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We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

arstechnica.com

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Re: We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

#111

Post by timewizard »

ralfd wrote: post #108
timewizard wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet Then can you tell me how many remote communities were not being served before that are now suddenly capable of accessing the internet now that these particular constellations exist? I mean just looking at Starlink's current availability map shows how little you might actually care about this particular outcome. Even so was th…

> looking at Starlink's current availability map https://www.starlink.com/map ??? Almost all of the Americas, including the deepest Brazilian jungle. Indonesia, Australia, Mongolia. Decent chunks of subsahara Africa. Ships far away on the ocean, transcontinental airplanes … how is this all not amazing?

You did notice that many of those areas are "Service Date Unknown," "Pending Regulatory Approval," and "Coming Soon?"

The first world has great coverage, I'll give you that, but to say that this network is somehow an inherent advantage to indigenous and under served "remote" people is quite literally laughable.

And yes, the Amazon is being served, and they have _faster_ internet than before, which is somewhat good and not without it's problems to be sure, but they had the internet before. They have smartphones. How did you think they utilize the starlink service at all? They have a pretty narrow power budget which this really doesn't help with all while delivering them deeper into the pockets of American monopolies.

Oh, and the mining and logging companies absolutely love that they have the service necessary to support their commercial work in the Amazon. High rating from them, they would agree, it's "amazing."

The ocean, planes, and all sorts of remote vehicles had internet before as well. This is nothing particularly new other than being faster. Which moves the question to the appropriate place. Is it worth damaging the sciences for faster commercial internet? Are we actually doing anything more than sending youtube poop and pornography and gambling websites into places that never had to deal with these intrusions before? All while enabling a higher rate of destruction of the very place they live?

Re: We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

#112

Post by lxgr »

SEJeff wrote: post #110
lxgr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easily possible to jam a frequency spread signal from a satellite, assuming you can get the directionality right (i.e. you need to be in the beam of whoever you’re trying to jam, or you’ll need even more power to overcome their receive directionality, which is never perfect). Signal strength (satellites are power constrained) and distances involved are tough. GPS uses frequency spreading too, and locally jamming…

US military gps is encrypted and heavily used FHSS. It is jam resistant, and can’t be jammed without significant expertise and know how. Russia has some of the best EW chops in the world (after the NSA perhaps), and they struggled to successfully jam Starlink after some defensive work was carried out by SpaceX. They use Starlink in the “sea baby” USVs that attacked Crimea just last night. https://tech.yahoo.com/gener…

GPS uses DSSS, not FHSS. The military version has a higher processing gain than the civilian signal, but it can still be overpowered by sheer signal strength.

I'm not saying that that's trivial against moving targets in a large area (especially if they can use directional antennas), but it's still very possible. GNSS jamming is a big concern of the militaries of the world, and there's currently somewhat of a renaissance of high-precision inertial navigation systems as a result.

Jamming a stationary satellite terminal, if you can get reasonably close, doesn't seem harder than cutting a fiber (although as a sibling comment has mentioned, jammers have the nice property that communication is restored once they're disabled, unlike damaged cables, so maybe the two can complement each other?)

Re: We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

#113

Post by amy_petrik »

jvanderbot wrote: post #15
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #8

I wonder what "earth observation" opportunities there would be with such megaconstellations, from simply having a camera with a telephoto lens pointed down to a giant, sky-spanning Synthetic Aperture Radar utilizing multiple satellites. Anything like that would explain the secrecy...

Probably few. The US has excellent observers and comms sats by the dozens are not very big. It's true you can get some photos but the kind you're thinking of, where you can track vehicles in a meaningful way or something, has to be done by something closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards).

> has to be done by something closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards). state of the art is about 2x diameter, with adaptive optics methodologies that avoid needing to polish a giga-mirror over several years

Re: We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

#114

Post by immibis »

lxgr wrote: post #49
neuroelectron wrote: post #31

The article doesn't even mention AWS, which I think is the obvious implication being overlooked here. AWS has Government and defense contracts, with DoD notably. This enables secure private communication outside of the internet across data centers (of which there are a lot) and of course, to any point on the Earth. The idea that this is for "underserved communities" is probably a sly nod to battlefield logistics.

> This enables secure private communication outside of the internet across data centers How so? I'd imagine the datacenter terminal side downlink to be much more easily tappable than fiberoptics. There are advantages in latency and potentially availability, but even there I would imagine fiber to win in an adversarial active jamming scenario.

Terminal side downlink?

With some satellites, you just point a dish at the satellite and get the same data everyone else gets. With more advanced ones, you have to be in roughly the same place as the intended recipient because the satellite has different antennas pointed in different directions. In either case, it's presumably encrypted data so what good is intercepting it?

Re: We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

#115

Post by immibis »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #10
croes wrote: post #4

So more satellites to block the view for astronomers.

Progress tends to have downsides. Highways and rail tracks destroy the environment and make areas hard to cross, but I think most people would acknowledge that on balance, having them them is a good thing. In this case, the obvious solution would be to provide a small number of orbital observatories to the astronomy community for free or with heavily subsidized pricing.

If Jeff has the right to jam my telescope with his satellite due to the lack of regulation, do I have the right to jam his satellite with my telescope due to the same lack of regulation, or does it only work one way?

Re: We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

#116

Post by gus_massa »

thrance wrote: post #79
gus_massa wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, people will chose on price, reliability, price, speed, price and free gigas.

The myth of the rational consumer again, of homo economicus .

More like "Homo avaricious" that discovered the panes seat that don't have enough room for your legs.

Re: We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

#117

Post by notepad0x90 »

The defense angle us civilians are probably not seeing is important. One big advantage for example is they're hard to take down.

Let's say there's a war with China, one of the first things the PLA will do is take down any US government controlled satellites. The normal big ones you can shoot down but thousands of them that can be replaced within a day, not so much. The PLA would also be giving out their launch positions for retaliatory attacks.

Let's presume the PLA has effective radio and GPS jamming tech, one solution is to use cameras on satellites for positioning and laser as well as frequency hopping satellite radio comms. Small, easily replaceable constellation satellites are ideal.

Re: We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

#118

Post by fragmede »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #117

The defense angle us civilians are probably not seeing is important. One big advantage for example is they're hard to take down. Let's say there's a war with China, one of the first things the PLA will do is take down any US government controlled satellites. The normal big ones you can shoot down but thousands of them that can be replaced within a day, not so much. The PLA would also be giving out their launch positi…

Kessler syndrome seems to be the MAD solution there though.

Re: We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

#119

Post by notepad0x90 »

fragmede wrote: post #118
notepad0x90 wrote: post #117

The defense angle us civilians are probably not seeing is important. One big advantage for example is they're hard to take down. Let's say there's a war with China, one of the first things the PLA will do is take down any US government controlled satellites. The normal big ones you can shoot down but thousands of them that can be replaced within a day, not so much. The PLA would also be giving out their launch positi…

Kessler syndrome seems to be the MAD solution there though.

in times of actual war, i doubt anyone in the military would care. The result is undesirable but there won't be any threat to life as a result, and there is always a chance the debris problem can be solved in the near future (just shoot it all down! lol)

Re: We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

#120

Post by fragmede »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #119
fragmede wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kessler syndrome seems to be the MAD solution there though.

in times of actual war, i doubt anyone in the military would care. The result is undesirable but there won't be any threat to life as a result, and there is always a chance the debris problem can be solved in the near future (just shoot it all down! lol)

The US military was able to stop using the U2 because they had imaging satellites for remote reconnaissance, nevermind that whole GPS thing. It would be a severe hit to their capabilities if space around Earth was made unusable.
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