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It only has fiber to compete with, and light only travels at 2/3 speed in fiber compared to free space.
SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
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Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#132Am I the only one that thinks Elon Musk is scattered and overextended? Literally a new grand idea every few months..
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#133Do these positions also require ITAR?
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#134Didn't SpaceX blow up the rocket carrying Facebook's Internet.org satellites (which more or less were doing exactly this)? https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/a-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-j...
"Doing exactly this" is kind of a misrepresentation. SpaceX is launching a fleet of low-earth-orbit satellites. The rocket that blew up was carrying a single satellite, owned/built by an Israeli company and destined for geostationary orbit; Facebook had signed an agreement to lease part of that satellite's capacity for several years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos-6
This is odd. I'm pretty sure I read this exact pair of comments in the other thread earlier today... is HN moving things around with a fresh time stamp?
EDIT: whew, I'm not going crazy yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973474
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#135Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#136Man, you have to tip your hat to Elon Musk and his teams. They manage to consistently up the scales - its almost like accelerating towards future!
The guys a freak. He's about the only optimistic thing going on at the moment, it seems.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#137I 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?
To take home users as an example, the residents generally sleep 8-10 hours a day, work 9 hours a day, commute ~1 hour a day, leaving only about 6 hours of free time at home a day. Assuming they spend that entire time watching 4K Netflix (25Mbit), they'll have used ~2TB in a month, or ~6Mbit/s total. Averaging bandwidth out over the whole month, each satellite would be able to support 3800 people. With the 4400 satell…
2TB/month is a lot. Home data caps tend to be more 10 - 40GB and I've got 4GB data on my phone which is fine for most stuff except video. I doubt the service will be very cheap - sat services are usually more than cellphone data.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#138yesterday's comments:
SpaceX FCC Application for over 4000 Internet Satellites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973223
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#139Such a genius move, surprising nobody saw it coming. Just think: he will already have access to a large base of customer's roofs (which SolarCity effectively owns) --- 1 million by 2018. Then, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to an on-demand, fully-cached, mesh network. They're probably not far from being able to provide internet service to all SolarCity customers, just a bit of a modification to the contract.
Since Tesla will be making solar panels that look like tiles, they could also make mesh networking antennas that look like chimneys...
That is simply brilliant. Faux bricks which connect together to create a phased array antenna that create a mesh network between connected homes. Now if it was low enough power to run on the heat differential between the flue gases and the ambient air I would know I was in the future.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Specs for minimum ping of some internet technologies: 2G (100–400 Kbit/s) 300–1000 ms 3G (0.5–5 Mbit/s) 100–500 ms 4G (1–50 Mbit/s) ADSL+PPP (0.1-200 Mbit/s) 40 ms Cable (2 Mbit/s - 1 Gbit/s) 80 ms Fibre (1 Gbit/s - 100 Gbit/s) 5 ms Note that this latency is just the transmission delay, it does not send your data more than a few hundred meters (technically up to 200km for fibre, but usually the actual distance sent i…
Where are those numbers from? I get a consistent 12ms ping with my cable internet (200Mbps) to local cloud servers, and have seen as low as 1-4ms on fiber.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're made up, and they lack context.
40ms for ADSL... From where to where are you pinging?
Gamers will regularly achieve ~20ms pings to other gamers on the same continent. Where as pinging around the other side of world (under-sea cables) is going to add approximately 150-200 ms.
Also FTTH vs. ADSL vs. Cable really shouldn't make much difference with regards to ping (they're all fibre for the majority of the distance). The main reason FTTH (or even FTTN) networks tend to have a quicker ping is because they usually have newer/faster routing hardware running on them.