TitansN – Titans Universe

TitansN: Satellite Broadband

The original pioneers of residential satellite internet are launching a new global satellite internet provider - dedicated to provide ultra-fast internet connections to the 4 billion underserved people worldwide.

Angie Communications | 6G | Fiber | Mobile | Wireless

Angie Communications, a pioneering fiber and wireless company that was founded by the Titans Universe team, is investing heavily in 6G developments in order to enter the mobile broadband industry from 2025/2026 onward.

28-year history: Space | Satellite | Fiber | Mobile | Wireless

The Lachman brothers and several Titans Universe/TSI co-founders were involved with space, satellites, and broadband long before it became a race among billionaires. In fact, they entered the satellite broadcast business in 1995 (obtaining three international digital satellite broadcasting licenses), and after a stint with an LMDS terrestrial systems developer, they funded the first-ever pilot of a multi-hundred megabit per second connection satellite connection in 1999 on an Eutelsat transponder, which they then advertised in the WSJ (Dec. 1999). The plan was to service multi-ten million people all over the world. The Lachman brothers invested close to US$5 million in the founding of InternetHyperGate, a pioneer in satellite broadband (see the links below).

When the 2000 recession hit, the Lachman brothers decided to focus on pioneering fiber to the home instead.

Fast forward to 2020/2021, after more than three years of operating in stealth mode, the Titans Universe team announced the upcoming launch of TitansN, a new satellite service provider, on Linkedin. However, due to COVID, some plans, including TitansN, didn't materialize as planned.

TitansN is closely tied to Angie Communications, a pioneering fiber and wireless company that was also founded by the Titans Universe team. TitansN is now planned for launch in 2026, and Angie Communications is investing heavily in 6G developments in order to enter the mobile broadband industry from 2026/2027 onward. Indeed, we have skipped the entire 5G segment, even though we have a long track record in 5G research and planning.

As with all Titans Universe projects, our communications divisions will be developed in stealth mode for the foreseeable future.

The text below is a slightly updated version of the 2021 announcement and is for informational purposes only as it related about our fascinating history in the communications industry.

Announcement for TitansN Satellite Broadband | Angie Communications 6G

Since 2013, my team and I built a strong relationship with hundreds of telecom and technology suppliers. In 2018, after a year of highs and lows, we suddenly stopped communicating with the world. Today, I’m explaining briefly why that was, through this announcement.

While we'll be entering the consumer market (Direct to Home/Premise) as a service provider, TitansN will also work with Angie Communications and other fixed, mobile and wireless (WISP) operators all over the world, as a wholesaler and backhaul provider as well as a retail operator.

To make a long story short, over the last three years, we have been setting up new businesses and projects. Today, those projects are collected under Titans Universe. Meanwhile, we kept researching the best and most efficient way to provide (wireless) services to tens of millions of people; something we have been trying to accomplish for many years. Our biggest hurdles were mainly caused by dealing with governments who don't take newcomers and startups seriously.

We found the right solutions now, but we're taking things easy while the industry figures out their best business models.

Some of you may know the pioneering role my team and I played in the Fiber to the Home industry (since 2000). We pioneered the FTTH industry since early 2000 when zero homes were connected. More about that later in this article.

Ever since, we've influenced hundreds of billions dollars worth trajectories (value wise) of almost all telecom players, worldwide, from Verizon to British Telecom, from Earthlink to Google.

Fun fact, I coined or at least popularized the term FiberBroadband in 2000, and used to own the fiberbroadband.com domain. Now, the huge, global FTTH council is named the Fiberbroadband Association.

As I explained in a 2017 post, I believe that FTTH is not going to survive too long as a stand-alone business. Building large (nationwide) FTTH infrastructures would cost many hundreds of billions of dollars; we realized that very early on. On the other hand, mobile and wireless 5G services (while very promising) are too limited in terms of reach and capacity. Instead, we started looking at satellite broadband again, which also happens to be an industry I helped pioneer in 1998.

1998-2000: Setting up Satellite Internet

In 1998, everything "internet" was red hot and raking in hundreds of millions. When my brother Aniel and I decided to invest a few million dollars of our own money in a pioneering satellite broadband and multimedia venture, we also agreed that we'd invest heavily in digital infrastructure. That's why the company was called Lachman Brothers Digital Communications. This included the physical infrastructure of satellite constellations, satellite user equipment, and rocket launches.

