FREE LOCAL CALLS AND A FLAT RATE FOR LONG DISTANCE 

Shortly after the opening of the 21st Century you will be shopping mostly "via catalogs and two-way computers" according to the Marlborough Group in New York. 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 the economically-important data you leave in the computer each time you shop. Once that is in place world-wide, flat-rate phone service will follow. Why? Directdialing will show almost no extra operational cost phoning from New York across the world to New Delhi via satellite, than from New York across the river to New Jersey. When Arthur C. Clarke, author of the movie "2001", more than 40 science-fiction books and a thousand articles first conceived the idea of geo-stationery satellites back in 1945, even the word satellite meant something else, like a moon. His concept, outlined clearly (and incidentally was unpatented) in the October 1945 edition of the British publication "Wireless World", showed how it would work. Twenty years later it was tested by the Soviets and led to the array of more than 1,000 satellites orbiting our planet today.

A phone call, routed through satellite service, reaches its "uplink" point and is directed via microwave towards one of the geostationary satellites (they appear to be "stationary" because they are rotating as the earth rotates), all hovering at an altitude of 23,300 miles over the equator. They can't be anywhere else and be geo-stationary. Further out, their velocity would carry them to outer space. Closer in earths gravity would eventually draw the satellite closer to earth and it would burn up upon entering the atmosphere. (There are though, hundreds of other satellites whizzing around up there but they are not geo-stationary; they don't stay still, they are in elliptical orbits).

The up trip to a communications satellite can be either from Arizona or Zanzibar. Once the signal has gone 22,300 miles up and a similar distance down then the terrestrial distance between caller and receiver is almost irrelevant. So actual operating cost becomes irrelevant 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, callanywhere basis. Those that do not offer the same service and join the new global plan will be left behind as technology simultaneously offers almost insignificant-size 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 multi-million dollar industry making and selling satellite dishes for a few thousand dollars that accomplished 95 percent of what was accomplished by the more highly-engineered dishes, owned by the phone companies, that sold then for $500,000.

A totally new method of communicating data, utilizing different, continually-moving, low-level satellites will shortly enter this highly-competitive world of communications, but that is the material for a forthcoming column.

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