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Admittedly, I scanned the article, but this article seems mostly business speak. I was more curious behind the technical details, specifically potential speeds and overcoming limitations with satellite internet.

In other words, can this someday compete with (or even eliminate the need for) current broadband infrastructure?

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>In other words, can this someday compete with (or even eliminate the need for) current broadband infrastructure?

Most likely not. The amount of spectrum required to replace current broadband users would be significant. The amount of coordination overhead for even managing just 50,000,000 satellite client transmissions would probably make the system unusable. I think the target here is less of a last mile replacement and more of a town-wide Internet uplink replacement for places in the middle of nowhere. i.e. the town would get one satellite uplink and then run last-mile connections to their own users.

but they could offer cellphone service across the globe without having to bribe the FCC.

No. Speed of light ensures this will never happen.

LEO satellites transmissions have only 1-2% the latency of geosynchronous. The internal latency, cache capacity, etc. of newer routers will be better, too. Not ideal, but not too bad.

In theory, satellite Internet could have any capacity you want by flying more satellites. But that's always going to be more expensive than other ways of providing coverage.

In a real case, I expect this to be part of a terrestrial, drone, and maybe even balloon network.

This won't replace broadband, but for a different reason.

The article suggests the satellites would operate from LEO orbit which generally means a few hundreds to 2,000km above the planet. This is less than 10ms even accounting for ionospheric effects.

Bandwidth would be a huge problem, though.

So would LOS. LEO sucks because you definitely aren't going to be using a dish, doubly so if you want continuous connections. At least not on any large scale.

Well, I remember reading about teledesic, which this seems to be under a new name, and the idea was you would always have 3+ sats in your sky at once.