“ has put together the right technology and strategy to offer broadband connectivity anywhere on earth at a small fraction of what’s possible using traditional satellites,” Andreessen Horowitz says in a blog post. Last week, the company received a vote of confidence in the form of a $13.5 million funding round from venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The startup is convinced that this combination will allow it to offer satellite internet to users at the price of cellular data. So, while these mini sats will have all the benefits of low hardware costs, Astranis wouldn’t be burdened with launching hundreds of them just to become operational. Manufacturing and launching so many satellites takes time – lots of it.īut now, a startup called Astranis has come out of stealth mode to reveal that it has developed satellites the size of a mini-fridge for the geosynchronous orbit. To swathe the entire planet with coverage, you need hundreds of smallsats operating at once in what is known as a constellation. Smallsats, on the other hand, float in the low Earth orbit (LEO) – which is at a distance of around 100 to 1,250 miles – and circle the Earth every 90 minutes. Companies like SpaceX and OneWeb are planning to work around this by flooding our skies with inexpensive small communication satellites.īut, traditional satellites hang around 22,000 miles above the Earth in the geosynchronous orbit (GEO) and are able to cater to a large area at once. The hardware will set you back by hundreds of millions of dollars, and the cost to deliver a satellite into space is no peanuts either (though it has come down considerably in the past few years).
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