LightSquared's mobile hopes to rise with satellite

The satellite's reflector -- the dish antenna that will send and receive signals from users on Earth -- is among the biggest ever at 22 meters (72 feet) across. The six-ton craft, about the size of a small school bus, has 11,900 watts of power for those transmissions, compared with 9,000 watts for Inmarsat, a current-generation communications satellite, Surface said.

The edge in terms of spot beams

SkyTerra-1 also has the edge in terms of "spot beams," which can be moved around to cover different parts of a region. These can be used to quickly boost communications capacity in a given area, such as the site of a natural disaster, Surface said. SkyTerra-1 can have more than 500 spot beams working at the same time, compared with 200 for Inmarsat, the next most powerful communications satellite, he said.

Once it reaches orbit, the satellite will follow the Earth as it revolves, remaining in its designated spot at 101.3 degrees West longitude. It will provide coverage across Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico as well as the continental masses of the three North American nations. According to the terms of its spectrum licenses, LightSquared is required to reach 92 percent of the U.S. population by the end of 2014. The satellite will link back to the Internet via four ground stations, arrays of dishes located near Ottawa and Saskatoon in Canada and near Dallas and Napa, California.

The satellite

To communicate with the satellite, users will have to have an unobstructed view of the part of the sky where SkyTerra-1 is in orbit. But they won't have to point their phones at the satellite, Surface said.

The satellite service should be able to deliver speeds of about 300K bps (bits per second) to 400K bps, enough for basic e-mail and for voice service, which will use VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol), Surface said.