The visualization shows the Astranis satellite over the Philippines in orbit.
Astranis
Astranis, a San Francisco-based company that provides another approach to providing Internet access from satellites, recently signed an agreement to provide dedicated services in the Philippines, the first in the country of the archipelago.
“They intend to use this bandwidth to connect hospitals, schools and other businesses, in addition to arrange community Wi-Fi hubs,” Astranis CEO John Gedmark told CNBC.
“We estimate that we will connect up to 2 million individuals with access to this broadband internet that they did not have before,” Gedmark added.
The satellite that will provide services in the Philippines is scheduled for launch in 2024. That is the latest exercise in Astranis’ campaign to provide services to underserved communities around the world, with its first small satellite expected to serve “a whole bunch of hundreds of individuals” in Alaska and one other upcoming satellite expected to provide services to 3 million people in Peru.
Astranis will own and operate the satellite, and repair provider Orbits Corp. will buy bandwidth in a long-term cope with local Philippine ISP, HTechCorp. Astranis declined to provide financial details of the deal, but Gedmark stressed that the service was “very low-cost”.
The Philippines is inhabited by over 100 million people, spread over over 7,000 often mountainous islands. This makes broadband “one among their biggest problems to date,” Gedmark said.
Astranis pointed to the recent one third party investigation it’s estimated that providing broadband in the Philippines, also generally known as “closing the digital divide”, will create greater than $100 billion in economic value in the country by the end of this decade.
Join here for the weekly CNBC Investing in Space newsletter.
Astranis launched its first satellite in May. It’s currently preparing to launch two more batches of satellites – which Astranis calls “Block 2” and “Block 3”. Unit 2 will be launched in Q4 it will feature 4 satellites, one among which is for Peru, and Block 3 will be launched in mid-2024. it will contain five satellites, one among which is devoted to the Philippines.
The corporate is one among many next-generation broadband satellite systems under development as firms race to meet the growing global data demand – including SpaceX’s Starlink, UK-owned OneWeb, Amazon Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile and others.
But the company’s approach marks a novel way to deliver broadband services from space, Gedmark previously said. The corporate’s dishwasher-sized satellite combines the small size of satellites like Starlink in low Earth orbit with the distant, geosynchronous orbit of traditional players like Viasat.
Geosynchronous orbit, or GEO, is about 22,000 miles from the planet’s surface – a position that permits the spacecraft to stay above a hard and fast location by matching the Earth’s rotation.
Astranis will find a way to “cover the entire Philippines with this one satellite,” noted Gedmark.