Satellite Internet … will it reach the Arab world?

Since famous billionaire Elon Musk announced on May 23, 2019 that SpaceX has launched the first Falcon missile carrying 60 satellites inside, to provide fast space internet to all regions of the world; Questions started on the seriousness of this matter, and what speeds will this service offer and reach our Arab region or not?
Internet across space
Elon Musk’s idea is based on launching around 12,000 satellites over the next few years into close orbits, with a mission to provide very fast internet service with a 3 millisecond latency delay rate for all parts of the Earth, including remote areas with very slow Internet services, in addition to providing Internet for the first time to nearly 3.5 billion people who do not even have access to Internet service to date.
How will satellites reach high speeds despite their great distance from Earth?
It is known that traditional satellites, such as broadcast satellites, are located in orbits far from Earth at distances of about 36 thousand kilometers and are considered a fixed station, where at this height the moon rotates on it. – even at the same speed as the Earth’s rotation. However, the large size leads to a drop in the quality of the signal in addition to the difficulty of communicating with it, especially in difficult climatic conditions.
What is new in the “Star Link” project is that the satellites in this network will fly in very low orbits divided into 3 groups. The first group has 1,440 moons at an altitude of only 550 km, while the second group has 2,825 moons at a distance of 1,110 km, and the last group consists of 7,500 moons at a distance of 340 km.
These altitudes are considered very low if we compare them with conventional satellites, so each satellite will cover a specific geographic area as it moves, which means the signals will reach a higher intensity towards Earth and this will help reduce response time, and also to reduce the energy consumption of receivers, in addition to reducing their size and cost. .
Geography and price
Is it possible to subscribe and will the service reach the Arab region? The idea of ​​a satellite internet is similar to the idea of ​​antennas and traditional communication antennas, so to subscribe to the service you will need to purchase a dish and a receiver. The difference here is that the dish will be the size of a pizza, as indicated by Elon Musk, and it is distinguished in that it does not have to be pointed at a specific moon, but rather is sufficient to point it at. the sky to start receiving the signal from nearby satellites.
It is clear that technically anyone in the world can benefit from this technology, but the question remains dependent on the approval of local governments or not. For example, SpaceX has a license from the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which allows it to establish a satellite Internet network in America and has also obtained approvals. In other countries, like Great Britain, at first, to be available on a larger scale in the years to come.
What about the prices? As for pricing, the company opened their requests last summer and submitted my request to test the service, but so far I haven’t received any updates. In America, the demand started as the company sent an email to everyone who requested the service advising them that the subscription prices are $ 99 per month in addition to the one-time purchase of equipment at $ 499. The post says: Internet speeds will be between 50 and 150 megabytes per second, with a response time of between 20 and 40 miles per second. And thanks to a report released by UK media, early users of the service confirmed that it is 95% faster than current service providers and that they were able to watch 4k videos without any buffering delay. .
The project appears to be a dream for millions of people who have difficulty accessing the Internet or have no access to it at all. In 2017, Internet World Stats published a report on the number of Internet users in the Arab world, in which Egypt tops the list, while Saudi Arabia ranks second and Morocco third, followed by Algeria. and Iraq. Despite the large number of internet and social media users in the Arab world, many suffer from poor services or lack of access.
The project is not the first of its kind, but was preceded by large companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and OneWeb supported by the French company Airbus, and time alone will tell the extent of the success of this promising project, that will cost Elon Musk around $ 10 billion, and he hopes to make up for it soon, as reports say. The company will be able to generate $ 30 billion a year, more than 10 times the annual revenue from SpaceX’s missile business.