There are also millions of wealthy people who go places (even not far from their homes) where there is no internet access. Remember that business is about filling the area under the demand curve. I'd say that "internet everywhere" is a massive opportunity.
A fair point. But there's a difference between a person not having internet access and a place not having internet access. You'd be surprised at the far flung locales that still have internet cafes and WiFi at hotels. The density and quality of internet access in poorer areas is already going to be a function of where wealthy people travel.
Also, you have to correctly judge the cost of service. Demand for internet access is much more elastic than, say, demand for a cure for cancer. The lesson from the Iridium constellation is that even wealthy people aren't necessarily willing to pay as much as needed, or as often as needed, to recoup investments. Iridium succeeded but the original company went bankrupt shortly after starting service.
But I want internet at my cabin in the woods - and I'm sure that I am not alone. Lots of things have improved since Iridium, but I agree that that is a warning to heed - you have to know the shape of that demand curve.
The entire world (even the most remote places) already has internet access (VSAT, BGAN, etc). OneWeb is just supposed to make rural satellite internet faster and cheaper.
Current internet via satellite is barely usable due to the extremely high latency. It's better than nothing but many services are de facto not usable. I've just been to Scotland and many places there have to rely on satellite internet, I'm sure the vast majority of them would be happy to switch to lower latency connections (and could pay well for it).
A few decades ago we had this same argument about bringing telephone access everywhere via satellites. After a spectacular bankruptcy, we learned that wealthy people don't take their calls in the unpopulated desert, they spend their time in cities and well-equipped resorts
Iridium went spectacularly bankrupt and was bought by a new corporation that was formed to acquire all of its assets... And with a little bit of engineering for better handheld, maritime and airborne terminals you know what they discovered? Rich people actually DO like to be connected in the middle of the ocean or anywhere that cellular service is unreliable. I would challenge you to find a private yacht on the planet with a value of >$175,000 that does not have an Iridium phone on board. Or a cargo ship of any appreciable size (likely to have both Iridium and Inmarsat terminals on board). Most private jets too.
As much as I like Iridium (and own an emergency handset) I think it was much more they learned that if you don't have to pay any of the capital costs for a satellite constellation and launch costs, and the DoD gets into an unexpected war on a side of the planet where they have an extreme need for more communications bandwidth - you can pull off a marginal business using what amounts to a government bailout.
Iridium existing as it is today has pretty much nothing whatsoever to do with it's commercial viability. It exists largely due to the original investors giving away a free network to the current operators, and an "anchor tenant" customer that was willing to more or less fund the network's opex for a number of years.
yes, all of this is true. The second incarnation of Iridium Corporation which acquired the bankrupt assets paid maybe 5 cents on the dollar. It was ridiculously expensive to build and ate up a ton of late 1990s venture capital money. And the US DoD gateway stuff (Hawaii, etc) and Iraq, Afghanistan wars certainly helped their revenue stream. But now that they're established, they seem to have found commercial viability and funding to launch the next generation of satellites which will provide medium speed (but expensive $$$/MB) data service in a truly global fashion.
Iridium's polar orbit LEO architecture makes it a rare and special thing. Globalstar was an utter network architecture failure (bent pipe satellite relay), Inmarsat is not usable at polar latitudes due to being geostationary based.
