances into our system. At
the same time, we are not inventing any new technology in our system. We are using
technologies that have either been proven in space or on the ground.
Who are your prime contractors and what are their key
roles?
As prime contractor, Motorola will lead
Teledesic’s global industrial team and be responsible for the design, construction,
and deployment of the Teledesic network. We are in the process of defining the roles of
our major subcontractors.
How is your system different from the others that would be
available in the future?
Teledesic
is the first satellite system designed and constructed to operate as a broadband satellite
network. Its interconnected satellites will provide interactive broadband services
world-wide, with end-to-end guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). Teledesic’s Low
Earth Orbit (LEO) system enables it to meet the low latency requirements that customers
and their applications demand. While most LEO systems will provide narrowband voice or
paging services, Teledesic is focused on global broadband networking and mission-critical
applications, ranging from ERP to carrier-grade voice to collaborative computing.
Teledesic is
inherently complementary to the broadband terrestrial networks being deployed today, and
our network design will ensure seamless interoperation with its customers’ and
service providers’ existing and planned facilities.
How would you ensure QoS to the end user?
Teledesic will offer ironclad Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) to its service provider partners, with the expectation that those
partners will in turn pass on SLAs to their customers. These SLAs could cover a range of
parameters, from latency guarantees to service uptime/reliability to call centre wait
time.
Would the local service provider have control over its
customers?
The Teledesic network enables its service
provider partners to have full visibility into and control over their customers. Each
service provider can implement whatever access control and provisioning mechanisms they
require.
How will people use your system and what capacity and
bandwidth would your system support?
Teledesic is intended to integrate with
computer networks, and thus customers will not access the network using handsets or other
traditional telephony devices.
Teledesic can provide guaranteed
end-to-end QoS to millions of simultaneous users. End-to-end quality service would be made
possible by a combination of global connectivity and unprecedented speeds, which are 100
to 1,000 times faster than that are currently available through standard analog modems.
Apart from this, Teledesic will provide bandwidth-on-demand at a cost independent of
location.
What is your gateway strategy?
Unlike other systems that require large,
expensive gateways, Teledesic can interconnect all sites of a multi-national enterprise
and offer end-to-end QoS guarantees. Teledesic uses a mesh-network architecture to provide
"fibre-like" service quality, interactive broadband network access, and
connectivity between any point on earth. For Teledesic, a gateway is simply an
interconnection point into a public or private network. There is no restriction on the
number of gateways or the type of Teledesic terminal used for the gateway connection. Any
Teledesic user equipment can—and will—serve as a point of interconnection to
other private and public networks.
Where are you planning to build constellation operations
control centre, network operations control centre, and gateways?
This has not yet been finalized.
What is the targeted cost of your project; how much of it
has been financed?
The cost target for designing,
manufacturing, and deploying the Teledesic system is more than $9 billion.
In the past one year, we have raised more
than $1 billion in investments. Early private investors in Teledesic include Craig McCaw,
Motorola, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, His Royal Highness Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of
Saudi Arabia, and The Boeing Company. Investment in Teledesic will ultimately expand to
include a variety of traditional sources of private and public debt and equity capital
from around the world.
How do you plan to recover your investment and how
affordable would your service be?
We expect Teledesic to turn to profit
quite soon after the system becomes operational. We believe global enterprises will see
the value in Teledesic’s unique combination of instant infrastructure, end-to-end QoS
guarantees, global reach, seamless compatibility with terrestrial networks, flexibility,
differentiated services, and bandwidth-on-demand.
Teledesic expects rates to be comparable
to those of future urban wireline services for broadband access.
Where do you anticipate the maximum demand for your system
to come from?
We expect much of the early demand to come
from the developed parts of North America and Europe, with the developing world eventually
overtaking the developed world in terms of service demand during our 10-year business
plan.
What is your agenda for India?
India is
an important market to Teledesic. We have met with various business and government leaders
throughout the country. We have no specific agenda other than to learn about the telecom
needs of an important part of the world and explore ways Teledesic can help serve those
needs. We may eventually open an Indian office but we have no immediate plans for one as
we are still five years away from service.