# Will the National Broadband Plan be Obsolete



## RichInSpirit (1 Jan 2020)

Will the National Broadband Plan be rendered obsolete before it even starts ?
Why I'm asking this is as a result of someone I know telling me of seeing a strange star formation in the sky the other evening.
It turns out that this strange star formation was actually a collection of satellites launched in 2019 called Starlink (satellite constellation).
These are being launched by SpaceX an American company headed by Elon Musk of Tesla car fame. The intended use of these satellites is for Internet access for places that are not already connected to the Internet. Like Africa and maybe even Ireland.
If this infrastructure of communication satellites is in place is there any need to run fibre broadband services into every nook and craney in Ireland?


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## Zenith63 (1 Jan 2020)

I’ve been having the same thought recently and cannot see a major down-side to it tbh.

The Irish government could pay a fraction of the final cost of the NBP to SpaceX (and potentially OneWeb and Amazon who also have similar services imminent) up-front to encourage them to roll-out satellites covering Ireland and to subsidise the monthly fee down to a level that people in remote areas are not economically disadvantaged compared to people where fibre is available.

The low altitude satellites these services use means latency times have the potential to be lower than fibre - these services are very different to the horrible high-latency satellite broadband services some people may be familiar with.

Very interested in this discussion!


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