W Band and Novel Plan Bridge Digital Divide

Signal, May 2007 by Lawlor, Maryann

"They" say it can't be done, but this visionary is determined to prove them wrong.

A tiny nation on the brink of bankruptcy and a tenacious technological futurist could parent a telecommunications leap as significant as the Internet itself. The Republic of Nauru, a South Pacific island onequarter the size of Manhattan, is set to be the host country licensor of the Super Wide Area Network, defined by its creator as Wi-Fi or WiMAX on steroids. Once built and launched, the satellite system not only would offer unheard-of ubiquitous communications capabilities but also would bridge the digital divide with a business model that provides citizens of even the poorest countries with access to the latest technologies.

As currently envisioned, the Super Wide Area Network Satellite (SWANsat) system will be a constellation of no less than four and possibly as many as a dozen high-power geosynchronous orbiting (GSO) satellites licensed to provide two-way broadband services using 10 gigahertz of electromagnetic frequency in the W band. With the exception of the regions near the North Pole and South Pole, each bidirectional signal will cover the globe, and each spacecraft in the constellation will be able to deliver 600 million 2-megabit-persecond broadband Internet connections and about a quartermillion video channels worldwide.

The first spacecraft containing the communications payload is planned for deployment in late 2010, and subsequent launches would occur annually until the entire constellation is in place. According to Dr. William Welty, creator of the SWANsat concept and manager of SWANsat Holdings LLC, Cheyenne, Wyoming, once the SWANsat system is up and running, customers will use a handset that features universal serial bus 2 and FireWire ports, in/out audio and video connections with a built-in 30-frame-persecond video camera, a Bluetooth wireless headset and a built-in FM transmitter.

Among the services included with a SWANsat subscription are free unlimited worldwide voice communications with no international calling fees, worldwide fax services and audio- and videoconferencing. In addition, customers will have high-speed Internet access, secure socket layer encrypted e-mail service with user-defined spam filtering, personal Web pages, 250 megabytes of e-mail and file server storage, digital satellite video and radio, and home school educational and entertainment channels at no charge. Encrypted global positioning system location capabilities and worldwide secure emergency services also are part of the subscriber package. Welly's business model calls for a per-subscriber service fee of $100 per month, well below the amount telecommunications users are paying today for these capabilities, which often are supplied by several vendors.

Rather than area or country codes, the SWANsat business model features nine subscriber account territories, or SATs, each with its own code number. Although the entire package will not be available for several years, customers already can reserve subscriber accounts by purchasing MySWANmail e-mail accounts through the 128-bit fully encrypted e-mail service. The accounts are accessible via subscribers' current Internet landline or wireless connections.

The personal account will be assigned to one of the SATs based on a customer's physical address. Clients with more than one residence located in different territories will be able to select one primary World Code. Subscriber account numbers will resemble a combination of today's telephone numbers and Internet protocol addresses, for example, 101.1.8777926728.swan. The dot-swan top-level domain will not be available until the SWANsat satellites are in orbit. According to Welty, every effort will be made to assign customers the SWANsat subscriber account number that matches their home or cell phone number.

This kind of bleeding-edge technology is not exactly new to Welty. His experience in telecommunications began in 1982 when he pursued and obtained a broadcast license from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to operate, on an interim basis, the facilities of the ultrahigh frequency KHOF-TV channel in San Bernardino, California. In addition, he opened the last round of Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) applications with the FCC in 1987 and sold his DBS interests in 1996, donating all the proceeds from the sale to a charitable trust. Welty began pursuing the SWANsat project in 1997.

The road was not easy during the SWANsat concept's formative years. Welty conducted his own analysis of spectrum worldwide and found a section of spectrum allocated many years ago for fixed, mobile and broadcast service. "Today, all of that is converged, but the regulations haven't caught up with the technology yet," he muses. "I decided to drive a truck through the loophole."

The analysis revealed that all of the United Nations' information and communication technology (ICT) regulations were based on the common carrier and broadcast models. However, Welty points out that today's technologies enable the convergence of these two models and that common carrier and broadcast services already are merged at Web sites such as YouTube. "For SWANsat, there are not just two kinds of information and communication technologies, there are three, and we invented the third form and exempted it from the regulations of either," Welty claims. "I wrote my own ITU [International Telecommunication Union] regulation to cover the exemption for a frequency that was allocated but never assigned by the ITU."