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Already, traditional players like Intelsat, the world’s largest satellite company by market capitalization, is using the capabilities of its next-generation geostationary satellites to deliver Internet connectivity to airplanes, cruise ships, the world’s merchant marine fleet, all markets that “basically didn’t exist five to seven years ago,” says David McGlade, CEO of Intelsat.
New Protocols
ViaStat ViaSat appear to be getting round the problem of request/responses taking ~ 0.5 second on geostationary satellite links (and hence leading to long delays to complete loading of web pages) by aggregating the multiple request/reponses for the web objects in a page. However this will not assist for real time applications such as gaming or haptic surgery or Voice over IP. For VoIP my the concern is the RTT delays of 500ms for geostationary satellite plus any delays between the ground stations and the conversants, plus de-jitter buffer etc. exceeds the recommended specifications for VoIP (see for example http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/QoS and ITU-T G.114). In particular long delays reulst result in difficulty for the conversants to know when the speaker is done.
ViaSat equipment/services are used in aviation, military, business, and consumer sectors. Besides having fixed based terminals, they also have portable satellite terminals <http://www.satcomresources.com/Viasat-Exede-Pro-Portable-Satellite-Terminal> . Until ViaSat-2 is launched, they have limited Inflight Wi-Fi on "JetBlue and some United Airlines commercial planes <http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/aug/06/viasat-spacex-jet-blue-united-airlines-amazon/>". ViaSat-1 launched in late 2011 supports 140Gbps of capacity. In 2016 they are launching ViaSat-2 offering between 250 and 300 Gbps, and in 2020-2021 they plan to launch ViaSat-3 in the terabit range. The first market ViaSat 3 will address is the Americas, building on the presence of ViaSat 1 and 2 while plunging significantly further into areas like Latin America. The second ViaSat 3 satellite is to focus on Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and the third on the Asia Pacific.
Overall Summary
Satellites can last decades, but balloons and drones must be constantly replenished, and many more are needed to cover the Earth.
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