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It's a cool system. There's a slight disadvantage that the satellite-to-ground link is at 10-15 GHz for users, so it will go down in a heavy rainstorm, and some
by IndexicalDemon 10y ago
It's a cool system. There's a slight disadvantage that the satellite-to-ground link is at 10-15 GHz for users, so it will go down in a heavy rainstorm, and some fraction of the time due to other atmospheric effects. Should be reasonably reliable but far from fiber, and it will be interesting to see what uptime they guarantee. Assuming this all ever actually happens.
- alkonaut 10y agoI assume the sensitity to weather etc depends on the type of equipment you have? Couldn't a community use a huge high power and high sensitivity common receiver/transmitter station, that provides fiber to 10-1000 households? The community station could also provide some kind of limited bandwidth fallback such as DSL or LTE that just ensures peoples fiber lines limp along when the satellites can't be reached (so their juice machines don't stop working...).
- rhino369 10y agoThe cost of fiber is mostly the cost of hooking up homes. Once you have that, the cost of running a connection to a telecom is cheap comparatively.
- alkonaut 10y agoI think that's true in places like (large parts of) the US where the "last mile problem" exists. However for lots of rural Africa, China, Australia there surely must also exist a "first 1000miles problem".