Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space • Hacker News Board

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

#21

Post by seanp2k2 » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 7:57 PM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #6

ryandvm wrote: post #2

Slow race. Motorola tried this once already and failed with the Iridium Constellation in the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio... The venture went bankrupt and Motorola was actually on the verge of burning them up in the atmosphere when the Pentagon stepped in: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119255 Another interesting thing about the Iridium Constellation is that the satelli…

Iridium wasn't intended for internet -- it was intended for voice only. And by the time they got enough birds in the air, most areas were covered by at least one voice provider, so the only potential market was people that traveled frequently to remote areas. Not to mention that you could never have a handset that fit in your pocket. Now the way I thought Iridium should have been constructed, is to have the uplink be…

FWIW this is kind of what they do on e.g. racing sailboats offshore; a central uplink hooks into the satellites and distributes internet onboard via wifi. It's slow and expensive, but let's you do things like pull weather reports from the middle of the Atlantic, post your progress back to race control and your family / friends, etc.

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

#22

Post by digler999 » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 8:02 PM UTC

What I think they should do (not sure of what this is called ) is UDP-broadcast "caches" of popular sites such as reddit, (hacker news :) ) wsj, etc, continuously.

I'm willing to bet that a very large portion of people only access a relatively small number of sites. If they streamed a cache this way, it could probably cut their bandwidth substantially.

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

#23

Post by seiferteric » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 8:02 PM UTC

digler999 wrote: post #22

What I think they should do (not sure of what this is called ) is UDP-broadcast "caches" of popular sites such as reddit, (hacker news :) ) wsj, etc, continuously. I'm willing to bet that a very large portion of people only access a relatively small number of sites. If they streamed a cache this way, it could probably cut their bandwidth substantially.

multicast

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

#24

Post by snowwindwaves » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 8:19 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #13

__john wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geosynchronous satellites don't have to be over the equator. Geosynchronous satellites that are over the equator are called geostationary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_satellite#Defin...

Interesting. Til I guess. But what's the purpose of not being geostationary?

Covering areas far from the equator ?

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

#25

Post by guelo » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 8:39 PM UTC

SEJeff wrote: post #16

oxalo wrote: post #12

Has anyone figured out how to deal with the issue of latency for space-based internet? Things like online games and video calls will just not work if the traffic hits space. I could see an ISP offering a service where traffic that needs low latency gets routed on land, while web pages and the like get routed through space. At a cost, of course.

All of the past versions of "space internet" have been geostationary orbit, which is around 25,000-26,000 miles above sea level. The new iterations, such as SpaceX's idea, is to use many many more microsats and put them in LEO. Low Earth Orbit is closer to 750 or so miles above sea level. Since the ping latency of geostationary sat internet is around 500-700ms, it would be massively less for low earth orbit. The two…

The article reads almost like a press release for ViaSat which uses a handful of big geostationary satellites. It even disparages the OneWeb LEO initiative saying it will be too expensive and take too long to build. I think the article was prompted by the dispute between American and Gogo. I'm not sure what it's doing here on HN, doesn't seem that interesting.

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

#26

Post by mikeash » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 8:53 PM UTC

seanp2k2 wrote: post #20

mikeash wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early, or late. One of Iridium's problems was that by the time they actually became operational, a huge chunk of their potential customer base had been eaten up by terrestrial cellular phones. The number of people who needed something more than a cell phone was a lot smaller in 1998 than it was in 1987. Iridium service was also unbelievably expensive and not all that useful. (For that matter, still is.) If you had a…

Interestingly, they're still popular with some very adventurous groups, e.g. Round-the-world sailors, motorcyclists going through remote locations, climbers and hikers in remote places / foreign countries, etc. Very useful if it's the only thing that will work.

Exactly. For some cases it's an amazing service. It just wasn't enough to sustain a company that had to spend $5 billion up front to get things started. Once that got discharged in bankruptcy, it managed to do OK.

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

#27

Post by mschuster91 » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 9:19 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #18

tarnquil wrote: post #4

I wonder whether China would consider any internet-supplying geosynchronous satellites over their borders as an affront to their sovereignty. Satellite internet (without a land-based backhaul) is surely the most effective way of subverting the Great Firewall.

They will probably be able to convince the service providers not to offer service within China. Flying the satellites over the country is fine, various international treaties take care of that, but once you start actually doing business in the country (even at a remove) then you'll run into trouble. It would be interesting for an outside company with no ties to China to just say "screw it" and ignore Chinese demands…

> Note the distinctly China-shaped hole in East Asia.

Quote: "Please note: Satellite coverage may experience outages for reasons such as government regulations"

I guess this is intentional because China may retaliate against violators (e.g. prohibit fly-overs).

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

#28

Post by mschuster91 » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #7

tarnquil wrote: post #4

I wonder whether China would consider any internet-supplying geosynchronous satellites over their borders as an affront to their sovereignty. Satellite internet (without a land-based backhaul) is surely the most effective way of subverting the Great Firewall.

People would still have to subscribe to the service, and I'm sure China could control their population's purchases to prevent them from paying for it. They could also use detectors (or jammers) and threaten their population enough to keep them from utilizing the service.

> People would still have to subscribe to the service, and I'm sure China could control their population's purchases to prevent them from paying for it.

China is iirc (one of) the biggest Bitcoin usage countries.

> They could also use detectors (or jammers)

Jamming doesn't work with a proper directional dish, and detecting who in the country surfs via satellite doesn't work if there is proper encryption on the air protocol.

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

#29

Post by gozur88 » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

oxalo wrote: post #12

Has anyone figured out how to deal with the issue of latency for space-based internet? Things like online games and video calls will just not work if the traffic hits space. I could see an ISP offering a service where traffic that needs low latency gets routed on land, while web pages and the like get routed through space. At a cost, of course.

Games and video calls, no, but it should work just fine for things like watching streaming movies.

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

#30

Post by vocatus_gate » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

seanp2k2 wrote: post #20

mikeash wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early, or late. One of Iridium's problems was that by the time they actually became operational, a huge chunk of their potential customer base had been eaten up by terrestrial cellular phones. The number of people who needed something more than a cell phone was a lot smaller in 1998 than it was in 1987. Iridium service was also unbelievably expensive and not all that useful. (For that matter, still is.) If you had a…

Interestingly, they're still popular with some very adventurous groups, e.g. Round-the-world sailors, motorcyclists going through remote locations, climbers and hikers in remote places / foreign countries, etc. Very useful if it's the only thing that will work.

I've used Iridium sat phones in Iraq, and am currently prepping for deployment to Antarctica, where we'll have Iridium phones as backup to a satellite data link.