Connecting the next four billion people, Venrock’s investment into Astranis

In the US, fiber costs an estimated $27K/mile to lay down in an urban region, and we’ve already spent over $100 billion in the US laying down fiber lines connected to IP backbones to gateways and cell towers.
In a remote or rural region, i.e. Alaska, it can cost 10x — 100x that. Terrestrial networks have not been a viable option to provide connectivity to them. 45% of the global population live in remote or rural regions.

#News(General) [ via IoTGroup ]

Headings…
Traditional approaches
The next four billion
Geosynchronous Satellites
Low Earth Mega Constellations
Atmospheric Balloons & Drones
That’s until we met John and Ryan at Astranis.
Ethan Batraski

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The $100s of billions in fiber lines to connect our IP backbones to gateways and cell towers will be out of reach for the next four billion; across both developed and emerging nations, in often rural or remote regions, starting with limited to no connectivity infrastructure, and with far less economic buying power.
At Venrock, we have always been interested in the infrastructure stack and services that power our everyday lives; commerce, media, communication, connectivity… As legacy systems exceed their scale and performance capabilities attempting to support existing demand, and new market participants join to further stress their capacity to serve, the markets begin to shift to embracing new solutions.
We have always believed that the ways we provided connectivity and bandwidth had to change; the infrastructure was bursting from the seams, we can’t lay down fiber fast enough, the needs of the new market participants were different from what the traditional solutions could offer, the scale and performance requirements just for the existing demand as a whole could no longer be met (5G, 8K video, continued migration of cable to streaming, etc).
Areas that are remote, rural, or distributed, as most of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and even parts of North America (i.e. Alaska, Northern Canada), simply lack the population density to justify enough satellite coverage and bandwidth to provide any meaningful connectivity or accessible bandwidth, at affordable prices.
LEO based solutions are able to micro-size (down to 150kg — 500kg range from 6000kg+) the satellites to be far more efficient to build and launch into orbit, but require constellations of them in order to provide continuous coverage and service (each satellite circles the globe every 90–120 minutes)

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