60ms cross continent

Thu Jul 9 02:56:05 UTC 2020

For the IoT/M2M stuff that doesn’t require huge amounts of data, there is  a Silicon Valley startup that is deploying cube sats for just that.

Swarm Technologies

https://www.swarm.space/

-Mike

> On Jul 8, 2020, at 19:49, Denys Fedoryshchenko <nuclearcat at nuclearcat.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
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