Experts question feasibility of low-orbit satellites for Internet

Some of the world’s most well-known investors, including Richard Branson and Elon Musk, are betting that new projects that involve putting thousands of satellites into low orbit will bring the Internet to millions of people who don’t have access. While some have indicated these initiatives has could improve access in remote and rural parts in Canada, some experts are skeptical about their chances of success. “It’s challenging to get the business plan right for any of these big systems, when you have to launch hundreds or thousands of satellites, and spend billions of dollars before you can generate any revenue,” California-based technology consultant Tim Farrar, whose specialties include advising satellite operators, said in a phone interview. OneWeb, whose board of directors includes Branson, plans to launch 648 satellites. The company did not respond to interview requests about its project, but in a press release in June, it announced it had raised $500 million US in funding from a number of companies, including Coca-Cola Co. OneWeb founder Greg Wyler said in the press release that the company is “committed to solving one of the world’s biggest problems — enabling affordable broadband Internet access for everyone.” He said that the “dream of fully bridging the digital divide is on track to be a reality in 2019.” Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, of which Musk is the CEO, is working on a similar project of its own. The company declined to speak about the project or provide any information about it. Media reports have referred to a filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that indicate the initiative would involve 4,000 satellites. The company would start testing the service next year and hopes to have the project running in about five years, the Washington Post reported in June. Farrar said OneWeb has made more progress thus far than SpaceX when it comes to finding a contractor to build satellites. While SpaceX raised about $1 billion earlier this year from Google Inc. and Fidelity Investments, that money isn’t earmarked specifically for satellites, he noted, while OneWeb’s $500 million US is specifically for the satellite project. In interventions filed in the CRTC’s review of what basic telecommunications services should be available to all Canadians, companies such as Rogers Communications Inc. and Shaw Communications Inc. pointed to such projects, with Rogers saying plans like OneWeb's “present great potential for Canada.” According to Joseph Touch, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, one of the problems with putting satellites in low earth orbit is that you need a lot more of them. Traditional satellites are placed about 30,000 miles (48,300 kilometres) away, and stay stationary because they are “basically falling around the earth at the same rate that the earth is turning.” Projects like those proposed by OneWeb and Space X would put satellites in low earth orbit — between 180 and 2,000 kilometres away from the ground, according to NASA — where it takes about 90 minutes to circulate the globe, Touch said. “Think about how long over L.A., when it’s going around the entire globe in 90 minutes?” he said. “Which means you’ve got to have another one right behind the first one, and another one right behind that, and another one right behind the other one. By the time you’re done, you need thousands of these things swarming around the planet,” he said. Companies have tried to do this in the past and failed, Touch said. “The number of satellites you need to make it work is just insane,” he said, adding that "it’s hard to believe that it would become feasible." A downside of having satellites in high orbit is that the signals have latency, or a delay, of about a quarter-second, Touch said. “Which means gaming’s off the table. Skype is off the table,” he said, adding that satellites in high orbit also have slow upload speeds. The benefit of putting satellites closer means that “the latency is great” and applications like Skype can work, Touch said. Satellite industry consultant Roger Rusch said in a phone interview that other projects aiming to put more satellites in lower orbits exist, but that the SpaceX and OneWeb initiatives “are the ones that seem to have the most substance behind them at this time.” Rusch said OneWeb seems to be focused more on providing high-speed access to people throughout the world, while SpaceX is focused on building a satellite network and selling connectivity to telecommunications companies. “I think would put themselves in the position of many satellite operators, which is to be a carrier’s carrier,” he said. “So they would be, in effect, an extension to the Internet backbone that would cover the entire globe, he said. “Whereas OneWeb's approach seems to be to provide direct access to unserved people in some parts of the world.” Despite those goals, Rusch said more traditional geostationary satellite systems like EchoStar and the ViaSat, which serve Canada, “are the most practical ways to get Internet access for people.” He added they’re likely less expensive “than these new systems that have been dreamed up.” Both systems will launch new satellites in the near future. Canadian satellite Internet provider Xplornet Communications Inc. has purchased capacity on both the EchoStar XIX, expected to launch in mid-2016, and on the ViaSat-2, which will launch at about the same time, spending a total of $475 million on capacity on the two satellites. The company declined to comment for this story, though president Allison Lenehan said in an interview last year that the satellites will allow the company to offer speeds that are “much faster than 10 Mbps” across the country, as compared to speeds of 5 Mpbs and 10 Mbps that the company offers now “almost throughout all of Canada.” Lenehan said this summer that Xplornet aims to make 25 Mbps Internet available to all rural Canadians by 2017. Touch said that additional capacity on high-throughput satellites will not improve latency. Oana Spinu, executive director of the advocacy group Nunavut Broadband Development Corp., said that upgrades Xplornet has announced for 2017 “will be a welcomed improvement but it will not meet all of the North’s telecommunication needs.” She added in an email: “Service availability is just the first step; the end goal is service adoption. There are other efforts required; for example, to make service affordable for low-income households, to ensure that schools, public libraries and other community institutions have sufficient connectivity, and to improve digital literacy.” OneWeb and SpaceX “are not the first projects to aspire to delivering Internet access globally via low earth orbit satellite constellations. This is a noble but still elusive goal,” she said. She noted that her organization told the CRTC in its intervention in the basic telecom-services proceeding that “it is almost impossible to imagine a long term solution for Nunavut that does not involve fibre.” Low-earth orbit systems have been tried in the past unsuccessfully, Rusch noted, recalling companies such as Global Star Inc. and Iridum Communications Inc. have gone into bankruptcy trying to make this type of technology work. While geostationary satellites can “focus the energy into the areas where the service is needed … these low-earth orbiting satellites provide service uniformly around the world. They have to, just by their very nature,” Rusch explained. “And they are serving not only the people in remote areas, they are serving areas where there is absolutely nobody. Totally, totally void areas, and there are vast expanses of the earth that have a population that is literally zero. … So it costs a lot of money if you provide uniform service around the world.” — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Experts question feasibility of low-orbit satellites for Internet

News | August 25, 2015

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Experts question feasibility of low-orbit satellites for Internet

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