Low Earth orbit broadband constellations

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Networks of many hundreds to many thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit providing consumer and enterprise internet access, and the first genuinely new large-scale space business since satellite television. The design trade is fixed by physics: at 500 to 600 kilometres the round-trip signal delay is tens of milliseconds rather than the roughly 500 milliseconds of a geostationary link, which makes interactive applications usable, but each satellite is visible from a given point for only minutes, so continuous coverage requires thousands of them and constant replacement as drag decays their orbits. SpaceX's Starlink began operational deployment with sixty satellites in May 2019 and has since become by a wide margin the largest satellite constellation ever operated, with millions of subscribers; Eutelsat OneWeb operates a much smaller constellation aimed at enterprise, government and backhaul rather than consumers; Amazon's Kuiper — rebranded Amazon Leo — began deploying production satellites in 2025 against binding regulatory milestones. The open commercial question is whether recurring subscription revenue can fund perpetual replacement of a fleet with a service life of roughly five years. Not a place.

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