How far did you get? What went wrong? What sort of latency/bandwidth did you expect to achieve? Was it relaying via geosynch/higher orbit 'hubs' or peer to peer sideways routing?
We raised $1.6 B, received the largest spectrum allocation in the history of the world (1000 Megahertz, in the Ka band, available globally), and launched one test satellite.
But, the biggest problem with these sorts of systems is that there is no MVP. Essentially everything has to work before anything can.
Our design was for a network of Low Earth Orbit satellites, which would mean cellular-like latency. We were planning to offer tens of megabytes per second, but it would have been really expensive. Our design used lasers for inter-satellite links, so there was no need for lots of local gateways.
In retrospect, the biggest mistake was to try to raise money from the incumbent telecom operators around the world, whose business we should be have been planning to disrupt.
It seems there are still phases you could do. Instead of trying to bring up an entire constellation at once doing two-way communications covering the entire globe, you could start with just a few broadcast-only satellites. Not competitive with at my house in urban North America where wifi and LTE is ubiquitous, but that's never going to be your market anyway.
The receiver on the ground is going to have to be specialized hardware anyway, so build in a battery and a real time clock so it can wake itself up when one of the satellites is in range, and then record everything the satelite is transmitting. Send the entire contents of Wikipedia once a week, send technical manuals, send the week's news, Windows updates, Linux distros; the Internet is so ubiquitous these days but fast access to it is still elusive in remote parts of the world.
This wouldn't have been useful in 2000 but 15 years later, a box with an wifi access point and a 1 TB hard drive chock full of information that's relatively up to date?
Not as cool as "internet anywhere in the world", but a start. Phase in delayed 2-way communication next, reusing the physical antenna from version 1; adding more satellites as you go.
Of course, 15 years later, the cost of putting 1 kg in orbit has also shrunk, and having a WiFi-capable computer in my pocket to look up information on is "normal" - which wasn't so, 15 years ago.
