ViaSat-1 has already won numerous praise as satellite marvel, boasting a total capacity of 140 Gbps, which it uses to provide its Exede broadband service in remote and rural areas in the U.S. as well as to supply internet connectivity to JetBlue airplanes. The new satellite, aptly named ViaSat-2, is expected to double ViaSat-1’s capacity and greatly expand the provider’s coverage in the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean and Central America (ViaSat-1’s beams today skip over large parts of the Rocky Mountains and Western Great Plains).

The satellite hasn’t been without controversy, though, as ViaSat is switching out suppliers. Space Systems/Loral built ViaSat-1, but the two became embroiled in litigation after ViaSat accused the aerospace company of absconding with its intellectual property when it built a competing satellite for Hughes Network Systems.

That satellite became EchoStar 17, doesn’t have quite the capacity of ViaSat-1, but Hughes is using it to go head to head with ViaSat in the rural broadband market. Its Gen4 service offers speeds of 10-15 Mbps to customers, while ViaSat’s Exede service clocks in at about 12 Mbps.

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HughesNet has named the new service Gen4 and the satellite utilizes EchoStar-Hughes’ new Jupiter high-throughput technology, which expands the total capacity of the satellite to 100 Gbps. That has allowed Hughes to distribute that capacity more liberally to its customers, bumping up download speeds from 1-2 Mbps to 10-15 Mbps and upload speeds above a megabit. ViaSat launched a similarly brawny satellite last year, and began offering a $50/month 12 Mbps service in January.

Hughes service plans are comparably priced with cable broadband, ranging from $50 to $100 a month, but the satellite’s finite capacity does give the service some stiff limitations. Unlike its previous plans, these newer, faster tiers come with caps. At the low end customers are limited to 20 GB, while the upper tier taps out at 40 GB. By comparison cable operator Comcast recently raised its monthly cap from 250 GB to 300 GB a month.

What’s more, customers are restricted when they can consume that data -– on all plans, half of the monthly data bucket can only be tapped between 2 AM and 8 AM. But Hughes also seems to have done away with the old daily throttling policies that irked so many of its customers.

Before Gen4, customers technically didn’t have to deal with caps, but they were limited to daily download allotment from 250 MBs to 450 MBs. If they exceeded those caps in a 24-hour period, their connections were throttled back to dial-up speeds, returning to normal after another 24 hours. It’s not clear if Hughes is eliminating those fair-use policies completely, but it looks like customers are getting much more flexibility in how they consume their admittedly limited monthly data allocations.

Though it’s still not on par with its wireline counterparts, satellite broadband has made leaps in last year as a new generation of equipment has gone into orbit. That’s led to several new services that have bumped up the speeds available to a large swathe of the American hinterland and other underserved areas where DSL and cable aren’t options. In addition to ViaSat’s Exede and HughesNet’s Gen4, Dish Network has bought capacity from both companies, allowing it to sell a broadband service called DishNet in areas ViaSat and Hughes’ respective birds don’t cover.

Improved satellite technologies have also expanded broadband access beyond rural homes and business. ViaSat’s satellite will power JetBlue’s forthcoming in-flight Wi-Fi service, significantly boosting the speeds available to passengers while drastically lowering the cost of delivering that data. In three years, Iridium will begin launching a new constellation of 66 satellites into low-Earth orbit, which will be able to supply 8 Mbps connections not just to homes in the Midwest farmlands but to any point on the globe.

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Genachowski on Wednesday began circulating a proposed order among commissioners that, if approved, would give AT&T a free-and-clear 20 MHz of spectrum in the 2.3 GHz Wireless Communications Services (WCS) band for a new LTE network. Here’s what FCC spokeswoman Tammy Sun had to say on the matter:

“Today’s action is part of Chairman Julius Genachowski’s continued efforts to remove regulatory barriers that limit the flexible use of spectrum, which is one way he has led the Commission towards helping address the continued ‘spectrum crunch.’ By unleashing 20 megahertz of spectrum now – and up to 30 megahertz in the future – the Chairman continues to leave no stone unturned when it comes to maximizing opportunities to refill the mobile spectrum pipeline that had begun to run dry over the last decade. In addition to removing regulatory barriers, the Commission continues to push ahead on innovative spectrum solutions in addition to traditional auctions, including incentive auctions, government-commercial sharing, technology-based opportunities like small cells, and freeing up unlicensed spectrum for innovations like Wi-Fi.”

