GENEVA — Globalstar chairman Bernard Schwartz appeared at Telecom 99 on Monday (Oct. 11) to host the "soft launch" of phone service from the 40-satellite low-earth orbit (LEO) Globalstar system, developed by Loral Space and Communications Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. based on Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology. Some 233 service providers worldwide will be offering trial services to customers this month, and Globalstar plans to launch four more satellites on Oct. 18 to give the network full redundancy.
The coalition behind this LEO effort will be promoting services in the shadow of Iridium LLC's failure. While the Iridium 66-satellite constellation is operating and in place, the company had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after too few cellular users proved willing to test the service.
Schwartz said that Globalstar has some built-in advantages by opting for a passive satellite system wherein most of the intelligence is in the ground-based gateway systems. Unlike the Iridium system, the satellites in the Globalstar network do not have intelligent inter-satellite links and do not perform significant DSP operations in space. Qualcomm chairman and chief executive Irwin Jacobs said that this creates a significant hurdle for Iridium backers: the Iridium satellites have shorter lifetimes and must be replaced at a higher unit cost because of on-board intelligence, which Jacobs said could prove a difficult financial task for a partnership in bankruptcy protection.
Qualcomm has tri-band handsets in production that support AMPS, IS-95, and Globalstar networks, while L.M. Ericsson and Italtel are both in preproduction qualification of handsets. Globalstar was conducting tests on Palexpo grounds with Telecom 99 attendees, in which virtually all calls to cellular and land-line phones worldwide were going through. Schwartz said that the first few months of in-house testing had shown call completion rates of 90 to 96 percent.
