Methera Preparatory Phase

联合国和国际电联强调，有必要为联合国（under）服务国家的农村地区提供负担得起的高速宽带服务。卫星服务对一般消费者来说还不可行：卫星带宽的每月费用和用户设备的初始安装费用太高；户外设备太大；总的可用容量和容量密度太低，不够灵活，无法构成国家宽带基础设施的重要组成部分（例如10-20%）。在人口稀少的大片地区，地面技术既昂贵又不实用，因此与世隔绝的家庭、企业和社区目前处于不利地位。Methera计划作为一个灵活的MEO卫星星座，以帮助填补伙伴国家的空白，这些国家将能够以与地面技术具有竞争力的价格向小型、低成本用户终端提供这些服务。Methera将能够为分布在全球的5-15个合作国家提供300- 1000Gbps的容量。这项研究将允许团队设计和建模系统，并预测容量、成本和性能的分布，这些分布可以满足潜在参与者的全国农村宽带市场需求，并有望导致提前销售。

The need for affordable, high speed broadband services to rural areas of un(der)served nations is underlined by the United Nations and the ITU. Satellite service offerings are not yet viable for general consumers: monthly costs of satellite bandwidth and initial installed cost of user equipment are too high; outdoor units are too large ; and total available capacity and capacity density are too low and inflexible to form a significant component (eg 10-20%) of a national broadband infrastructure. Terrestrial technologies are also costly and impractical over very large sparsely populated areas and so isolated homes, businesses and communities are currently left disadvantaged. Methera is planned as a flexible constellation of MEO satellites to help fill the gap for partner nations who will be able to provide these services to small, low cost user terminals, at prices competitive with terrestrial technologies. Methera will be capable of providing 300- 1000Gbps capacity to each of 5-15 partner nations distributed around the globe. This study will allow the team to design and model the system and predict the distribution of capacity, cost and performance which can be delivered to meet the national rural broadband market needs of prospective participants which will hopefully lead to advanced sales.