My dream of an off-grid cabin with internet access inches closer!
You can do that today. I work with a guy who lives in an off-the-grid place in what most of us would consider to be the middle of nowhere with satellite for his internet access.
SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
211–220 of 540 posts
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because if it generates energy from your fridge it means you deeply failed at insulating your fridge, and you have to spend several times as much energy putting the cold back inside. In most places you can use significantly more efficient devices to turn heat differences into electricity.
I think he is more talking about the heat that the fridge outputs to cool the inside, which is likely warmer than the ambient temperature in the room. Just a guess.
I was; the fridge outputs quite a bit of heat, good for raising seedlings on top of. But I would imagine the expenses involved in this stuff wouldn't make it sensible for a fridge (I don't think they draw that much power anyway).
I just had never heard you could harness this, it's cool.
Edit: Bit late to the party, 1821. Bit of catching up to do.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#213Such 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.
no one saw it coming? they anounced this in 2015. Here is a video where elon explains the system very well in 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if everyone gets 1Gbps then each satellite can only service 23 people. Of course people who have that kind of bandwidth don't use it continuously. But what if we all try to watch some 4k video at say 20mbps? That's 50x23 = 1150 users per satellite or around 5 million users to saturate the whole constellation. It's still cool, but certain things will not be possible.
Oversubscription isn't exactly a rare thing in the ISP world.
No, but cables can be duplicated, wireless bandwidth can't.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#215Free, 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).
Spreading true (well, at least less wrong) information is a noble goal. Unfortunately, I'm not sure we're not seeing such information availability providing avenues towards a smarter, more progressive planet. Instead, the internet seems to be helping people create cocoons of ignorance and "evidence" to support even the most specious claims - such as the world being flat. Knowledge does not seem to be enough. Wisdom a…
> Unfortunately, I'm not sure we're not seeing such information availability providing avenues towards a smarter, more progressive planet.
The long-term view, spanning decades or hundreds of years, overwhelmingly argues in favor of information availability leading to progress. That progress doesn't happen all at once, gains are not always evenly distributed, it's gradual and eventual. All great leaps of human progress have directly coincided with immense increases in information availability. I'd be very skeptical that that is a coincidence. Ignorance is gradually boxed into smaller and smaller enclaves when confronted with unfettered access to information. The only way to truly retard that progression is through violence and that is always temporary.
What other explanation is there for seven billion people having such a drastically higher median when it comes to knowledge, versus what the median was 500 or 5,000 years ago? 500 years ago, the median on the planet was extraordinarily ignorant compared to today.
You can see ignorance collapse rapidly when confronted with information. Countries as varied as China, Vietnam, Romania, Colombia, Brazil, etc. have been or actively are incredible demonstrations of it in action the past few decades. Cuba will demonstrate it once again over the next ~20 years. China's last 30 years may be the single largest / greatest leap in history, going from a median that was hyper ignorant and impoverished agrarian to quickly closing the gap with the global median. That China leap directly coincided with a vast increase in knowledge availability for the median (even if state censorship is still present, the education level available to their median has skyrocketed).
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Duh whatever Google and Facebook deem to be real news of course. The Ministry of Truth will root out all these evil white supremacist sites like Breitbart and Fox News. I long for the day when only Salon and Slate are considered sources of truth.
I've heard of Breitbart. Isn't that the site that encouraged people to "hoist the Confederate flag high and proud" because the Confederacy was a "patriotic and idealistic cause"? Same one right?
That's the one! Breitbart is all about killing foreigners and hating non-white people, right?
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#217napkin math (chemistry style): (4425 satellites * 23Gbps) / ((60,000PB of fixed internet traffic / 1 month [1]) * (12 months / 365 days) * (1 day / 24 hours ) * (1 hour / 60 minutes) * (1 minute / 60 seconds) * (8 bits / 1 byte) * (1024 Tera / 1 Peta) * (1024 Tera / 1 Giga)) = An astounding O(54% of global internet traffic) [2]! Obviously there are many many more variables in this [3]. Nonetheless this will be super…
it's about 100Tbs which is close to current US to Europe internet capacity. So it's definitely will not represent 1/2 of the world's traffic.
Per the wiki [1], Internet traffic is defined as: the amount of data sent and received by visitors of a particular web site.
The traffic between europe and the US is not solely dominated by the amount of data sent and received by visitors of a particular web site. It includes a lot of other background data such as backups between regions.
The analogy to economics would be the calculation of GDP in that you generally don't factor in B2B products/services when the end product/service is the consumer.
Obviously, this won't replace my "laptop -> router" communication nor "server -> server" communication but it's the consumer that matters.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Intern...
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You should try Australia. Undersea cables definitely adds more than 150-200ms (but I guess you mean the Atlantic) to everything here.
He _did_ say on the same continent. 150-200ms within Australia would be considered pretty slow.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#219Such 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.
Phase 1 of Tesla/SpaceX merger.
Re: SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
#220Free, 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).
Can we get free clean drinking water first? That is more of a problem than free internet.