![]() ![]() For his part, Del Portillo wondered whether the new proposals would be a viable, reliable service for regions of the world where internet has been either inaccessible or unaffordable. Such meganetwork proposals have drawn criticism from the astronomy community, as the thousands of satellites launched into space would potentially obscure astronomers’ observations of astrophysical sources. SpaceX and OneWeb are deploying the first strings of satellites as part of separately proposed networks, while Telesat and Amazon are moving forward with constellations of their own. In recent years, satellite hardware and software technology has advanced, and demand for broadband has grown, such that the idea for global internet coverage from space has resurfaced in a big way. “There was a huge bubble burst 20 years ago, and now we’re asking the question whether the massive growth in data needs can support one, or perhaps even several competitors providing global internet,” Cameron says. These efforts, however, were quickly eclipsed by a rapidly expanding land-based infrastructure. Since the 1990s, there have been various efforts to launch satellite constellations into low-Earth orbit to provide global broadband service. The vast majority of the world’s high-speed internet access comes from land-based networks - cable, DSL, fiber optics, and wireless towers - with a minority delivered through regional satellite networks. The paper’s co-authors at MIT include graduate student and lead author Nils Pachler, along with Edward Crawley, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering, and Bruce Cameron, Director of the System Architecture Group. It can be really life-changing for those areas.”ĭel Portillo and his colleagues will present a paper detailing their results next week at the IEEE International Conference on Communications. ![]() “But these constellations can bring a lot of throughput to areas where right now there is no service whatsoever, no fibers. “We won’t be in a situation where densely populated regions like New York City or Los Angeles will be served entirely by satellite capability,” says Inigo Del Portillo, a former graduate student in MIT’s System Architecture Group. However, the team concludes that the space-based fleets could fill in the gaps where conventional cable connections have been unfeasible or inaccessible, such as in rural areas, remote polar and coastal regions, and even in the air and overseas. While the networks vary in their proposed number and configuration of satellites, ground stations, and communication capabilities, the team found that each constellation could provide a total capacity of around tens of terabits per second.Īs proposed, these megaconstellations would likely not replace current land-based networks, which can support thousands of terabits per second. ![]() The researchers calculated each network’s throughput, or global data capacity, based on their technical specifications as reported to the Federal Communications Commission. Now researchers in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics have run a comparison of the four largest global satellite network proposals, from SpaceX, Telesat, OneWeb, and Amazon. Each is designed to deploy thousands of satellites at various altitudes and inclination angles to the Earth, to connect remote and rural users to the internet. Starlink is among a handful of global satellite networks currently in development (though not without controversy, due to effects on our view of the night sky). The formation is not extraterrestrial, or even astrophysical in origin, but is in fact a line of satellites, recently launched by SpaceX, that will eventually be joined by many more to form Starlink, a “megaconstellation” that will wrap around the Earth as a global network designed to beam high-speed internet to users anywhere in the world. In recent months, people have reported seeing a parade of star-like points passing across the night sky. ![]()
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