Update on Satellite Broadband

It’s been a busy few weeks with announcements from the satellite broadband industry.

1. OneWeb successfully launched 36 new satellites with rockets supplied by NewSpace India Limited. The company has also been hinting at using the satellites to bring broadband to remote cell towers and to remote outposts for governments and militaries around the world. 
2. Project Kuiper, owned by Amazon and Jeff Bezos is finally ready to hit the skies and plans to launch its first two prototype satellites in early 2023. The company has an ultimate goal of launching a total of 3,236 satellites. 
3. Starlink recently added new language to the terms of service for both residential and business customers that introduces the idea of a data cap. The new terms of service say that customers will get a monthly limit of ‘priority access’, and once that limit is reached, the customer will no longer be prioritized over traffic generated by other customers. This is interesting from several perspectives:

• Starlink said in the early days of the business that it would never put a cap on usage. The company still hasn’t done that since customers will be free to continue to use broadband for the remainder of the billing cycle. 
• Numerous engineers have speculated that any satellite constellation will have a finite capacity to move data, and this announcement hints that that data limit is already foreseeable for Starlink. Of course, the company can continue to launch more satellites and has plans on the drawing board to have as many as 30,000 satellites in its constellation. But for now, with a little over 2,300 satellites, this announcement says that the constellation is probably already getting over-busy at times.