We organized the world's first multi-hundred megabit per second internet connection over satellite (on an Eutelsat transponder) in on December 3, 1999, and advertised the results in the Wall Street Journal.

We explained our grand vision and ambitions for the future, we hired pioneers like one of the fathers of the Internet, Dr. Barry Leiner (who brought the Internet to the public domain) to join our advisory board, and we invested heavily in R&D. In January 2000, more than 22 years ago, we officially signed the first five satellite internet transponders on the Eutelsat constellation, planning to have hundreds if not thousands more. We got involved with satellite as well as rocket launch and manufacturing firms. We would be huge in space business.

If you open the millennium edition (December 1999) of The Economist (all print editions), right in the middle, you will see the spread advertisement of InternetHyperGate, a satellite broadband service provider that was set to launch in 2000.

The company was founded by Lachman Brothers Digital Communications Inc., established in 1998, and as you may have guessed it, that refers to (two of) my brothers and me. We had already contracted capacity on five satellite transponders, and early 2000, we were special guests of General Electric’s American Communications Broadband Forum in St. Petersburg, Florida, where we would discuss launching our own satellites on our own rockets to serve tens of millions of people all around the world. We had to because other providers were just inadequate.

That in itself is a long story, but the main point is, this is years before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would dream up their space and rocket ventures, and almost 20 years before they’d have the fantastic plan to launch a satellite internet service. In 1999 and 2000, we spent several million dollars in advertising (WSJ, The Economist, FT, Time, CNN, CNBC, etc.) and research and development, before pivoting towards pioneering fiber to the home.

Fun fact: One of Titans Universe's founding partners, Gregory Nemitz, a space and satellite executive, saw our commercials on CNN and decided to give us a call. He has been part of the team ever since.

A Fascinating Track-Record of Pioneering Technologies and Thought Leadership

My brother Aniel and I were having lunch at the beautiful Renaissance Resort where GE’s Broadband Forum was being held (2000), and we saw the market crash, the start of the internet and telecom bubble burst, on Lou Dobb’s program on CNN. That, and some serious satellite capacity/bandwidth issues, was the reason we changed our satellite internet plans on our plane ride home, and instead focused on a new pioneering idea: fiber to the home.

In 2000, we couldn't imagine that it would turn into a multi-hundred billion dollar industry. Back then, exactly zero homes had a fiber connection. Fast forward to 22 years later, several hundred million households are enjoying fiber connections all over the world, and an ever-growing part of the $2 trillion telecom services market.

Of course, there were several companies involved in fiber testing and trying out fiber technologies, but there were no real plans to roll out fiber to premises. When I called the then world leader in fiber, Worldcom, in April 2000 with the question, "How can we extend your fiber to connect homes?", they answered, "You tell us!".

Indeed, that was the beginning of an extensive relationship, and I even consulted them on VoIP protocol. That's another fun fact. Almost all communications nowadays run on VoIP-based systems, but back in 2000, even the largest telecom players didn't have a clue what the future would be, or which system would become standardized. I knew because we had been researching and analyzing it in-depth.

My Team and I Wrote the Book on Next-Gen Communications

In 2007, we wrote a 160-page white paper, “Building Communications Infrastructures for the 21st Century”, which gave us the “bragging rights” to claim that we literally “wrote the book on next-generation communications”.

This document was requested by more than 2,500 people, and maybe because of that large group of readers, it had many ramifications for the communications industry, including settling the WiMAX (which had major players pushing for it) versus LTE issue (we explained why LTE would/should win), bursting free city-wi-fi dreams, and most importantly open-sourcing the Fiber to the Home business model, as a result kickstarting the Fiber to the Home industry in a major way.

In 2009, I co-authored a paper about the future of photonics in the telecom infrastructures, describing a novel approach (those days we were called iUHBA). In 2017, we published a 5G infrastructure design proposal paper, based on our pioneering 10-Gigabit fiber connections to three separate private (non-enterprise) clients. And the list goes on. I must have forgotten at least a handful of other seminal research we have published.

