That being said, I hope one of these projects takes off. Most of the undeveloped world would benefit greatly from even just 5mb/s of internet.
This isn't really the goal of the project. SpaceX needs to create a com link with Mars. Also, it can cheaply laucnch sattelites so it will be able to connect the world via satelite uplink. The goal isn't to beat wired networks but provide redundancy and in some cases primary connections.
SpaceX is betting on itself achieving reusability which will lower costs from ~$60M to a marginal cost of something like ~$600K. As a byproduct of the cellphone wars nanosats have become insanely cheap due to commoditization and miniturization of hardware. Making this more feasible
The reason they are doing this is to establish communications between earth & mars. Even a 50mbps connection could bring huge swathes of the world online and create a race for infrastructure to compete.
So if we could get 1-5gbps connections terrestriallydue to some market penetration and competition, it would bringlots of people online. The goal of the project is lofty, but would provide a lot of positive things.
Downsides: * personal satelites and the proliferation of spying. * space debris could lock us out of orbit. * space debris/launch failures could cause issues. * something like radiation or an unexpected externality could make this non-feasible. * we could literally create skynet.
I am pumped on it though, and those reasons, along with the many others I have assuredly missed make me really really excited to see this happen. We need a secondary network anyway and terrestrial speeds won't improve without competition so I would roll the dice on skynet for that.
datenwolf did the math and answered it in greater detail than I.
Didn't Iridium try to do this a while back? Launch a constellation of LEO satellites to provide low latency data and cell communications? Hopefully the reduced launch and operation costs expected will give these current projects more success.
I am not very knowledgeable about things related to radio spectrums and so please clarify this for me.
What might the upper bound of radio broadcast data transmissions be if the entire radio spectrum could be allocated and given our current radio comms technology?
> When you say there isn't enough, is that there isn't physically enough spectrum, or is it just that there isn't enough licensable spectrum (or even enough available unlicensed spectrum)?
Both. Or rather physical spectrum is a superset of licencable spectrum and already the physical spectrum only has so many quantum numbers to encode information in.
We can pretty much rule out orbital momentum encoding for satellite transmissions; the effects the atmosphere has on polarization are just too strong, for orbital momentum to survive to a degree, that it remains usable for consumer grade equipment.
That leaves as encodable quantum numbers: - frequency - amplitude - polarization - momentum (i.e. direction of propagation)
The band usable for radio satellite communication, i.e. able to pass through the atmosphere is rather narrow (compared with the whole EM spectrum): About between 100MHz up to 20GHz. That leaves you with a total usable bandwidth of about 19.9GHz.
Multiply that with the symbol density reachable through AM (under good conditions with a low noise floor you can encode about 5 to 6 bits). Polarization gives another bit. Spatial multiplexing gives you log2(n steerable directions) extra bits (usually not more than 4 beams you can control). Divide that by two, because existing transceiver systems (except for some lab systems) can't do full duplex on a given channel.
If you multiply that up this gives you a theoretical limit of about 10TBit/s you can implement for a given satellite location (having several satellites in proximity means they have to share the spatial encoding bits).
Good answer by the way. I can second that what datenwolf said is pretty darn accurate, but doesn't account for a lot of the inteference that happens to reduce usability of the specturm.
You also get into beam widths so and antenna. So if you have 700 satellites up in the air given full spectrum that means they'd have a fixed limit of 10TBit/s. That can be divided between their users (but it won't be anything close to 10TBit/s).
So this will really be a factor of how big their beams are, how many people are within their beams, and how much frequency they can legally use. While this is really cool and possible, I doubt this will open up a whole new internet in it's first pass.
There is also the issue with, how are they going to get the signal to it's destination? They can't beam it all the way around the world for you, and from what I understand at least OneWeb isn't going to communicate from satellite to satellite. So they'll have to have a ton of ground stations to receive your link and then send it over fiber, or transmit up to GEO, then down again. OR they'll have to hop up and down between nodes to it's destination, in a similar fashion to TOR. I don't know how they plan to solve this or if SpaceX has a better solution.
They might be able to achieve parity with fiber on optical links between satellites -- basically the same technology that's used with fiber -- but of course atmospheric conditions won't support that sort of bandwidth at optical frequencies, so there would be no easy way to get it to/from the surface.
That and the billion+ potential customers currently without any access at all can probably provide a very healthy revenue stream, even if they don't pay much at all.
There's a big jump between dialup and low end broadband. I can get by on low end broadband (which I think in rural areas may end up being LTS) but I can't get by on dialup.
That is why my bet is on Musk. With lots of low orbit transmitters each covering a small area you have "space division" like in a cellular network. I.e. less endpoints competing for the bandwidth to the same transmitter.