Musk often says he has a first principles approach to thinking. So let’s do it.

If you wanted to connect everyone on a planet to high-speed broadband, given technology available today (and not technology based on copper-based infrastructure that has been with us for decades), would you bother digging holes, laying copper, fibre, backhaul, exchange buildings, lay cable that crosses oceans, then on top of that build millions of cell towers with relatively limited range that span continents in order to connect mobile devices?

Probably not — particularly if there was an alternative available where you could grab internet from the sky.

Or as Patricia Cooper from SpaceX said:

“…the common challenges associated with siting, digging trenches, laying fiber, and dealing with property rights are materially alleviated through a space-based broadband network”

(And if you were the sort of person who wanted to build high-speed connectivity on a brand new planet — such as Mars — because the 1 million person colony there will probably want to have iPhones, you would certainly not have the approach of building a land-based communications network. You would do it in orbit. It’s much cheaper.)

As of the end of 2016 there were about 1,459 satellites in orbit around the Earth. SpaceX last month announced a plan to launch some 11,943 satellites — multiplying orbital vehicles by an order of magnitude.

Why so many satellites? Global broadband. Why is this interesting? Because it is completely independent of the switch-based POTS legacy we still largely work with (albeit we have been transforming it from a switch system to an IP-based network for decades now).

What will this new SpaceX satellite system look like? First is the LEO or Low Earth Orbit constellation of 4,425 satellites. Here’s the breakdown:

The second part of the SpaceX constellation will be the VLEO, or Very Low Earth Orbit network, comprising 7,518 satellites. By operating closer to the ground, SpaceX say this will both boost capacity and reduce latency in heavily populated areas:

SpaceX say this should give 1Gb broadband with relatively low latency (25–35ms because of the lower orbit than other space-based systems) to millions (or billions) of subscribers using relatively small user terminals with coverage across continents. They illustrate the relative coverage of the LEO and VLEO systems here:

Both these networks would be meshed to co-ordinate and provide redundancy and capacity, for constant near-global coverage. As you can see here, the higher dots are LEO and the lower ones are VLEO.

But I love the phrase SpaceX use in the document, because it’s part of the narrative companies like them and OneWeb are using about providing broadband to poorer countries or under-served rural locations:

SpaceX has designed its V-band system to meet the dual requirements of the world’s broadband demand — namely, connectivity for rural, remote and hard-to-reach end-users, as well as efficient, high-capacity connectivity at all locations.

In journalism this is called burying the lead.

What SpaceX are actually seeking is to replace every broadband and communications provider on the planet, by cutting out the middle man of land-based networks that stand between you and the internet. In doing so they will be essentially competing with every communications provider in the world — a business valued at over a trillion dollars. Forget about poor communities in Africa for a second: this is a pitch to replace physical fibre/cable connections in modern industrialised economies.

But a few questions arise from this including the big one: mobile phones. Will the plan be to have mobile phones work directly with satellites overhead? Is that even possible? Or will there be a hybrid approach — provide broadband to physically static locations and work from there?