by cornleaf on May 17th, 2006

cornleaf

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Does the U.S.A have the technology to launch a sattelite were everyone can have wireless internet connection all over the world?If so why havent they launched one yet?

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  • by Thom64 on May 17th, 2006

    Thom64

    No. No one sattelite could provide continuous service to everybody in the world. It would take what they call a constellation of low-earth-orbit tranceivers or a bunch of geosynchronous ones. Either solution would cost billions of dollars.

    There are a couple of commercial ventures offering this service for a fee. Connexion by Boeing is one.

    Even using the best and fastest available devices I don't think we could produce such a system with enough banwidth (throughput, gigabytes per second) to serve everybody that currently uses phone, DSL, cable or wireless internet access and still serve at a reasonable speed... well... OK it is possible, but not economically feasible... and it would take a lot of years to get it all working... and then there is the cost of the radio on the user's end... and as soon as you got it all working, it would be obsolete...

    Anyway, possible, practical and economically viable are three very different things...

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  • by ChrisDG on October 22nd, 2006

    ChrisDG

    No - it's line of sight. If you take a ball, representing the earth. And then if you hold a smaller object (like a raisin) away from it to be the satellite, at no point can you get the satellite in position to reach every part of the planet at once. In fact you will only get less than half the surface covered regardless of how far away the satellite would be due to the Earth's surface not being totally flat.

    Obviously the closer the satellite is the the surface, the smaller the area the signal can reach without being blocked by the Earth itself. The only option would be to build a satellite with a transmitter that was so powerful the signal could travel through the very core of our planet, and I would stake my ham sandwich on the fact that this isn't possible at the moment.

    Plus, why would they care that a blind woman in Sudan with 14 children and no house cannot receive a internet connection?

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  • by SANHEDRIN on May 17th, 2006

    SANHEDRIN

    They would probably would just like russia.

    But it would be about security and prevention of hackers.

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  • by Im Alec has abandoned this account on December 30th, 2009

    Im Alec has abandoned this account

    No. There are several reasons why not.

    The first is that no satellite can see the whole surface of the earth. The further up they are, the more of the surface they can see - but the more power it takes for them transmit to the ground and for devices to transmit to them. The Iridium global phone network is in low orbit for that reason - and needs 66 satellites to keep in touch. Satellites don't have a lot of power.

    Secondly, talking to a billion devices would consume an awful lot of energy. It is not like satellite TV, where you transmit one signal to millions of people - you would have to transmit a different signal to each listener.

    Thirdly, there isn't enough bandwidth: there are simply too many massages to fit into the available frequencies. Cellphones are based, as the name implies, on cells: different cells re-use the same frequencies to talk to different phones. There is enough bandwidth in each cell for a few tens, maybe hundreds of conversations - and each cell can have a different set of conversations. In cities, they make the cells quite small, so that you can have thousands of conversations in the city. But a satellite would be one giant cell for the whole area it was covering, so it could only provide a few hundreds of connections at the same time - maybe a few tens of thousands with more advanced technology, but not millions.

    Fourthly, all the connections would have to go into one gigantic switch to be touted to the right place. And a single switch which could handle a large proportion of the internet has not been built yet, would be the size of a large building if it were built (much more than the size of a satellite) and consume mind-boggling amounts of power - far more than is available on a satellite.

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