PRESS: Russian official calls satellite Internet sci-fi project

MOSCOW, Feb 17 (PRIME) -- Canadian-U.S. entrepreneur Elon Musk’s idea of create a U.S. $10 billion universal satellite Internet a sci-fi populist project, Deputy Director of the Russian communications service Oleg Ivanov said, the Izvestiya daily reported Tuesday.

“It’s an attractive populist idea, which is not backed up by any calculations. My opinion is that these are ideas from science fiction. We won’t see it in soon; it’s unrealistic,” Ivanov said.

Musk, who set up space company SpaceX and electric car maker Tesla Motors, has said the project will require putting 4,000 satellites into orbit.

“The orbit frequency resource won’t be enough to ensure a required band to deliver signals. Even now, the orbit frequency resource is insufficient. And the speed of the satellite Internet is slow, speaking about kilobits a second,” Ivanov said.

The official said that the idea could engage the use of a submillimeter range, but its deployment is very expensive. “Such projects will require the implementation of technologies, which do not exist at the moment. That is why my forecast is following: such a project won’t take shape during the coming 10 years,” Ivanov said.

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