There's a tradeoff there in the number of satellites needed and the amount of fuel needed to maintain their orbits... the closer to the planet, the more drag.

There's a tradeoff there in the number of satellites needed and the amount of fuel needed to maintain their orbits... the closer to the planet, the more drag. I suspect the larger number of smaller satellites will also produce lower available bandwidth, but I'm not sure how that scales. I recently saw an article about impulse engines using an arc-welding type approach where just electricity and some sort of metallic rod were needed. If these can be made small enough that could bring down the cost of station keeping dramatically, since presumably you could get a lot more lifetime thrust per kg of mass using that metal, then you would with propellants. (And the electricity can be harvested in orbit.)