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Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world
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Re: Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world
#12Hi 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.
Why do you think this pin-point for-hire internet sat service is better than a constellation? Is it because you can profit right away without an initial setup cost of the constellation? But in the long run the constellation pays off and might drive you out of business, right?
It may or may not.
If you think there is a rural/urban problem with optic fiber, you are jumping from the frying pan to the fire with LEO satellite constellations.
That's because an LEO satellite constellation has to cover the whole world (or almost all of it) to be able to cover any inhabited area at all. Thus it has to cover oceans, large roadless areas, deserts, mountains, etc. At least with optic fiber you only have to cover roads.
Note that high density areas can cause trouble on the other side -- you need to support the highest density worldwide that you support anywhere. Note that users in a place like New York City will generate noise affecting satellites 1000+ miles away, so if you don't ban people setting up accounts in dense areas, it will have to be priced so high that people with a lot of money looking for a backup connection will be priced out.
I am highly skeptical that the economics can work out for an LEO constellation.
Re: Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world
#13Isn't latency a major issue for connectivity with satellites in geosynchronous orbit? I'm curious what their approach is here, either technically or what customer use cases they are targeting.
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 worse in Web2.0 world where everything is running off of tiny queries that the web app developers assume will be back in 50ms or so.
TCP PEPs can only do so much too (cutting down on the roundtrips and ramping up the window size more quickly), eventually you hit the hard limits of physics.
Re: Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world
#14Isn't latency a major issue for connectivity with satellites in geosynchronous orbit? I'm curious what their approach is here, either technically or what customer use cases they are targeting.
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…
I am skeptical of that analysis.
I have worked over ssh over internet connections with satellite-class latency and I can say it is painful. (Emacs shell mode can help)
You probably think that 'the web' is a high latency application. It probably should be, and maybe it was in 2000. Since then, web developers have gotten into the habit of using AJAX indiscriminately, plus they feel pressured to add features such as customized fonts, advertising, third party tracking, etc. I am not sure if CDN is really a net positive when a web site might need to do 30 DNS lookups because it uses 30 CDNs. It just takes one of those lookups to be slow to obliterate the savings from the CDN. CDNs might help with the median, even the average load time, but I am not sure they help the 95% load time which is what causes customer pain.
Add up all those round trips and the overhead of access control (maybe those patents on slotted ALOHA for satellite applications have expired by now) and you are talking upwards of 0.5 sec and it doesn't take many round trips for that 0.5 sec to turn into 5 to 10 seconds.
Worst thing is that people who are developing locally or from places with fast connections to the data center will think these apps are really fast.
Re: Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How do you plan to compete with SpaceX once they start offering low latency service everywhere? All interactive traffic is latency sensitive (have built middleboxes to improve latency issues with tcp and other protocols)
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.
Re: Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world
#16Hi 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.
Any accompanying software tech to mitigate the latency issues?
Re: Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world
#17There's a reason that no other company tries to use geosynchronous orbit.
Stationary orbit is at a distance of 35800 km above sea level, which implies a one way latency of 110 ms based off the speed of light. Since any request from a user requires a total of 2 round way trips (one for request, one for response), the minimum latency for a request is 440 ms.
Avg latency with fiber is something like 30-60 ms, so we can assume an average request with Astranis will have ~500 latency.
Most modern webpages will not be able to support such latency. Astranis will need to essentially cache webpages on demand and deliver them to the end user as a fully rendered page, which will introduce security headaches.
I don't see why Astranis chose this vs a lower orbit.
Re: Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you plan to compete with SpaceX once they start offering low latency service everywhere? All interactive traffic is latency sensitive (have built middleboxes to improve latency issues with tcp and other protocols)
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).
Re: Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world
#19There's a reason that no other company tries to use geosynchronous orbit. Stationary orbit is at a distance of 35800 km above sea level, which implies a one way latency of 110 ms based off the speed of light. Since any request from a user requires a total of 2 round way trips (one for request, one for response), the minimum latency for a request is 440 ms. Avg latency with fiber is something like 30-60 ms, so we can…
No other company... like HughesNet, ViaSat, Inmarsat, Intelsat, etc. Maybe you were led astray by this terrible TechCrunch article.
Re: Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world
#20There's a reason that no other company tries to use geosynchronous orbit. Stationary orbit is at a distance of 35800 km above sea level, which implies a one way latency of 110 ms based off the speed of light. Since any request from a user requires a total of 2 round way trips (one for request, one for response), the minimum latency for a request is 440 ms. Avg latency with fiber is something like 30-60 ms, so we can…
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.