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FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

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Re: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

#301

Post by tyingq »

tyingq wrote: post #85
dawnerd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me curious, would a larger panel make for better service? Would be interesting if they made their solar roofs all in one.

More gain == more bandwidth, up to a certain point, so probably. Though they've probably considered this in their business model and throttled or charged appropriately. Like, do they just let high altitude customers in Denver get more bandwidth for free, or ?

Yes really. More gain means higher S/N ratio, therefore more bandwidth. Again, up to a certain point. Providers don't necessarily deliver an optimal antenna. See cheap home wifi routers for a real world example. Swapping their shit stock antennas for better clearly boosts bandwidth.

Re: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

#302

Post by Robotbeat »

mozumder wrote: post #293
lorenzhs wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latency and bandwidth are two separate things, and the distance to an LTE tower has approximately nothing to do with latency to the server you’re connecting to, which btw is likely much further away than 100 miles. Now factor in that light moves 50% faster in air or vacuum than it does in fibre optic cables. The satellites are also going to be at a height of around 1000km (600 miles). But I t takes light only about 3…

This is a discussion about low bandwidth. Why are you talking about latency?

Because otherwise your comment makes no sense. You can already get satellite data rates (100Mbps on a home plan) equal to or greater than LTE, from ~100 times further (36,000 km altitude Geosynchronous orbit) and the distance itself does not fundamentally limit the speed, but the latency there is terrible and is fundamentally limited. LEO satellite constellations address that.

SpaceX's particularly large constellation (allowing streaming from multiple satellites at a time and with large phased array antennae on both ends) will allow much higher bandwidth than existing satellite internet systems, but the biggest deal about these LEO satellite constellations over GSO satellites is the far lower latency.

Re: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

#303

Post by ejo4041 »

ctdonath wrote: post #287
stephen_g wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're perhaps over-estimating how much bandwidth the system will have. Satellites are limited by power, earth ground-station uplink/downlink, the amount of spectrum they have for customer access in each spot-beam, etc. Definitely for rural and less densely populated areas you could potentially get hundreds of Mbps per subscriber, but even for the crazy high number of satellites they're talking about in their…

Having bandwidth is paramount. I've long opined network routers should have an "ad-hoc" mode (preferably on by default) whereby users can create a decentralized network, leveraging whatever long-range/high-bandwidth connection that can be accessed. With enough market penetration, the need for a direct service provider drops (from per-endpoint to per-region or even per-backbone; poor description of intent noted).

Xfiniti wifi has this pretty much. If you have an xfiniti account, you can connect to anyone's xfiniti wifi. That saved me from installing internet in a small commercial shop because the neighbor had xfiniti and we had an account.

It would be nice to see other providers do this, but a lot of tech users have reservations about other people using their routers.

Re: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

#304

Post by jandrese »

agildehaus wrote: post #267
t3rmi wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. It looks like their orbit is around 800 miles compared to the usual 22,000. Expected latency seems to be around 25ms. Would satellites be used for first hop only? I image latency would quickly increase if used for multiple hops.

Once the constellation is built, you can do worldwide routing in orbit, which is actually more efficient latency-wise (at least for international hops) as you're not dealing with political and physical boundaries and light is passing through vacuum not fiber.

While this is possible, it is very challenging to actually achieve. Your latency numbers go to hell in a hurry if you're bouncing around satellites in orbit (eating a queuing delay on every hop). Iridium did this, but at the end of the day their mobile to mobile latency numbers are similar to Geo satellites.

SpaceX's plan is almost absurdly ambitious and there is a lot of skepticism in the comm satellite community that they will achieve their stated goals, especially at an affordable price point.

