With the financial community satisfied that Sky Station has its priorities in order, the company is going about the process of selling federal regulators on its technology to gain a license, a process that became much easier in May thanks to clever maneuvering.
"It was just a very well-managed move that put them on a faster track," explained Henry Goldberg, a partner with Washington, DC-based Goldberg, Godles, Godles, Weiner, and Wright.
That move was Sky Station switching its classification from mobile satellite to fixed wireless - in the process, simplifying the path to government approval.
By switching its classification from satellite to a fixed mobile service, Sky Station was able to hook into an open FCC proceeding on millimeter wave spectrum, a move that Goldberg says was key to getting the agency to carve out a part of that spectrum - 47.2 to 48.2 GHz - for stratospheric services in May. For the moment, Sky Station stands as the lone applicant for this property. The FCC has yet to set up an auction for the frequency band, however.
"It was the band of least resistance," admitted a giddy Sky Station senior vice president Paul Mahon, charged up from an afternoon meeting with out-going FCC chairman Reed Hundt and agency commissioners.
Should it get the band, Sky Station plans to use it to transmit high-speed multimedia services - at speeds ranging from T1 to OC3 - across a network of 250 stations to roughly 80 to 90 percent of the world's population. Each station will be positioned above a major metropolitan area and will interconnect with the local phone network. And instead of having to wait for all stations to be in their lofty places, Mahon says, Sky Station will be able to launch service immediately in the area where it places its balloon.
But it is the actual band of frequency that has brought out critics, who point to a high possibility of interruption with the service at radio frequencies that are yet to be tested. But to ham radio aficionados like Warp Speed Imagineering CEO DeWayne Hendricks, who note that their field has been a proving ground for many communications technologies, that notion is bunk. "You're shooting straight up [with Sky Station] and operating in free space - there is no clutter," he explained.
"Obstructions will be no more than when you listen to FM radio and travel through a tunnel," said Hendricks, who will have some experimental radio equipment aboard a Sky Station test platform set for launch this fall.
The frequency Sky Station proposes to use was once a radio property that had previously been under wraps and available to the military, though others could apply for temporary licenses to experiment with millimeter-wave technologies.
The high frequencies in the millimeter-wave spectrum - 30 to 300 GHz - yield wide bandwidths, the very thing that telecommunications providers crave. Although lower frequencies can travel greater distances and go through buildings, the short distances these higher frequencies can travel just may increase the efficiency of spectrum use. There is little chance of services interfering with each other, and transmissions can be more secure - after all, the military was using them, notes Michael Marcus, associate chief of the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology.
It is the perfect spectrum for a system where user connections are at 90-degree angles, says Mahon. "The 47 GHz band is swamp spectrum, so anyone with a service that has to go through lots of atmosphere will have trouble. But it's the perfect marriage for our service," he said.
Hopeful that it has the FCC's blessing, Sky Station stands ready to gain global approval at the upcoming World Radio Conference. The company has spent the past year working with technicians from the International Telecommunications Union radio study group, having its technology torn apart and analyzed. The sometimes bracing process has yielded the desired result - widespread international support.
The diplomats who show up at the WRC '97 this fall will be voting as a mere formality, Mahon said, noting that they will follow the recommendations of their engineering representatives who took part in the ITU study group. The result will be a treaty that will give Sky Station something unprecedented - a clear band of T1 to OC3 communications around the world.
"It won't be the case where you take your cell phone to Europe and can't use it because they have GSM," he said.
