Sometimes "Just a Little Bandwidth" is Quite Valuable

Though gigabit networks now have assumed a higher profile on policy and ISP agendas in some markets, the real challenge in many other markets is making "just a little bandwidth" available to billions of people with no Internet access. 

O3b Networks says it has successfully place four new satellites into orbit, part of a fleet of eight satellites to be placed into “medium earth” orbit. That means the satellites will not be “geosynchronous,” or constantly transmitting from a single location above the earth.

And though its marketing emphasizes "fiber" capacity arguments, no satellite fleet can match optical fiber backhaul capacity or access speed.

But that isn't really the point. In many cases, it is the ability to provide what we might call "just a little bandwidth" that is important, especially where people have no Internet access.

The advantage of the MEO approach is latency performance, since the roundtrip distance between earth stations and satellite, and back to earth, is far less than for a geosynchronous satellite. A geosynchronous satellite has 500 millisecond latency. Ob3 says it will have latency of about 150 milliseconds.

When the network is completed, O3b satellites will provide Internet backbone connectivity between 45 degrees north and 45 degrees south latitude, covering roughly 70 per cent of the world's population, especially in the global south.

The current business model calls for sales to distributors rather than end users, so O3b will be a “backhaul” provider.

As with any satellite service, aggregate bandwidth does not indicate what amount of capacity will be available to any single distributor or location. That is partly a matter of buyer desire (how much bandwidth can I afford to buy?) and transponder limits.

As one example, O3b has sold capacity to an ISP in the Democratic Republic of Congo, providing an aggregate 500 Mbps of capacity for the whole nation. What isn’t clear is whether this means 500 Mbps distributed across all potential access points, or 500 Mbps at each of the contracted distribution points.

O3b will provide higher satellite bandwidth than has been available before, and that is a good thing. But the new capability probably will get other people thinking about what else might be possible in the near term and medium term, using satellite and other network platforms.

It is in some real ways as big a challenge to get megabits to places with no access, as it is to get a gigbit to places that only have access to megabits.