Wow, they could complete their objective more quickly by taking a billion dollars in small denomination bills and putting it into a pile and lighting it on fire :-) Only slightly more seriously, it would be very impressive if they could pull it off, but having seen the deployment of Iridium (66), GPS (32), GLONASS (24) , and Galileo (30) it doesn't seem like we have a non-nation state that is up to the challenge of putting 600(!) satellites into orbit all at once.<p>If we assume the reporters got random factoids mixed up, 600 satellites? in 20 "planes" ? (lets assume they are somehow station keeping in the same orbital plane so 30 satellites each trying to stay 12 degrees away from the next satellite in the same plane, while trying to avoid the other 19 planes? One gets destroyed by space junk and you practically guarantee another 29 join it over the next 120 minutes or so? That is going to be quite the dance.<p>And what spectrum are they using for uplink/downlink? .5 Thz? Something they can get a license for all over the world presumably. That alone cost a billion dollars for Iridium.<p>I just can't imagine a scenario where this even works. Perhaps if they start with the old TeleDesic design or something.
I love how in like 2 months we've gone from nobody doing this to three separate entities trying to launch an internet of satellites. Gonna get crowded up there.
Ah, Branson vs Musk.<p>This is one of the things where investing in a fast moving technology reminds me of deflationary economy - we are putting a lot of satellites up there and spending billions doing it when tech is accelerating at such a fast rate that in 10 years the electronics will be quite dated, so it might be worth a wait. There is no easy way to update electronics on these once they're up.<p>Suppose billionaires wants to have a legacy in space before their time on earth is done!<p>Personally can't wait until this is cheap enough for normal individuals/startups. Low orbit nanosats can be done for $20k-ish already - www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21603240-small-satellites-taking-advantage-smartphones-and-other-consumer-technologies<p>Going to get crowded up there!
I'd like to see a server ON a satellite, beyond the reach of governments and regulation. Sell encryption keys and route your ground-based services through a cache up there.
It's very interesting that the reported price was ~ 1/2 million $ per 150kg sat. SpaceX's launch price to LEO is ~ $4.6k/kg, or ~ $700k per 150kg. While the price to launch these guys would be a bit higher (they need something to aggregate a bunch of sats into a single payload), normally the cost to build the sat is a lot bigger than SpaceX's launch price.
I thought one world was something new it turns out that it's actually been announced since February this year.<p>My main question is how fast is it going to be? Can I expect 10Mbps to each terminal / user?
"...OneWeb, a British Channel Islands-registered concern..."<p>If they're so british why don't they think they should pay tax like the rest of us?
Assuming at least 40KM distance from the earth, (40/300) * 2 means a roundtrip time of 267ms. That's without processing time, but that's probably in the ballpark of <5 ms.<p>This excludes many types of internet use cases.