Click here to sign up for a FREE Refer-it Webmaster Account
Find a job or the right person
|
|
|
(or, The Diary of a Confessed Caffeine Abuser)
What a Waste
Next time someone has a bright idea, hopefully they will think about all of it.
By David "Spam Me and Die" Fiedler
Stupid!
That's what I said the first time I heard about the Iridium plan to put dozens of satellites in low earth orbit for the purpose of portable worldwide communications.
Too bad I don't pick stocks for a living.
So why did I think it was stupid? I'm not going to pretend (as some people are doing now) that I knew how global telecommunications would be shaping up 3 or 4 years down the road. It's certainly true that land-based cellular networks have become more ubiquitous, but Iridium was really designed for those places that cell sites weren't -- jungles, mountaintops, ships at sea, etc. -- as well as a way of connecting through almost every incompatible cell network no matter where you went. And I like space technology and I'm certainly not a Luddite, so I didn't oppose it on technological grounds.
No, I'd simply have to say that it was the sheer incongruity of the project that turned me off. So many satellites. So much money. Such a low orbit (the better to give other space vehicles something to run into, I guess). Such a small potential market, and such high per-minute rates!
And now, it's all going, almost literally, to hell. All the design effort, sales, marketing, expensive phones, satellites, rockets...all will be thrown away, as if it didn't represent 7 billion dollars' worth of real (not even dot-com paper stock) money. The satellites will join the rockets in the oceans (hopefully they won't hit some ex-Iridium customer in a boat on their way down). The phones will show up on eBay in 2010. The waste of people's efforts and lives will perhaps eat at them for years.
I had been hoping that someone would come to their senses and keep the thing going for a while...maybe by reducing the rates to breakeven so more people could afford to use the service, and then it might just take off of its own momentum. I read that the Pentagon was one of the largest users of Iridium...couldn't they keep it going for awhile? I heard someone wants to use the satellites, now, for data encryption...nah. There is a use and a market for this kind of thing, but too many people expect instant return on their investments these days.
Maybe that's the worst legacy of the Internet.
But I hope I don't hear any more about how "responsible" the company is for "cleaning up after itself" and burning all its satellites up. The next time someone talks about how bad people when they drive vehicles larger than a midget race car and therefore use up all the world's energy resources, think about how much energy it took to build, transport, and launch 66 satellites and rockets. I'd bet that every one of those launches took more energy resources than you -- and everyone you'll ever know -- will use in your lifetime.
What a waste.
-- D. Fiedler
David Fiedler is Editor-in-Chief of WebDeveloper.com®, and his opinions are definitely his own.
Last modified: Thu Jun 15 06:19:14 EDT 2000
Visit the complete archive for this column!
Copyright © 1999-2000
internet.com Corp.All Rights Reserved. Legal Notices.
Contact the WebDeveloper.com® staff
Last modified: Thu Jun 15 06:19:14 EDT 2000
Refresh Daily
Join Editor-in-Chief David Fiedler
and find truth, justice, and a clue or two.
ActiveX / VBscript Animated GIF Archive Browsers CGI / Perl Database Connectivity Design / Graphics E-Commerce HTML-Advanced: DHTML, CSS HTML / Site Authoring Tools Intranet/Groupware Java JavaScript Multimedia: Audio / Video / Streaming Technologies Opinions Refresh Daily: Editorial Column Security Servers & Server Tools Site Design / Graphics Site Management / Marketing / Log File Analysis Tutorials VRML / 3D XML
