Holes in the solar arrays should not impact on the overall performance. The company is also building 36 extra satellites to lift into orbits where others may have been destroyed, or expire after their approximated life span. The Teledesic satellites are expected to have a 10 year life span. A fleet of new ones will replace old or broken satellites. The network is decentralised.
Many satellites together act like Internet nodes on earth.
The advantage of decentralisation is that if a satellite is broken, the system can still work. The network is designed to support millions of simultaneous users. Multiple manufacturers will offer a family of user equipment to access the network. Higher speed terminals will offer 64 Mbps or greater of two way capacity. The 64 Mbps represents access speeds more than 2,000 times faster than today's standard analogue modems.