Some of you may be wondering why AT&T is getting special dispensation from the government to rejigger its airwaves while others like LightSquared and Dish Network aren’t (at least not yet). But it’s important to remember that unlike the satellite bands, WCS was always intended for wireless broadband services. The conditions of that spectrum, however, have made it impossible for any carrier to deploy a commercial network in those frequencies.

As I’ve explained in previous posts, the big problem is that a high-powered wireless network would interfere with Sirius XM’s neighboring satellite radio signals. But AT&T and Sirius hashed out a compromise that would turn 10 MHz of that spectrum into a guard bands on either side of Sirius’s spectrum, effectively ensuring that Ozzy’s Boneyard and Howard Stern broadcast without interruption.

The catch is that in order for AT&T to pull this off it needs to own pretty much the entire WCS band coast to coast, so it has been buying up licenses anywhere it can find them in the last two months, starting with the purchase of spectrum squatter NextWave Wireless.

The newly minted Competitive Carrier Association (formerly the Rural Carrier Association) has objected to those purchases, claiming that AT&T is trying to build a spectrum empire on the sly. Rather than build it with one big acquisition as it tried with T-Mobile, AT&T is buying up bits and pieces of spectrum all over the country, CCA president and CEO Steve Berry said. In addition to a half a dozen WCS license buys, AT&T is picking up 700 MHz and Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) licenses from several other sellers.

“Allowing the largest carriers to obtain unlimited amounts of spectrum on the secondary market raises serious competitive concerns,” Barry said in a CCA statement. “The only way for the FCC to truly see the devastating consequences of further spectrum aggregation is by consolidating the proposed applications.  On their own, AT&T’s proposed license acquisitions may not seem significant, but when added together, it totals to a significant amount of spectrum.”

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Called PhoneSat 1.0, the 4-inch cube is the prototype for what NASA hopes will be a fleet of miniature orbiters that can each be built for less than $3500 in materials. The smartphone is a particularly key component because it already contains much of the core technology needed in a satellite: radios, a versatile operating system, a fast processor and multiple sensors. From NASA’s website:

The Nexus One acts as the spacecraft onboard computer. Sensors determine the orientation of the spacecraft while the smartphone’s camera can be used for Earth observations. Commercial-off-the-shelf parts include a watchdog circuit that monitors the systems and reboots the phone if it stops sending radio signals.

NASA’s PhoneSat 1.0 satellite has a basic mission goal–to stay alive in space for a short period of time, sending back digital imagery of Earth and space via its camera, while also sending back information about the satellite’s health.

The next version of PhoneSat will use the newer Nexus S and will have a mission more involved than mere survival. It will carry an S-band two-way radio, which will allow NASA to control the tiny spacecraft on the ground, rather than just receive transmissions. PhoneSat 2.0 will also have solar panels to keep the phone’s battery charged, magnetorquer coils – electro-magnets that interact with Earth’s magnetic field — and reaction wheels, which will allow engineers to control the satellites orientation in space.

NASA expects to launch two PhoneSat 1.0 satellites and one Phonesat 2.0 this fall, hitching a ride on the new Antares rocket, built by Orbital Sciences Corporation. Orbital Sciences is a competitor of SpaceX (check out my feature on how satellite company Iridium and SpaceX found common cause), which designs the Falcon rocket competing with Antares for NASA contracts.

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On June 4, 2010, Matt Desch, CEO of satellite communications company Iridium, sat in his McLean, Va., office staring into a computer screen at a live video feed of a 368-ton rocket idling on a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The telecom veteran had staked Iridium’s future on a $3 billion plan to bring the company’s aging constellation of satellites into the 21st century. A key part of that plan was getting 72 next-generation satellites into orbit, and it was this rocket, now preparing for its maiden flight, that would eventually carry Iridium’s precious cargo into space.

