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.

Comments

Movement

[JBMcB]

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.