French telecom giant Alcatel proposed SkyBridge and more recently the business has come full circle

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French telecom giant Alcatel proposed SkyBridge and more recently the business has come full circle.In July, Motorola announced it was proposing a $12.9bn system to address the data market but, once again, mobile users seem to have been left out. Celestri, as the complex project is known, will offer similar services to Teledesic and Skybridge.Given the revolution Iridium will bring to the world of voice communications, it is a little odd that the mobile data user seems to have been almost totally forgotten. Bill Gates, in his capacity as richest man in America and not as head of Microsoft, together with Craig McCaw, owner of a highly successful mobile phone operation, announced Teledesic to a disbelieving world in 1990 Part of the disbelief was the complexity of the system. And these services may start as early as 2002.Several companies have looked at transferring data over mini-satellites.

But hard on the heels of that will be third-generation mobile phone systems that will eventually support up to 255,000bps in urban centres. But by the time these services start to become popular the expectation of the average mobile business user will have skyrocketed.There are suggestions that GSM networks could support a modest improvement to 14,400bps data calls next year but within about two years new technology will boost that figure up to 64,000bps. ICO will offer a receive rate of 9,600bps with a send rate of just 4,800bps. For its part Globalstar claims it will offer 9,600bps in both directions, although analysts are sceptical about this claim. Ordinary landline modems today operate 33,600 or even 56,000 and are no doubt going to get faster.However, Iridium has a maximum data rate of 2,400bps.

GSM phones today will operate at 9,600 bits per second and are expected to be able to offer much higher rates in a year or so. And there have been others proposed.Iridium has moved very fast. It launched its first five satellites on 5 May, 17 are already in orbit (although one appears to be malfunctioning) and the system should be operational late next year. Globalstar expects to be operational in early 1999 (although it has yet to launch a satellite) and ICO expects to open fully for business in 2000 Their data performance varies from poor to modest. With its 77 satellites winging around the earth the project was dubbed Iridium, after the element which has 77 electrons flying around its nucleus. For at least a year, coverage of the project was entirely sceptical. But soon Motorola attracted investors into the $3.3bn project and imitator after imitator appeared.