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No other company... like HughesNet, ViaSat, Inmarsat, Intelsat, etc. Maybe you were led astray by this terrible TechCrunch article.
Seriously. Ever used internet on an airplane? You're using one of those companies geostationary satellites. The article is ridiculous.
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Seriously. Ever used internet on an airplane? You're using one of those companies geostationary satellites. The article is ridiculous.
Not necessarily. GoGo Inflight uses ground links for domestic US flights.
Hi everyone, I’m one of the cofounders of Astranis (YC W16). Thanks for taking the time to read about what we’re doing and happy answer any questions.
1. What bandwidth capacity are you aiming for per spacecraft?
2. Are you using commercial or rad hard parts?
3. Is there a deployable antenna that makes the spacecraft larger than 3'x3'x3'?
Hi everyone, I’m one of the cofounders of Astranis (YC W16). Thanks for taking the time to read about what we’re doing and happy answer any questions.
What effect does the small size of the satellite have on the cost and complexity of the terminal? The small-aperture terminal market has been driven by GEO satellites getting bigger, a lot bigger. Yes, we can fit more satellite in a small package, and solar cells have gotten more efficient, but there are laws-of-physics issues involving the size of the antenna, power requirements, etc. that aren't going to go away. G…
The high capacity satellites do have insufficient bandwidth to serve demand, on that I agree. But that's not a spectrum limitation, its a limitation on how many such large GEO's have been launched. Which is a small number because each one is so expensive. There is still plenty more spectrum we can use for GEO telecoms, and more with proper frequency re-use schemes.
The point you make about the drive to large GEO's holds true if you assume only one spacecraft will ever be in a single orbital slot. But that's not the case. There's plenty of orbital slots where multiple GEOs are co-located, and this will increasingly be the case in the future. I'd argue the drive to large satellites was more driven by various incentives and systemic issues in the industry that drove them that direction. A much longer conversation, but it's things that can all be fixed.
And to answer your last question, because our satellites are spec'd to provide the same EIRP on the ground, the ground terminals used are the same as those in use today for GEO telecoms. These terminals are all off-the-shelf and very low-cost compared to the terminals necessary for a LEO-based network.
Hi everyone, I’m one of the cofounders of Astranis (YC W16). Thanks for taking the time to read about what we’re doing and happy answer any questions.
Ok, I'll hit you with 3 questions: 1. What bandwidth capacity are you aiming for per spacecraft? 2. Are you using commercial or rad hard parts? 3. Is there a deployable antenna that makes the spacecraft larger than 3'x3'x3'?
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The distance to GEO does add some latency due to the distance, that’s the main trade off. What we found in studying this problem for a long time was that 95% of internet traffic isn’t latency sensitive— CDN traffic, video streaming, audio streaming, file downloads, social media posts, etc. The bandwidth crunch is a huge problem to solve but we realized there is low hanging fruit here that we can go after by putting s…
Audio streaming not including voice calls I assume, because those are absolutely latency sensitive. Are your terminals going to include TCP Performance Enhancing Proxies (PEPs)? The TCP three way handshake followed by the TLS handshake makes it kind of painful to browse on an unaccelerated network with a GEO hop. And this is before you get to the latency from the ground station to the website. The problem gets even w…
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I'd take SpaceX's latency claims with a big grain of salt. They'll only be true if you're in close geographic proximity to one of their ground stations. Once you're routing packets between satellites to get to a ground station all bets are off.
The SpaceX ground stations are meant to be consumer owned (about the size of a pizza box).
On the other hand it is completely possible that SpaceX's ground stations will use HW that is similar to their CPE box and thus they can build ridiculous amount of such ground stations (ie. at every IXP or so, althought the "lightweith non-IP transport" proclamation somehow precludes doing that)
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The SpaceX ground stations are meant to be consumer owned (about the size of a pizza box).
There is a difference between the CPE (what you use to get the service) and what SpaceX uses to sink your traffic into the global internet. And in fact there is exactly zero incentive for somebody other than SpaceX to run the ground stations. On the other hand it is completely possible that SpaceX's ground stations will use HW that is similar to their CPE box and thus they can build ridiculous amount of such ground s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What effect does the small size of the satellite have on the cost and complexity of the terminal? The small-aperture terminal market has been driven by GEO satellites getting bigger, a lot bigger. Yes, we can fit more satellite in a small package, and solar cells have gotten more efficient, but there are laws-of-physics issues involving the size of the antenna, power requirements, etc. that aren't going to go away. G…
Hi there, great questions. The satellites are spec'd to deliver the same power (EIRP) on the ground as traditional large GEO's, with each of our satellites having a fraction of the capacity. This is a key point-- it will take several of our satellites to do the same job as one traditional large GEO. But that's not only ok, it's much better. It means we can put up a smaller chunk of capacity as needed and not do the "…