I don't really understand how this could even work.

I just built a lighted sign for an event I'm doing that says PARKING with an arrow. It's made up of little lights that are spaced about 2 inches apart. The letters are about 9 inches tall and the sign takes over 200 lights!

I did a bunch of small tests and this design came up as about optimal. It can be seen (and read) from a decent distance, and uses the least amount of lights to do this. But if you are more than about 100 feet away you can't really read it.

If I read the article correctly they are talking about 50 satellites, what are they going to advertise? 50 dots isn't enough to do much. Even the old fashioned dot matrix printers wouldn't be able to spell much of a word with 50 dots. I just don't see this happening.