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Re: 5G roadblock: labor


From: Michael Thomas <mike () mtcc com>
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2020 13:44:47 -0800


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


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