In selecting a company to launch his satellites, Desch hadn’t opted for a tried-and-true aerospace player like Arianespace or International Launch Services. Instead, he had decided to go with the upstart Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX. Why? SpaceX had offered to launch the six-dozen satellites for half what the established players were charging, saving Iridium half-a-billion dollars.

Matt Desch

But the decision carried a huge amount of risk. While SpaceX’s entrepreneur-founder Elon Musk was already well known for his ambitious goal of privatizing space travel, his company at the time had had more failures than successes. Its previous-model rocket, the Falcon 1,misfired on each of its first three launches: the first caught fire, the engine on the second died, and on its third launch, the rocket’s two stages collided. Those failures sent the company teetering toward toward death, saved only by the Falcon 1′s fourth, successful, launch.

Now, Desch and Iridium were about to see whether SpaceX’s newest rocket, the Falcon 9, was more reliable than its predecessor — and the months leading up to June 4 hadn’t been very reassuring. The rocket was supposed to have embarked on its first flight in November of the previous year, but that launch had been postponed 10 separate times.

The rocket had finally reached the pad, but as Desch watched from his office, there had already been one false start, the launch aborted due to an errant sensor reading. If SpaceX couldn’t light the fuse by 3 PM, the mission would have to be rescheduled once again.

Another string of failures could endanger Iridium’s exacting launch schedule, or worse, send SpaceX spiraling into bankruptcy and Iridium scrambling to find another launch provider. The biggest concern, though, was the reaction of Iridiums’s bankers. Desch had negotiated a $492 millon contract with SpaceX — the largest commercial launch contract in history – but because of SpaceX’s track record, the consortium of European banks underwriting the whole project wanted to see a successful launch of the Falcon 9 before they put pen to paper.

As Desch put it: “Bankers don’t like to see explosions.”

Fifteen minutes before the launch window closed, the Falcon 9′s first-stage engines ignited and the rocket lifted off. Six minutes later it achieved its target altitude and placed a dummy capsule in orbit 155 miles above the Earth. The normally stoic Desch let out a cheer of elation. Outside his office his employees celebrated — high fives all around.

A week later, Desch was in Paris hamming it up with the bankers, and true to their word, the financiers signed off on the contract. When Musk attended Iridium’s investor conference in New Orleans later that year he was treated like a superhero — it was like “having Tony Stark, a real-life Iron Man” in the room, Desch said.

Elon Musk

The following is the never-before-told story of how Iridium placed a huge bet on SpaceX that wound up paying off. In a series of interviews, Desch shared with GigaOM the details about how a satellite communications company struggling with its future found common cause with a scrappy startup that wanted to broaden the frontiers of space exploration.

Iridium didn’t need SpaceX to survive, but by placing its faith its Elon Musk’s company it found a way to overhaul one of the largest satellite constellations in the heavens on a shoestring budget — and trade up its old voice-centric business model for one focused on data. In exchange, SpaceX got the major contract it needed to firmly establish itself as a powerhouse in commercial space flight.

A mobile network hurtling through space at 17,000 mph

Iridium was born out of the satellite communications boom of the late 1990s, riding a wave of speculation that satellite players like itself, Globalstar and Orbcomm could build a truly global mobile network for the monied classes. Backed heavily by Motorola, it activated its constellation in November 1999 and began selling its first bulky satellite phones around the world. Nine months later it filed for bankruptcy,

At that point it was clear that satellite telephony wasn’t going to even compete with cellular, much less replace it. There was a good chance that Iridium’s $5 billion to $6 billion network would have been decommissioned entirely, letting the satellites fall out of orbit and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, creating one of the most spectacular pyrotechnics display the world has every seen. But at the last minute, a consortium of investors bought Iridium’s extraterrestrial assets for pennies on the dollar and restarted satellite phone service in 2001 with much more modest ambitions.

