teledesic

Teledesic is a company founded in 1990 that developed a system for high-speed satellite communications. The satellite Internet via Teledesic satellites was initially to consist of 840 LEO satellites, but it was later reduced 288.

The 288 LEO satellites of the Teledesic system were distributed in 12 orbits of 24 satellites each. The altitude of flight was 700 km. In addition to mobile voice communications, the Teledesic system was to support high-speed broadband services for multimedia applications. Data rates of 2 Mbit/s, 155 Mbit/s and 1.2 Gbit/s were planned. ATM was envisaged as the transmission technology, with each individual Teledesic satellite representing a switching node in its own right.

Teledesic was later merged with the ICO system and in 2001 another merger with Ellipso took place. Teledesic activities were discontinued for the time being in 2002.