[Server-sky] Recent Changes, O3B

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 12:18:50PM -0400, Michael Turner wrote:
> O3B's website is a little sketchy about terminals. Any news here?

http://www.sspi.com.br/portal/images/stories/pdfs/vsat2012/O3b_SSPI_VSAT_DAY_Presentation_2012.pdf
or: http://tinyurl.com/o3bvsat

The reference design is a pair of four meter tracking dishes, about
$1M to install and costly to operate.  You can see a picture of the
Cook Island dish on O3B's blog, scroll down to May 7:
http://www.o3bnetworks.com/additional-pages/blog

O3B satellites use 6 pairs of small steerable Ka band dish antennas
rather than phased arrays, so every customer terminal is consuming
1/6 of a satellite when it is active.  Satellites are "bent pipe"
systems, no onboard proxy or storage, relaying packets from nine
terrestrial "Teleport" gateways connected to the fiber internet
backbone.  There will be significant dead time as a dish on the
satellite swivels to point at a different customer terminal or a
different teleport.  Ground terminals needing continuous coverage
will have multiple antennas.  O3B is not a last-mile system, and if
you are less than 100km from the fiber fiber backbone, microwave
links or fiber are cheaper.

Big GEO internet satellites like ViaSat-1 sell a lot more bandwidth,
far cheaper, to small fixed customer dishes the regions they serve,
like the continental US.  If the the satellite did not launch with
a fixed transponder pointed at your 500km wide region, or you are
competing for bandwidth with too many other customers, you are out
of luck.  Hence the more adaptable 03B.

Adaptability will be the key to O3B's success.  If some customer
needs megabit internet access in a particular place right now
only, and will spend any amount of money to get it, then O3B will
fly a terminal to that place and get that heap of money.  The 
customer's initials will probably be DOD.
   
Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993