Keeping in tandem with Prime Minister’s new policy initiative on Strat-ups, two space Scientists from Bengaluru have developed micro satellites weighing just 100 kilos to provide high quality internet signals through a constellation of 150 high bandwidth. Prasad Hl Bhat and Neha Satak an alumnae of Indian Institute of Science a Bengaluru based premier Science research Institute have set up a startup called Astrome to provide next generation internet service in the country.
Prasad Hl Bhat, chairman and chief technology officer of the company, who did his Masters and PhD in computer science and automation engineering from IISc says these micro satellites will be built by third parties and launched by space agencies.
According to Prasad Astrome is negotiating with various players to build the satellites, the first of which would be launched by the end of 2018. He said “five to ten satellites would be launched in 2019, with the rest of them put in their space orbit in 2020 to complete the constellation”.
While there are several private players in India that specialise in building small satellites, the payloads could be launched into the desired orbit by space agencies like India’s own ISRO, SpaceX, Blue Origin of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, and Virgin Galactic.
According to Prasad , Astrome plans to cover India, South East Asia, Middle East, Africa, latin America and Australia with its constellation of satellites connected to ground stations.
Prasad said the satellites would be placed in low Earth Orbit – technically abbreviated to lEO – at 1000 km into the space, as against the geostationary orbit of 36,000 km where regular communication satellites like India’s own GSAT and INSAT series are placed.
Neha Satak, CEO of the company said they are looking at ISRO, an established global player in the launch business. “We are looking at ISRO also as it is very reliable with a very low failure rate,” she said adding any deal with the state-run space agency would be entirely commercial.
From an end user perspective, Astrome has designed two plans. While home user plans would offer speeds of up to 50 mbps (megabits per second) speed, business users would be offered 400 mbps. “The tariffs would be competitive. But the biggest advantage of satellite-based Internet is the extremely minimal rate of disruptions,” said Prasad.
Unlike terrestrial broadband services that get disrupted with even a minor damage to the optic fibre or even metal cables, satellite-based Internet doesn’t face that issue. “This works just like your DTH (direct to home) TV services with a specially designed dish antenna and a receiver,” said Prasad.
Astrome plans to scale up its service after 2020 when 150 of their micro-satellite are expected to connect millions with high-speed Internet.
