First quartet of low-latency broadband satellites now in space Internet-to-the-world's-poor satellite backhaul provider O3b now has four satellites in orbit, ready to offer latency-free internet access to the three billion humans unable to see Facebook - by November if all goes to plan. There was a day's delay to the scheduled launch, caused by high winds at the launch site in French …
OTOH if the motorized aerials are supplied by the infrastructure operators, not the individuals then you can share that cost across all your customers.
For operators in some countries this sounds like a very good deal.
thumbs up for a clever idea.
"They're pitching it at mobile backhaul. "
That was my point about spreading the cost of the motorized antennas across their customers while the connection to their actual customers would be the usual kind.
Perhaps I was not clear enough
I think we all would.
I was also rather disappointed in the "latency-free" claim. Sure they may be able to offer quite a bit lower latency than the current satellite links. However zero-latency is just not possible as we all know that each hop on the route *will* add latency.
The progression continues.
The biggest cost is getting the things into orbit. Past experience indicates that once you pay this, the rest might make a profit. Of course those who invested in getting the birds into orbit will have lost all their money by then, but who is counting.
An Observation: Why is it that the "poor" nations seem to be around the equator?
Makes the antenna tracking more difficult. For an equatorial orbit the satellites will only ever move along a single line across the sky, for an inclined orbit not only will that line appear to move as the earth rotates underneath it but the ground station will also need to switch to the next plane of satellites as the line vanishes below the horizon.
Gravity doesn't know about the rotation of the earth, but the rotation gives about a 1000mph start to anything launched in that direction. As the inclination angle increases, the effect reduces and you have to put more effort into getting to orbit, until you get to a polar orbit when you get no help at all from earth's rotation. Since "The biggest cost is getting the things into orbit", it's cheaper to put satellites into an equatorial orbit.
I guess more poor per acre near the Equator (several billion compared with a few million punters in remote areas of Russia and USA - or none in the Southern Ocean). And I suppose - not an engineer - an inclined orbit may make the base stations a bit more complex. I guess cost of base stations is a key hurdle for telco's operating in the poorest nations.
"I guess more poor per acre near the Equator (several billion compared with a few million punters in remote areas of Russia and USA - or none in the Southern Ocean)"
Also, satellite internet services already exist covering USA (and AFAIK Russia.) In US we have Starband, Hughesnet, and Exede; Exede bought WIldblue and still operate Wildblue's satellite system as well. These are of course all GEO however. As for MEO, I thought several systems were supposed to launch but they all went bankrupt.
Wikipedia gives a typical altitude of 20,200 km for MEO, thats about 67.5 ms each way.
Pinging a server through one of these birds will have to make 4 trips so that's a whopping 270 ms just for one segment in the link. Acceptable for web browsing, but not much use for anything else.
That's likely to mean problems with FPS games, but should be fine for most other uses. A quarter second, or even twice that, might be noticeable on a voice or video link, but it shouldn't make it unusable. For most other uses, unless the protocol is designed very badly, and some undoubtedly are, I doubt you would even notice the latency.
No brain surgeons working by telepresence though.
No, you could have a nice flat panel array with many elements and radio for each.
But it would cost a shitload more.
SO those domes you see on ships have a similar steerable antenna in with a couple of cheap servo motors. This system only needs one degree of movement.
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