It’s virtually impossible to imagine a workplace without access to high speed, high bandwidth Internet access and connectivity. Much like it’s downright impossible to image day-to-day life without it.
However, the ability to deliver fiber-like network speeds, connectivity and bandwidth is somewhat limited by geography. Boats at sea, planes in the air and troops on the ground in remote or hostile regions simply don’t have the ability to be connected to the rest of the world by a fiber optic cable.
COMSATCOM has long been the solution for enabling connectivity and communications in these regions
. But latency and other factors have restricted the types of capabilities that traditional COMSATCOM could enable.
But all of that is changing. A new generation of satellites – called Medium Earth Orbit (or MEO) satellites – is now available. These new satellites orbit in closer proximity to the Earth and deliver much higher throughputs with far less latency than traditional geostationary (or GEO) satellites.
One of the most well-known constellations of MEO satellites belongs to O3b, a satellite services provider with 40 live customers and 12 MEO satellites currently in orbit – with eight more on order.
To get a better idea of what these satellites can do, and how they can be used for some exciting and innovative use cases within the government, we sat down with the CEO of O3b, Steve Collar. During our discussion, we talked about the fundamental difference between MEO and GEO, the benefits MEO satellites deliver and some of the amazing ways the bandwidth from MEO satellites can be utilized in military applications – including for distance learning and telemedicine implementations.
Here is what Steve had to say:
For additional information on O3b and the benefits of MEO satellite constellations, download the following resources: