On several previous occasions, Wireless Waffle has discussed some of the problems, both technical and economic that the raft of companies planning to launch new constellations of high throughput, broadband delivering, satellites may face in making their services a success. Whilst ferreting around the internet, it was interesting to discover a paper entitled 'LEO: Roar or Whimper' which discussed many of the same issues on which Wireless Waffle has opined in the past.

The paper, however, takes a more sideways approach and compares the situation facing new operators such as WorldVu and SpaceX who are intending to launch literally thousands of satellites to provide broadband services, with satellite broadband networks that were planned to do just the same thing in the 1990s (such as Teledesic and Skybridge) but which never got off the ground (so to speak).

It turns out that many of the potential hazards facing today's planned satellite networks have changed little since the 1990s and in some cases the situation may have gotten worse. Take for example the amount of space debris now hanging around at various orbits which is much greater than it was 20 years ago. And though the technology has moved on, the costs of implementing complex satellite earth stations that can track the satellites are no less soluble today than they where when the Spice Girls were topping the charts, even with the advent of leading-edge technologies such as meta-materials. There are a range of other issues discussed in the paper which seems to consider the landscape for the LEO networks to be relatively bleak and foreboding despite many big name investors backing these projects.

For what it's worth, the Wireless Waffle answer to the question posed in the paper's title, 'LEO: Roar or Whimper', is that it seems that the LEOs will roar, but quite possibly directing their volume at people who are wearing noise cancelling headphones and thus won't hear their bellowing cry. Metaphorically speaking!