Something people who have not worked a lot outside of the USA may not realize is: It's not hard for an autocratic regime to crack down on some types of WAN connection. Using currently available geostationary two way satellite technology, there are plenty of countries in the world where if you import and try to build your own Tx/Rx 3.8 meter size, C-band earth station and build a link to a teleport in Germany or France, the government will have a very simple response. A pickup truck with four men armed with guns will come and dismantle your dish.
I don't think this will be very helpful for scenarios like China at all. Or places like Iran where all the ISPs are forced to be downstream of the government ASN.
This will be very helpful for places on the planet that are extremely costly to reach with terrestrial fiber ($2m to $30m build cost) or a hill-to-hill relay of high capacity mountaintop tower sites with PTP microwave ($500k to $3m build cost to get from a major city into the hinterlands of some african nations). Also for places like small pacific islands that can never hope to economically bring a submarine fiber optic cable to them. A lot of these places have already moved off "traditional" geostationary C and Ku band transponder leases and onto o3b. This is basically a similar concept to o3b but applied not only to large backbone links for ISPs, but to individual customer premises rooftop antennas that might have a cost of under $1000.
I don't think this will be very helpful for scenarios like China at all. Or places like Iran where all the ISPs are forced to be downstream of the government ASN.
This will be very helpful for places on the planet that are extremely costly to reach with terrestrial fiber ($2m to $30m build cost) or a hill-to-hill relay of high capacity mountaintop tower sites with PTP microwave ($500k to $3m build cost to get from a major city into the hinterlands of some african nations). Also for places like small pacific islands that can never hope to economically bring a submarine fiber optic cable to them. A lot of these places have already moved off "traditional" geostationary C and Ku band transponder leases and onto o3b. This is basically a similar concept to o3b but applied not only to large backbone links for ISPs, but to individual customer premises rooftop antennas that might have a cost of under $1000.