5G roadblock: labor

Mon Jan 6 21:21:24 UTC 2020

----- On Jan 5, 2020, at 10:07 PM, Mark Tinka mark.tinka at seacom.mu wrote:

Hi,

> On 5/Jan/20 22:37, Sabri Berisha wrote:
> 
>>
>> My instinct tells me it will be some form of low earth orbit satellites. In
>> the past I worked for a GEO satellite ISP and while that technology has its
>> drawbacks, those are mostly resolved with transponders in LEO.
> 
> As a method to reach the 03b + under-served remote areas, perhaps. But
> the economics and technical performance don't make sense for LEO to be a
> last mile technology in a major metropolis.

It's actually the other way around. Geostationary satellites are exactly
that: fixed in one location. Your dish always points to the same point in
the sky. On the satellite side, transponders cover a specific geographic
region at all times.

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.

Thanks,

Sabri