131–140 of 179 posts
Shorter summary of SpaceX's Senate testimony https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/6c08b6c2... : Initially, the SpaceX system will consist of 4,425 satellites operating in 83 orbital planes (at altitudes ranging from 1,110 km to 1,325 km). SpaceX has proposed an additional constellation of 7,500 satellites operating even closer to Earth. For the end consumer, SpaceX user terminals—essentially, a relativ…
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Question for anyone who might know, would jamming work if you used highly directional antennas? Seems like it wouldn't really.
The antenna is already highly directional - those are LEO satellites we're talking about, you need to constantly track them. How phased array antennas respond to jamming is unfortunately beyond my knowledge.
It's been said before, but what people need to understand is that the goal of this service isn't to make money- it's to balance demand. SpaceX can plan to launch be 30% more launches than their actual customers need. All those extra rockets are used for internet satellites. If there's an accident (boom) or a sudden need for more rockets, the internet satellites get delayed, and the paying customer gets a rocket. If c…
http://www.wsj.com/articles/exclusive-peek-at-spacex-data-sh...
"SpaceX has also proposed an additional 7,500 satellites operating even closer to the ground, saying that this will boost capacity and reduce latency in heavily populated areas." This should be interesting, depending on how this is regulated on the legal side it could result in the major ISP's updating our infrastructure, of course nothing has stopped them from agreeing to update infrastructure then running off with…
> Not to mention they will probably use legal means to hamstring this if possible. I wonder how this could work. It's not like, e.g., Milwaukee has any legal oversight over LEO.
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Why does capitalism always get bashed by people who don't know what it is?
They bash it exactly because they don't understand it and they listen to whatever they read on Facebook that tells them why it is evil. Basic Economics education outside of University and even within University is strongly lacking in this country. We need mandatory personal finance/macro economics courses as part of high school.
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Musk himself has stated the goal is to make money to help pay for colonizing Mars.
"Musk himself has stated the goal is to make money to help pay for colonizing Mars." Which I continue to misunderstand ... You can go to Mars ... you can have an outpost on Mars ... you can have scientists and tourists and so on go back and forth to Mars - all very positive and exciting. But you can't live on Mars for an extended period because the gravity is 1/3 of earths. Your teeth will decay. Your bones will weak…
I'm genuinely curious.
For comparison my CableCo connection in the left-middle of America achieves a loop RTT of about 10ms (5ms Latency), and an RTT to 8.8.8.8 of 25ms (12.5ms Latency).
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The antenna is already highly directional - those are LEO satellites we're talking about, you need to constantly track them. How phased array antennas respond to jamming is unfortunately beyond my knowledge.
That's my point, if you have high gain in a particular direction, wouldn't interference coming from a different direction be mostly rejected? The point being, this could offer internet to people in repressed countries that can't practically be blocked or tampered with. If they coupled this with a free tier with low bandwidth it could be huge, assuming people could smuggle in the equipment to make it work.
Interesting. What would this be able to do ? Current wireless speeds, even with state of the art technology, is going to be something like 10Gbit. That'll have to be shared by an entire city at least (correction: about 2 satellites per state on average. Less for New York), and of course there won't be any CDNs or HTTP caches "upstairs" so to speak. So 1 bit in = 1 bit back out. Even at 4425 satellites that means, let…
It's a cool system. There's a slight disadvantage that the satellite-to-ground link is at 10-15 GHz for users, so it will go down in a heavy rainstorm, and some fraction of the time due to other atmospheric effects. Should be reasonably reliable but far from fiber, and it will be interesting to see what uptime they guarantee. Assuming this all ever actually happens.
I assume the sensitity to weather etc depends on the type of equipment you have? Couldn't a community use a huge high power and high sensitivity common receiver/transmitter station, that provides fiber to 10-1000 households? The community station could also provide some kind of limited bandwidth fallback such as DSL or LTE that just ensures peoples fiber lines limp along when the satellites can't be reached (so their…