ON THE VERGE (1 of 3)

Right to one headline story published yesterday by Sean O'Kane

Boeing gets green light for satellite internet constellation

By Sean O'Kane@sokane1 Nov 3, 2021, 4:20pm EDT

The Verge  

 

"The Federal Communications Commission has authorized a satellite internet project from Boeing first proposed in 2017. Boeing can now move forward with building, launching, and operating its own broadband internet network from space, joining its main aerospace competitor SpaceX.

Boeing’s plan involves placing 132 satellites into low Earth orbit at an altitude of 1,056 kilometers (about 656 miles). Another 15 will be launched to “non geostationary orbit” at an altitude between 27,355 and 44,221 km (16,998 to 27,478 miles). The company says it wants to use the satellites to offer “broadband internet and communications services to residential consumers, government and business users in the United States, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands” while the network gets built out, and on a global basis once it’s complete..

[. . .] Please read between the lines for important details missing here due to space limits)

Boeing now has six years to launch half of its satellite constellation and nine years to deploy the entire network. The company had asked the FCC to loosen those requirements — it wanted to only commit to launching five satellites in the first six years, and asked for a 12-year window to launch the entire constellation — but the commission denied that request, according to the order published Wednesday.

By comparison, SpaceX and Amazon have far grander plans for their networks, with each consisting of thousands of satellites. Boeing is a major satellite manufacturer, and so it spent the years before and after its initial 2017 proposal selling to early space-based internet providers as the market matured. But providers are now expected to collectively generate more than $50 billion by 2031, which could explain why Boeing bothered slogging through four years of the approval process."