Samsung publishes zetabyte per month 'Space Internet' proposal

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Thousands of low-cost micro-satellites could provide 200GB/month for 5 billion users.

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Read more.

"providing additional capacity of one zetabyte per month. That's equivalent to 200GB/month for 5 billion users worldwide."

Here's a math question Samsung didn't want to answer. "How much fuel would it take to put 4600 satellites in our orbit?"

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Originally Posted by HavoCnMe

Here's a math question Samsung didn't want to answer. "How much fuel would it take to put 4600 satellites in our orbit?"

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Lots, but Samsung can afford it :)

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Originally Posted by bae85

Lots, but Samsung can afford it :)

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True - It's been at least a month since Apple last sued them! :lol:

They could call it the Samsung Galaxy

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Originally Posted by HavoCnMe

... Here's a math question Samsung didn't want to answer. "How much fuel would it take to put 4600 satellites in our orbit?"

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I expect far less than you might imagine for small satellites in LEO. After all, NASA offers low cost deployment via it's Cubesat program already, so a dedicated LEO mini-satellite delpoyment mission could probably launch a lot of satellites at comparatively low cost...

Isn't the problem not getting the data down, but the requests up? I remember companies doing satellite broadband ~ 10 years ago when I was in Belize. The problem is that although the data is beamed down by satellite, you had to have a dial up connection for your upload. Not sure how this will fix it unless they're proposing satellite up-link from each AP?

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

I expect far less than you might imagine for small satellites in LEO. After all, NASA offers low cost deployment

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CSLI is effectively hitching a free ride on rockets with spare capacity, but the launch profile will be limited to planes dictated by the primary mission, which is roughly equatorial for the vast majority of launches. For the kind of global coverage Samsung is proposing they'll have to have a much more exotic launch profile on their own timetable, that will need their own dedicated launches, which is extremely expensive so they're going to have to pack as many units in as they can, but even still, there's a limit to how many you can get up at a time, they'd probably need 40 launches at least. And the individual units will need their own manoeuvre thrusting systems to handle plane and altitude changes so they can get into position, which in itself will require significant amount of fuel, especially the plane changes, and after all that, it'll need to make adjustments to avoid collisions, and routinely compensate for atmospheric drag. And that's assuming that the world's governments are happy to have these things whizzing across their borders. So orchestrating all that mess wont be simple at all, technically, or politically.

It smells a lot more like a pipe dream, one of many we've heard lately about bringing interwebs to the rest of the planet.

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Originally Posted by b0redom

Isn't the problem not getting the data down, but the requests up? I remember companies doing satellite broadband ~ 10 years ago when I was in Belize. The problem is that although the data is beamed down by satellite, you had to have a dial up connection for your upload. Not sure how this will fix it unless they're proposing satellite up-link from each AP?

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I remember those. But as I understand, things have evolved since. My folks run a hotel business in a country without very good internet infrastructure and satellite is the least bad option. Upload is no longer via dial up but some sort of uplink. It is very expensive, and the latency is pretty dire (non-turn based online games are almost unplayable) and the bandwidth nothing special.. yet at least it still beat dial-up for both upstream and downstream by a lot.

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Originally Posted by virtuo

They could call it the Samsung Galaxy

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Have a cookie for this :D

This does sound awesome.

However, there is the little (HUGE) problem for Space Debris to take into account. As of Sept 2013 NASA have said "There are more than 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the Earth. They travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. There are 500,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger. There are many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked."

Samsung are thinking about putting thousands more objects into orbit. It's going to end in an even bigger mess up there. Soon spacecraft won't be able to leave the planet without fear of being ripped to shreds by bits of 17,000mph death junk.

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Originally Posted by Lord Midas

This does sound awesome.

However, there is the little (HUGE) problem for Space Debris to take into account. As of Sept 2013 NASA have said "There are more than 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the Earth. They travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. There are 500,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger. There are many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked."

Samsung are thinking about putting thousands more objects into orbit. It's going to end in an even bigger mess up there. Soon spacecraft won't be able to leave the planet without fear of being ripped to shreds by bits of 17,000mph death junk.

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Been watching Horizon, too?

I must admit, though, they did paint an ominous picture. Some of those numbers are very speculative, though, as they (the US military and/or NASA) can't currently track anything much smaller than a baseball in space, though they're currently tracking about 20,000 objects of that size or larger. For smaller objects, it's something of a guesstimate.

I'd have thought UAVs/pseudo-satellites would be a better fit for this sort of application - not only would the lower altitude reduce latency but you don't add 5,000 pieces to the space-junk problem. I guess the technology/cost isn't quite comparable yet but at least it's there as an alternative for the future.