On the evening of Tuesday, May 19, the Panamsat Galaxy 4 satellite, rotating 22,300 miles above the earth, slipped out of orbit and began spinning uncontrollably. Immediately, more than 40 million of the 50 million pagers used in the U.S. lost service. It wasn’t until the following weekend that customers were able to regain service through another satellite.
This switch resulted in a tremendous amount of work: several hundred thousand satellite dishes needed to be redirected, and a large percentage of them needed to be adjusted in person.
Engineers worked around the clock, sleeping in the back seats of cars and vans as they were driven from dish to dish. Some companies responded ingeniously. For example, National Public Radio switched to RealAudio and the Internet to distribute its programs live to member stations. But the fact remains that the Panamsat satellite, a division of General Motors, controls the vast majority of such wireless traffic.
High-tech industries have responded to crises like this by consolidating their services. Even before most of its pagers were back in service, Motorola announced that it was backing out of its $13 billion attempt to build an “Internet in the sky.” Instead, the company plans to invest $750 million in a similar project by Teledisc, owned by Craig McCaw and Bill Gates.
As the wireless Internet inches toward reality over the next five years, it’ll be the Big Boys who control it.
Please come back next week for a series of Special Reports on Linux, an open-source operating system.
