On 1/6/20 1:21 PM, Sabri Berisha wrote:
Low Earth Orbit satellites do not have a fixed position and move in a low orbit. This means that in order to serve a particular region, one must deploy a constellation of satellites in order to ensure that at least one transponder is always covering the region. That means that as soon as your satellite is out of range for that region, it may cover an other region. A small number of companies (SpaceX, Amazon) are working on launching their own constellations consisting of a few thousand satellites. This should be enough to basically cover most of the inhabitable parts of the planet. In this case, it makes sense to offer satellite services even in an urban environment because the satellite is idling anyway. There are some costs associated with that: you'll need a ground station and the necessary infrastructure from/to the ground station, but I'm sure that will be economically viable, otherwise companies would not do it. I predict that your in-flight wifi will become a lot cheaper as a result of this.
But at what cost to latency? Sounds like gamers would probably hate it. Mike