Re: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

#305

Post by jandrese »

swiley wrote: post #290
tbabb wrote: post #215

Here's one way I could see this killing Comcast, even in major cities: As a homeowner, you by a small box which lives under the eave of your roof. The box has high-bandwidth, low-latency satellite uplink to SpaceX which gives you your internet. The same box also has a terrestrial wireless repeater which serves the local neighborhood. Internet is available through your "tower" to neighbors and passers-by. You and Spac…

Satellite internet: a radio based internet connection (like cellular or wifi) but now instead of having the antenna/base station sitting on something it's hurtling around the earth at an unimaginable speed and a rather large distance from everything connected to it. This might disrupt cellular and satellite ISPs and it will affect wired ISPs in the same sense that cellular affects them now which is all pretty excitin…

Even for your parents you need to consider the cost. There are a number of satellite internet companies already providing service, but none of it is affordable to your typical rural customer. Often billing is still measured in megabytes, and denominated in full dollar amounts. Think $5/MB, if you buy a lot of data up front to keep the costs down.

Even a highly disruptive network that drops the cost by two orders of magnitude will still be expensive.

Re: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

#306

Post by p1esk »

Numberwang wrote: post #186
fastball wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sri Lanka is only the 51st "best country in the world" according to US News[1]. That's really not bad and not really 3rd world at this point. [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/sri-lanka

That list is a bit weird though (looking at the top 10 overall)

The list looks about right. What do you find weird?

Re: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

#307

Post by ryanmarsh »

Did anyone else find Jessica Rosenworcel's statement at the end of the memorandum to be unprofessional?

I don't often read FCC rulings but her language seems breathless, unfactual, and unprofessional.

coming together to pioneer a wide range of cool satellite services

Cool?

No one imagined commercial tourism taking hold, no one believed crowd-funded satellites were possible, and no one could have conceived of the sheer popularity of space entrepreneurship

No one?

Lastly, her statement is rambling. Especially the last two paragraphs.

Re: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

#308

Post by jandrese »

pharke wrote: post #256
slr555 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was visiting a friend in Sri Lanka in 2004 and he was checking cricket scores on his phone in the middle of the jungle. I still can’t get a signal the whole way between KC and Omaha. We Americans sometimes ave a distorted view of the world.

It's funny you mention that route, it's about 185 miles which is about how wide Sri Lanka is. Living in the US also gives us a distorted view of how large the typical nation is.

For reference for Americans that's about the distance from Providence to New York City. Or San Diego to Oxnard for left coasters. Drives that people wouldn't think anything about, and where you would probably have cell service for the vast majority of the drive.

Re: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

#309

Post by mozumder »

Robotbeat wrote: post #281
mozumder wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, they can want infinite speeds, but they're only going to get a few megabits of speed. It will be much slower than LTE, since the satellites are going to be about 100 miles away. LTE towers are only a few miles away. How do you expect it to have higher bandwidth than LTE with communications a hundred miles away? It doesn't matter that they're putting in 4000 satellites, since those satellites are still 100 miles…

How? Because both the satellites and the receivers will use large phased array (beam forming) antennas with hundreds to thousands of elements unlike LTE. No one will have deployed phased arrays to users at the scale of this constellation, therefore SpaceX has invested a lot in phased-array/beamforming technology. “Another one of Elon Musk’s garbage projects that doesn’t really advance the state-of-the-art.” Okay, so…

OK but now you've limited your applications to non-mobile devices, unlike LTE.

And if they're targeting this for cellular base-stations, they're now on the hook to provide an even larger aggregate bandwidth to share among hundreds or thousands of local users per tower.

Re: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services

#310

Post by Robotbeat »

mozumder wrote: post #309
Robotbeat wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Because both the satellites and the receivers will use large phased array (beam forming) antennas with hundreds to thousands of elements unlike LTE. No one will have deployed phased arrays to users at the scale of this constellation, therefore SpaceX has invested a lot in phased-array/beamforming technology. “Another one of Elon Musk’s garbage projects that doesn’t really advance the state-of-the-art.” Okay, so…

OK but now you've limited your applications to non-mobile devices, unlike LTE. And if they're targeting this for cellular base-stations, they're now on the hook to provide an even larger aggregate bandwidth to share among hundreds or thousands of local users per tower.

Correct, the entire point of SpaceX's constellation is non-mobile. Always has been.
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