A new research paper by Farooq Khan, Samsung president of R&D America, revealed that the company is concerned for the future of consumers when it comes to connecting onto the internet. With Samsung’s concern, they raise an opinion and an idea on how they could potentially solve some of these issues and it looks like the answer may be microsatellites and lots of them. This isn’t the first time we’re hearing companies taking technology into space in order to provide more of widespread internet coverage but if this is Samsung’s plan, they’ll want to hurry up as the competition is already working on similar ventures.
According to the paper written by Farooq Khan, the amount of consumers who are connecting to the internet is constantly increasing especially in terms of mobile users. In order to see that there is enough internet coverage widespread for worldwide, Samsung proposes a plan on sending out 4,600 micro-satellites. These microsatellites would reside within Low Earth Orbit and will apparently provide a signal that would have a latency of only 0.02 seconds.
When these microsatellites launch into Earth’s low orbit, it will be able to stream over one zettabyte of data per month and that will equal out to about 200GB per month to five billion internet users. Although, it seems that we’re nowhere near close to the point where that amount of data is needed as Farooq Khan suggest that the demand for at least one zettabyte of data per month will hit around 2028.
Furthermore, Samsung is waiting to provide these satellites after 5G wireless technologies are adopted widespread as it will help out the cost of running the network. Regardless of Samsung’s plans, there are other companies that expanding their work into the skies above. Already there are companies such as Google, Facebook, and SpaceX that have suggested plans on taking their equipment into new heights but unlike Samsung, most of these companies have already begun their work and plans for a full launch are not set years away. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what Samsung does bring to the table when the time comes for massive amounts of internet data are required monthly.