5G roadblock: labor

Mon Jan 6 21:44:47 UTC 2020

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