Iridium isn’t your typical satellite communications company. It’s not tossing a few satellites into orbit that are hovering at fixed points above specific continents. Instead, it operates a constellation of 66 birds that cover the entirety of the Earth’s surface from pole to pole. Each satellite travels at an orbital velocity of 17,000 mph on dispersed planes that intersect on the Earth’s axis, meaning no matter where you’re standing – or floating — on the surface of the earth, you’re in view of multiple Iridium satellites.

That kind of network may not be useful to your typical consumer or business user, but it’s extremely attractive to a certain set of professionals – military, international contractors, merchant marines, field scientists and surveyors – that travel to the far corners of the globe.

When Desch took over as CEO in 2006, Iridium had cemented a close relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense, and was expanding into the private sector. He took the company public, made it a profitable venture, and expanded the company’s portfolio to include data and machine-to-machine services communications (for companies or organizations that want to keep track of their assets even when they are in the middle of the ocean or in the remotest jungle). Desch has doubled Iridium’s subscribers to 576,000 in six years, according to the company’s last earnings report.

Iridium has some big accounts like FedEx and UPS but many of its customers are smaller outfits. Iridium satellites track dog sleds as they race across Alaska in the Iditarod, and they provide crucial communications for the relief workers of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in war-torn and diaster-stricken regions of the world.

Desch said Iridium no longer has any interest in challenging the mobile carrier powers or moving beyond basic voice and data connectivity. “I hate to use the term dumb pipe,” he said. “It has such negative connotations. But I have no problem with the term because no one can supply the kind of dumb pipe we can.”

A fascination with anything that flies 

Desch started his career at Bell Labs 30 years ago, and since then he’s made the rounds through the telecom industry. He was president of the now defunct Nortel Networks’ wireless division, where he oversaw the construction of some of the  world’s biggest 2G networks. In 2002, he was tapped to become CEO of Telcordia, the former research arm of the regional Bell phone companies. He sits on President Obama’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee and has either chaired or sat on the boards of pretty much every U.S. telecom industry trade and standards organization.

An Iridium Flare over upstate New York

Desch grew up during the Apollo Moon flights, and has always been fascinated by anything that flies. Though he’s never left the troposphere, he pilots his single-engine Cessna T210 several times a month. When discussing Iridium, Desch never fails to mention that the satellite constellation has become an object of obsession among star gazers. All of Iridium’s satellites have flat, door-sized, highly-reflective antennas. When those antennas catch the sun’s rays just right they produce a “flare” 3o times brighter than Venus in the night sky.

When Desch accepted his new role at Iridium, he was almost immediately handed a huge task: to replace Iridium’s aging constellation with a new generations of satellites. It’s current network is already well past its anticipated operational lifespan of seven to 10 years, and several satellites have already malfunctioned or have tumbled back into the atmosphere. Iridium 33 was decommissioned in a more dramatic fashion in 2009 when it collided over Siberia with a defunct Russian communications satellite at 22,000 mph.

Iridium replaced those defunct or lost satellites with in-orbit spares, and Desch said that the company could keep the current fleet going until 2017 when it hopes to complete its replacement. But there is definitely a sense of urgency. Iridium may be able to squeeze some more operational life out of its satellites, but it doesn’t change the fact they’re already obsolete.

In the last 10 years, mobile communications has shifted its focus from voice to mobile broadband. Satellite broadband technology has made huge leaps. ViaSat in October put into orbit a satellite with a total network capacity of 140 Gbps, allowing it to offer speeds up to 12 Mbps to customers on the ground. Iridium’s closest competitor Globalstar, which runs a constellation of 40 satellites, is already one-third of the way through its next-generation satellite deployment. Globalstar’s orbiters only support speeds of 256 kbps, but even those sub-broadband connections put Iridium at a significant disadvantage.

Iridium’s network can only support a 10 kbps earth-to-orbit connection, which is pretty much the speed of a 1990 dial-up modem. That might be fine for downloading email without attachments from an ocean-bound oil tanker or sending out the GPS coordinates of a polar expedition. But in an age of multi-megabit connections to smartphones, those speeds just don’t cut it.

