At the receiver end, OneWeb and SpaceX are developing low-cost (USD 100–300), solar-powered transceivers which would provide 3G, LTE and WiFi connectivity to local communities.

OneWeb has a constellation size of 648 satellite with a combined throughput of 10Tbps. Each OneWeb satellite can cover an area of approx. 800,000 sq.km. and each transceiver can provide services at upto 50Mbps. SpaceX has a more ambitious plan of launching around 4000 satellites starting 2019 till 2030, predominantly to serve the International backhaul market which today operates on a network of undersea cables carrying over 95% of the international traffic. Yaliny is developing a handheld satellite transceiver which would connect to the user and provide unlimited data at $10 per month. LeoSat is primarily targeting enterprise customers such as Telecom backhaul, Defence, Oil&Gas and would deliver bandwidth as high as 1.2 Gbps.

Airbus was awarded the contract to build OneWeb’s 900 satellites. Source: Airbus (Youtube)

Many Satellite-based Internet ventures were proposed in the 90's which eventually failed due to limitations of technology and fast proliferation of terrestrial networks. Key innovations in satellite miniaturization, phased array antenna (electronically-steered) and solid state amplifiers (GaN) are making these constellations technologically and economically feasible now. Also, the increase in availability and reduction in costs of launch services for small satellites provided by private space companies is accelerating these ventures. Developing rapidly reusable rockets, like SpaceX Falcon 9R, would improve availability and cut costs further by orders of magnitude (10 to 100 times). These ventures have also attracted significant investor interest with SpaceX raising $1 billion from Google and Fidelity and OneWeb raising $500 million from a consortium of investors.

Two important issues that crop up on the regulatory front are spectrum allocation and landing rights. OneWeb has been granted the global license to operate in the non-Geo Ku-band by the ITU if they become operational by 2019. But it isn’t clear how new satellite constellations would be allotted such spectrum while operating relatively free of interference. SpaceX’s application for permission from the US FCC to test two of its satellites has already drawn objections from Intelsat. On the issue of landing rights, OneWeb would be partnering with domestic telecom operators using their ground stations and gateways to beam Internet, therefore they may not confront many domestic regulatory road blocks. It is not clear at this point how SpaceX would be delivering their services to the end user. Yaliny is perhaps most prone to governmental scrutiny since they would be operating based on a network of international ground stations.