Big Satellite Systems, Simulated On Your Desktop (sf.net)

An anonymous reader writes: Big systems of hundreds of satellites are under development to provide wireless Internet globally, with Richard Branson's OneWeb and Thales' LeoSat aiming at consumers and business markets respectively. It's like reliving the late 1990s, when Bill Gates' Teledesic and Motorola's Celestri were trying to do the same thing before merging their efforts and then giving up. And now you can simulate OneWeb and LeoSat for yourself, and compare them to older systems, in the new release of the vintage SaVi satellite simulation package, which was created in the 1990s during the first time around. Bear in mind Karl Marx's dictum of history: the first time is tragedy, and the second time is farce. Do these new systems stand a chance?

Comments

Re:Remmber 70% of time spent over water

[ihtoit]

you conveniently missed out the fact that these satellites are part of a dynamic mesh network, which are in a state of continuous reconfiguration to provide 100% coverage. What this means, is that even when a satellite is flying over the middle of the South Pacific, it's still providing a bridge between New Zealand and Peru by connecting two satellites either side of it.

Ergo, no satellite is ever idle as long as the network is in use *anywhere*.