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Plans are afoot to build several medium-earth orbit (MEO) satellites to serve the other 3 billion people in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia who have little or no internet access. The satellite company undertaking this venture is O3B, a reference to the ‘other 3 billion’, who recently linked up with Google and other investors ‘to bring cheaper, high-speed wireless Internet access to areas unlikely to see investments in fiber infrastructure.

MEO what? As its name suggests medium-earth orbit satellites orbit the earth at an altitude of around 5,000 miles compared to its Geosatellite counterparts that do so at around 22,500 miles. As it’s much closer to earth, latency (signal looping time between earth and satellite) is also shorter– around 120 milliseconds.

The plan is for O3B to launch 16 MEO satellite and have these activated by late 2010.

(source: The New York Times)

There’s no specifics yet as to which part of Asia will be included in the coverage but I should think that it would no longer cover Southeast Asia as they project it to be covered by the Kizuna satellite.

Not

And speaking of the Kizuna satellite, July & August has come and gone and yet the promise of Kizuna going live by July 2008 has remained just that– a promise. The latest word on the Kizuna is that it is being tested for commercial operations. But that was an eternity ago.

If not for this news about O3B, interest on the Kizuna would have waned completely. It’s somewhat weird that the Kizuna satellite boys are not providing enough regular updates on what’s going on. Is there a problem? What timeline are we looking at now?

Paging JAXA, throw us a little bone over here please?

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