Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world

Isn't latency a major issue for connectivity with satellites in geosynchronous orbit? I'm curious what their approach is here, either technically or what customer use cases they are targeting.

With what rocket system do you plan to launch these sats? Which company will launch and which will assemble them (often these are different ones)?

The distance to GEO does add some latency due to the distance, that’s the main trade off. What we found in studying this problem for a long time was that 95% of internet traffic isn’t latency sensitive— CDN traffic, video streaming, audio streaming, file downloads, social media posts, etc. The bandwidth crunch is a huge problem to solve but we realized there is low hanging fruit here that we can go after by putting satellites one at a time in GEO and putting a dent in it immediately. vs LEO constellations where you have to put up hundred of satellites (at a cost of billions of dollars) just to get started.

95% of traffic != 95% of value.

What effect does the small size of the satellite have on the cost and complexity of the terminal?

The small-aperture terminal market has been driven by GEO satellites getting bigger, a lot bigger. Yes, we can fit more satellite in a small package, and solar cells have gotten more efficient, but there are laws-of-physics issues involving the size of the antenna, power requirements, etc. that aren't going to go away.

Geosynchronous satellite spacing is determined by the ability of ground stations to resolve satellites so there is a certain number of satellites that can fly, so there is a pressure towards large high-performance satellites that can deliver the maximum capacity as opposed to launching fewer low-performance satellites. Already the high-capacity satellites have insufficient bandwidth to serve demand (otherwise people would just be getting satellite instead of asking for terrestrial internet) and I don't see how low-capacity satellites will actually help.

I see similar problem with the terminals for systems like the SpaceX constellation. To get "wireless equivalent" performance I see the ground terminal requiring some kind of electronically scanned array which would put the cost upwards of $6000.

There is a precedent for satellite services with a high-cost terminal, as back in the 1980s many people would spend about that much for an unlicensed satellite terminal to receive TV, but since that was pirate there was no subscription fee. Compare that to $100 a month for cable and that pays for itself in 5 years.

I have this funny feeling that next-gen satellite providers want to have the expensive terminal AND the expensive service -- possibly because of the "Juicero" issue that the people bankrolling them don't know what prices look like to the average customer.

I would love it if you could prove me wrong.