Desch’s big bet

Between 2015 and 2017, Iridium plans to replace every single one of its 66 current satellites with new Thales Alenia-built orbiters, and also throw up six spares. Called Iridium Next, the constellation will boast device connection of speeds of well over 1 Mbps to mobile devices and 8 Mbps to dish antennas, and will significantly boost the capacity of the overall satellite grid. When the constellation is complete, Desch said, Iridium will be the only communications company in the world that can deliver a megabit or more of a bandwidth to any point on the globe.

To get such a huge payload into low-Earth orbit, Desch didn’t just need a launch provider to supply multiple rockets, he needed one that could reliably send those rockets into space every few months starting in 2015. Once Iridium puts its first batch of satellites into orbit, the others need to go up in rapid succession.

Iridium’s satellites aren’t just bouncing signals back down to the Earth’s surface. They’re inter-networked. They’re passing calls among one another in a cosmic game of hot potato until one of those satellites flies over one of four ground stations where it finally connects the call to the terrestrial network.

Having a 1 Mbps connection to a new satellite does little good if the satellite completing the chain can only support dial-up speeds. So Iridium Next won’t be open for business until the full complement of 66 new satellites is in orbit.

Finally, Iridium had to buy those launches on the cheap, according to mobile satellite services analyst Tim Farrar. The original Iridium constellation in 1999 was a multi-billion-dollar debacle. So Iridium is determined to get its next-generation network up on a $3 billion budget, Farrar said.

“Iridium really had to go with SpaceX, because more established players have found their launch services in heavy demand in recent years and so have been raising prices,” Farrar said.

For $492 million, SpaceX would deliver eight launches, while any other rocket supplier would have charged $1 billion for the same services, Desch said. But Iridium also hedged its bets. It contracted with ISC Kosmotras – a launch consortium between Russia, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan — to serve as a second launch provider and as a backup in case SpaceX is delayed.

Still, it wasn’t an easy decision, Desch said. Iridium first started negotiating with SpaceX in 2006, when its rockets started falling out of the sky. It wouldn’t matter how much of a deal SpaceX cut if it couldn’t deliver a reliable launch vehicle or ceased operations.

“Our view was always that SpaceX was going to be successful,” Desch said. “What we weren’t sure about was when they would be successful.” Iridium had some leeway since its first launch wasn’t scheduled until 2015, but it couldn’t push its launch date out much further. At that point Iridium’s old orbiters would be 15 years old, long past their original expiration dates. It needed to get the new birds up but before the old ones start failing en masse.

Iridium is by no means Space X’s most important customer — that would be NASA. Nor is Iridium SpaceX’s first commercial satellite customer. But the size and scope of the Iridium deal were key to establishing the fledgling aerospace company as a heavyweight in the commercial launch industry, said SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who led negotiations with the satellite operator.

Gwynne Shotwell

“We definitely knew the significance of that deal,” Shotwell said. “It was the largest commercial launch contract at the time. No one else has ordered six or seven launches. … It’s helped us out in every deal we’ve gotten since.”

Houston, do we have a problem?

Earlier this month, Iridium revealed in its second-quarter earnings call that it was canceling its first Falcon 9 launch, and had decided to go with backup ICS Kosmotras for its first flight. Desch said there were no problems or delays; rather Iridium was just minimizing costs. By packing 10, rather than nine, satellites onto each SpaceX rocket, Iridium says it can reduce the number of launches from eight to seven, saving an estimated $15 million. But Desch added that Iridium also wanted to buy SpaceX more time.

“It’s a smarter strategy for in-orbit testing and provides us some additional cost savings,” Desch said. “It also gives SpaceX a little more time to get through the two dozen or so launches that are on their manifest before Iridium Next.”

Ironically, the greatest risk to Iridium now isn’t the possibility of SpaceX’s failure, but the possibility that SpaceX becomes too successful, according to satellite communications analyst Farrar.

