Last time I checked (5 years ago), small satellites were a _booming_ industry, but also a very amateur / research oriented one. While a professional military o

Last time I checked (5 years ago), small satellites were a _booming_ industry, but also a very amateur / research oriented one. While a professional military or communications organization may launch a number of small satellites, they tend to go through the same process as when they're building a large one. As such, most of the small sat world is focused on amateurs launching small satellites of their own design, student organizations and startups launching 1U type boxes, and research efforts for which a tiny box is sufficient. As for your second question, a few points: 1) yes, it is massively cheaper to give your nation cell coverage via satellite as opposed to via tower. There have been a number of success stories in Africa where a local government / business managed to put together the funds to buy a communications satellite, and overnight, the entire country has cell phones. 2) No, you wouldn't do this via a small sat, you'd need a real deal communications satellite to achieve this. One of the key features of small sats is that they are small enough that if you beg and plead enough to the powers that be, you might find room on a launch vehicle to launch your tiny satellite in some spare room. If this service can open that up to people who don't have governmental / educational connections, all the better. 3) There is research on creating swarms of small satellites that can communicate and act like one giant one. That's pretty cool. I worked with these guys http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/blog/?page_id=260 http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/blog/?page_id=260 for a time, and they were working on setting up satellites that were so small, they couldn't even fit a real antenna on them, but figuring out basically a radio based encoding pattern so that you could pull their signal out from beneath the noise floor anyway. That all said, the industry is dominated that way because of the difficulty of launching a satellite to begin with. If you can make it easier to launch sats of any type, then people will start building those too. Build it, and they will come.