{"id":20947,"date":"2020-01-31T00:01:35","date_gmt":"2020-01-31T00:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/?p=20947"},"modified":"2020-01-30T16:19:40","modified_gmt":"2020-01-30T16:19:40","slug":"update-oneweb-and-spacex-leo-ultrafast-broadband-satellites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/index.php\/2020\/01\/update-oneweb-and-spacex-leo-ultrafast-broadband-satellites.html","title":{"rendered":"Update – OneWeb and SpaceX LEO Ultrafast Broadband Satellites"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good progress is being made by rivals SpaceX<\/a> and OneWeb<\/a>, which are both now rapidly moving into a new phase of large-scale deployments on the road to creating two mega constellations of compact Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ultrafast broadband satellites; these should eventually offer “fibre like<\/em>” speeds to consumers across the world.<\/p>\n

At present most broadband internet connectivity services – those delivered to consumers in the UK via satellites at least – come from spacecraft that are positioned high above the Earth in geostationary orbits (GEO \/ GSO), which often reflects a distance of about 35,000km+ from the planet’s surface.<\/p>\n

Such satellites are the size of a double decker bus, have limited peak capacity and take years, as well as hundreds of millions of pounds, to build. As a result latency times are often incredibly slow (around 600 – 1000 milliseconds – useless for fast paced online video games etc.), data allowances are often meagre and service speeds can suffer (especially at peak times).<\/p>\n

By comparison both SpaceX (Starlink<\/a>) and OneWeb<\/a> (Microsat) hope to eclipse the old solutions by creating vast constellations of significantly smaller LEO satellites. Such platforms tend to weigh around 150-260Kg each and, with solar sails folded, are often smaller than an adult human. The LEOs tend to orbit at around 500-1300km above the Earth, which is significantly nearer than their giant cousins and thus fast latency times of 25-40ms are viable.<\/p>\n