Background to the company

For a personal account of the formation of Transfinite Systems written by one of its founders, John Parker, Click Here.

In September 1994 the satellite communications industry was on the edge of a revolution. A number of organisations were proposing personal communications systems that would utilise constellations of non-geostationary satellites. Low Earth Orbiting and Intermediate Earth Orbiting (LEO and ICO) systems were proposed.

Mobile satellite terminals and even satellite telephones had been around for some time, but the crucial idea of LEO and ICO constellations broke down two barriers to widespread commercial success:

As the satellites were much closer, lower power, hence light user terminals were conceivable.

The delay in a two-way communication via a GSO satellite (latency) could be eliminated.

These two factors meant that a service comparable to terrestrial mobile personal communications could be offered on a global basis. The businessman could go anywhere in the world and take a telephone number with him, remote areas could be contacted without the need to develop terrestrial communications infrastructure.

Initial reactions were (in my experience) unfavourable due to perceived technical difficulties and the proposed cost vs. the projected markets.

The organisations involved could, therefore, rightly be thought of as pioneering. The systems proposed by Inmarsat, Iridium, Globalstar and Odyssey, the new systems attracted a great deal of attention, once it was realised that they were both technically feasible and economically sensible.
Very quickly the radiocommunications community had to take the launch and operation of these systems very seriously - the implications for spectrum sharing and interference analysis were profound. The variation in interference levels seen both to and from NGSO satellite constellations is large. Analysis of static worst case levels was not good enough to ensure efficient use of the available spectrum.

Visualyse-the original concept

Visualyse was originally conceived as a general interference analysis tool that would be applicable to all possible sharing scenarios that could arise in the ITU-R arena. No commercial product was available, though many organisations were developing software for their specific needs.

The problems associated with software development include:

Cost;

You never get quite what you expect;

No-one else believes your software works correctly.

Visualyse would be a professionally developed and supported, off the shelf package that would become a standard tool for all interference analysis and spectrum management tasks. Visualyse would address all the problems identified above:

The purchase price would be a fraction of the development cost;

The finished product could be assessed before any money was committed;

Many other people would have the same product and would trust the results.

The goals were challenging but achievable, the early feedback from potential clients was good.
The first commercial release of the product was Visualyse Version 2 -released at WRC 95.