The mayor and city council where I live have a big hardon for municipal fiber. I have this feeling that if and when they ever get it built they will have spent a ton of money on something that is obsolete on day one.
SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
61–70 of 540 posts
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
seems so expensive for such a short lifespan
I'm curious if they can launch multiple at once. I assume they can, and on top of that, once they can reuse rockets My guess is the cost might be as little as a million ( or less ) for a satellite in orbit. That would be, what, $9 billion? That sounds like a lot, until you realize they can spread that cost over 2-3 years and have millions (if not billions) of people paying for internet. This would replace cellphone p…
This is wild, wild overexageration.
>millions (if not billions) of people paying for internet
You're vastly underestimating the challenge in attracting millions (let alone "billions", that's so ridiculous it's not even worth commenting on) of costumers.
>This would replace cellphone plans too remember...
You can't just hope to replace 4bil+ users in a snap of the fingers... Even if you had a hypothetical magical product that was cheap, available and revolutionary, flipping 4,500,000,000 clients would be a grueling task.
>could probably charge a nice $100 - $300 a month and people would clamor for it.
Why?? Who would be willing to pay 300$ a month for internet?? Maybe wealthy people in developed countries would pay that for the convenience of replacing home+mobile internet, but you wouldn't ever reach the amount of users you project with those kids of prices.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
seems so expensive for such a short lifespan
I'm curious if they can launch multiple at once. I assume they can, and on top of that, once they can reuse rockets My guess is the cost might be as little as a million ( or less ) for a satellite in orbit. That would be, what, $9 billion? That sounds like a lot, until you realize they can spread that cost over 2-3 years and have millions (if not billions) of people paying for internet. This would replace cellphone p…
It's a good bet Musk has done the math.
It's also a good bet Musk has done the math and thought about future math as well.
This won't just be profitable. It has the potential to be a political game changer.
After a while it's going to be possible to start running servers on satellites, to move them out of national jurisdictions.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#64Free, global internet access is the next step toward a smarter, more progressive planet. I don't even care about the speed - if the only thing users could access was wikipedia, I'd still personally donate to the project. I cannot emphasize how important democratizing knowledge is to me (and many others).
This still requires ground stations. Though I guess you could pay for "censor resistant" traffic where your data is bounced among the satellites until someone has a US ground station in sight...
That still wouldn’t give you access to piracy sites, for which the FBI has required US ISPs to censor them from their DNS servers.
I’ve had this occur quite a few times now that 8.8.8.8 (yes, verified with DNSSEC to be the real one) and DNS servers of US ISPs returned different IPs than the authoritative nameservers, and the returned IPs always showing a neat "The FBI has seized this property due to piracy" link.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#65Free, global internet access is the next step toward a smarter, more progressive planet. I don't even care about the speed - if the only thing users could access was wikipedia, I'd still personally donate to the project. I cannot emphasize how important democratizing knowledge is to me (and many others).
Free global wireless internet lets every device in your home spy without an easy way to firewall it off.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#66I don't understand the math. 800 satellites at 23 gbps seems to be able to provide 1 gbps to 18,400 connections at any given time. This seems to be many magnitudes off from what would be needed to have any impact. What am I missing?
Lots of people have mentioned over-subscription, but another consideration is that while 1gbps connection speeds may be offered, they're likely to have other speeds as well at different costs. For a lot of people, even 100kbps would be an improvement over what they have (which might be dial-up, might be satellite with 2-second ping times, or might be nothing). I myself probably wouldn't notice much difference between 5mbps and 1gbps, as long as youtube works.
This could be a big deal for the huge under-served population in rural America and in developing countries. Incumbent telcos would have to have service at least as good/cheap as SpaceX's internet service to stay in business. I hope they introduce a low-cost, relatively low bandwidth plan that's accessible to the world's poor.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#67I don't understand the math. 800 satellites at 23 gbps seems to be able to provide 1 gbps to 18,400 connections at any given time. This seems to be many magnitudes off from what would be needed to have any impact. What am I missing?
Satellite communication at the moment is very expensive
(like dollars per kilobyte expensive) not because of the limitations of long distance wireless communication in general, but because most of our satellite equipment up there is old and outdated.
At some point as we developed world wide communications, laying down long distance fiber became cheaper than deploying communication satellites, and the existing satellites had enough capacity for the demand at the time.
We stopped shooting up sattelites, but we developed much better wireless technologies (e.g. MIMO) down on earth, and SpaceX now has the means to deploy those in space and undercut the competitions offerings that is still being used heavily for specific use cases (e.g. broadcasting, marine, etc applications)
It doesn't even have to be cheap, it just has to be cheaper than the competition. It's not quite world changing, but it's still a massive business (i guess) and would provide spaceX with some steady revenue stream. If it eventually becomes cheap enough for mass market that's just icing on the cake.
Also note that any competition also will have to pay SpaceX for deployment, so SpaceX wins no matter what.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#68I don't understand the math. 800 satellites at 23 gbps seems to be able to provide 1 gbps to 18,400 connections at any given time. This seems to be many magnitudes off from what would be needed to have any impact. What am I missing?
You're missing the current very high cost of crappy satellite bandwidth. This isn't competing with downtown fibre, it's competing with current solutions for way-out-of-town stuff, which are either very expensive or very low bandwidth or both.
Source: am outdoor robot researcher.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#69How will this be affected by weather?
It won't be affected much. http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/spacelink/radiospace.htm
We're ok-ish with frequencies up to 20GHz or so. Standard satellite TV is below that. Spacex filed for bands 10.7 – 12.7 GHz and 14.0 – 14.5 GHz for user down/up link (Ku band) and higher frequencies (Ka band) for high powered gateways.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#70I don't know how they're going to get 25/35ms hops. If they're using low orbits to reduce latency, the surface coverage is going to be lower so they're going to have to mesh them in some way to span large areas. That means routers and intelligence which means uplink, interlink, downlink hops in both directions. 600ms here we come again.
Here is the part you missed: "Optical inter-satellite links permit flexible routing of traffic on-orbit."
It's still EM radiation. Takes the same amount of time to propagate between two points in a vacuum. Line of sight optical in space is going to be very difficult. Even relativistic effects need to be considered at very high frequencies as they can cause phase shifts. Managing that on a mesh hurts my head.