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FCC Grants OneWeb Approval To Launch Over 700 Satellites For 'Space Internet' (theverge.com)
OneWeb has been granted approval from the FCC to launch a network of internet-beaming satellites into orbit. FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement: "Humans have long sought inspiration from the stars, from the ancient Egyptians orienting the
pyramids toward certain stars to the Greeks using constellations to write their mythology. In modern
times, we've done the same, with over 1,000 active satellites currently in orbit. Today, the FCC harnesses
that inspiration as we seek to make the promise of high-speed internet access a reality for more Americans, partly through the skies..." The Verge reports: OneWeb plans to launch a constellation of 720 low-Earth orbit satellites using non-geostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) technology in order to provide global, high-speed broadband. The company's goal has far-reaching implications, and would provide internet to rural and hard-to-reach areas that currently have little access to internet connectivity. Additionally, OneWeb has a targets of "connecting every unconnected school" by 2022, and "bridging the digital divide" by 2027. According to OneWeb, the company plans to launch an initial 10 production satellites in early 2018, which, pending tests, will then be followed by a full launch as early as 2019.
36,000 kilometers for geosynchronous orbit, versus 200ish km for a low earth orbit.
36000 kilometers is 0.120 seconds at the speed of light, there and back is your 250 ms. Low earth orbit could be much faster.
What I'm wondering though isn't this something nasa/faa should be approving? That's a lot of potential space trash.
I'm skeptical of the figures too, but I'll wait and see the math. LEO is a lot cheaper to reach than GEO, and you are well within the Van Allen belts so don't need as much radiation hardening and associated mass, both of which are going to bring the price per launch down substantially. Of course, the plan also involves nearly 10x as many satellites, albeit presumably much smaller and more "disposable", which will push it back up again.
From the illustrations on OneWeb's website it appears that we're essentially talking about a few hundred slightly oversized cube-sats that could potentially be thrown up a few dozen at a time by SpaceX's Falcon 9 heavy or a similar booster, so you could easily end up with a smaller price tag than Iridium. Still likely to have a total price tag of a few billion, but not tens of billions, and potentially still commercially viable if you can resell enough bandwidth at the low, low prices that are all that their primary customers can afford. It's all going to depend on the unit cost and how many they can launch per booster - if they can bring both of those down low enough, provide enough bandwidth, and some higher end services (real time global tracking of ships and aircraft, perhaps?) then I don't see why it wouldn't be viable.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
They intend on using 18 orbital planes at an altitude of approximately 1200 km (750 miles). Doing the math for a 3000 mile round trip at the speed of light gives me 16 milliseconds. Of course, the actual latency will be higher since that 16 ms latency is just the trip to and from the satellites. You also need to add in the distance between both the satellite you connect to and the one that the ground station connects to. Worse case would be the ground station being on the opposite side of the world, in which case the total round trip latency from the user to the ground station would be 96 ms.So in summary, depending upon the relative locations of the user and the ground station the user connects to, the latency added by the satellites is between 16 and 96 milliseconds.