February 2026 | Here's what's happened in the last month.
LEOs, LEOs Everywhere?
For the past three years, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite Internet services have 'quietly' captured the Internet news and research community's attention amid the stomping sounds of AI elephant stampedes.
While research and news have predominantly focused on the launches, performance, and dealings of the dominant product, Starlink, new providers are increasing their constellation sizes and brokering deals with governments, airlines, and mobile providers to connect previously unconnected users and provide viable competition. For all the hype, though, recent research shows that current offerings alone cannot efficiently deliver universal, meaningful connectivity.
Writing on the Pulse Blog this week, Wesley Woo at Virginia Tech, noted that even under optimistic assumptions, Starlink’s current deployment struggles to serve all unserved households in the US at acceptable broadband quality.
"Even with existing government subsidies, over 65% of unserved households remain unable to afford reliable Starlink service."
Figure 1 — Using the Alliance 4 Affordable Internet's (A4AI) guideline that affordable connectivity does not exceed 2% of monthly income, Wesley's group estimated the number of currently unserved residential locations that cannot afford Starlink's Residential broadband plan. They found that ~3.5 million of 4.6 million unserved locations are unable to afford Starlink at this benchmark; with existing government subsidies, over ~3.0 million still cannot afford Starlink. In comparison, network operators like Xfinity and Spectrum offer nation-wide plans affordable to over 99.999% of locations without subsidy.
This isn't to say that LEO satellite Internet services cannot play an important connectivity role, especially when disaster strikes.
As another of our guest authors, Vaibhav Bhosale from Georgia Institute of Technology, noted earlier this month, this technology has been invaluable in connecting people when land and subsea connectivity options are disrupted. However, these instances have been predominantly reactive. As such, his group recently sought to simulate the resilience of six countries' LEO satellite networks as a national backup during large-scale disruptions to connectivity.
Figure 2 — Failover traffic from Great Britain reduces available LEO capacity across much of Europe and as far as Mongolia, illustrating the need for international coordination during national-scale LEO failover.
The takeaway: Most countries need to invest more on deployment choices as well increase coordination between national governments and satellite operators to fully rely on them 'when' an event happens; a similar recommendation noted by Wesley, too.
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