Motorola India Electronics, the wholly owned subsidiary of Motor-ola Inc, is to enter into alliance with Teledesic which is in the process of building a global, broadband `Internet-in-the-sky' using a constellation of low-earth-orbit satellites.
The city-based Motorola India will be involved in the project development and deployment for this $9 billion network.
The project will create the world's first network to provide affordable, worldwide, fibre-like access to telecommunications services such as broadband Internet access, videoconferencing, high-quality voice and other digital data needs.
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Motorola will be the prime contractor for the global technology team that will head the engineering and construction activities in which the software content has been valued at $3 billion.
Motorola India Electronics is likely to bag a major chunk of this development contract and will be in liaison with worldwide Motorola development centres.
"The decision to award development work to Motorola India Electronics has come through owing to the high levels of quality being maintained at the centre," an industry analyst said.
Motorola India Electronics is among the few development centres globally which has achieved level 5 of the capability maturity model of the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.
The Teledesic network will consist of 288 operational satellites, divided into 12 planes, each with 24 satellites. To make efficient use of radio spectrum, frequencies are allocated dynamically and reused many times within each satellite footprint.
The Teledesic network can support over 500 megabits per second of data to and from user terminals within a 100km radius.
The Teledesic network supports bandwidth-on-demand, allowing a user to request and release capacity as needed. This enables users to pay only for the capacity they actually use, and for the network to support a much higher number of users.
This worldwide network is expected to revolutionise data transfer technology and will extend the existing terrestrial, fibre-based infrastructure to provide advanced information services anywhere on the globe. Teledesic does not intend to market services directly but will enable service providers in countries worldwide to extend their network, both in terms of geographic scope and in the kind of services they can offer.
Motorola India Electronics posted a net profit of Rs 4.59 crore on sales of Rs 39.63 crore for the year-ended March 31, 1998, an increase of 20 per cent over the previous year.