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O3b Launches Four More Satellites To Bring Internet To 'Other 3 Billion'
An anonymous reader writes "O3b Networks is aiming to provide internet access through satellite, to the "other three billion" people in under-served equatorial regions (Africa, the Pacific, South America). O3b launched four more satellites [Thursday], to add to the four they already have in orbit. This is a very international effort; a Russian Soyuz rocket went up from South America, carrying satellites built in France. There's a video of the rocket and payloads coming together and a video of the rocket launch. There's also an academic paper describing using the O3b system from the Cook Islands in the Pacific, giving an idea of what it does and those all-important ping times."
Please put ping time in summary when posting satellite internet stories. I'm not here to RTFA.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
These aren't exaclty lucrative potential customers...
Who's paying for this and why?
Every now and then humanity actually does something good. It is rare enough that I am in shock. I'll bet money that the people who benefit will make important contributions that effect all of us.
Maybe the other 3 billion will use a near limitless supply of knowledge for something other than watching cat videos.
Good question. According to their FAQ their satellites will be capable of delivering "gigabytes of capacity". Obviously that would be split among individual beams, and sliced up into smaller pieces for individual service providers and again for individual people. It is based on the Ka-Band which currently supports about 500 megabits per beam (with multiple beams).
Yep, I was born and raised in the Cook Islands. How many other Cook islanders are reading Slashdot?
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
The Other 3 billion all have satellite dishes
3 billion more faces in front of ads.
most without clean drinking water, food, electricity, adequate health-care .... But Hot-Damn, they will be able to search Google!!!!
Jeez!
But enough about Detroit... what about those people in other countries?
People are living in (comparatively speaking, anyway) shithole ghetto countries with an extremely low standard of living, and you want them to get the Internet? Expensive Internet, at that? What the actual fuck? Only the 1% richest people in these 'equatorial regions' will end up with access, the poor will still be fucking poor and in many places starving. How about you invest that money in getting rid of local warlords, drug cartels, corrupt governments, and other assholes that profit from keeping people down and out so they can live high on the hog? How about you invest that money in helping people to improve their lives? This makes no sense whatsoever, unless you factor in the 'publicity' factor; I'm sure these assholes think it makes them look real humanitarian and all that crap to the rest of the world. I call bullshit on the whole thing.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You're running out of places to hide.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
And the launch vehicle burnt up quite spectacularly over the south of Australia recently after it had done it's job.
Once satellite is mentioned there is no need to mention ping times, if you went to high school you probably already know about the speed of light and that it's a long way up to geostationary orbit. Other stuff is lower but lag is expected whenever satellite is mentioned.
So while you are correct there is probably not a single reader here that needed to be corrected.
Second sentence FFS: "Other stuff is lower but lag is expected"
From rtfs, it seems o3b is aimed at the ISP market. I think this could be quite neat, they are aiming at being a backbone provider for say a local wireless ISP on a tropical island, this ISP sets up their terrestrial wifi equipment, and sets up a link to o3b for backhaul.
This could transform the competitive landscape in a lot of these places where either a) becoming an ISP means signing a multi-thousands/mo deal with the 1 company that has pulled fiber under the sea for thousands of miles, or b) having no option, because the terrestrial land lines are all owned by the government run telco who has no interest in providing an upstart with bandwidth
Of course, for this utopia of competition to break out, it assumes that o3b will be charging significantly less than whoever has pulled fiber under the sea, and that government regulation in all these countries doesn't simply preclude the business model by granting unlimited monopoly power to the government run telco. I know in the 2 south american countries I've visited this second hurdle is much larger than the first... The government owns the telco, thats the only way to get internet, period.
But assuming I'm wrong about the regulatory landscape, and assuming o3b will have reasonable pricing, it almost becomes interesting to attempt to setup a wifi based ISP in some underserved country...
It's barely more an international effort than when the US launches a US built sat from the Cape on an Atlas V (using Russian RD180s): French Guyana is as much of France as Hawaii is of the US so both the sats & the launch location are French.
But this is a post from Timothy so we all know that accuracy and absence of bias in the extract are too much to expect...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Thanks. When I heard it was a Soyuz launched this week I assumed it was the South American launch and didn't check to see if there were any others. I was too far north to see it but apparently it was very bright.
Nice try at whatever you are attempting to do there, but it is always going to vastly exceed the time going via the much tighter curve of the Earth's surface even if it's as low as Iridium which is about as low as you get for a long term circularish orbit. (Spy sats get lower for short periods but have very elliptical orbits and don't last long).
So to sum up ping times are going to vary from bad (Iridium) to very bad (nearly half way the the moon for geostationary), thus if ping times are a criteria at all it's always going to look bad.
Wikipedia says 12Gbit total per satellite: O3b (satellite)
Not enough for 3 billion people.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Consider geometry then try again.
2.6Mb = 325KB = half a web page, not very useful.
100Gb/s / 3 billion = 33b/s or 4 Bytes per second each.
100Gb / 10Mibt = 10,000, factor in 250/1 contention ratio and there's maybe enough bandwidth for 2.5million people, not bad but 99.9% short of 3 billion.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Sometimes a fucking stupid and insulting comment should be called something stronger than "not quite right" after the first polite attempt, especially if it's as inaccurate and downright offensive as "there is no food to distribute".
You had your first polite reply, which was ignored, so why complain about someone being blunt enough to get a message across if that's what it takes?
The USA - land of the 1930s dust bowl, obviously no food to distribute so no need for internet - or is it not obvious at all and a fucking stupid suggestion way out of touch by decades? Yours is equivalent.