“Their risk has always been that SpaceX gets a lot of money from NASA and so will likely put them first,” Farrar said. “That’s also the exciting, novel stuff like manned spaceflight, so people naturally gravitate towards it. Launching commercial satellites is a less exciting business requiring a lot of repetitive, careful engineering.”

Dragon Spacecraft

SpaceX has been on quite the roll lately. It hasn’t suffered a single failure in its three Falcon 9 launches, the last of which delivered the company’s Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station on a resupply mission. Earlier this month, SpaceX won the ultimate prize: a $440 million contract from NASA to design a manned spacecraft to shuttle its now-grounded astronauts into orbit.

When asked if SpaceX’s recent success jeopardized Iridium’s tight launch schedule, Desch laughed. He admitted that he freaks out a little when Musk goes off on one of his soliloquies about exploring other planets or talks up new rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy designed to propel astronauts on their extraplanetary adventures. Desch just needs to get to low-Earth orbit, not Mars.

But Desch said Iridium has SpaceX’s full attention. Iridium Next is still SpaceX’s single largest commercial contract — it’s not going to get pushed to the wayside no matter how many sexier missions the company lands. Desch has been working with Musk and Shotwell for nearly six years, sticking with the company through its lowest points. He believes that SpaceX will remember its early friends. As he told analysts at Iridium’s earning call: “We knew them when they weren’t quite as cool.”

Iridium flare photo courtesy of Flickr user Gadget_Guru

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Kymeta is the second startup to be spun out of Intellectual Ventures’ vast intellectual property portfolio, having launched its first, nuclear power startup TerraPower, in 2008. But as my colleague Jeff Roberts points out, IV’s primary business is that of a patent troll, vigorously pursuing legal action against companies that don’t agree to license its vast trove of intellectual property. IV, however, has been trying to clean up its image, insisting it will use its intellectual property for both public good and technological innovation. According to its website, Kymeta is the first commercial offspring from a decade of work in the field of metamaterials:

Kymeta is the result of our patience and persistence. Based on IV’s metamaterials satellite antenna technology (MSA-T), Kymeta’s mTenna products will simplify the satellite connections needed for broadband Internet on the go, anywhere in the world.

Why not just develop this product ourselves? IV creates new companies like Kymeta (or previously TerraPower) to focus on bringing particularly promising new inventions to market so that our inventors can continue doing what they do best – dreaming up the next big idea.

Kymeta will part from IV with a fistful of cash, $12 million, supplied by some impressive backers: Bill Gates, Liberty Global and Lux Capital. It plans to put those funds to use building briefcase-sized satellite antennas that can be mounted on planes, trains, boats and ships and just about any highway vehicle.

Satellite may not seem like the most cost-effective or efficient way of providing broadband to a train or bus full of laptop-wielding passengers, but the technology has come a long way in recent years. Last year, ViaSat put a satellite into orbit that can support up to 140 Gbps of capacity throughout its North American footprint. Those impressive delivery capabilities mean ViaSat and its partner Dish Network can offer 12 Mbps downlink and 3 Mbps uplink speeds for little more than the cost of a cable or DSL connection.

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Me, too. If you pride yourself on not paying for cable or satellite, you will be scrambling to watch. But, if you are one of the nearly 100 million households that get ESPN, you still might be scrambling — unless your cable provider or ISP has the right deal.

To be sure, ESPN’s 2012 Wimbledon presentation is a milestone (and people who know me know how much I resist calling anything on the Internet a “milestone”). When ESPN starts its 12-year exclusive run June 25th, U.S. fans will, for the first time, will be able to watch every possible Wimbledon match in real time coast to coast. No tape delays.

NBC, which held the rights for 43 years, also held us in thrall, manipulating a mix of live and tape delay to avoid preempting some of its lucrative Today Show hours and refusing to allow other rightsholders to carry the matches that didn’t fit. Particularly galling in this social media age: the practice of airing matches live in the east and tape delaying them for the west.

