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If I were them, I would do both with the same stone: Customers get terrestrial repeaters with their satellite antennas, and provide service to the local neighbo
by tbabb 9y ago
If I were them, I would do both with the same stone: Customers get terrestrial repeaters with their satellite antennas, and provide service to the local neighborhood. If you are in the vicinity of someone with a roof box, you connect to/buy from them. If not, you invest in a roof box and sell internet back to "the grid", rather analogous to roof solar.
Basically like treating the satellite as backhaul for small cells, and also having the customer BE the small cell. No fiber laying or city government permits or telephone pole work or anything.
- elihu 9y agoThat might be a pretty good option just from a protocol overhead standpoint. Maybe there are good technical solutions to this that I don't know about, but I'm inclined to believe that a satellite could communicate more efficiently with a handful of high-throughput ground stations at once than it could hundreds or thousands of smaller ground stations that are continually connecting and disconnecting as they gain or lose line-of-sight. That's a lot of control messages to deal with.