Space Networking
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Providers
- SpaceX Starlink - Hawthorne, California
- 42,000 planned satellites
- Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) - To provide satellite-hosted coverage for terrestrial mobile providers. (aka direct-to-handset satellite service or “cell tower in space”) PCS G-block
- Amazon Project Kuiper - Redmond, Washington
- OneWeb - London, England
- Telesat - Ottawa, Canada
- China SatNet GuoWang - Xiong’an New Area, China
- 12,992 planned satellites
Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) Satellite Providers
- O3b (originally “other three billion”) WikiPedia
- About 20 satellites at an alititude of 8063 km
Geostationary Orbit (Geo) Satellite Providers
Sun-synchronous Polar Orbit
Interesting Facts
- Radio travels faster in space than in a fiber.
- Radio travels at the speed of light which is 3e8 m/s in a vacuum but light only travels about 68% as fast in glass. Even radio in the dielectric coax cable is faster than fiber at 87% of the speed of light in a vacuum.
- Radio travels at nearly the speed of light through the Earth’s atmosphere since the air molecules are so spread out that the impact is negligible.
- Once inter-satellite radio and optical communications are perfected, a data packet from the New York Stock Exchange to the London Stock Exchange will be faster over a LEO satellite network than the submarine fiber network.
See Also