Worldwide Phone Rates


       Shortly after the start of the twenty-first century, you will be
     shopping mostly via catalogs and two-way computers. This will prove so
     profitable to phone companies (or cable companies if they get there
     first) that local phone service (to buy all those goodies and make
     personal calls) will be free. It's going to be possible because of the
     economically important data you leave in the computer each time you shop.
     Once that is in place worldwide, flat-rate phone service will follow.
     Why? There will be almost no extra operational cost to make a direct-dial
     call from New York across the world to New Delhi via satellite than from
     New York across the river to New Jersey. Worldwide 800 and 900 numbers
     will follow.

       When Arthur C. Clarke first conceived the idea of geostationary
     satellites back in 1945, even the word satellite meant something else --
     a celestial body such as a moon. Clarke's concept, outlined clearly
     (incidentally, it was unpatented) in the October 1945 edition of the
     British publication Wireless World, showed how geostationary satellites
     would work. Twenty years later the idea was tested by the Soviet Union
     and led to the more than one thousand geostationary satellites that now
     orbit our planet.

       A phone call, routed through satellite service, reaches its "uplink"
     point and is directed via microwave toward one of the geostationary
     satellites (they appear to be stationary because they are rotating at the
     same apparent speed that the earth rotates), all hovering at an altitude
     of 22,300 miles above the equator. A satellite can't be anywhere else and
     be geostationary. Farther out, its velocity would carry it to outer
     space. Closer in, earth's gravity would eventually draw the satellite
     closer to earth and it would burn up upon entering the atmosphere. (There
     are hundreds of other satellites whizzing around up there, but they are
     not geostationary; they move in elliptical orbits and have shorter life
     spans.)

       The trip up to a communications satellite can start anywhere from
     Arizona to Zanzibar. Once the signal has gone those 22,300 miles up and
     back down, the terrestrial distance between caller and receiver is almost
     irrelevant. So distance becomes irrelevant to the actual operating cost
     as well.

       Some countries will open up their phone companies to such services to
     keep them in the vanguard of communications innovations. They will
     develop the system and offer it to the world on a flat-rate,
     call-anywhere basis. Those that do not offer the same service and join
     the new global plan will be left behind as technology simultaneously
     offers small uplink dishes that can tie into such celestial systems
     independently.

       In many ways the change will be reminiscent of the early days of home
     satellites, when a host of small private companies and entrepreneurs
     built up a multimillion-dollar industry making and selling satellite
     dishes for a few thousand dollars. These dishes achieved 95 percent of
     what was accomplished by the more sophisticated dishes, owned by the
     phone companies, that then sold for $500,000.