There has been a lot of discussion in the last couple of years about providing broadband internet to rural areas. Part of the issue is defining “rural.” The majority of people living in “rural” areas actually live in small towns, which are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as rural if they have populations smaller than 5,000.

Rural towns are often easy to upgrade to broadband with fiber. Build simple aerial cable plants and connect homes with prefab drops for fiber to the home or coaxial for cable broadband. Farm areas, however, are expensive to connect because of the distance. Many rural areas also do not have good cellular coverage, especially with the bandwidth to deliver internet data. 

The least costly methods to deliver internet to rural areas are line-of-sight wireless and satellite. Line-of-sight wireless requires a fiber connection within the user’s sight, which is still expensive. 

Satellites, meanwhile, can provide coverage anywhere you can see the sky and have a satellite overhead. These techniques received large grants for building rural broadband as part of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program, but both grants were later rejected, claiming the two services could not deliver “promised speeds.”

We expect the change in the U.S. government to cause a shift in policy regarding satellites due to the influence of the tech entrepreneurs behind them. SpaceX’s Starlink system and Amazon’s proposed Project Kuiper system, both using low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, might get more opportunities to provide rural broadband in the future. 

Types of satellites

Geostationary satellites from Hughesnet and Viasat systems have been serving rural areas for years, but get little attention today. All current systems already serve rural areas and are well known to the government due to their defense contracts.

Satellite internet works in two ways. Geostationary satellites are in very high orbits, about 22,000 miles above the Earth’s equator, so they stay above the same point of the planet’s surface at all times. One satellite can cover large numbers of users. The problem is latency: signals take a quarter second to go between the Earth and the satellite, and may take seconds to process links to websites.

LEO satellites are closer to the surface and their coverage moves very fast. It takes thousands of LEO satellites to provide nonstop coverage. A ground user must connect to the satellite and follow it across the sky, then connect to another one for a time, then another and another and so on. However, because they are close to the ground, latency is not a problem.

In my April web exclusive on ECmag.com, I’ll talk more about how these satellites work.

Both types of satellites have a problem with bandwidth. Compared to fiber’s gigabit speeds, satellites are slow, at about 20 megabits/second (Mbps). That’s fast enough for video conferencing, but only for a few users at a time. Streaming HDTV is probably out of the question. But rural users are used to satellite TV, so keeping both services is a solution.

I have some experience from a user standpoint. We had one of the first cable modems in 1997 when 4 Mbps always-on internet was miraculous compared to 56 kbps dial-up modems. 

A decade later when we lived in a rural area, we had cable modem service, but it was not much faster than the original one. For backup, we had DSL that struggled to reach 1 Mbps. When satellite service was offered, we signed up. It offered faster speeds of 20 Mbps, with a limit on total monthly data—that meant no video streaming. However, it was totally reliable and great for our backup internet connection.

For truly rural users, satellite internet makes perfect sense. The biggest advantage is how quickly you can set it up. Order the service, get an antenna, plug it in and you’re online. If you wait for fiber, it can take 5–10 years even after a service provider gets funding, due to the time it takes to get a fiber project off the ground, receive all the permits, order components, install the cables and set up the communications equipment.

As a fiber person, I have no problems with satellites. Satellite service depends on a comprehensive ground-based fiber optic communications system to connect satellites to the internet backbone. That keeps the fiber installation workforce busy.

Header image: Telstar 2, one of the first communications satellites launched by NASA in 1963

National Aeronautics and Space Administration