According to an article in Network World, a company called O3b which stands for those “other 3 billion people,” a reference to the world’s population that still can’t access the Internet, is planning to put 16 satellites into medium-earth equatorial orbit to provide broad band internet access. The company, which is based in the U.K.’s Channel Islands, said their satellites that will sharply reduce the cost for ISPs and operators to provide Internet access over 3G and WiMax networks.
HSBC, Liberty Global and more recently Google, have together invested a cool $65 million in the venture. The rest of the money needed, to a total of $650 million, will be financed through a debt-equity loan.
Wireless seems to be the only economically feasible way to reach the population of the developing world with broadband connectivity. The fiber optic cables that connect the industrialized north are out of the question – too expensive to lay.
The area served by the satellites will be a band of between 45 degrees south to 45 degrees north of the equator catching all of South America, Africa and Southern Asia.
Geostationary satellites, which already provide a similar service, occupy a higher orbit which means longer lag time, and the price is higher.
Buying backhaul capacity from geosatellites can cost a stunning US$4,000 per megabit per month, but Wyler believes O3b will be able to offer the same capacity for $500 or less by using different, cheaper medium-earth orbit (MEO) satellites.
Geosatellites orbit the earth at an altitude of 22,500 miles, while MEO satellites are around 5,000 miles. The latency, or the time it takes for a signal to make a loop between earth and the satellite, can be upwards of 600 milliseconds for a geosatellite because it is further out. For a MEO, latency is around 120 milliseconds, close to that of a fiber network, Wyler said.
The service should be activated by late 2010 and provide speeds of up to 10G bps to areas including Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Financial Times article (has a map showing what areas will be reached).
great to hear, looks like a wonderful and promising project!
wireless and wired connectivity don’t have to be seen as mutually exclusive, in addition to gaining internet access an important consideration is load balancing and distributed networking.
as can be seen in some exciting wireless technologies like 802.11s (used in the OLPC) its possible for multiple users to share multiple network connections.
if wireless can bring internet access to more of the global population that is phenomenal, and an important part of this will be to use distributed networking techniques to balance and share bandwidth between multiple wireless and wired networks in an efficient, and fault-tolerant manner.