High-speed Net access that's out of this world
John Koehler retired from a career at Hughes Electronics and the CIA to build fast Net connections on satellites already in orbit.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mark Compton

Dec. 13, 1999 | Even though Tachyon.net's satellite-based Internet access service won't formally launch until the New Year, it's already creating some buzz -- the sort of buzz that download rates of 45 Mbps can inspire. For those of us who are a little slow at math, that comes out to something around, oh, 30 times faster than T-1 access.

That alone is pretty spiffy -- but what may be even more interesting is that Tachyon claims to have figured out how to deliver this, along with a superfast 256 Kbps upload path, via high-flying geosynchronous satellites. Stationed some 22,300 miles above the equator, these so-called "high-flying birds" have historically been considered a poor match for TCP/IP-based Internet traffic because of the considerable time required for signals to travel all that way. (That partly explains why investors like Bill Gates are backing Teledesic -- a $9 billion network of 288 low-orbit satellites, scheduled to launch in 2004.)

But John Koehler, an economist by training (with a Yale Ph.D. to prove it), could see that the demand for fast Internet access, at least at the enterprise level, probably wasn't going to wait that long. And when he did the math, he figured that the pricing for access services could be made a heck of a lot more attractive if a company didn't first have to amortize a $9 billion infrastructure investment. So he formed Tachyon, on the premise that a way could be found to deliver two-way Internet communications via hardware already in orbit.

Thinking out of the box seems to be a way of life for Koehler, who at 58 looks a tad out of place at an Internet start-up. And indeed, an Internet start-up is not the sort of career step one would have expected for a man whose résumé includes stints at the Rand Corp., the Congressional Budget Office, Hughes Electronics and -- get this -- the Central Intelligence Agency. Koehler served as deputy director of the CIA during the Carter administration, when the Cold War was still a going concern and many of the kids making millions today off dot-com IPOs had yet to be born. Clearly, the man marches to a different drummer.

I've got to ask: Did your interest in satellite technology first come into bloom while you were acting as deputy director of the CIA?

Yes, it did. A principal part of that job was managing the budget for the National Foreign Intelligence Program. As you might expect, most of that budget was spent not on spies lurking in darkened alleys, but on things that got launched into space or on computers that got installed in the basement of Fort Meade.

Not very Le Carré, but quite au courant, I'm sure.

Yes, that's exactly right. In fact, making decisions on next-generation systems was a very important part of my job there -- deciding which space systems to modernize, what they should look like, and that sort of thing. Because that meant making system engineering choices, I naturally got involved in satellite technology in a variety of ways.

Next page | Cutting through that chatty TCP/IP