Meeting Docs - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report customers that need it immediately. The fiber network design can accommodate these future technologies and faster speeds. Low Orbit Satellite Technology It's worth a short mention of the several major companies that are planning to provide fleets of low-orbit satellites to provide broadband service. This includes efforts by SkyLink(Elon Musk), Project Kuiper (Amazon), and OneWeb that have announced plans to launch swarms of satellites to provide broadband. Following is a list of the satellite plans that have been announced: Current Future Total SkyLink 11,927 30,000 41,927 OneWeb 650 1,260 1,910 Telesat 117 512 629 Samsung 4,600 4,600 Kuiper 3,326 3,326 Boeing 147 147 Kepler 140 140 LeoSat 78 30 108 Iridium Next 66 66 SES 03B 27 27 Facebook 1 1 Total 13,153 39,728 52,881 We're not going to provide more than a mention of the technology, because we find it unlikely that the product will compete in Ellensburg. This is going to predominantly be a rural technology to provide broadband where it's expensive to build other technologies. We mostly mention because the topic comes up in almost any discussion of broadband. Low-orbit satellites have one major benefit over the current broadband satellites which sit more than 22,000 miles above the earth. The new satellites are proposed to orbit between 200 and 800 miles high. By being significantly closer to the earth the data transmitted from low-orbit satellites will have a latency of between 25 and 35 milliseconds—about the same experienced in a cable company HFC network. This is much better than the current latency for high-orbit satellites which has been reported as high as 900 milliseconds. The low-orbit satellites will be able to easily support real-time applications like VoIP, video streaming, live Internet connections like Skype, or distance learning. One of the most interesting aspects of the technology is that a given satellite passes through the horizon for a given customer in about 90 minutes. This means that there needs to be a large fleet of satellites so that there is always one in the sky over a given customer. StarLink now has around 900 satellites in orbit, but the business plan calls for over 4,000 satellites in the first constellation. Keeping the first constellation in place will be an ongoing challenge since the satellites have an estimated life of 4 to 5 years. StarLink will forever have to be launching new satellites to replace downed satellites. StarLink has even more ambitious plans and has told the FCC that it might eventually launch over 30,000 satellites–but they need to fund and launch the original batch first. Page 80