I live just above 61°N. Won’t work for me.
You’ll be able to make an ordinary call from your cell-phone while on your yacht. Or in the North Pole.
“I’m in a bad cell right now...” —that will be gone.
And it’ll come with progressive censorship - free of charge.
(And free of morals and logic.)
Ping!..............
Much as I’d love to have network capabilities out in the sticks, especially competition...
2,000+ satellites in low Earth orbit? One company alone? And others competing for the same orbit space?
I spent a third of my US Air Force career working for units that tracked satellites and space junk. We don’t need so much stuff up there we cannot launch without a collision, either.
Putting all of those satellites into LEO is one thing, but I’d like to see their plan for frequency use and ground stations to relay internet data to and from the orbiting constellation.
Amazon Outer Prime?
I have used Viasat and their predecessor companies for over 15 years because these satellites are the only game in town where I live. Latency is a big problem along with variable bandwidth depending on the number of subscribers and where you are in the beam. This technology and 5G will supplant them almost overnight as soon as someone rolls out a real product. Standing by.
“could conceivably reap billions of dollars in revenue”
If it’s “free” then by definition there’s no revenue to be had.
L
It will all depend on cost.
Kind of like the Iridium project.
Likely with the same end result for the company putting this debris field up there...
“The effort, code-named Project Kuiper, follows up on last September’s mysterious reports that Amazon was planning a “big, audacious space project” involving satellites and space-based systems. The Seattle-based company is likely to spend billions of dollars on the project, and could conceivably reap billions of dollars in revenue once the satellites go into commercial service.”
The Fraud is mixed up in this somewhere.
Big Media defined him for years with the word “audacious”.
“unserved and underserved communities around the world”
Americans will pay full price, while people in backward hellholes will get to enjoy the benefit of our hard work and be rewarded for their indolence.
Minimum transmission delay of ~4 ms. Not bad.
VOIP / internet based phone service would require a maximum delay of about 200 ms. There are several other delays that would need to be accounted for to determine if VOIP would be viable.
Why don’t they just buy Viasat? The infrastructure is already in place and all they have to do is offer better overall service than what Viasat does now.
Iridium satellites are still working.
About 20 years, kind of sort of.
The Iridium satellite constellation provides L-band voice and data coverage to satellite phones, pagers and integrated transceivers over the entire Earth surface.
The constellation consists of 66 active satellites in orbit, required for global coverage, and additional spare satellites to serve in case of failure.[4] Satellites are in low Earth orbit at a height of approximately 485 mi (781 km) and inclination of 86.4°.
All of which come with a fantastic amount of atmospheric drag. The orbital decay on the first group would give it a life span of only a year (maybe two if there is enough onboard fuel), maybe less. Wonder what their replacement plan/cost will be?
At least one of those fool children at google needs to read the book “Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story”.
The hard part isn’t putting up and operating the satellites but getting every nation on earth to agree to allocate a common communications spectrum just for this purpose AND to allocate ENOUGH of that spectrum ...
spectrum allocation has ALWAYS been the problem with ALL wireless data communications, and the bigger the area, the more powerful the signal, and the broader the bandwidth the bigger the problems, both technically and politically ...
all of these johnny-come-lately satellite constellation promoters are truly promoting pie-in-the-sky BS ...
Iridium II...
Because Iridium I was such a success.