O3b Launches Four More Satellites To Bring Internet To 'Other 3 Billion' 80
An anonymous reader writes "O3b Networks is aiming to provide internet access through satellite, to the "other three billion" people in under-served equatorial regions (Africa, the Pacific, South America). O3b launched four more satellites [Thursday], to add to the four they already have in orbit. This is a very international effort; a Russian Soyuz rocket went up from South America, carrying satellites built in France. There's a video of the rocket and payloads coming together and a video of the rocket launch. There's also an academic paper describing using the O3b system from the Cook Islands in the Pacific, giving an idea of what it does and those all-important ping times."
Re:Ping (Score:3, Informative)
.15s between ground nodes, or 150ms. So a traditional ping would be about 300ms round trip.
Re:Ping (Score:5, Informative)
The 150 ms / 300 ms round trip was the "simulated" ping time. They ran real ping tests over 24 hours to the most remote coverage location at the Cook Islands. [wikipedia.org]
One was from Surrey, England to the Cook Islands and averaged 570-800ms round trip -- the other was from California, US to the Cook Islands and averaged 420-620ms round trip. These were performed once per second for 24 hours and can be found in Figure 5 of the research paper. [arxiv.org]
Re:Throughput? (Score:4, Informative)
Good question. According to their FAQ [o3bnetworks.com] their satellites will be capable of delivering "gigabytes of capacity". Obviously that would be split among individual beams, and sliced up into smaller pieces for individual service providers and again for individual people. It is based on the Ka-Band which currently supports about 500 megabits per beam (with multiple beams).
Re:Throughput? (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia says 12Gbit total per satellite: O3b (satellite) [wikipedia.org]
Not enough for 3 billion people.