Please don’t forget about us in the South Pacific. We are not many, so laying cable to us makes even less sense.

Om, heard you on The World today! You did a great job!

“I think that their US$ 750 million investment in satellites will be useless within 20 years of launch due to degradation (NYT claims a 10-15 year life for MEO satellites), whereas building more land capacity in Africa would have much longer-lasting benefits.”

“Google clearly wishes to use this project to enable broadband Internet access in developing regions, but many other things must be in place, including fixed power infrastructure, PCs or OLPCs, technical support and skills, and demand and useful content and services for areas with lower literacy, before that can happen.”

You wrote:

“They have a dedicated Ka-band satellite and as a result, the large available Ka-band spectrum can help deliver bandwidth at speeds of Gigabit/second and higher.” I believe that Ka-band has issues with rain fade, and the weather in Africa is often bad and likely to get worse, particularly at times when people might need a phone service for emergencies

“O3b Networks uses parabolic antennas, which reduce latency.” I think the key to reducing latency is the low orbit of the satellites, and I can’t see how the antenna shape makes any difference.

“Their birds — 16 of them — are going to be positioned at 8,063 kms from the Earth, which allows them to add new satellites.” You can add new satellites in any orbit, and I don’t see any plans for more than 16 of them.

The low latency will come from the orbit that is chosen, less distance to the satellite will mean less latency. However to increase bandwidth you need to use directional (versus omnidirectional) antennas and therefore require parabolic dishes that actively track the satellite. These are orders of magnitude more expensive to purchase and operate than fixed VSAT antennas. The orbit may allow for additional satellites, but as you add additional satellites complexity for routing increases exponentially.

In response to Prashant Singh’s comment regarding Iridium, this project is more an evolution of existing VSAT technology. The significant difference is that the satellites will be communicating with fixed ground stations that will most likely use multiple dishes for continuous operation rather than mobile handsets with omnidirectional antennas.

It still faces the fundamental problems that Iridium did in both the political quagmire of offering services in multiple countries and the long development and deployment time for satellite based systems having a tendency to make them obsolete at or near service launch.