Teledesic was a 1990s proposal to build a commercial
broadband satellite constellation for
Internet services. The proposal was extremely ambitious, and was gradually scaled
back in complexity and number of satellites as market expectations for the sale of capacity decreased. The failure of
Iridium (satellite) was a significant factor.
Teledesic was notable for gaining early funding from Craig McCaw[?] and Bill Gates,
and for achieving allocation of Ka-band[?] frequency spectrum for non-geostationary services.