TRW space unit to compete with Intelsat.

Venture to lease pan-oceanic satellite communications

TRW Inc. is launching a new business venture to lease satellite-communication links to companies for transmitting video, data and telephone signals across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, TRW officials announced last week.

Thanks to the burgeoning privatization of satellite access, TRW and its marketing partner in the venture -- Columbia Communications Corp. -- will be the only non-government companies offering satellite relays across the Pacific to Asia and they will compete with only one non-government outfit, Connecticut-based Alpha Lyracom, across the Atlantic.

TV broadcasters are prime customers, although in coming years many non-media companies are expected to consider moving their data, voice and motion-picture images across oceans by bouncing them off satellites. Many, however, may make use of a competing technology -- fiber-optic cables strung across the ocean floors.

TRW and Honolulu-based Columbia will vie for customers that are now using the satellite system managed by Intelsat. That consortium of 120-odd nations offers the bulk of such services worldwide.

The new venture was cooked up at TRW's Space & Technology Group in Redondo Beach, a major builder of satellites. TRW officials said supply-and-demand problems justify the move.

"Intelsat is about out of capacity," said Joe Del Riego, director of commercial and international business development for the space group of TRW, an $8.1-billion-in-sales Ohio corporation.

Del Riego said some of Intelsat's orbiting birds are "wobbly," and that has caused signals to fade at times. Meanwhile, networks like CNN have squeezed available satellite capacity with ambitious global broadcasting agendas.

Intelsat spokeswoman Sigrid Badinelli said demand has prompted Intelsat to begin building seven more satellites to add to its flock of 11 that span those two oceans. She said, however, she was not aware of any "degradation of signal power."

TRW's new service, which it says is immediately available, would ease it into a new business it vowed to enter last year. Last August, TRW filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission for authority to build, launch and operate its own communications satellite, called PacifiCom-1.

The TRW-Columbia deal, covering communications from Istanbul to Beijing, "will allow us to immediately enter the commercial market in the Pacific Rim while FCC approval is pending on PacifiCom-1," said James H. Taylor, vice president of Del Riego's division.

TRW has begun focusing about 80 percent of its marketing efforts on Asia, said Del Riego. "The typical customer is a TV broadcaster that wants access to audience or programming on the other side of the ocean," he said. Potential takers include many Southland companies concentrated in entertainment and news-media fields, many of whom serve polyglot audiences here.

"There's a lot of demand to transmit Chinese and Japanese programs into Los Angeles. And there's a big demand to import United States programming to Japan," said Del Riego. He spoke by telephone last week during a break at the Pacific Telecommunications Conference in Honolulu, where he was attending seminars and hustling clients. Asia "is where the money is," he said, noting also the steep economic growth of several Asian nations.

One satellite over the Pacific and another over the Atlantic, each in a stationary orbit about 22,250 miles above the earth's surface, will be used by TRW. They are owned by NASA. The U.S. space agency leases access to its C-Band antenna, dedicated to commercial use, to Columbia which, in turn, subleased for six years to TRW.

In fact said Del Riego, TRW may make most of its early sales to broadcast resellers, in a daisy chain of resellers that would eventually reach the end user. TRW would ask roughly $500,000 to $2.5 million for the annual fee per transponder, estimated Del Riego. TRW officials declined to estimate potential revenues or profits.

In 1989 Columbia bid for and won control over the NASA satellites' 12 commercial-use transponders, which are relay devices. Columbia paid $61 million for exclusive access to 24 transponders. Each transponder can carry the equivalent of one continuous TV video and audio feed.

TRW would also sell transmission services between points on the same side of ocean, like between Los Angeles and Alaska. It would then, however, compete with other regional satellite systems, like Hughes Aircraft's Galaxy system, GTE's Spacenet or the Palapa service among the islands of Indonesia.