`CommStellation`: Swarm of net satellites planned
Baku, January 21 (AZERTAC). A Canadian company has announced a plan to put 78 small satellites in orbit to carry the internet, BBC reports.
Called the "CommStellation", the system would be deployed from 2014-2015. It would require six rockets to take the platforms to an altitude of 1,000km.
The network will act as backhaul, linking the traffic of local telecoms and internet service providers to the global fibre infrastructure.
Microsat Systems Canada Inc (MSCI) has not revealed any details on financing.
It is, however, an established and very experienced small spacecraft systems manufacturer.
The company said many regions across North America and the rest of the world were falling behind in terms of the bandwidth needed by users. Space offered a simple solution to that problem, claimed David Cooper, the president and chief executive of MSCI.
"Here in Canada, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is pushing to extend high-speed internet connections to all Canadians," he explained.
"We`re not necessarily a head-to-head competitor for O3b, although we will provide a similar service to them over the equator," Mr Cooper told BBC News.
"Much of our strong capability will be in areas north and south of 45 degrees latitude where they won`t have a lot of capability. But even at the equator, recent estimates I saw talked about O3b addressing less than half of 1% of the global market for backhaul. So there`s lots of room out there for another constellation."
The Canadian venture`s 78 microsatellites would sit in six planes (with a spare in each plane), providing, says MSCI, up to 15 times the speed and 10 times the total bandwidth capacity of a MEO constellation of comparable satellites. Each platform would have a mass of approximately 150kg and a total throughput of 12Gbps.
The constellation would be connected to terrestrial fibre networks through 20 telecommunications ports, or teleports, located around the globe.
One the of advantages of having a low-orbiting system is the reduced latency, or delay, introduced into the transmission of data as it passes back and forth to the satellites in the sky. This latency can be quite severe on geostationary systems positioned 36,000km above the Earth.
Constellations for satellite communications have had a chequered history. Two of the best known satellite phone and data services companies, Iridium and Globalstar, had to go through major financial restructuring when their initial business models failed.
O3b took a couple of years to put its financing in place despite the backing of some big names like Google and the TV satellite operator SES.
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