If they pull this off, what would this mean for the future?
Someone in a third world country can have the same speed as someone in a developed country.
Why should I keep my cell phone?
Will comcast go out of business?
Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
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Re: Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
#92If they pull this off, what would this mean for the future? Someone in a third world country can have the same speed as someone in a developed country. Why should I keep my cell phone? Will comcast go out of business?
Well probably because the receiver is going to be the size of a few bricks, so you’ll want to hold onto your phone for a while.
Re: Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starlink animations depict each sat servicing a narrow cone below. Remember, these operate much closer to the ground than geosynchronous; they'll have a much better idea where the client is than just which hemisphere.
Radio wave propagation is a little more complicated than what the animations depict. It would probably be easy to pretend to be somewhere else by pointing a more directional antenna at the horizon.
All Starlink communication is already extremely directional. The spot size of the beam coming from the satellite is ~1.5km on the ground, and the receiver is also directional with similar accuracy. The entire principle of Starlink is based on extreme SDMA.
If you try to communicate with a satellite on the horizon, you will not hear it, and it will not listen to you.
Re: Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
For us non-Americans this is not that great. How would you feel if China or Russia launched such a system? Or even Germany?
Why would I feel anything but good about this? At the worst it doesn't impact me at all, at best it means a large number of people are going to be able to get online for cheap who previously weren't.
A large number of people moving to this network means a majority of the internet is routed via the United States. Local service providers will die out and in the end the internet is owned and operated by one corporation which is willing/required to hand over anything to the state. Total surveillance, total control. This is a nightmare.
Re: Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would I feel anything but good about this? At the worst it doesn't impact me at all, at best it means a large number of people are going to be able to get online for cheap who previously weren't.
A large number of people moving to this network means a majority of the internet is routed via the United States. Local service providers will die out and in the end the internet is owned and operated by one corporation which is willing/required to hand over anything to the state. Total surveillance, total control. This is a nightmare.
I'm not sure that's true.
From a technical perspective, from what i've seen SpaceX is planning on eventually having them communicate as a web across themselves. So your "average" communication will be something like "user>base station>sat>sat>sat>base station near destination>destination". Or if the destination is nearby, something like "user>base station>sat>base station>destination"
I haven't seen anything claiming that they are going to route all internet through the US. I've actually seen the opposite about how they are planning on using this system to do intercontinental communication at faster latency than undersea fiber can currently do. And to me that implies that they will be taking the most optimal path, which means if neither the source nor the destination is in the US, the communication wouldn't have any reason to enter the US.
From a legal/political perspective I could see where you are coming from. It's a US based company, and they comply with US laws, so if push comes to shove they are going to do what the US requires them to. But I very much doubt that SpaceX will end up being a monopoly on internet access. They aren't the only player in this game (OneWeb and Eutelsat are 2 others I know off the top of my head that are working on similar products), and even if they were to become the only "fast satellite internet" company, they aren't targeting "all the internet".
For the foreseeable future, the base stations required to communicate with Starlink are expected to be large and power hungry enough that you won't see them in cars or phones or anything super mobile. They hope to get it down to the size of a pizza-box one day. They also don't have the bandwidth to handle all the world's internet access, and likely won't ever have that much bandwidth. Fiber in the ground is still significantly cheaper, faster (unless you are talking intercontinental), and more reliable for most usecases.
If things start to look like they could possibly end up at a total monopoly by SpaceX as "the internet company", i'd be right there with you about how this could be a nightmare. But i just don't see that happening, and until it does this is just another ISP.
Re: Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Radio wave propagation is a little more complicated than what the animations depict. It would probably be easy to pretend to be somewhere else by pointing a more directional antenna at the horizon.
All Starlink communication is already extremely directional. The spot size of the beam coming from the satellite is ~1.5km on the ground, and the receiver is also directional with similar accuracy. The entire principle of Starlink is based on extreme SDMA. If you try to communicate with a satellite on the horizon, you will not hear it, and it will not listen to you.
I checked it out, it says each satellite covers area with 550km diameter on the land. That's about a few countries at a time and possibly deep penetration into the larger ones.
They will have to turn off the sattelites over Austria to prevent connections in Turkey.
Re: Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
#97Will Starlink, when operational, put price pressure on satellite phone and internet service providers such as Inmarsat? Or will prices for internet coverage in remote areas just as expensive as before?
I hope that this pressures companies like Comcast and Verizon where I live, to offer reasonable prices.
Re: Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
All Starlink communication is already extremely directional. The spot size of the beam coming from the satellite is ~1.5km on the ground, and the receiver is also directional with similar accuracy. The entire principle of Starlink is based on extreme SDMA. If you try to communicate with a satellite on the horizon, you will not hear it, and it will not listen to you.
I checked it out, it says each satellite covers area with 550km diameter on the land. That's about a few countries at a time and possibly deep penetration into the larger ones. They will have to turn off the sattelites over Austria to prevent connections in Turkey.
1.5km vs 550km is not necessarily mutually exclusive when using phased array antenna: the beam may be 1.5km wide, but it may be steered across a 550km area. Ergo sat could service both Austria and Turkey, without blurring - it knows which country it's "pointing" at during any millisecond, so could service each without legal conflicts.
Re: Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do the satellites know the precise location of the client? Wouldn't it possible to buy a subscription in one country and go use it in another country?
Since these satellites are in low earth orbit, the satellites currently overhead will be changing very frequently. It's possible the satellites will actually not transmit at all over certain countries. The receivers will also know their location based on what's currently overhead. This is all technical assumptions at this point since the service isn't rolled out, but being in LEO instead of GEO simplifies things grea…
> but being in LEO instead of GEO simplifies things greatly
It may simplify some things, but it also introduces lots of complications like managing satellite handovers, telemetry tracking for thousands of satellites, accident avoidance in space, etc.
Re: Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
All Starlink communication is already extremely directional. The spot size of the beam coming from the satellite is ~1.5km on the ground, and the receiver is also directional with similar accuracy. The entire principle of Starlink is based on extreme SDMA. If you try to communicate with a satellite on the horizon, you will not hear it, and it will not listen to you.
I checked it out, it says each satellite covers area with 550km diameter on the land. That's about a few countries at a time and possibly deep penetration into the larger ones. They will have to turn off the sattelites over Austria to prevent connections in Turkey.
They use steerable beams. The spot size of the beam is just 1.5 km across.
(edit: I remembered wrong. 1.5 degrees, or at 550km, ~10 kilometers.)