But NBC had one aspect in its favor: when matches were live they were broadcast and available to anyone with a signal. The current version of NBC Sports probably would spread matches across NBC and its cable networks, as it did to mixed effect for the Stanley Cup playoffs and will for the Olympics, but the major matches would be broadcast. This year’s finals will be broadcast, too — but they will be taped and aired later on ABC. All the live action is pay-for-play in one way or another.

NBC started to stretch the live streaming boundaries in 2009, streaming all of its broadcast hours plus some concurrent matches.

Now ESPN is pushing it even further. Here’s how Wimbledon 2012 will be shown on U.S. digital platforms — and who will have access:

ESPN3: More than 800 hours covering matches on all available TV courts (up to nine) will be live streamed “first ball to last ball each day” and available on demand. It includes multi-screen viewing.

• Who can get it: The live and on-demand broadband network is available to about 73 million video and ISP subscribers whose providers have deals with ESPN. Another 21 million U.S. college students and U.S.0based military personnel have free access through campus or base networks. But paying for ESPN through cable or satellite is no guarantee; ESPN covers nearly 100 million households and a lot of those will be left out if there is no deal in place.
• Video affiliates: Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks, Verizon FiOS and Comcast Xfinity TV.
• ISP affiliates: Here’s the full list. You can also check by zip code and provider and follow instructions to complain if you don’t.
• How: WatchESPN.com. Video subscribers and Verizon broadband can access through WatchESPN apps on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android. Also ESPN on Xbox LIVE for Gold members.

WatchESPN: In addition to ESPN3, video subscribers can watch linear channels ESPN and ESPN2 live on the WatchESPN apps and at WatchESPN.com. Most Wimbledon coverage is on ESPN2.

ESPN Mobile: If you don’t have WatchESPN, the mobile experience will be all about info — point-by-point coverage on mobile browsers and the ESPN ScoreCenter app (iPhone, Android, Windows) plus some video highlights. Unless you pay for ESPN MobileTV through AT&T ($10/month), Alltel, Sprint TV (free with certain data packages and devices) or Verizon ($3/day, #10/month). Then you get 105 hours of live ESPN/ESPN2.

More details here about all the coverage, including the second year of ESPN 3D, multi-screen access on DirecTV.

ESPN is working closely with the BBC, which also outlined its plans. That includes two full matches on the iPlayer every day, the BBC Sport app for connected TV, and up to six live matches streams on the BBC Sport site.

Not a cord-cutter’s Wimbledon

Intrepid fans who don’t pay for video and don’t have access to ESPN3 through ISPs will find ways to watch matches but there is no easy, legit solution other than the limited amount of mobile TV video. No other standalone subscriptions. ESPN needs to provide value for its high-end fees and does so, in part, by protecting how its programming is distributed online and across devices. Offer Wimbledon outside that ecosystem and the value starts to dissipate.

Live sports continues to be one of the top reasons people will pay for video and ESPN is doing everything it can to protect that, including airing everything it can. Tennis Everywhere, as long as someone pays.

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Deploying any kind of service on WCS has been cluster-you-know-what for any operator that has made the attempt. ExtremeTech provides an excellent description of the problems of making WCS workable for mobile broadband:

WCS licenses were auctioned off by the FCC in 1997. The FCC hoped that it would be used rather quickly, but the restrictions that WCS imposed on licensees caused issues. For one, the power and emissions restrictions made it nearly impossible to deploy any sort of terrestrial network technology.

The other issue was that satellite radio (officially known as the Satellite Digital Audio Radio Service, or SDARS) lived in between two halves of the WCS frequency range. That meant that terrestrial network technologies would easily block out satellite radio signals from receivers. This alone has severely paralyzed efforts to make the WCS frequencies usable.

AT&T and BellSouth, which was eventually acquired by Ma Bell, experimented with the band for years, launching trial pre-standard WiMAX networks in several markets (Oddly, one of those markets was Pahrump, Nev., the brothel capital of the U.S.). But neither company could make the technology work, and both were constantly running up against the protests of Sirius and XM, which themselves merged in 2008.

