hmmm "Satellites may connect the entire world to the internet"

[JHan]

Ships, planes and remote businesses rely for internet connections on signals sent from geostationary orbit, but this method is too pricey for widespread adoption. Beaming the internet via satellites orbiting closer to the planet has been tried before. The idea was popular at the height of the tech boom of the late 1990s. Three companies—Teledesic, Iridium and Globalstar—poured tens of billions of dollars into the low-Earth orbit (leo) satellite internet. It culminated in the collapse of Teledesic. Although the technology of the time worked, it was very costly and so the services on offer had to be hugely expensive, too. Iridium survived, but as a niche provider of satellite telephony, not a purveyor of cheap and fast internet access.

These companies want to avoid the technical issues of geostationary satellites by putting theirs into a low orbit, where the data will take only a few milliseconds to travel to space and back. And because signals need not be sent so far the satellites can be smaller and cheaper. OneWeb claims they might weigh 150kg and cost a few hundred thousand dollars, compared with a tonne or more, and tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, for the geostationary sort.

Access all areas

The new constellations will also raise tricky questions of national jurisdiction. Countries generally have control of the routers which connect them to the wider terrestrial internet. Satellites threaten that control. The national regulators that OneWeb has talked to are uneasy, says Mr Wyler, because it would create a route to the internet that countries could not monitor. OneWeb’s intention is to build 39 “gateways” on the ground around the world that will beam up and receive traffic from its satellites.

The first is under construction in Svalbard, a remote Norwegian island chain. These access points, and those planned by other firms, present another difficulty. Some countries are willing to share gateways with other countries. Others want their own because they are concerned that third parties will be able to monitor internet traffic, potentially using it to hack data flows of national importance.

Questions remain about whether the businesses involved can do all they promise cheaply enough. But if these companies succeed, their impact will go beyond helping to bring 3.5bn people online. Mr Musk has hazy plans to use Starlink as the foundation for a deep-space network that will keep spacecraft connected en route to Mars and the Moon.

Even if the new satellites bring the internet to people and parts of the planet that have been ill-served up until now, putting ever more objects in space brings another set of difficulties. Satellites in densely packed constellations may crash into each other or other spacecraft. “If there are thousands [of satellites] then they’ll have much higher probability of colliding,” says Mr Dyer. “If there is a collision in these orbits it will be a monumental disaster. At 1,000km, if there’s an incident it will be up there for hundreds of years."

Pros - Great for connectivity.
Cons - The "Kessler Syndrome"

The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect, collisional cascading or ablation cascade), proposed by the NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade where each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges impractical for many generations

We may think Space is big enough, but these thousands of satellites will be in intersecting orbits, thus crashes are possible- The chance per hour ( subject to orbit time) /per day/ per year is something to take seriously.

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/12/08/satellites-may-connect-the-entire-world-to-the-internet?fbclid=IwAR35DCL0PoG7DgQ30LHP6cRHaMMknhPX1bmmmawGxaJ1bSIVfGvrnV5BJUE

[GeorgeGist]

1. I'm replying via satellite internet service.

https://www.viasat.com/

[CloudWatcher]

2. geo-sync orbits

The satellite(s) for Viaset (and the other satellite internet providers of today) are in geo-sync orbit ... about 26000 miles. So it takes about 1/4 of a second to get there and back. Coupled with how the internet works, it can make for a lot of painful delays. The new sats are going into low-earth orbit so it would be much more like a "normal" internet connection.