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Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

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Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#51

Is this a case of doubling down, whilst SpaceX waits for the demand to launch satellites at the lower price grows. Its one thing to be able to launch satellites far more cheaply than other companies, perhaps the economics demands certain number of launches a year to keep capacity up and price down? The question is what happens when they launch all 1000 satellites?

> The question is what happens when they launch all 1000 satellites?

The plan is for 12,000 satellites and they are only designed to last a few years and then be replaced. This keeps launch rates constant, allows them to make much larger use of economies of scale by having that many satellites, and to constantly improve speed by building the new satellites with state of the art technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always seen this as two things. The first being space x filling in gaps in their launch schedule as you've pointed out. The second is to launch a commercial services which can provide a constant, predictable income to fund other projects. The upfront capital must be huge but with debt markets still this cheap i'm not surprised they're investing.

I always thought of it as Elon Musk advertising. But I visit reddit where tesla/elon/spacex topics are boosted with upvotes. Im just bitter because I believed in him, but his promises fell flat.

I find the SpaceX subreddit to be full of good information. Its a bit heavy handed with moderation and over zealous leaving little room for discussion, you're either on team Musk or told to leave.

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#54
post #35
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell of a lot of places without 5G, or any , mobile internet. Don't forget aviation and to a lesser extent maritime either. People love their onboard wifi. Owning the launch platform could mean that he's able to significantly undercut current players, although funnily enough soon-to-be competitor Iridium recently launched a whole bunch of new satellites using SpaceX. Good position to be in when your competitors are d…

StarLink will be mostly in LEO, so latency will be competitive with terrestrial services.

Depends on the terrestrial service. When I used to have FIOS, many places on the web were sub-10ms. HFC ISPs however are typically in the range Starlink will be in though (25-35ms) which is already better than many cellular data networks by a factor of ~2.

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#55
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well populated and tech heavy parts of the UK have spotty and unreliable 4g which is baffling to me. If Elon can deliver a low latency satellite network even just for peering it will be a big step potentially.

Even parts of London have spots where even 3G coverage is poor.

Yeah fully agree. Going down the M4 from London to Bristol i will constantly drop between 2g 3g and 4g. Really disappointing situation for one of the richest areas of the world

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#56
post #17

For those of you in the know here. Is this a realistic project/enterprise he is working on? Seems both costly to deploy that many satellites and risky in the sense that you can't count on getting a lot of customers. Especially with the new super speedy 5G networks and so on.

Hell of a lot of places without 5G, or any , mobile internet. Don't forget aviation and to a lesser extent maritime either. People love their onboard wifi. Owning the launch platform could mean that he's able to significantly undercut current players, although funnily enough soon-to-be competitor Iridium recently launched a whole bunch of new satellites using SpaceX. Good position to be in when your competitors are d…

1) Starlink will be in LEO around 800mi up unlike most communications satellites (like HughesNet) which are in geostationary orbit at ~22,200mi. Expect 25-35ms latency as compared to 600+.

2) due to having a lot more birds in the air at lower altitude with newer tech, they should be competitive with 5G networks speed wise as compared to existing satellite internet.

Edit: fixed distance typo for HughesNet

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#57

The headline is completely misleading. The transport layer won't use IPv6. It's like saying ethernet doesn't use IPv6. That's unsurprising.

Beyond that, there is entirely no substance here - unless he wants to release details, this is non-news, just more business fluff - "Ours will be even better. It'll be huge. The best. Others, so sad"

"And if its hacked, we'll just patch the firmware. So easy."

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always seen this as two things. The first being space x filling in gaps in their launch schedule as you've pointed out. The second is to launch a commercial services which can provide a constant, predictable income to fund other projects. The upfront capital must be huge but with debt markets still this cheap i'm not surprised they're investing.

I always thought of it as Elon Musk advertising. But I visit reddit where tesla/elon/spacex topics are boosted with upvotes. Im just bitter because I believed in him, but his promises fell flat.

> I'm just bitter because I believed in him, but his promises fell flat.

Which promises are those, because I have seen him deliver most of his goals? Albeit, they are practically always late but everyone who has followed him should know by now that he always underestimates timelines. The running joke is to multiple his estimated timelines by 1.8 (mars year / earth year).

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#59
Hi, I'm andrestaltz who Elon answered on Twitter. Like others have mentioned here, it seems like Elon is referring to the link layer between the satellites. "Peer-to-peer" probably meant "without a network switch".

I wish I had originally tweeted "... peer-to-peer connections within Starlink-only customers" because I was actually interested in knowing if Starlink could be like ZeroTier. https://zerotier.com/

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#60

The headline is completely misleading. The transport layer won't use IPv6. It's like saying ethernet doesn't use IPv6. That's unsurprising.

He specifically mentions a much lower protocol overhead, implying a translation of some sort, as opposed to just encapsulation. As an ex-programmer, is unlikely Musk would make that confusion.

Are you ever an ex-programmer? I would say, once a programmer, always a programmer.
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