Entrepreneurs Envision Airplane-To-Ground Internet System Constantly Circling Airplanes Would Be Cheaper Than Satellites, Angel Technologies Officials Believe

Call it a communications tower in the sky - specially equipped airplanes circling 24 hours a day 10 miles up, providing high-speed wireless Internet access and other data services to people on the ground.

A slew of companies are offering or plan to offer wireless data links that would let customers surf the Net, send and receive e-mail, faxes or files from their computers at home or work. Sophisticated, cellular-like networks on terra firma or satellites out in space would carry the load.

But a small St. Louis company thinks it has a better idea: Put all the hardware in the air, right over our heads.

Angel Technologies Corp.’s proposed system is “basically a tall tower in the sky,” President Peter Diamandis said.

Flying in a circular path between 52,000 and 60,000 feet, a plane with a pod attached to its underside carrying an antenna and other communications equipment would beam wireless data services to and from a specific metropolitan area, explained Chief Executive Officer Marc Arnold.

The range of the service would be limited - 50 miles to 75 miles in diameter - and beyond that, people would lose the signal.

To provide round-the-clock service to just one metro area, three piloted planes, each flying consecutive 8-hour missions are needed, Arnold said.

The planes would need FAA clearance and certification to fly.

To send and receive signals, people would need an 18-inch dish mounted on a rooftop or outside a window.

It’s a new twist on an old concept.

In the early 1960s, a converted Army plane transmitted public television signals to schools in the Midwest for several years, said a former public broadcasting engineer, Peter Fannon.

And for 12 years, the federal government has beamed radio signals, later followed by TV signals, into Cuba via a transmitter aboard a tethered balloon 10,000 feet above the Florida Keys.

More recently, President Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig Jr., has been involved in a project called Sky Station that would provide worldwide high-speed wireless Internet access, mobile phone service and other data communications via blimp-like aircraft.

Angel’s proposal would be a tough sell to investors and would-be customers, said Elliott Hamilton, a vice president with The Strategis Group, a wireless research company here.

“If I were a customer, would I depend upon these planes flying overhead?” he asks. “I don’t see this ever going off the ground. In the early days of cellular, people talked about cellular sky pilots. Why have a cell site on the ground when you could have it up in the air? No one ever did anything.”

For Angel’s plan to work, it needs a big slice of the public airwaves. Angel executives said they won’t bid for airwaves licenses, but want to team up with companies that already hold them. Negotiations, they say, are under way. In December, the FCC will begin auctioning licenses for big chunks of spectrum at frequencies that would be well-suited to Angel’s proposed operation.

In the meantime, a prototype of the special airplane Angel expects to use is being built by Scaled Composites in Mojave, Calif. The first flight test is expected next year. Scaled Composites created the Voyager, which in 1986 became the first aircraft to fly around the world without refueling.

If Angel’s plan gets off the ground, executives hope to begin offering service in selected metropolitan markets in 2000.

Angel executives insist that the company will be able to provide service more cheaply than rivals using wireless networks on the ground and satellite systems in space. But they would not offer financial details to support this.

“As far as the economics, it’s true the terrestrial networks have relatively high upfront capital costs, but once you build those networks, you have very low costs. Their system would have a continuous high operating costs,” said Hamilton.

Arnold said financing has been lined up only for building the prototype plane and testing it. He said each plane costs at least a few million dollars to make.