OneWeb Wants To Rebuild the Internet in Space, Connecting Billions Not on the Web (cityam.com)

Later today, the first six of OneWeb satellites are expected to be launched.[Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] from a remote launch site in French Guiana, a key step toward building out a constellation that could eventually reach nearly 2,000. From a report: If OneWeb's founder Greg Wyler plans are successful, what he and his fellow executives at OneWeb envision is nothing short of revolutionary: becoming one of the world's largest providers of Internet service by building the architecture in space, allowing the billions without access to WiFi to finally use the Web. Wyler founded the British-based company in 2012.

"The ultimate goal is to connect every school in the world, and bridge the digital divide," Wyler said in an interview after his pep talk. "We're bringing connectivity and enabling it for people around the world, and in rural populations." If successful, remote areas all over the world, from Alaska to Africa, that are out of reach of fiber optic cables could suddenly join the world of Google and YouTube, a feat Wyler and others believe could be transformative. But building the backbone of the Internet in orbit is no easy task. Others have tried to put up constellations of communications satellites, only to fail spectacularly. The enormous cost is only outmatched by the risks of putting up hundreds of spacecraft in orbit.

Comments

Re:Failure predicted

[Rei]

I'm not going to write them off so quickly. But they certainly are behind. Starlink launched its first test satellites a year ago. And they have the massive advantage of owning their own launch service, which also happens to be by far the cheapest in the world.

But you never know. I absolutely wish OneWeb the best. LEO constellation-based broadband is going to be a game changer for much of the world's population.

I wonder what the Chinese think about this?

[supremebob]

I have to wonder what the Chinese Government thinks about projects like this, as it seems like a pretty easy way to bypass their countries firewall restrictions.

How do they stop something like this? Ban the ownership of OneWeb receivers? How would they even enforce that? Would they take even more drastic efforts if the service became popular, like run a signal jammer on that frequency?

I doubt that it would get to the point where they start shooting down "rogue" satellites over their airspace, but I guess that's what Trump wants Space Force for :)

Bandwidth

[jstott]

The radio spectrum is going to be a problem — the bandwidth just isn't there for a billion people to use the internet by satellite at the same time. As it is, phone companies are buying up every scrap they can get, and those are just line-of-site towers (so you can re-use the same frequency every 200 km). To put all that into a fleet of globally-visible satellites? I think the business vision statement has out-paced the engineering plan on this one.