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OneWeb Secures "Largest Ever" Rocket Acquisition For Satellite Internet Launch
Mickeycaskill writes: Virgin, Airbus and Qualcomm-backed satellite Internet venture OneWeb has acquired 65 rockets and $500 million in funding to launch its satellites by 2019. OneWeb has partnered with Airbus to produce 900 microsatellites which will provide "affordable", fast, low-latency Internet to remote parts of the world and to ships, planes and oil rigs. It has also been suggested the network will be a cheaper way for mobile operators to expand coverage in rural areas. Other partners include Bharti Enterprises, Hughes Network Systems, Intelsat, Coca-Cola and Totalplay, all of whom have committed financial, technical or manufacturing support to the project.
"Low-latency"
Yeah. Right.
At absolute best*, with no processing time, buffering, contention, sharing, delay or retransmission whatsoever through the entire process, with optical switching all the way along, with routing direct to each users and end-point, with not a single blip or anything else, that's going to be more delay on top of normal Internet latency.
Fast, yeah I can't argue that one way or another. But that's about volume, not delay. If you turn on a tap (faucet?) in the US and then put your head in the other end of the hose in the EU, it doesn't matter how big the hose is or how much water is coming down - it will still take a long time for the water to arrive. When it does, of course it can be high-pressure, huge volume down a ginormous hose. But delay will still make it useless for telephony, streaming, and a range of other purposes.
I'm all behind the concept, but don't claim low-latency as if it could possibly compete with any other technology out there - my mobile phone barely get 100ms delay to even default gateways).
(* Even LEO is 190km up. A round-trip from that to a base-station to a 0ms Internet back to the satellite back to the ground is going to be:
4 x 190km = 760,000m
Speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s.
3ms or thereabouts?
Maybe tiny in theory, huge in practice because none of the above theoretically-ideal-scenarios actually exist.)
39 of the rockets they've "acquired" have never flown. LauncherOne is over a year away from its first test flight.
Arianespace's soyuz launchers (the other 21) have at least actually, though why they're not buying soyuz launches directly from the Russians is unclear.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Next week, OneWeb's lisping president, Richmond Valentine, will announce free SIM cards for EVERYONE.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The satellites are cheaper, more capable, and far more numerous, and there's a lot more of a market for low latency internet access that doesn't have to follow fiber links on the ground than there was for the capability to make an occasional call with an expensive, clumsy sat-phone.
And cities cover a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface. Around 20% of the population of the US lives in rural areas, and the fraction is much higher in developing countries. It's also not just people in remote areas that will be interested in this, the low, perdictable latency will be of interest to financial institutions, among others.
Anybody who would use this service is going to be WAY out in the boonies and there simply aren't huge numbers of people who live that remotely, who need and can afford fast internet service and who can be reached economically to sell them the necessary equipment.
I think you are underestimating just how desperate people are to get out from under Comcast's thumb. If OneWeb and/or SpaceX can operate in the US at all (and presumably they will be getting the necessary spectrum), both of them will be able to pick up a LOT of Comcast refugees, many of whom will be from urban areas. If they have anything like comparable bandwidth, they could make a huge dent in Comcast subscriber numbers. From what we've been hearing, these satellite systems stand a very good chance of being latency competitive with any land-based ISP that likes to meddle with customer traffic, and Comcast tops the list of meddlers. So reasonable latency and competitive bandwidth (which isn't hard, despite inflated claims by Comcast) would finally give entrenched monopolies and duopolies some competition.
It could be very interesting.