Fun fact: I owned and published the world's largest FTTH, Wi-Fi, and Free Space Optics newsletter from 2000-2003, with more than 25,000 bi-weekly recipients.

The Infrastructure Conundrum

Some of my founding partners (from TitansN and thus Angie/Oy and its predecessor companies) and I formed the 21st Century Infrastructures Consortium in 2002, mainly because we realized, through experiences since 1995, that there were enormous and manifold challenges pertaining to building infrastructure.

We understood the immense value of joining forces with like-minded individuals and partner firms and institutions. This concern was primarily telecom related; satellites and rockets (1998), fiber to the home (2000 onwards), WiFi and Free Space Optics (2001), etc. Fast forward to 2022, and nothing much has changed, if not for the worse.

Whether it’s antenna attachments, fiber trenching, or building systems like Hyperloop, progress in building infrastructure is severely limited by many factors, including right-of-way and geographical restrictions. Furthermore, technological, regulatory, and public issues arise more often than not, making building large scale infrastructure an almost impossible task.

This all accumulates to costly, unaffordable, time-consuming, and soul-wrenching situations, hampering innovation, and thus progress. We know, because we have been the victim of such schemes more than once, destroying our plans to build future-proof nationwide telecom infrastructure from the ground up, which would have brought much-needed investment (of $100+ billion) to the industry over the course of five to ten years.

Our solution is to launch a mega-constellation of thousands of a mix of LEO, MEO, and GEO satellites (starting in H2-2025/H1-2026), to become a service and platform provider.

In the first phase, we will utilize rockets from third parties to launch our satellites, but from 2027 onward, our own spaceplanes and spaceships will be used to launch satellites.

By utilizing our own high-frequency space launch vehicles, we will save multiple billion dollars in launch costs, which we can pass on to our end-users.

Billionaires and their Side Hustles

Around 2018, Elon Musk and his Starlink, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon and Kuiper, and Richard Branson and his Virgin Orbital were planning tens of billions $ of investments in satellite broadband, and we decided to let them fight and watch what's going to happen. That was a wise decision.

The industry has now invested billions of dollars in an industry that we plan to dominate. It won’t be Starlink, Kuiper, OneWeb, or the now-defunct Virgin Orbital that will benefit most from the technological readiness level that we'll achieve in the coming years. It will be TitansN. Thanks though, Elon!

All joking aside, the satellite broadband market is huge, since almost 4 billion people are unserved or underserved.

With all the idealistic business models of yesteryears, this is still a fact. The digital divide hasn't disappeared, it hasn't even narrowed, and as a matter of fact, I think that it's worse than ever. Thanks to new technologies and many billions of dollars invested by others, satellite broadband is finally becoming at least equally powerful as 5G Mobile and wired FTTH, with the added huge and unique benefit of having no land or border restrictions.

We can make billions of dollars while also helping a chunk of those 4 billion people with high-speed service. There is enough market and profit potential for all satellite operators present and future. My Captain Obvious-but-seemingly-not-so-obvious statement: Just don't try to charge poor people rich-people prices.

You may realize that all those other projects are like side hustles for those billionaires. They may know their stuff but they don’t know much about telecom; it’s an afterthought for them. On the other hand, TitansN was founded by a group of telecom and technology pioneers and experts with a combined 300 years of telecom and technology experience.

This has been my bread and butter for more than 25 years, and for some of us, three or even four decades. These are my co-founders with whom I worked for many years (some more than 20 years, some since 2008); they are not just hired guns.

Yes, we have major ambitions, but they are realistic and doable. Difficult, but not impossible, as they say. In terms of our role in society, I promise that we are a different kind of company. We believe in fair wages, unionized labor, fair taxation, and thriving employees. We will look after society through responsible investing and social care, but also by empowerment and cooperation.

Thousands of satellites from TitansN would contribute to the space debris, don’t you think? No, we know it won’t. There are regulatory plans in place to avoid satellite collisions. We are also no real fans of why a few American companies would rule over space. As such, we are considering launching our mega-constellation outside of the USA realm.

On our websites you can find extensive information about our plans, including our spaceplanes, and soon we'll share some further plans on how we plan to connect the poorest people and low-wage earners, and how suppliers and tech firms can help and benefit as well.