Satellite Broadband Goes Around and Comes Around

Kevin Maney writes: Just this week, I've been pawing through big thick files I kept from a decade ago when I wrote some big stories about Teledesic -- and now BusinessWeek has a story about how Hughes satellites are serving up broadband to people in rural areas in the U.S.

Remember Teledesic? It made a huge splash in 1994. Craig McCaw and Bill Gates had put up their own money, and McCaw was going to build a global, low-earth orbit constellation of satellites that would cover the planet in broadband Internet. Nice idea, but in the end nothing about it made sense. The satellites never got built. The costs didn't work out. Cable and phone companies built networks so most of the people who would want broadband could get it by wire more cheaply than Teledesic's service would've cost. It was an odd era when satellites -- Teledesic, Iridium -- were supposed to solve a lot of personal communications shortcomings...but didn't.

And now most urban areas are wired and 3G cellular systems and Wi-Fi and Wi-Max are adding wireless to the mix. Satellites seem to make sense only in those places so remote, no other broadband network is anywhere nearby. Amazing how the world can turn out differently than even people the caliber of Gates and McCaw foresee.