Page 30 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

1. SATELLITES AS WORLDWIDE CHANGE AGENTS 7

also providing the paging service for a large percentage of the U.S. public, includ-
ing a high percentage of doctors. This disrupted the medical system of the entire
United States, and thousands of operations and the provision of emergency care at
hospitals all over America were thrown into a great tangle. On the Evening News
Hour with Jim Lehrer, the executive director of the Satellite Industry Association
and I were invited to explain how not only the United States but the entire world
was now dependent on hundreds of communications satellites that provide com-
munications for business, education, health care, and news. We made clear that
improved restoration planning was critical to avoid a repeat of the "satellite pag-
ing crisis" of the day.
On a more positive note, Japan has turned to satellites in the wake of the great
Kobe earthquake of the early 1990s. When the earthquake hit, all terrestrial com-
munications via fiber optics and coax cable were instantly destroyed. Only the
wireless satellite circuits for national and international connectivity survived. To-
day, throughout Japan, there is a Local Government Wide Area Network
(LOWAN) that consists of over 5,000 satellite terminals that have been installed
against the possibility of another major earthquake disaster, and soon this network
will include 10,000 very small aperture antennas (VSATs). Around the globe, sat-
ellites are increasingly seen as a way to maintain communications in case of a nat-
ural or man-made disaster or terrorist attack. No other technology interconnects
the world so incredibly well and reaches so many remote locations. Some 220
countries and territories are linked together via satellite. Fiber optic systems con-
nect less than half that number of countries. The smallest, most isolated, and most
land-locked countries and territories in the world are linked via satellite. As you
see later, this has changed things forever.
One can argue that the impact of satellite communications around the world on
business and the citizenry has been good, bad, and occasionally even indifferent. In
the chapters that follow, we see evidence of all three results.

SATELLITES HAVE CHANGED THE WORLD AS MUCH
AS TV OR THE TELEPHONE

Change spawned by electronic connectivity is everywhere—from news to terror-
ism, from education and health care to warfare. Marshall McLuhan, the Father of
the "Global Village," was wrong—or at least only partially right—when he said
that the new "cool" and "mentally involving" media of TV was the message! As
we explore our electronic world, we find it is actually much more complex than
even McLuhan sought to describe.
However, the futurist James Naisbitt (1980) was probably right when he sug-
gested that global connectivity was perhaps of equal or greater importance to media
content in shaping today's world. Naisbitt thus challenged McLuhan when he sug-
gested that instantaneous distribution of information globally was the key to the .fu-