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Can We Get Global Broadband From Low-Earth Orbit Satellites? (blogspot.com)
"The internet is unavailable to and/or unaffordable by about 50% of the world population," writes Larry Press (formerly of IBM), who's now an information systems professor at California State University. But he's also long-time Slashdot reader lpress, and reports on new efforts to bring cheap high-speed internet to the entire world.
SpaceX, Boeing, OneWeb, Telesat, and Leosat are investing in very large projects to deliver global, high-speed Internet service [using low-earth orbit satellites]. This could be a significant option for developing nations, rural areas of developed nations, long-haul links, Internet of things, and more by the mid-2020s.
Parts of Alaska could see internet-via-satellite as soon as 2020, according to Larry's article, which adds that the technology could even be used to bring high-speed internet access to ships at sea.
Parts of Alaska could see internet-via-satellite as soon as 2020, according to Larry's article, which adds that the technology could even be used to bring high-speed internet access to ships at sea.
We already get internet by satellite from a dozen companies.
Here are the top ten.
http://www.toptenreviews.com/s...
High latency, so probably not.
Public land mobile networks will always have lower latency than satellite as long as the internet is on the ground and the speed of light exists.
Get a phone and use mobile data.
with the towers just a few hundred yards away is garbage. We tried Cleat here in Seattle, and went back to dialup since the latency and packet loss was so bad. Worked OK for video, but SHH sessions were just unusable.
Iridium
direkt TV
Satcom
stratacom
global link
Latency is the problem with satellite packet networks.
For varying definitions of broadband. How easy is it to overload a cell network? Each satellite is equivalent to one tower serving everyone under it. One tower for all of Chicago... Would it work as a contiguous network worldwide? Sure. Would it have enough throughput to be called broadband for a significant percentage of the world? I doubt it. Even given incredibly wide bands to operate over the number of customers under it is equally large.
Covering the globe with internet via low earth orbit would take a LOT of satellites, or you could use just three. Like these folks are planning. https://www.viasat.com/product...
Hasn't Alaska suffered enough?
And they fall out of orbit and have to be replaced too often. Bad for the environment!
See Teledesic
Getting a two-way connection from a moving satellite is a nightmare. You get all kinds of frequency-shift, Doppler, atmospheric, and localized multi-path problems. You'll need a big chunk of spectrum for all the error correction and sync signals required. You'll either need a tracking dish, which will be expensive, or a phase-array, which is cheaper to build but will require a more complicated and expensive front-end.
It may work for niche cases for low-bandwidth applications in remote areas. I'm guessing the uplink hardware will be so expensive that you'll have micro-ISPs serving small areas.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
It would take a lot of LEO satellites, but it would also offer *massively* greater capability than using just 3 GEO sats.
Ezekiel 23:20
Covering the globe with internet via low earth orbit would take a LOT of satellites, or you could use just three. Like these folks are planning. https://www.viasat.com/product...
If they are geostationary, they won't have low latency because too far away. If they are leo then they will be moving and three won't be enough to cover everything, so how can 3 sats work?
LEO Satellites at 1200 miles up will have a minimum Earth-Ground latency of 24 milliseconds and Earth-Ground-Earth Latency of 48 milliseconds because of the speed of light ---- this is a major latency issue unless there are MANY infrastructure Earth stations at major colocation facilities AND the traffic can be efficiently routed, so we're not landing traffic in a NEW YORK internet exchange that then needs to be routed to SAN FRANCISCO, or Atlanta, and thus appending another 50 milliseconds of ground latency after the satellite hop, for example.
The three satellites described in that article will be in high earth orbit and geostationary. More latency than your cable ISP, but probably quite usable. If you've used the wifi on Jetblue than you've used this sort of high earth orbit satellite network and it seems to work fine for web browsing and streaming media.
So single use thing.
Think iridium sat phones and GPS sat. Both are low earth orbits. Merge them together with internet. You have a have a winning combo.
Being somewhat familiar with SpaceX's plans here are a few advantages of their approach, I guess compared to traditional satellite providers:
They're planning to deploy thousands of cheap, small, short-lived satellites in LEO, which means:
-They get the advantages of cheaper production due to economies of scale, orders of magnitude better than something like GPS or Iridium.
-So many units means they can just over-provision, use less hardened, cheaper components, and just replace units as they fail.
-Being in LEO means they have a shorter lifespan due to atmospheric drag, so they stay up for maybe 5 years, drop into the atmosphere and are replaced by newer, better hardware.
-I did a back of the envelope calculation once and I think I came up with something like 1/3 the latency of fiber when going halfway around the earth, due speed of light in glass vs air/vacuum, and the various geographical features cables need to contend with.
-One of the reasons I remember being mentioned for SpaceX getting into building their own satellites when their rocket reuse program was just getting off the ground is they'll eventually end up with a supply of rockets that's larger than the entire launch market is going to need, at least in the short term, so this is a way for them to be their own customer and amortize the cost of the rocket by reflying it 10 times with cargo they can afford to lose.
Yes, but those 3 geostationary sats would have enormous issues with capacity and latency.
Just wait until these sats get hacked.
Places free of the pollution of the internet are getting rarer by the day. Digital quiet is a disappearing resource. What about VLA and people who prefer to live and vacation in places without connections?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The problem is not whether it can be done, weâ(TM)ve done it already. The problem as always is cost.
