Tuesday 16 May is the day chosen by the US Bankruptcy Court in Wilmingon, Delaware, to discharge the former ICO Global Communications company from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, under which it has been sheltering since August 27 last year. Though the final text of the announcement was not available by press time, sufficient detail has already been agreed to confirm that the name of the emergent company is to become ‘New ICO’, and that a structure has been put in place to align it as a precursor to the still planned Teledesic broadband constellation. This is of course nominally a ‘Non-GSO Fixed Satellite Service’, and is still seen as numbering 288 satellites. An updated plan for Teledesic has ben promised for some time, but it has been clearly sidelined by CEO’s chairman Craig McCaw’s preoccupation with restarting ICO. In fact, he has been laying-off employees specifically working for Teledesic.

(He also spent some time investigating Iridium, and was reportedly at one time looking at spending $74.6 million to keep it afloat until June. But this didn’t happen, and officially at least Iridium’s largest shareholder Motorola is going to de-orbit the satellites. But gossip insists Motorola is still doggedly hanging on for a buyer.)

New ICO will in fact be acquired by Eagle River, a financing company associated with McCaw, via a new entity which has not yet been publicly named nor its shareholders disclosed. It is understood that Subhash Chandra, who – among many other ventures in India established Zee TV and promoted the ASC-Agrani geostationary mobile services satellite system, which is still in being – had initially attempted to beat out McCaw for the right to rescue ICO. This competivity later turned to cooperation when Chandra and McCaw allegedly joined forces in a roughly 33-66 per cent joint venture. ASC’s CEO Jai Singh (formerly with ICO) did not return calls by press time to confirm that his company was still involved in ICO.

Although the hard – and particularly financial – facts are still missing, documents produced earlier by the McCaw interests to the Bankruptcy Court confirm that New ICO will be a system offering high bandwidth and Internet Protocol capability. Initially, of course, it was intended to provide only narrowband voice and circuit-switched data access to handheld satellite telephones. New ICO ntends to enhance this service offering in many ways. The essential element will be to transform ICO into a packet-based data system, permitting “always-on” connections.

Ultimately, following modifications to its ground infrastructure and so-far-non-existent handsets, it is intended that New ICO will support data rates of 384Kbit/s. In the nearer term, with unspecified but less-extensive upgrades, it should support a rate of up to 144kbps.. It is foreseen that this capability should be achieved by 2002, when the initial service offering is set to roll out.

Following the Chapter 11 restructuring, which according to earlier statements by McCaw required a terminal payment of $700 million, additional expenditures of at least $2.1 billion will be needed to bring the system up to McCaw’s vision. This is $1 billion more than “Old ICO” had foreseen needing to bring its previous voice system to completion. Beyond this again, McCaw can predict needing a further $700 million investment to bring New ICO to a cash-positive position.