O3b is a satellite constellation designed for telecommunications and data backhaul from remote locations. O3b stood for "other three billion," or the other three billion people at the time that did not have stable internet access. The first four satellites were launched on 25 June 2013, eight more in 2014, and four more on 9 March 2018. The constellation was extended to twenty satellites in April 2019. The constellation was initially built, owned and operated by O3b Networks, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of SES S.A. in 2016 and ownership and operation of the constellation passed to SES Networks, a division of SES. The O3b constellation began offering service in March 2014.
Satellites
The first satellites were deployed in a circular orbit along the equator at an altitude of 8063 km at a velocity of approximately, each making 5 orbits a day. As of 2018, the constellation has sixteen satellites operational in orbit, after four launches of four satellites each. Due to problems with a component of the first four satellites launched, three of those four have been placed on standby for the other three, so thirteen are used operationally. Each satellite is equipped with twelve fully steerable Ka band antennas that use 4.3 GHz of spectrum with a proposed throughput of 1.6 Gbit/s per beam, resulting in a total capacity of 16 Gbit/s per satellite. Each beam's footprint measures 700 km in diameter. O3b claims a mouth-to-ear one-way latency of 179 milliseconds for voice communication, and an end-to-end round-trip latency of 140 ms for data services. The maximum throughput per TCP connection is 2.1 Mbit/s. For maritime applications, O3b claims a round-trip latency of 140 ms, and connectivity speeds of over 500 Mbit/s. The satellites are powered by gallium arsenide solar arrays and lithium ion batteries and weigh approximately each. The satellites were constructed by Thales Alenia Space, a division of Thales Group. The first satellite was built in the Cannes Mandelieu Space Center, while the rest of the constellation was assembled, integrated and tested in Thales Alenia Space Italy's Roman facilities. In September 2017, SES announced the next generation of O3b satellites and placed an order for an initial seven from Boeing Satellite Systems using a new satellite platform based on Boeing's 702 line of scalable buses. Expected to launch in 2021, the O3b mPower constellation of MEO satellites for broadband internet services will "be able to deliver anywhere from hundreds of megabits to 10 gigabits to any ship at sea" through 30,000 spot beams. Software-defined routing will direct traffic between the mPower MEO satellites and SES' geostationary fleet.
