Capacity Supply and Demand, 2026–2035
Will there be enough satellite capacity to serve the users in Setcoin's scenarios, or too much?
Chapter summary
In 2026 global D2D capacity is small, a few hundred gigabits per second across all systems at most (Setcoin estimate), but so is demand.
Key takeaways
- 1
Next-generation systems could raise supply by one to two orders of magnitude by the early 2030s.
- 2
Setcoin's comparison suggests that messaging and IoT will never be capacity-constrained, that voice and light data in rural areas could be served comfortably by the 2030s, and that broadband-like use by tens of millions of consumers would strain even next-generation systems in busy beams.
- 3
The likeliest outcome is ample capacity on average with local congestion at peak times and in disasters, and capacity that remains small compared with terrestrial networks (Chapter 39).
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Forecasts Compared and Setcoin Scenarios
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