Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 290 posts

Re: SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites

#11

Post by zaroth »

Too bad the public markets have given Elon such a lashing with Tesla, because I would love to buy into SpaceX.

But then, I’m not the only one;

“There is an unlimited amount of funding that the company could probably access globally in private markets," Hilmer said, adding that he has personally met many of "a diverse group" interested in SpaceX. Everywhere I travel around the world, investors of all types — individuals, family offices, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds or private equity — want to get into SpaceX," Hilmer said. "It's almost all investors I talk to."

Of course at the same time I’m happy they aren’t public. The market couldn’t handle the time horizons that SpaceX operates under, nor the mission statement that drives them.

[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/13/equidate-spacex-27-billion-v...

Re: SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites

#12

Post by dr_orpheus »

spaceribs wrote: post #9
zjaffee wrote: post #3

Does anyone have any context on what sort of internet speeds satellite internet has been benchmarked to provide. I can't imagine the latency being anywhere near good enough to do many of the high bandwidth things people use the internet for today.

You'd be surprised, this article describes round-trip times to be 25ms to 35ms and gigabit speeds: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/space... Who knows if they'll actually reach these speeds/latencies in practice though, that remains to be seen.

Yeah, a significant portion of the latency is just the distance to the existing satellites in geosynchronous orbit. For light to get out and back to the geo belt is around 240 ms, excluding any other factors. Getting up to the promised gigabit speed will be significant challenge. The original demo satellites that SpaceX launched only had data rates of ~15 Mbps.

Re: SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites

#13

Post by zw123456 »

CarVac wrote: post #5
zjaffee wrote: post #3

Does anyone have any context on what sort of internet speeds satellite internet has been benchmarked to provide. I can't imagine the latency being anywhere near good enough to do many of the high bandwidth things people use the internet for today.

You're conflating bandwidth and latency. Not much needs both high bandwidth and low latency. The latency has the potential to be better than the current internet backbone when going intercontinental due to straighter paths, but it'll be higher when going to your local AWS, probably. Bandwidth is anyone's guess.

The amount of BW is based on how much spectrum you have (see Shannon's Law). I am not sure how much they have. Also, I am not sure they will have enough power to provide in building service.

Re: SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites

#14

Post by bdamm »

zjaffee wrote: post #3

Does anyone have any context on what sort of internet speeds satellite internet has been benchmarked to provide. I can't imagine the latency being anywhere near good enough to do many of the high bandwidth things people use the internet for today.

This might be true of geo stationary satellites, but not of LEO satellites, which are close enough to even consider video or voice conferencing, albeit with latency and jitter even worse than bluetooth.

Re: SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites

#16

Post by napsterbr »

lccarrasco wrote: post #8
mtgx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$29 (or less) for 1Gbps would probably give American ISP executives night sweats.

I live in Bolivia, South America, the impact a global ISP would have cannot be overstated, in developing countries internet prices are still extremely expensive, up until a month ago I was paying around USD 60 for 10Mbps, and that was the best price I could find in my city, the second largest in the country.

Yep, same here (Brazil).

I suppose SpaceX plans to start with us-only offerings. I also suppose it will take a while until it reaches developing countries.

Does anyone have a better take on this?

Re: SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites

#17

Post by wongarsu »

zjaffee wrote: post #3

Does anyone have any context on what sort of internet speeds satellite internet has been benchmarked to provide. I can't imagine the latency being anywhere near good enough to do many of the high bandwidth things people use the internet for today.

"Regular old satellite internet" is very high latency because it's few satellites in high orbit. SpaceX is doing many satellites in low orbit, resulting in much shorter paths and low latency.

Latency for medium to long distances could be better than regular fiber, both because of straigher paths and because speed of light in the relative vacuum of the satellites' orbits is higher than speed of light in fiber.

We don't know yet what kind of equipment the satellites will have, but fundamentally bandwidth is constrained by bandwidth per covered area. I guess they will sell gigabit or better to cargo ships at sea, similarly good speed to rural regions, but nothing interesting to urban areas. Providing fast internet to a city via satellite would be very challenging, providing lighning fast internet to lone people in a desert is much easier and more profitable (no competition).

Re: SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites

#19

Post by RegBarclay »

zjaffee wrote: post #3

Does anyone have any context on what sort of internet speeds satellite internet has been benchmarked to provide. I can't imagine the latency being anywhere near good enough to do many of the high bandwidth things people use the internet for today.

I had Hughes satellite service for a while. Bandwidth was good. Latency was terrible. For surfing the web and streaming content it was fine. For anything twitchy, like driving a computer desktop through terminal services or any kind of gaming, it was nigh unusable. Plus, there were fairly low data caps that limited how much streaming one could do.

The big difference with Hughes and SpaceX is that Hughes satellites are geostationary and SpaceX's will be low earth orbit, so SpaceX's transmission distances and times should be much better.

Hughes provided a decent option for very remote areas. SpaceX appears to be putting together a first class option for everyone.

Re: SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites

#20

Post by TrueDuality »

zjaffee wrote: post #3

Does anyone have any context on what sort of internet speeds satellite internet has been benchmarked to provide. I can't imagine the latency being anywhere near good enough to do many of the high bandwidth things people use the internet for today.

There were recently two simulations done on possible latencies based on the FCC filings. You can find the video simulations in the links at the bottom of this post.

You can see international links that have latencies lower than the existing internet by a significant margin.

Unfortunately neither of those simulations take into account that the first iteration has been changed to only use radio and no laser links.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKNCBrkZQ4

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU

Post reply on HN