Satellite Internet Access - History of Satellite Internet

History of Satellite Internet

Following the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik 1, by the Soviet Union in October, 1957, the US successfully launched the Explorer 1 satellite in 1958. The first commercial communications satellite was Telstar 1, built by Bell Labs and launched in July, 1962. The idea of a geostationary satellite — one that could orbit the Earth above the equator and remain fixed by following the Earth’s rotation — was first proposed by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in 1945. The first satellite to successfully reach geostationary orbit was Syncom3, built by Hughes Aircraft for NASA and launched Aug. 19, 1963. Many improvements and modifications followed, and after the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web, geostationary satellites were looked at as an alternate means of providing Internet service. Part of the story involves the opening up of the K_a band for satellites. In December, 1993, Hughes Aircraft filed with the Federal Communications Commission for a license to launch the first K_a-band satellite, Spaceway. In 1995, the FCC issued a call for more K_a-band satellite applications, and 15 companies filed applications. Among those were EchoStar, Lockheed Martin, GE-Americom, Motorola and KaStar Satellite, which later became WildBlue.

In the midst of all this came Teledesic, an extremely ambitious and ultimately failed project funded in part by Microsoft that ended up costing more than $9 billion. The idea was to create a broadband satellite constellation of hundreds of satellites in the K_a-band frequency, providing cheap Internet with download speeds up to 100 Mbit/s. The project was abandoned in 2003. While unsuccessful, Teledesic likely stalled satellite Internet development by other companies, and it wasn’t until the 2000s that the first commercial K_a-band Internet satellites were launched.

The first Internet ready satellite for consumers was launched Sept. 27, 2003 by Eutelsat.

Other services followed, including offerings from WildBlue in 2000 and HughesNet, both of which remain the two dominant players in the market today. WildBlue was acquired by ViaSat in 2009; HughesNet was acquired by EchoStar in 2011.

A new generation of equipment has significantly increased the speed offerings of satellite Internet providers, starting with ViaSat’s ViaSat-1 satellite in 2011 and HughesNet’s Jupiter in 2012. The new satellites have bumped the download speeds of their service from the 1-3 Mbit/s up to 12-15Mbit/s and beyond. The improved service has been a boon to rural residents who’d previously only had access to slower service via dial-up, DSL or the original satellites.