An interesting site; tons of links & info on constellations in general,
Teledesic & Iridium in particular.
His SaVi projections of planned footprint coverage of both Iridium & Teledesic
are both highly interesting.
Lloyd Wood, the guy who maintains the site, is a PhD student who
obviously thinks _a lot_ about these things. The stuff on IP over LEO vs.GEO
is quite good, and he puts himself clearly in the anti-ATM camp with:
>ATM over satellite
>
>The ATM over satellite page is maintained by my colleague Tolga.
>
>If you think that a protocol developed for permanent, high-bandwidth,
fixed, error-free
>fibre links is really useful in lower-bandwidth satellite constellations with
>rapidly changing geometries in bursty-error space I wish you lots of luck.
ATM will
>have to be hacked heavily (particularly in the adaption layer), to the
point where
>it will hardly be recognisable as ATM, in order to truly support satellite
links. As if
>ATM wasn't complex enough already.
>
>I don't believe in ATM, and this Netheads vs Bellheads article by Steve G.
Steinberg
>will give you some of the background that underlies such heresy.
Ron