Samsung has joined the ever growing list of companies proposing a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit to provide broadband internet across the world. Farooq Khan, president of Samsung Research America, published a paper proposing a…
Samsung has joined the ever growing list of companies proposing a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit to provide broadband internet across the world.
Farooq Khan, president of Samsung Research America, published a paper proposing a satellite internet system capable of carrying at least one zettabyte per month of data traffic, equivalent to 200Gbps for five billion users worldwide.
In order to achieve this, Khan envisions a constellation of 4,600 satellites based on the assumption that each satellite would provide in excess of one terabyte per second of capacity and that there would be two thirds utilisation of that capacity.
The system would utilise a new wireless architecture proposed by Samsung called multicomm-core (MCC). This uses higher frequencies referred to as millimetre waves and would be based on a single standard-based wireless technology for cellular (5G), WiFi and satellite.
Khan explained that at millimetre wave frequencies, radio spectrum use is lighter and very wide bandwidths along with a large number of smaller size antennas can be used to provide the orders of magnitude increase in capacity needed to keep up with consumer demand over the next 15 to 20 years.
The MMC approach would use spectrum in the 10GHz to 275GHz frequency range and Kahn identifies a potential spectrum availability of over 100GHz, including 57.75GHz for uplink, 56.2GHz for downlink and 38.75GHz for inter-satellite communication.
The paper, however, does not outline the estimated cost of such a multi-satellite system nor a potential timeframe for its development.