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With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

arstechnica.com

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Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#171

Post by mabbo »

namlem wrote: post #124
mabbo wrote: post #90

It's been said before, but what people need to understand is that the goal of this service isn't to make money- it's to balance demand. SpaceX can plan to launch be 30% more launches than their actual customers need. All those extra rockets are used for internet satellites. If there's an accident (boom) or a sudden need for more rockets, the internet satellites get delayed, and the paying customer gets a rocket. If c…

Musk himself has stated the goal is to make money to help pay for colonizing Mars.

And I bet it will help with that- but I don't see that as the sole purpose.

He's an industrialist. He saw he'd need batteries for his electric cars, so he said "I should make batteries". Then he said "Who else needs batteries? Solar producers". So Tesla now makes cars, batteries, and solar panels. That wasn't just by chance, that was planned.

Now he says "I have a rocket company I want to scale up, but I don't know if demand will be there". So what does he do? He makes a company that could be profitable, but more importantly fills in the demand he wants to have for his rockets. The rocket business is bigger, which makes it more stable. The internet company might work, or it might lose money, but it's still a tool to the real goal.

This is why Amazon made AWS. Because they needed cheap, simple cloud infrastructure. Alexa/Echo helps people buy more stuff. They're building a shipping infrastructure ostensibly for themselves but probably soon enough for customers as well.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#172

Post by MertsA »

jsz0 wrote: post #39
zwily wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast just released Gigabit (over copper, DOCSIS 3.1) for all of Utah. It's only 40Mbit up, but I'm pretty happy with it. I thought it would take a lot longer.

This is exactly why cable providers have been so reluctant to spend huge amounts of money on FTTH. Squeezing more bits through existing copper infrastructure is a win-win situation for everyone.

But that doesn't scale. Gigabit speeds are possible with DOCSIS but that hinges on massively oversubscribing their last mile infrastructure and usage patterns to slowly increase. With DOCSIS, nodes can be huge and encompass hundreds of homes. The bandwidth available is shared with everyone on that channel in the entire node. For GPON it's similar, but nodes are somewhere between 16 and 64 homes and there's even more bandwidth available.

ISPs aren't letting congestion get to record levels to YouTube and Netflix because they want to screw with you, they're keeping the congestion "contained" at certain peering links because that cuts down quite a bit of the amount of aggregate bandwidth they have to deal with at the last mile. If they upgraded their peering links then they'll just cause congestion for everything instead of just video services that will gracefully degrade to worse quality in the face of congestion.

Moving to FTTH is a win-win situation, ISPs get a break from the endless struggle of keeping the last mile free of congestion and customers get something closer to net neutrality since the ISPs don't have perverse incentives when it comes to peering agreements.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#173

Post by avmich »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #168
ASalazarMX wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my question as well. We do that at fairs for fun, a spinning habitat seems very feasible.

Feasible for a few billion people, eventually? This concept has been explored in many sci-fi shows, with the usual solution being to make a big ring and spin it in space.

We can solve problems incrementally - we often do, and space access history is a good example for that.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#174

Post by perilunar »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #165
avmich wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can't live on Mars for an extended period because the gravity is 1/3 of earths. Can't you rather cheaply create a centrifuge where you'll sleep - and may be even work indoors - which will maintain 1G? Centrifuge big enough so no significant side forces would occur?

This is my question as well. We do that at fairs for fun, a spinning habitat seems very feasible.

It wouldn't even need to _spin_. You could mount the habitat on a large, banked, circular track and just drive around it at a constant speed.

Or if you wanted to go underground, bore a large circular tunnel and put the habitat inside.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#175

Post by ericb »

vkou wrote: post #159
donkeyd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fail to see how one could actually live on Mars without sacrificing 30 or more years of lifespan. Maybe they just cant can't, but don't care. Some people could be willing to decrease their lifespan in order to colonize a different planet, making the human race interplanetary. Also, theoretically, people will evolve over time to be able to handle those conditions. We're used to making plans a couple years ahead. W…

Evolution happens over many generations, if people who are less fit for survival die before, or are prevented from reproducing. You don't want to go down that road.

Reproductive fitness is less scary--it doesn't always mean "prevented from reproducing"

* Imagine 20% of the population has adaptations that make them better suited to mars--they keep their teeth, their bones are stronger, they do well in sports, they have more energy to take care of kids, so they have 1 extra kid on average. In one generation, that percentage is 30% and in one more it is 45%, one after that and it is the majority and heads toward 100%.

What we'll be looking at is speciation. Also, evolution is at-work on our population as we speak--it doesn't take breaks.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#176

Post by vkou »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #169
vkou wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution happens over many generations, if people who are less fit for survival die before, or are prevented from reproducing. You don't want to go down that road.

The alternative is to stay on a planet where 20-40% of people don't even "believe in" evolution or taking care of the planet which their eventual descendants would need to inhabit, many times in favor of short-term capital gains. I fail to see how we're not already, as of about a hundred years ago, pretty screwed either way.

What makes you think that all the worst aspects of our myopic culture won't follow us into space?

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#177

Post by path411 »

alkonaut wrote: post #116
noonespecial wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Space is huge. This is a little like asking if there's enough space left in earths oceans to float a few thousand pingpong balls. 2) Present internet satellites are all in mostly geostationary orbits that are much further away then the proposed leo's. Realistically the ones we have now introduce a whopping 650ms. This will be a huge improvement.

> This is a little like asking if there's enough space left in earths oceans to float a few thousand pingpong balls. I'd be pretty nervous about throing 10k pingpong balls into the atlantic IF the collision of two pingpong balls was disastrous :) Obviously these satellites will be carefully placed NOT to collied - but the effect of a collision is pretty bad. The problem is that any one of them might collide with some…

Remember that space is 3d. Not only do you have the surface area of the entire earth + the area from where LEO starts. You can then stack layers on top of that.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#178

Post by shaklee3 »

mabbo wrote: post #170
shaklee3 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. Wsj got their revenue projections for 2020+, and the bulk of it was satellite internet revenue. http://www.wsj.com/articles/exclusive-peek-at-spacex-data-sh...

And maybe they will make money. But they aren't making the company just to make a profit from it- they're making it to increase demand for rockets, which they also make. The smart industrialist expands his business to become his own supplier and his own customer.

You said the goal of the service isn't to create money. It is. And it's intended to make the company profitable. Launches won't be for quite some time.

Re: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

#179

Post by Neeek »

skrause wrote: post #105
Neeek wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These low orbits aren't stable though, I think they only have a lifetime of 10-20 years before their lateral velocity decays and they de-orbit on their own, it's not like will just be stuck up there.

No, with orbit altitudes of 1,110km to 1,325km we're talking about many hundreds of years: https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html - "Debris left in orbits below 370 miles (600 km) normally fall back to Earth within several years. At altitudes of 500 miles (800 km), the time for orbital decay is often measured in decades. Above 620 miles (1,000 km), orbital debris normally will continue circling Earth for a century…

Ah, I was under the impression that to achieve 25ms latency you would need something very low but it seems to be almost anywhere in LEO would give you close to those speeds.

I was thinking of older speculative articles where HN discussions seemed to think they would only be 300-500 kilometers up, this article states otherwise.

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