Re: 60ms cross continent

[Mike Lyon <mike.lyon () gmail com>]

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 () 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.