Quite exciting. At the same time, did anyone watch Kingsman?
I worry about a big play like this in a market with ridiculously high barrier to entry. We might find ourselves in a vulnerable position if we invite monopoly.
Musk files to provide Internet service from space
61–70 of 129 posts
Re: Musk files to provide Internet service from space
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty easy to ignore laws from space. Reference satellite TV in the middle east. Al-Jazeera is banned in many countries, but still has high penetration as users just ignore the laws. Saudi Arabia has an outright ban on satellite television... yet 97% of Saudis have access to satellite television. [1] Iran also bans satellite television, yet more than 70 percent of people Tehran watch banned satellite channels.…
It's easy if consumer devices can talk directly to your satellites. AFAIK, this still needs a ground based relay to be of any use to the average person - it's a replacement for transoceanic cables or ISP backbones, not for WiFi.
Depends how expensive the receiver equipment is. Seeing as how this is an LEO constellation and not GEO one, and that internet requires bidirectional communication instead of a pure receiver they'll be more complicated and expensive than satellite TV for sure. I just don't know enough about the current hardware to know if it's within reach of the average consumer.
(BTW, I find it likely that even if the ground stations ate cheap enough to be privately owned, they'll be more like a cable modem than an 802.11 chip - a relatively expensive stationary piece of equipment that you hook up to an 802.{3/11} network in the home.
Re: Musk files to provide Internet service from space
#63My first thought, here, was "Well what about the speed of light? Wouldn't that cause satellite internet service to suck, just like it does now? And isn't that why news correspondents are always delayed?" But then I did the math: Speed of light = 186 miles per millisecond. Satellites orbit at about 380 miles above earth (Source: Hubble). So it only takes ~4 ms for a round trip to a satellite directly above? I did not…
Good question. The vast majority of satellite communications today are conducted via geostationary orbit, 35,786 km above the earth. This is the distance at which a satellite orbiting around the equator moves with the same velocity as the surface of the earth, keeping the satellite in a fixed position. This is good for communicating via the ground, since you can just set up your dish pointing in the direction of the…
And the other disadvantage is more expensive and complicated ground equipment that can handle changing angle to satellites and handoff on three order of every several minutes. But I imagine that's only getting cheaper...
Re: Musk files to provide Internet service from space
#64I was Director of Marketing with Teledesic, Craig McCaw and Bill Gates's Internet-in-the-Sky from 1995 to 2000. I'm a huge fan of what Musk is doing, with order of magnitude cheaper launch costs and satellite hardware. AMA.
How far did you get? What went wrong? What sort of latency/bandwidth did you expect to achieve? Was it relaying via geosynch/higher orbit 'hubs' or peer to peer sideways routing?
We raised $1.6 B, received the largest spectrum allocation in the history of the world (1000 Megahertz, in the Ka band, available globally), and launched one test satellite.
But, the biggest problem with these sorts of systems is that there is no MVP. Essentially everything has to work before anything can.
Our design was for a network of Low Earth Orbit satellites, which would mean cellular-like latency. We were planning to offer tens of megabytes per second, but it would have been really expensive. Our design used lasers for inter-satellite links, so there was no need for lots of local gateways.
In retrospect, the biggest mistake was to try to raise money from the incumbent telecom operators around the world, whose business we should be have been planning to disrupt.
Re: Musk files to provide Internet service from space
#65I'm so ready for this.
At the very least, it would bring more ISP competition to underserved /sarcasm extremely remote areas /sarcasm like where I live - that would be Portola Valley, CA - where the only internet provider available to most of us is Comcast. Which all of us hate.
I live 16 light-µsec from Stanford (OK, free-space velocity for C), and my neighbors and I have one ISP to choose from.
Go, Elon!! I'd light the fuses on the launch vehicles to see this done.
Re: Musk files to provide Internet service from space
#66I was Director of Marketing with Teledesic, Craig McCaw and Bill Gates's Internet-in-the-Sky from 1995 to 2000. I'm a huge fan of what Musk is doing, with order of magnitude cheaper launch costs and satellite hardware. AMA.
How will devices on the ground communicate with the satellites? i.e. do we still need fixed dishes, or are we looking at something new so an iPhone can get signal right from the satellite?
I believe Musk is, like Teledesic, planning to use the Ka-band. That means the smallest antenna would be the size of a large laptop (and that's only if phased arrays become cheap enough). So, it would work for a car, plane, boat, or house, but would be too big to use while walking.
Re: Musk files to provide Internet service from space
#67I was Director of Marketing with Teledesic, Craig McCaw and Bill Gates's Internet-in-the-Sky from 1995 to 2000. I'm a huge fan of what Musk is doing, with order of magnitude cheaper launch costs and satellite hardware. AMA.
1. At the risk of sounding stupid, will governments allow something like this that can bypass gateways under control? 2. Can cellphone communication work this way on scale (like Iridium)? Bypassing providers like tmobile, sprint etc.
1. As an American-based company, SpaceX would be subject to CALEA [0], meaning that they would have to enable law enforcement intercept of communications with a warrant. This would likely be done by replicating the packet streams at the gateway. However, it's quite possible that you could use the system in a repressive country, without them knowing about it or having a way to stop you.
2) The purpose of the system (and the spectrum) will likely be broadband data, not hand-portable voice. So, it should be disrupting Time Warner and Verizon's cable and fiber offerings, not cellphones. The real value is internationally to have reliable broadband available anywhere.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_L...
Re: Musk files to provide Internet service from space
#68Re: Musk files to provide Internet service from space
#69The ability to go off-grid is becoming more of a reality for me now. I'd love to be able to get a cabin in the middle of nowhere, slap some solar panels on top still have access to highspeed internet. Even if you didn't want to go off-grid, this could open up a lot of developing countries to being more viable remote-working locations. I recently spent some time in Bali and considered moving there for awhile but ultim…
Isn't the internet by very definition a grid?
Re: Musk files to provide Internet service from space
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because something is being built with other people's money does not make something a success. None of the companies Elon has been involved with have ever actually generated a profit -- they have largely just taken advantage of speculative investors and their willingness to buy into his ideas.
> None of the companies Elon has been involved with have ever actually generated a profit Bullshit; there are companies he's been involved in that have turned a profit. Zip2 made a good profit and a great exit - http://news.cnet.com/Compaq+buys+Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.htm... X.com / Paypal generates first profits in 2002 - http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y02/m04/i18/s02 SpaceX is profitable - http://www.bloombe…
zip2 would be quite viable even today without much "re-invention".