> But Teledesic has not yet settled on satellite design.
> It has not developed the software that will control the
> network. It hasn't decided how to transmit signals from
> satellite to satellite (it must choose between radio
> waves and laser beams).
In fact, mobile routing b/w satellites is so hard, Iridium's sw team gave up
and agreed to downlink all traffic to terrestrial NAPs in every country
they will do business in. To be sure, that decision is probably heavily
political, since intersatellite routing drains the coffers of state telco
monopolies that are used to taxing all cross-border bitflows (and downlinking
is the path of least resistance), but it must also partially be because no one
is confident enough of the sw to fight for it.
RK