60ms cross continent

Thu Jul 9 02:47:43 UTC 2020

On 2020-07-08 10:05, Mark Tinka wrote:
> On 7/Jul/20 21:58, Eric Kuhnke wrote:
>> Watching the growth of terrestrial fiber (and PTP microwave) networks
>> going inland from the west and east African coasts has been
>> interesting. There's a big old C-band earth station on the hill above
>> Freetown, Sierra Leone that was previously the capital's only link to
>> the outside world. Obsoleted for some years now thanks to the
>> submarine cable and landing station. I imagine they might keep things
>> live as a backup path with a small C-band transponder MHz commit and
>> SCPC modems linked to an earth station somewhere in Europe, but not
>> with very much capacity or monthly cost.
>> 
>> The landing station in Mogadishu had a similar effect.
> 
> The early years of submarine fibre in Africa always had satellite as a
> backup. In fact, many satellite companies that served Africa with
> Internet prior to submarine fibre were banking on subsea and 
> terrestrial
> failures to remain relevant. It worked between 2009 - 2013, when
> terrestrial builds and operation had plenty of teething problems. Those
> companies have since either disappeared or moved their services over to
> fibre as well.
> 
> In that time, it has simply become impossible to have any backup
> capacity on satellite anymore. There is too much active fibre bandwidth
> being carried around and out of/into Africa for any satellite system to
> make sense. Rather, diversifying terrestrial and submarine capacity is
> the answer, and that is growing quite well.
> 
> Plenty of new cable systems that are launching this year, next year and
> the next 3 years. At the moment, one would say there is sufficient
> submarine capacity to keep the continent going in case of a major 
> subsea
> cut (like we saw in January when both the WACS and SAT-3 cables got cut
> at the same time, and were out for over a month).
> 
> Satellite earth stations are not irrelevant, however. They still do get
> used to provide satellite-based TV services, and can also be used for
> media houses who need to hook up to their network to broadcast video
> when reporting in the region (even though uploading a raw file back 
> home
> over the Internet is where the tech. has now gone).
> 
> Mark.

I don't think traditional satellites have much future as backbone. Only 
as broadcasting media.
Most are still acting as dumb RF converters, but we can't expect much 
more from them.
On geostationary orbit, it is not only expensive to bring each 
additional kg, but also they
need to keep it simple as possible, as it is all above van allen belt, 
and it needs to run there
without any maintenance for 7+ years.
So if SpaceX managed to squeeze in their satellites at least basic 
processing (and seems they did),
it will improve satellite capabilities (and competitiveness) greatly.
The only thing i hope, if they had space for some M2M IoT stuff, similar 
to ORBCOMM.