Boeing gets green light for satellite internet constellation

The Federal Communications Fee has approved a satellite tv for pc web challenge from Boeing first proposed in 2017. Boeing can now transfer ahead with constructing, launching, and working its personal broadband web community from area, becoming a member of its principal aerospace competitor SpaceX.

Boeing’s plan includes putting 132 satellites into low Earth orbit at an altitude of 1,056 kilometers (about 656 miles). One other 15 will probably be launched to “non geostationary orbit” at an altitude between 27,355 and 44,221 km (16,998 to 27,478 miles). The corporate says it needs to make use of the satellites to supply “broadband web and communications companies to residential customers, authorities and enterprise customers in america, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands” whereas the community will get constructed out, and on a worldwide foundation as soon as it’s full.

All 147 satellites would broadcast within the V-band, a higher-frequency slice of the wi-fi spectrum than the Ka and Ku bands utilized by SpaceX’s Starlink community or Amazon’s yet-to-be-deployed Venture Kuiper satellites. Utilizing V-band may permit for quicker knowledge switch charges however runs a better danger of interference as a result of the upper frequencies have extra bother penetrating stable objects. (SpaceX has plans to make use of the V-band in some future satellites, and so does OneWeb. The Ka and Ku bands are additionally utilized by satellites that present in-flight web on business airways.)

SpaceX has beforehand expressed concern that Boeing’s proposal to launch into already-crowded low orbits may enhance the chance of a collision with different satellites. In 2019, SpaceX stated to the FCC that it believed Boeing’s community would create a “clear hazard of dangerous interference,” in response to Reuters. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites orbit the Earth at an altitude of round 550 km (roughly 342 miles), which is round the place OneWeb’s web satellite tv for pc constellation could be discovered (and the place Amazon’s satellites will go as soon as they launch). SpaceX and OneWeb narrowly averted a collision earlier this 12 months.

Boeing now has six years to launch half of its satellite tv for pc constellation and 9 years to deploy your complete community. The corporate had requested the FCC to loosen these necessities — it needed to solely decide to launching 5 satellites within the first six years, and requested for a 12-year window to launch your complete constellation — however the fee denied that request, in response to the order printed Wednesday.

By comparability, SpaceX and Amazon have far grander plans for his or her networks, with every consisting of hundreds of satellites. Boeing is a serious satellite tv for pc producer, and so it spent the years earlier than and after its preliminary 2017 proposal promoting to early space-based web suppliers because the market matured. However suppliers are actually anticipated to collectively generate greater than $50 billion by 2031, which may clarify why Boeing bothered slogging by way of 4 years of the approval course of.