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

SpaceX's solution

[EnsilZah]

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.