[sebringj]

The article mentions ubiquitous micro satellites. This tech is simply following from that although not directly stated in the title. The fact that these micro satellites are cheap and so easy to cookie cutter and deploy is great in terms of tech but seems to compound the issue of space debris. Anyway, just after becoming aware of this I was less enthusiastic about the communications aspects.

[rtkwe]

Down linking data has never been the particularly difficult part of working with a satellite though getting it up there with all the approvals that requires was and still is the major hurdle. Just because it's easy to downlink doesn't mean the FCC is going to suddenly rubberstamp every startup's 10k satellite constellation.

[7952]

Depends how much data you want to downlink though. Sats in LEO have fairly small footprints and you can only get data when that footprint is over a ground station.