Re: 5G roadblock: labor

[Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom mu>]

On 6/Jan/20 23:21, Sabri Berisha wrote:

> It's actually the other way around. Geostationary satellites are exactly
> that: fixed in one location. Your dish always points to the same point in
> the sky. On the satellite side, transponders cover a specific geographic
> region at all times.
>
> 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.

For very specific use-cases, such as inflight or marine vessel
applications, sure. Maybe even military or contract work, yes. Emergency
situations for some government agencies, perhaps.

I'm not certain there is enough of a use-case to support millions of
customers that only want to post empty plates at the end of dinner, to
Instagram, and aren't interested in paying the data costs associated
with doing that.

Mark.