The sight is startling: Two dozen lights moving across the early night sky in a gentle arc. This is a “train” of Starlink low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, lit up by the sun and still aligned, before separating and rising to their designated orbits.

Given some recent client projects, satellites have been on my mind. My exposure to space-based telecom and media infrastructure, however, has a history. It goes back to my reporting on the technology side of the cable industry, which was transformed by the adoption of satellite-delivered media.

Satellite and Cable History

By many accounts, that transformation began on October 1, 1975, when HBO delivered a commercial broadcast of a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. HBO uplinked a live feed from the arena in Manila, Philippines, to a geo-stationary orbit (GEO) satellite. Then it bounced the signal back to a 10-meter receive-only (RO) earth station in Hawaii and uplinked it again to another GEO satellite. The final destination: two U.S. cable systems, one in Florida, the other in Mississippi.

Satellite history goes back another eighteen years, to the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Spurred by this Russian threat, the U.S. government dominated the initial era in satellite technology. What happened after the 1975 ‘Thrilla in Manila,’ however, was a wave of commercial deployments, with one network after another opting to deliver video via satellite transmission to cable systems, soon equipped with more manageable 4.5-meter RO dishes.

Some cable dish farms were more capable than others. In 1995, TCI President and CEO John Malone created a major facility for digital television production and distribution. About ten years later, on a trip to Denver as editor of a trade journal, I visited this massive building, then known as the Comcast Media Center (CMC). The extent of its satellite uplink infrastructure astonished me.

DBS, Internet and GPS

Meanwhile, the satellite industry was entering the consumer market. In 1994, DirecTV launched direct broadcast satellite (DBS) service, offering 150 digital channels through GEO-based direct-broadcast satellite (DBS). (This was a Sputnik moment of sorts for cable.) Then in the late 1990s and early 2000s, companies such as DirecPC (later HughesNet) and Starband started offering internet services, also via GEO satellites.

Consumers soon encountered another satellite-based service. Developed by the U.S. military using a constellation of medium-earth orbit (MEO) satellites, the global positioning system (GPS) was declared dual-use in 1996. It then spread rapidly in the 2000s, first for navigation in cars and then into smartphones.

Starlink LEO Internet

Fast forward to the 2020s. Leveraging miniaturization and reusable boosters and spacecraft, SpaceX (Starlink’s parent company) has built up a dominant position. It has 2.7 million subscribers around the world as of March 2024 – up from 1 million in 2022. While a fraction compared to cable and telco, Starlink’s results far outpace other satellite operators.

Starlink’s constellation of 6,000 satellites blanket the earth, operating at an altitude of 350 miles. That compares to 5,000-12,000 miles for MEO, and 22,000+ for GEO satellites. Another key to Starlink’s success: performance (especially latency) improves the closer you are to earth.

Starlink is not alone in low orbit. There’s Eutelsat’s OneWeb with about 600 LEO satellites, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper with its big plans. But for now, those are Starlink birds you see at night. Initially released in a bundle about 200 miles from earth, they form a line and then spread out, finally rising another 150 miles to their ultimate orbital destination.