Rob L wrote:I thought it was all about providing Internet access where it wasn't otherwise available (for example: remote areas of the world in Africa; South America; Antartica etc)
Indeed, just like O3B (the 'Other 3 Billion' name was chosen to reflect their market) and, to a lesser extent, OneWeb. Or look at Kacific for a similar project with more traditional technology.
Rob L wrote:$499 set-up cost and $99 per month. How many people in the areas it's intended for will be able to pay those fees? Or is it not intended for remote areas?
The price is just that - a price driven by the market, not linked to the cost to them of providing the service. So the price may (and will have to) vary across countries. It's one of the reasons they will need to think about if they want to make it truly mobile. Apart from managing 'landing rights' (licensed use of the spectrum in the markets they transmit over) they will certainly want to charge 'developing country clients' less - until they take their kit with them to the UK. The potential for a grey import market will give some solder-happy hackers a lot of fun, I'm sure.
On bandwidth, a slightly interesting concept will be that over less densely populated areas, they can afford to provide higher bandwidth to the few customers they have. Over almost any kind of conurbation, the contention ratio will mean that they need to throttle their customers once they get a few... Hence, they are likely to be better value in rural areas than in cities from a bit/s per pound perspective - and certainly are unlikely to even try to compete with FTTC solutions in urban areas. So whether their price will actually come down as the service rolls out is not at all obvious as their USP will remain.
Price point is not that bad, but the lack of any sort of indication of availability and the 'beta' factor means that it is difficult to switch to them for any kind of serious 'working from home'. Latency, BTW, should be close to fibre and may even be better depending on how clever their inter-satellite links end up being and the size of those inter-satellite pipes. If they can minimise the number of gateways and route as much as possible point-to-point that can be quite efficient.
We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon.