LEO Satellites One Option for Connecting Hardest to Serve Worldwide: OneWeb
Geostationary orbit (GEO) satellites are limited in their ability to connect people around the world, but low earth orbit (LEO) satellites offer much more promise, said Ruth Pritchard-Kelly, OneWeb senior adviser-satellite regulatory affairs and sustainable space policy, Thursday at IEEE’s virtual Connecting the Unconnected Summit. Other speakers said it’s difficult to even count how many people remain without internet service in many parts of the world.
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Concerns about the latency of satellite connections stem from traditional GEO satellites, Pritchard-Kelly said. “I do sincerely believe that once the LEO constellations are fully operational that will be the technology of choice in remote areas because a space-based technology is the only one that can literally reach every point on the globe, including mid-air and mid-ocean,” she said. “Fiber is coming,” she said: “4G has become 5G and will become 6G and the unconnected remain unconnected.”
“In the developed world, we’re talking about defining standards for broadband, which are significantly above, much higher than 10 Mbps data rates,” said William Lehr, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In the developing world, where most of the problem is, they’re much, much lower than 10 Mbps.” Costs are also a factor, he said. In the developed world, people view $30/month service for low-income consumers as the target, but in the developing world the goal has to be closer to $3/month, he said.
If a location has no broadband connections, it’s difficult to even collect data, said Monisha Ghosh, Notre Dame electrical engineering professor and former FCC chief technology officer. “How do we even know where the unconnected are?” she asked. Government subsidies for service are helpful, but only “if you have something to connect to,” she said: “That works, for example, in urban areas where you have networks that you connect to, it’s just too expensive for a lot of people.” In places like India, or some rural markets in the U.S. where there’s no infrastructure, subsidies won’t help, she said.
Even in South Bend, Indiana, many students didn’t have the connectivity they needed for remote education at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ghosh said. The school district worked with companies using the shared citizens broadband radio service to get students online, she said. To help fill gaps, the U.S. needs more bands with a licensed component like CBRS for community networks, she said. Unlicensed bands “are great for what they’re doing -- they cannot really provide that last-mile connectivity,” she said.
“There really are a lot of models” for the government to be involved with broadband deployment, said Dennis Roberson of Roberson and Associates. “There has to be coverage first,” he said. Roberson noted GEO satellites are effective for downloading video, the major way people still use the internet. “You do need a hybrid, you need the combination of broadband capabilities for download along with [low] latency for certain applications,” he said: “Satellites have to have a significant role in meeting needs on a global basis.”
There are 800 million 4G subscribers in India, but the average download speed is 2 Mbps, which is low for many applications, said Varadharajan Sridhar, professor at ‬the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore. We don’t know how many people are unconnected in some regions and that’s “a big problem in developing countries,” he said.
The five LEO constellations currently being built are “inherently global,” Pritchard-Kelly said. Starlink and OneWeb “are close to fully operational in the globe” and by 2025 at the latest, there will be three satellite options, she said. All use high-band spectrum, the Ku band for direct service in some cases and all use the Ka band “for the major trunking, the major backhaul” on their networks, she said.