Elon Musk’s company has already launched an additional 60 satellites in the lower earth orbit. These satellites will be used to provide Internet in North US and Southern Canada. Musk has an ambitious plan to put 40,000 satellites in the lower earth orbit. Till now he has 770 satellites floating in the sky. An Internet satellite is placed at an orbit of 22,000 miles above the earth. Its latency is close to a minute. Musk proposes to put satellites at a distance of 342 miles. Thus it takes much less time to bounce the signal between the web server, satellite and user.

There are other players too who are into satellite internet. Amazon has its constellation project (Kuiper) which aims to put 3200 satellites in the lower earth orbit. Facebook proposes to roll out Athena. OneWeb is the oldest player in the game, and is now backed by Softbank. It has sold its assets to a consortium led by the UK Government and Bharti Global.

There are costs of launching a satellite. The ground is covered by receiving stations and dishes. Here regulatory approvals from different governments are needed to establish satellite links. The geo-stationary satellites at higher orbits are longer lasting than the lower orbit satellites. There are replacement costs involved. There are costs of user terminals and antenna.

The system can deliver 100 Mbps download speed with 30 ms latency. The plan is to take the speed to 1 Gbps.