Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

NNSL (Mar 29/99) - Phone calls from space are connecting people in remote locations with a new phone that uses a series of satellites in orbit miles above the Earth.

The Iridium satellite phone was the brainchild of an engineer who envisioned wireless telephone transmission anywhere on the planet, said Rob Eisses, product manager for Infosat, the service provider for Iridium Canada.

"It was a concept of a Motorola engineer, to be able to provide a wireless hand-held phone that could be used anywhere in the world," Eisses said. "It's the first of its type ever developed."

Iridium launched a series of 66 satellites, becoming the largest private satellite constellation in space, he said.

"The satellites are in a low polar orbit," Eisses said. "Which means they are circumnavigating the globe in a North Pole to South Pole orbit, 780 kilometres above the Earth."

The system ensures uninterrupted telephone transmission throughout the world through a direct link to one of the networked satellites. As one satellite sinks below the horizon, another is coming right behind, Eisses explained.

"The signal travels from satellite to satellite and then back down to another handset or to a public switched line," he said.

"It's a really exciting technology, when you look at it in terms of where satellite technology has (come) from," he said. "We've gone from these large, suitcase-sized phones down to a small, hand-held phone, which is not much bigger than a cell phone."

"It's just been a tremendous feat in communications technology," he added.

Pierre Lepage of Danmax Communications is a Northern distributor for Iridium. He said the large network of satellites were launched over the last 10 years.

"These birds are travelling pretty quick," he said. "It takes 106 minutes to go around the globe. You can actually see them at night."

This technology comes with a price, however.

"The phones are just under $5,000," Lepage said. "Calling costs $2.50 a minute anywhere in North America and most Caribbean countries."

While it costs the owner to call from the set, Lepage said incoming calls are billed to the caller. He said the price of placing calls is not likely to drop either, because of the high maintenance costs of the system.

"Every seven to eight years they have to replace the satellites, because they are low-orbit satellites," he said. "They break up a lot faster in the atmosphere."

Motorola and Kyocera are manufacturing the phones and both offer different features. They both can be used as either cell phones or satellite phones, Lepage said.

The people buying the phones come from many walks of life, he said. Even people concerned with the problems associated with the new millennium are buying.

"People who are paranoid about the Y2K problem are all concerned that if something happened to the landline, they would have the Iridium," he said. "My customers are mostly geologists, surveyors, emergency response people, fishing and hunting lodges -- anywhere where cell phones or regular telephones won't work."