mide: i hope that i am on the right track. here is a clip from an interview from wireless iq q&a interview with leigh coleman -
WIQ: If one "Stratellite" has line-of-sight to an area the size of Texas, why would it take 300 to cover the continental USA?
LC: We operate airships as a fleet, in which they act as a sort of mesh network to provide coverage. There is a limit to the number of subscribers per airship, due to spectrum and frequency issues. Therefore as the bandwidth requirement increases, we add airships. If you were to calculate the number of airships to provide coverage, but not to support large numbers of subscribers, then the initial number of airships could be far less. If we project a national broadband network of many millions of subscribers, the fleet would grow to 300 airships.