Satellite communications company TerreStar has signed a nationwide reciprocal roaming agreement with AT&T Wireless. It will allow the satellite phone company to allow roaming with it’s handheld devices. Financial terms and duration of the agreement were not disclosed.
TerreStar is developing a geosynchrounous satellite phone system with terrestrial repeaters. The company plans to target its service at commercial, government, rural and public-safety users in North America. TerreStar is developing bridging technology to provide interoperability across legacy Land Mobile Radio (LMR) systems and cellular, satellite and land-based communications.
TerreStar will operate in two 10-Mhz blocks of contiguous spectrum in the 2 GHz band throughout the United States and Canada. TerreStar Networks shares the 2.2 GHz (MSS) band with ICO. ICO launched its huge spotbeam platform, ICO G1 this March.
TerreStar now plans to launch its TerreStar-1 satellite in the second quarter of next year. Earlier the company had planned on a Dec. 2008 to Feb. 2009 launch.
Both ICO and TerreStar have 20 MHz each in the MSS band (2.0/2.1 GHz). They’ll deliver spotbeam satphone services from geosynchronous space, but will suppliment the space connection with terrestrial repeaters which allow small, inexpensive handsets to be used.
TerreStar received $300 million in financing earlier this year to help the company deploy its mobile hybrid satellite service. TerraStar was also named in a lawsuit filed last month by Sprint Nextel for not paying relocation costs associated with the ongoing 800 MHz rebanding efforts.
ICO plans to deliver 10-15 channels of premium live TV content for 7–15 inch screens in the United States. ICO and Clearwire will conduct a mobile video trial in Raleigh, North Carolina, this year using DVB-SH, a mobile TV standard. It expects to launch commercial service in 2009.
MediaFLO, by contrast, is stuck with 6 MHz and can only broadcast locally — mostly from central broadcast towers. Their mobile tv service is limited to a handful of fixed channels.
Meanwhile, Toshiba said it will shut down its four-year-old, satellite-based digital multimedia broadcasting service, which it offers via its Mobile Broadcasting Corporation business unit.
The MBSAT from Mobile Broadcasting Corporation is a three-axis attitude stabilized geostationary satellite designed and manufactured by Space Systems / Loral, based on the SS/L 1300 bus and featured a 12m-aperture (40 foot) S band high gain antenna.
In 2005, South Korea began a similar mobile TV service using Satellite-DMB (S-DMB) and terrestrial DMB (T-DMB) service. Since launching in May 2005, South Korea’s TU Media has signed up more than one million subscribers, uses the S-DMB (satellite digital multimedia broadcasting) standard, offering 15 video and 19 audio channels.
Toshiba said the Japanese service has failed to attract sufficient customers in the face of demand for free mobile broadcasting services that are targeting mobile handsets. Toshiba said it will dissolve the company and end services by March of next year. It is expected to cost Toshiba about $232 million. The company launched the service in Oct. 2004.
