Ticking Time Bomb This time is not like any other time in history, and it means the difference between life and death and prosperity and poverty. This time is unique because we live in an information rich world where information that used to take years, or even generations, to transport, can now be sent around the world in milliseconds. I first heard talk of Internet time back in 1994 when I visited the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. I was with friends and we walked out of a building in a parking lot when someone on a cellular phone said to me, “I love you, my wife loves you, she loves you, and the kids love you.” I am not making this up. These words came over the Internet to my ear from one of the professors I was traveling with in a matter of seconds. As we continued to talk, my friend commented to me, “You know you are really traveling a lot these days with those cellular phones!” It seemed obvious that the “Internet,” as we called it then, would be a great advantage to humanity in time of war. Because the news of war travels the fastest, and can affect all humanity instantly. But it was also clear that its greatest advantage was during war. The Internet’s ability to deliver accurate, up-to-date news would be essential to the survival of mankind in a time of war. We have now reached that war—a war that will determine the fate of the planet. When I started my journey down the path of developing the first commercial satellite Internet, it became clear to me that an important part of the equation for providing an information-rich Internet was the need for satellites that were capable of being used during war. Since then we have continued our work at Iridium, where we are building a new kind of satellite communication system—a system that can deliver Internet-like capability anywhere on the globe where there is a direct line of sight to our satellites. Our new system is designed to handle the needs of military personnel in war zones, rescue and disaster workers, and other groups who want to stay connected to each other, but are not in a position to have a communications infrastructure in place in war zones. This new system has been called Iridium OpenPort. It will utilize both Iridium Next and Iridium Direct technologies to create the global system of interconnected communications that is so important to a war-capable world. Although our new system will be in place before we complete the final steps of our development of Iridium Next and Iridium Direct, we have already made substantial progress towards completing our work. We have a solid path to have our new system completed in less than one year. This is why it is important to me to make every effort to move us forward as quickly as possible in the development of this new and improved communications system. We must not be distracted by issues that do not pertain to the war-readiness of our system and that do not contribute to our mission to deliver a global communications system in an information-rich world. I am confident that after decades of intense effort, we will have finally reached the goal we have been working toward for so long—a war-capable satellite communications system. We owe it to our users, investors and society to make sure that this new system is ready to meet the needs of war. We must never allow our dedication to this mission to become compromised by those who want to prevent our work from ever progressing. The Internet is a tremendously useful communications tool that has developed into a great commercial communications network. If the information it carried were delivered on paper or on a DVD, the communication network would be called “news” and would be free. But with the Internet we have an unparalleled opportunity to deliver on an almost infinitely broader scale—the delivery of information that changes the world. It’s clear that the Internet is the communications network of the 21st Century, but if we are going to reap the benefits of this new communication tool, we will have to help the Internet fulfill its great destiny. Iridium I One of the biggest differences between the Internet of today and the military versions of the Internet is that today’s Internet transmits information in what is called 64 Kbit/sec, where 64 is the speed in bits per second and K means “kilobit.” This is an abbreviation of kilobit/second. The K stands for kilo—with a capital K. But in military applications where the data transfer rate is in Mbit/sec, the K in Mbit/sec refers to “kilo” with a lower case k—a “K.” You could refer to the network as the Kilobyte Internet or Kbytes—with a small k. So a 64 Kbit/sec Internet would be a 64-K Kb/sec Internet, and a 4 Mbit/sec Internet would be a 4 M Kb/sec Internet. In military terminology, we have to be sure to be specific with our symbols and abbreviations because there are many meanings for them. For example, in medicine there is a difference between a C, standing for “Centimeter,” and a KB, standing for “Kilobyte” in the data transmission size and speed. There are many reasons why our military could not depend on an Internet as data communications tool. One reason is that military personnel rely on their radios much more than civilians. A military team that is trying to escape a battle zone or rescue someone needs the ability to communicate at a rate much greater than 64 Kb/sec or 4 M Kb/sec. The average person who has a home computer has at least 200 GB of data on his hard drive—a lot of video and audio, but not much of any other data. So it might seem that building a network that would work in the military for this consumer would be quite easy. But even though he has a lot of data on his hard drive, he rarely receives it in more than an hour. If the Internet were the communication network of the military today, in a typical evacuation situation, the military might first wait for the police to arrive at a dangerous scene, as much of a safety issue as the situation was a military one. If it took them over an hour to send some initial information to people involved in the rescue mission, everyone would be delayed—an even bigger problem. In addition, even if they used the Internet for communication and it took an hour for the first transmission to get to the people needing help, the information could easily be relayed to another source at a slightly faster rate. In a war zone, it is hard to predict how much time will elapse before a particular transmission is received. That’s why people on the battlefield today in Iraq and Afghanistan often carry walkie-talkies and try to maintain constant radio contact. They need this capability to get quick information because they don’t know how long it will take to get an answer back from the base camp where the information is received. That’s why our military has always had different systems for different levels of communications. The Internet could allow an instant communication medium but it’s not used for those kinds of responses—it’s used for immediate communications. It’s not too hard to imagine the consequences of relying on the Internet in some of these situations. Imagine you were planning a trip to the next shopping center in your area and you decided to use your laptop and the Internet to make your travel arrangements. You would be typing your travel plans into the web browser and clicking through to the web sites of your local hotel and restaurant. You would look for a particular room at a particular hotel and book it for yourself with reservations made and made payable to you. You would order a delicious dinner for two for an evening and then you would pay for it and wait for the confirmation e-mail to arrive. It might be delayed and you might have been waiting there for five or 10 minutes or even an hour. But you might just pay for it anyway—it is already sitting in your memory. When you arrive at your hotel, the hotel has checked you in and you start looking around for your room. But it is now three in the morning and you are too tired to check in. The lobby is deserted except for a cleaning crew, who tells you there is a power failure and asks if you will sleep in your car for the night. As you pull your car in, your laptop goes crazy. The screen comes up with thousands of red warning messages, every screen flashing at you at once. One screen says “your room reservation has expired!”, while another says “your room reservation has been cancelled!” There are thousands of messages, and none of them say what the cause of the problem was. After three or four minutes of this chaos, you regain some sense and sit down to try to shut down the computer and restart it. As you type in the restart instructions, another window