But apparently these old antagonists have come to an accord. From the FCC filing:

In order to resolve these issues, AT&T and Sirius XM met to discuss whether their differences could be bridged and have reached an accommodation with significant concessions on both sides. The accommodation, if accepted in its entirety, will enable the adoption of technical rules satisfactory to both interests and allow licenses in the 2.3 GHz band to exploit the most efficient new mobile broadband standards, including LTE, while limiting the potential interference to satellite radio reception to respectable levels.

The major concession appears to be on AT&T’s part. The carrier has agreed to carve out a 5 MHz guard band on either side of Sirius’s satellite spectrum, creating in essence a no-man’s zone where no transmissions can travel. That’s quite a big deal actually: As little as 10 MHz can support a full-fledged HSPA network and is equivalent to half the LTE capacity AT&T has deployed in most markets.

But AT&T figures it is better than not being able to use the spectrum at all — and risk losing it. In fact, AT&T has been trying to sell off the same WCS airwaves it now proposes to make guard bands.

If the FCC grants AT&T’s request it will be left with between 10 and 20 MHz of remaining spectrum over which to launch LTE. It may seem like a win for all parties involved, but this won’t be an automatic approval for the FCC. AT&T is the largest spectrum holder in WCS, but there are other licensees that could potentially get screwed by this proposal. As satellite broadband analyst Tim Farrar points out on his blog, NextWave owns a lot of WCS, and nearly half of its holdings are in the same blocks that AT&T wants to make off-limits.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Nicolas Raymond

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We tend to associate femtocells with spot coverage: Having trouble getting a signal inside your house? Well, call up your carrier and chances are it will offer you a femtocell, delivering a private signal in your home. But RascomStar is taking that same concept and extending to entire villages and towns in the Congo. This summer, it’s deploying a pilot network of 50 miniature base stations — supplied by U.K. femto vendor ip.access — in communities all over the Congo. RascomStar plans to expand the pilot into a larger-scale commercial launch in 2013, as well as extend it to at least 10 other African countries.

RascomStar’s satellite network plays a critical role here. Mobile communications may use the airwaves to deliver their voice and data payloads, but they rely on wireline networks to take over once those transmissions hit the tower. Since telecom infrastructure is scarce and far between in remote communities, RascomStar is contracting with ViaSat to backhaul those femtos, bouncing their transmissions off orbital satellites back to the RascomStar’s core network in Brazzaville, the capital of the Congo.

Operators all over the world use satellite to backhaul tower sites in remote locales, but the combination of femtocells with satellite adds a new twist. Femtocells and picocells are designed to (BE?) self-configuring devices that can be installed much like you would INSTALL a consumer Wi-Fi access point.

If RascomStar takes this trial to its logical conclusion, it could have a big liberating effect on network deployment. Rather than send engineers, technicians and trucks to individual communities to build towers and install costly base stations, a carrier could practically build remote networks via mail, shipping femtos out to isolated communities where someone with a basic technical knowledge could get a wireless network up in running in a matter of hours.

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“These guys have the pipe and the bandwidth,” Ars Technica reported Aragon as saying. “If they start capping things, it gets difficult.”

At issue isn’t just the 250 GB monthly cap that Comcast has imposed on its residential broadband customers, but the fact that it’s making exceptions to that cap. Content streamed to Comcast’s Xfinity app in the Xbox is off the meter, while content coming from other providers is counted against that monthly allotment. While Netflix , Sony and other over-the-top video providers aren’t happy with the situation, my colleague Stacey Higginbotham writes that Comcast may be well within its rights, since it’s using its own infrastructure to deliver the Xfinity service and can therefore treat it as a special case.

However, as my colleague Daniel Frankel at paidContent proposes, Comcast may be biting the hand that feeds it. Providing broadband services, which in turn bring third-party content into the home, is turning out to be a much better business model for cable operators than providing that content on their own. Cable providers are losing video customers and finding their programming margins squeezed, but those same customers remain willing to pay big bucks for raw broadband access.

Picture courtesy of Flickr user brizzlebornandbred.

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