Here's What You Need to Know About SpaceX's Satellite Broadband Plans
Just 10 minutes before SpaceX was due to make its latest Falcon 9 launch on Wednesday, the company decided to delay it because of high-altitude winds. The launch, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, will now hopefully take place on Thursday.
One particularly interesting thing about this launch is its payload. Alongside a satellite that will be used by the Spanish defense ministry, there are two prototype satellites for SpaceX’s planned Starlink constellation—the company’s contender in the growing push to provide cheap internet services to people on the ground.
Here’s what you need to know about Starlink, and where it sits in the satellite-broadband scene.
Is satellite broadband new? Not at all. The first satellite built for two-way broadband communications—e-BIRD, built by Boeing (BA, +0.21%) for the French-headquartered Eutelsat—went up some 15 years ago. There have been many more since. However, so far it’s a relatively niche market.
The advantage of satellite-based broadband is that it can cover entire regions without the need to build out expensive land-based internet infrastructure—you just need a satellite dish to use it, which makes it good for serving rural areas. And while it started out pretty slow, it’s gotten a lot faster over the years (though it’s still not in the same league as a decent fiber connection).
There are two big disadvantages, though (apart from interruptions due to cloud cover). The first is that it tends to be pretty expensive, and the second is that it usually suffers from high latency, because of how high the satellites are.
Latency is the time it takes for a signal to get from one place to another. While it’s not a big issue when you’re sending emails or trying to view a static webpage, high latency can be a showstopper for video, virtual reality, and real-time communications.
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