portillo

8 ms·

31.
by portillo 7y ago
Yeah, we will see the price of those phase array antennas.
32.
by portillo 7y ago
Exactly, that is the real problem, the lack of competition from terrestrial networks. In the US the ISPs operate as a monopoly. In most big cities in Europe you have 3/4 providers to choose from, which reduces costs and increases the q
33.
by portillo 7y ago
I am not talking fiber to the home, I am talking a fiber backed infrastructure, like cell towers and such. If the solution was to provide Internet wirelessly, we would have that right now. The cell phone infrastructure provides much higher
34.
by portillo 7y ago
I don't think that latency is a decisive factor for most people / networks (as long as its below certain threshold). Most people will tell you it's a price-based decision. On the other hand, roughly 85% of the population worl
35.
by portillo 7y ago
Good luck making a business case with ARPUs of 3-4 USD / month from those people. They have nothing to do in big cities, they cannot deliver the required data-rate density (bps/km2).
36.
by portillo 7y ago
This is complete nonsense. There is not enough demand for all those satellites and capacity, so it's very hard to understand why they are making such a filing. As of today, there is probably ~ 1 Tbps of usable capacity in space (wordlw
37.
by portillo 7y ago
If all the constellation + GEO systems proposals end up being launched, there will be an oversupply of capacity from space. Rural areas are a viable market only in the US and Canada, where people can afford to pay $50+/month for connec
38.
by portillo 8y ago
1.- As an individual, the cheapest and simplest options would be to use Nanoracks, Spaceflight, or a similar company that handles most of the launch process. Their price is ~$100k for a 1U Cubesat. I have serious doubts that they would be O
39.
by portillo 8y ago
Yes, it is all solar power. 5.5 kW is not a lot of power, modern buses for geostationary satellites (i.e., 720HP) can produce close to ~18 kW, of which ~80-90 % are normally used by the payload in a communications satellite.
40.
by portillo 8y ago
I agree with you. I should have said that I think they were not looking to maximize the system throughput when designing the system, instead wanted to test this new technology. Seems the 450 kg Quantum payload has a 5.5 kW power consumption
41.
by portillo 8y ago
Seems that those 8 beams can be further subdivided in different spot beams (not sure how many subdivisions are possible though). Also, a previous article [1] mentions that they are actually limited to a maximum of 1 GHz/beam (I underst
42.
by portillo 8y ago
Initially, in 2015, they were talking about ~6-7 Gbps [1] but my guess is that the current design allows for a little bit more of throughput (8 beams @ 1 GHz/beam (max. BW) x 2 bps/Hz (?) -> 16 Gbps (?)). In any case, I would s
43.
by portillo 8y ago
That headline is quite misleading, as there are several re-configurable "software-defined" satellites active in orbit, each one presenting different degrees of flexibility. Dynamic power and frequency allocation have been used sin