For the IoT/M2M stuff that doesn’t require huge amounts of data, there is a Silicon Valley startup that is deploying cube sats for just that.
Swarm Technologies https://www.swarm.space/ -Mike > On Jul 8, 2020, at 19:49, Denys Fedoryshchenko <nuclear...@nuclearcat.com> > wrote: > > On 2020-07-08 10:05, Mark Tinka wrote: >>> On 7/Jul/20 21:58, Eric Kuhnke wrote: >>> Watching the growth of terrestrial fiber (and PTP microwave) networks >>> going inland from the west and east African coasts has been >>> interesting. There's a big old C-band earth station on the hill above >>> Freetown, Sierra Leone that was previously the capital's only link to >>> the outside world. Obsoleted for some years now thanks to the >>> submarine cable and landing station. I imagine they might keep things >>> live as a backup path with a small C-band transponder MHz commit and >>> SCPC modems linked to an earth station somewhere in Europe, but not >>> with very much capacity or monthly cost. >>> The landing station in Mogadishu had a similar effect. >> The early years of submarine fibre in Africa always had satellite as a >> backup. In fact, many satellite companies that served Africa with >> Internet prior to submarine fibre were banking on subsea and terrestrial >> failures to remain relevant. It worked between 2009 - 2013, when >> terrestrial builds and operation had plenty of teething problems. Those >> companies have since either disappeared or moved their services over to >> fibre as well. >> In that time, it has simply become impossible to have any backup >> capacity on satellite anymore. There is too much active fibre bandwidth >> being carried around and out of/into Africa for any satellite system to >> make sense. Rather, diversifying terrestrial and submarine capacity is >> the answer, and that is growing quite well. >> Plenty of new cable systems that are launching this year, next year and >> the next 3 years. At the moment, one would say there is sufficient >> submarine capacity to keep the continent going in case of a major subsea >> cut (like we saw in January when both the WACS and SAT-3 cables got cut >> at the same time, and were out for over a month). >> Satellite earth stations are not irrelevant, however. They still do get >> used to provide satellite-based TV services, and can also be used for >> media houses who need to hook up to their network to broadcast video >> when reporting in the region (even though uploading a raw file back home >> over the Internet is where the tech. has now gone). >> Mark. > > I don't think traditional satellites have much future as backbone. Only as > broadcasting media. > Most are still acting as dumb RF converters, but we can't expect much more > from them. > On geostationary orbit, it is not only expensive to bring each additional kg, > but also they > need to keep it simple as possible, as it is all above van allen belt, and it > needs to run there > without any maintenance for 7+ years. > So if SpaceX managed to squeeze in their satellites at least basic processing > (and seems they did), > it will improve satellite capabilities (and competitiveness) greatly. > The only thing i hope, if they had space for some M2M IoT stuff, similar to > ORBCOMM. >