Pretty much all of inhabited areas these days has been wired with data-capable systems, even if itâ(TM)s just 56k or DSL for third world countries with a twisted pair. Most areas have wireless coverage of some sort. Whether or not the locals can or want to afford the connection is another thing.
Putting stuff in LEO or space doesnâ(TM)t solve that problem of either bandwidth or cost, actually it makes the equation worse.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Do the math. First make an estimate of how much solar power your 300 (or whatever number of) satellites can catch. Then multiply that by the conversion to RF power and spread the resulting power evenly over the surface of the earth. You now have power density. Next, calculate the maximum antenna size/directivity a single user can use. His beamwidth can't be narrower than the inter-satellite angular spacing. Next after derating the above result based on necessary link margin for foliage, precipitation loss (if it applies at the wavelength used) etc, apply Shannon's equation to this power budget and calculate the available per-user information rate. Finally ask yourself who besides the fringe will be willing to pay enough for this relatively low average rate to support the whole thing. As with the Iridium system, even without latency and particularly in the present age with the per-user bar up in the 10's of Mbps, the overall user base will not be willing to pay so much for so little. For a few users the few kbps (not Mbps) average rate might be useful but it is necessary to have a lot of users to pay for it all. This is essentially a very over-subscribed approach and the physics, even with moderately good nearly line-of-sight radio paths, won't support any reasonable economic model. The US 7B original cost of Iridium turned into something only a few tenths of a percent of that at the last sale, as I understand it. Yes, it is possible to make a system that can support a few users at high rates or a lot of users at low average rates but the economics require both simultaneously. It's not going to happen with a LEO satellite system in this day and age.
Since there's little up there we could have a LOOM constellation. Cheaper, easier to put up, and less latency.
As long as wires keep being deployed I don't mind people having a wireless option until the wire reaches them. I don't think wireless will be able to compare to wire for a very long while.
Nothing more to add.
I am surprised to see corporations investing on poor countries. What kind of return on investment do they expect here?
It has been estimated that the earth is naturally bombarded by 37000-78000 _tons_ of meteorites a year. a few hundreds/thousands of sats will not make a noticeable difference.
http://curious.astro.cornell.e...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I know more than a few people that do like to disconnect even if their job requires them to be connected at all times.
These are the ones that like to leave their phone on, even if they're off-duty, and don't answer calls or "decline" them so as to give the illusion that they couldn't reach the ringing phone in time before it goes to voicemail.
Being in a place where there's no signal and/or having a device that is "not reachable at this time" means a lot to these folks.
Once companies hear about practical, cost-effective satellite internet and buy devices for their employees that can use this internet, employees will have very little excuse to say "Sorry, I was in a spot with no signal."
Some people may be very uncomfortable with this concept.
..web..
Seriously..how about we deal with what we have before asking for seconds .. (i'll wager 50% is a suspect figure)..
Bitch you KNOW the side.. WORLD MAFUCKIN WIDE..
It's not a basic income. It's interest made on a payment to the State. The specific intention was that the future citizens would have something else instead of the ton of oil that used to be up there. You're welcome to try to live on the thousand dollars or so per year, but you would probably be an idiot.
ever tried to point a dish at a low earth orbit satellite?
"Anything plus internet is a winning combination" said every pets.com investor...
Ken
There are various ways to tap into the global net on the cheap over satellites.
1. http://www.uhf-satcom.com/faq.html
2. http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outernet
I'm sure there are other ways too.
Did not he said he has to provide broadband to the world from LEO? Has given up on this?
Is this supposed to be funny or real?
"There should be the same amount of atmosphere to cross whether the Sun rises due East in the summer, or South-East in the winter."
Get a globe and check it out, you will find that this statement is not true.
"Space is fake. The Earth is flat. The eclipses prove it."
Hardly. The Earth reflects light back to the moon, hence you can see the back of the moon (both at a new moon and at a solar eclipse). The Earth is not translucent, so the lunar eclipse is pretty dark (but not completely, due to the atmosphere).
The fact that you cannot imagine a round Earth does not mean that it has to be flat. :-)
Maybe you need to get the globe. My statement was true, you've just bought your brainwashing.
The Earth does not reflect light back to the moon. And it most certainly does not reflect a streak of red that matches the chromosphere, and the protuberances. That is impossible, and any fool would know it.
The FakeX rocket launch also proves two things: They use self-luminescent fuel, and there is no red light passing through the atmosphere to illuminate the lunar eclipse in red.
Space is fake. The Earth is flat. The eclipses prove it.
"The internet has already grown to be available to and affordable by about 50% of the world population," writes Larry Press (formerly of IBM), who's now an information systems professor at California State University.
FTFY.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I suspect that SpaceX will somehow find a way to use excess launch capacity on customer launches to squeeze in a few free LEO internet sats for themselves. (Having said that, I have no idea if that's physically possible with the different orbits that customers need vs what they need.)
Of course it is technically possible to deliver internet via satellites, we've been relaying data with them for decades. The difficulty is navigating the myriad of governments, lobbyists, regulations & extreme costs to bring it to a larger group. Of course with the possibility of hundreds of millions of customers bringing in tens of billions of dollars in revenue it just might be enough to do it.
no one wants satellite internet