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Elon Musk is talking with satellite industry executives about creating smaller, less-expensive satellites "that can deliver Internet access across the globe", according to a Wall Street Journal article today.
Citing anonymous sources, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk is working with Greg Wyler, a former Google executive who founded a new company called WorldVu Satellite.
"In talks with industry executives, Messrs. Musk and Wyler have discussed launching around 700 satellites, each weighing less than 250 pounds, the people familiar with the matter said," the Journal wrote. "That is about half the size of the smallest communications satellites now in commercial use. The constellation would be 10 times the size of the largest current fleet, managed by Iridium Communications Inc."
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday November 09 2014, @12:49PM
So launch at a high altitude and you'll need tons of non-overlapping bandwidth. About "thirty" GPS satellites results in about "ten" visible at any given time. At least hand offs will be trivial if its a 12 hour orbit and the average user session might only be a couple minutes. Heck, the battery life and bandwidth caps are likely to be such that it won't be usable for more than a fraction of 12 hours anyway.
Or launch at low altitude and you won't have the visibility so dropouts will happen depending on ground station location, and low orbit means a whole pass might only be 10 minutes or so under ideal plains/mountaintop geography, so handoffs are going to be an exciting problem.
And before the accusation of binary thinking and "just launch both kinds" the link budget / battery budget / bandwidth budget aren't going to support that. You'd basically have one company launching and operating two completely different systems. Which might be their secret sauce, seeing as nothing else is technologically new or advanced, at least from a high level (so maybe the modulation method will be interestingly new/patented, who cares).