Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Blue Origin is a Jeff Bezos' startup providing space services to NASA and other clients. Those services include cargo delivery, rocket engines, lunar landing vehicles, and under development, a commercial space station. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket carries as much cargo as SpaceX' Starship and successfully launched a NASA probe in late 2025. The first stage is reusable.  New Glenn's success has encouraged Blue Origin to develop new satellite constellations. The company announced yesterday a hybrid network of 5,280 LEO and 128 MEO satellites called Terawave that will use dual free space lasers and radio frequencies to communicate with the Earth. Radio frequency will provide a minimum committed bit rate of 144 Gibabits per second, many magnitudes greater than what Starlink offers, with free space lasers boosting the throughput by 6 terabits in ideal weather conditions. Dual connectivity is not a new idea. Low latency financial trading platforms have been using microwave ...

University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands has set up a 4.6 kilometer free space optical link that traverses the city center. Its throughput is 5.7 Tbps. Unfortunately, I don't see signal to noise measurements. Free space lasers suffer from atmospheric turbulence such as rain, fog, and clouds. They work well in outer space. The technology is the basis of the new NASA deep space communications network. Click here for the short paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21058v1.