151–160 of 540 posts
> SpaceX wants to launch 4,425 satellites into low-Earth orbits, with altitudes ranging from 715 miles to 823 miles. By contrast, the existing HughesNet satellite network has an altitude of 22,000 miles.
That's about — basic arithmetic alert! — three percent the distance for the SpaceX satellites compared to existing geosynchronous ones.
I 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?
People aren't generally using a 1 gbps connection at 100% capacity 100% of the time. If we assume customers use an average of 1 TB of data per month and the time they use it is pretty spread out (seems reasonable since they are going to be spread out accross timezones eventually), you can serve about 6 million customers with 800 satelites @ 23 GBPS, and with 4400 @ 23 GBPS you could do ~33 million. Admittedly these n…
The issue is the antenna needs to be around 2 foot by 2 foot.
But, with autonomous cars people may want significant bandwidth in there cars. An hour or two of video a day seems reasonable especially if they can cache popular content.
Honestly, if they can get the price down this could be very profitable.
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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.
That's a pretty serious statement, the government threatens infrastructure providers all the time but I haven't heard of the FBI requiring ISP level censorship of DNS.
> 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
Can you give some examples?
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Doubt it. Elon's made his fortune by replacing existing products with superior alternatives. He's said in every case that driving cost down is one of the most important parts of creating something people want. Why do you think he wouldn't do the same here? He knows everyone hates existing telecoms. He's trying to create a better alternative.
> He knows everyone hates existing telecoms. Not true everywhere. I'm paying < $40/month for a 100 MBit connection and I don't hate my telecom.
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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.
See http://domainincite.com/2766-icann-had-no-role-in-seizing-to... for an example
Such 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.
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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…
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Competition makes a big difference. Just over a year ago with Google Fiber rearing up, my ISP offered 150Mbps for $35. This year with Google Fiber downsizing, the big American ISPs are back to their duopoly: 25Mbps for $40 or 10Mbps for $30. Hopefully SpaceX is able to force them to lower rates for everyone.
It's not going to replace internet for cities/towns. Think of the latency! It is directed towards middle of nowhere areas where nobody provides fiber.
An astounding O(54% of global internet traffic) [2]! Obviously there are many many more variables in this [3]. Nonetheless this will be super interesting to follow.
[1]: my estimated current data usage from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Intern...
[2]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(4425+*+23)+%2F+((60,00... (1024+%2F+1)+*+(1024+%2F+1))
[3]: Side note, someone should create a multi user algorithm website (it might be able to be done over google spreadsheets) but adding in extra factors like revenue streams and what not sounds like it would be fun to play around with.