Internet access everywhere on the Earth by satellites, dream or reality?

#1

Hello, you have certainly seen in recent months the launching of entire groups of satellites, several dozen sometimes, which are intended to cover almost the entire globe to spread Internet.

Do you think that this extremely expensive and time-consuming project will come to an end and will one day make possible to make Internet access by land useless?

Because if it will undoubtedly be technically possible to broadcast Internet from these satellites to large regions, the problem of uploading data remains and the systems that allow data to be sent directly to the satellite are rare and very expensive.

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There are still many questions to be answered, for example, what area of the globe will be covered when will it be possible to access these systems? What is the planning for setting up those satellites? Is it a good idea to send hundreds of satellites into orbit in an already saturated Earth orbit?

In short, does this dream of permanent and global access to the Internet for everyone seems reasonable to you?

#kuiper #SpaceX #oneweb #starlink #telesat

#2

SpaceX issued a statement that it has lost contact with three of the 60 Starlink satellites launched last May. Despite this, this first launch is a success for the company, which wants to create a constellation of 12,000 artificial satellites in the long term.

SpaceX reported on the launch of 60 Starlink satellites a few weeks ago. It should be recalled that they were released on 23 May from the upper deck of the Falcon 9 into a low Earth orbit of 440 km. Unfortunately, not all of them have reached their target altitude of 550 km. In particular, Elon Musk’s company claimed to have lost contact with three nano-satellites. “Three satellites that initially communicated with the ground but are no longer in service will passively de-orbit,” said a spokesman.

#3

The OneWeb project aims to provide very high-speed Internet access over a much wider area, thanks to the launch of a whole constellation of satellites. Six of them have already been sent last February, and have just started transmission tests. Conducted in partnership with Intellian and SatixFy, which deal respectively with antenna systems and modems, the tests consisted in broadcasting streaming in Full HD in the city of Seoul.

Of course, other tests, such as FaceTime calls, Google Map and other cloud services, were also performed. They were conclusive, as the latency obtained was 32 milliseconds on average. For comparison, ADSL has an average of 50 milliseconds. Geostationary satellites are limited to 600 milliseconds. It must be said that these are located 36,000 km above our planet, compared to 1200 km for the OneWeb network.

On the bandwidth side, it’s not bad either, since the maximum speed was 400 Mbps, almost forty times more than with ADSL 2. However, using this value can be misleading since it does not indicate a true average. But the results are encouraging.