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Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

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Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#21

Post by andygates »

endymi0n wrote: post #19
Numberwang wrote: post #3

For those of you in the know here. Is this a realistic project/enterprise he is working on? Seems both costly to deploy that many satellites and risky in the sense that you can't count on getting a lot of customers. Especially with the new super speedy 5G networks and so on.

Thinking at the scale of Musk's ambitions real quick, this makes a lot of sense. At Tesla: Think about every Tesla car worldwide being able to phone home with self-driving learning data. Being able to remote operate them in the 0.001% of cases where human intervention is neccessary, no matter whether in the Australian outback or the Alps (without "no network"). At SpaceX: Being able to communicate with every Mars-bou…

The antennas for this are the size of pizza boxes - which puts a question over the car connectivity. That's a lot of flat sky-facing surface to hide.

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#23

Post by dboreham »

mtgx wrote: post #10
gagabity wrote: post #7

How will this actually work? Will individuals be able to tap into it skipping the local ISP? I also wonder how the issue of government censorship/control be dealt with in various countries around the world.

It would be nice if it used unlicensed spectrum in all countries, and then all anyone would have to do to connect to the SpaceX internet is get their hands on a modem that supports it. That would be very liberating for many countries, and I'm not sure there would be much the local governments could do other than throw a tantrum. They could start requiring a license for all free spectrum, but that would have non-insig…

In general use of unlicensed spectrum for satellite communications is not permitted.

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#24

Post by madez »

I don't think the market for satellite Internet is only where other services don't provide fast enough internet. Of course, the technology of glass fiber in the ground can't be beaten qualitywise, but glass fiber can more easily be controlled by your ISP and your government, unlike satellite internet. If SpaceX manages to provide unfiltered, net neutral, cheap internet, I'd consider getting it to complement my current connection.

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#25

Post by zeristor »

Is this a case of doubling down, whilst SpaceX waits for the demand to launch satellites at the lower price grows.

Its one thing to be able to launch satellites far more cheaply than other companies, perhaps the economics demands certain number of launches a year to keep capacity up and price down?

The question is what happens when they launch all 1000 satellites?

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#26

Post by lallysingh »

sly010 wrote: post #2

It's not "internet" then, it's a communications network. On top of which third parties will probably implement IP. He also says peer to peer, but perhaps he just means point-to-point, in which case it will be very similar to existing satellite communications network, perhaps just more and faster.

Sounds like something analogous to ATM or whenever frames. The IP layer would probably start from the satellite transceiver on The customer premesis.

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#27

Post by taneq »

CamTin wrote: post #13

So is he not planning on offering Internet access then? Just transit to other Starlink stations? Presumably even that would allow somebody to offer a "real" ISP on top of this service with a ground station and then peering to the Internet. Still, paying for Starlink and then separately paying for a Starlink-Internet bridge isn't the greatest consumer experience.

Well presumably he'd have peering arrangements in a few key places, it just means that within the network your data would go relatively directly instead of satellite-hopping to a central server and then back out.

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#29

Post by gnode »

I wonder if the reason here is that the topology of the network will change rapidly. E.g. as equatorial and polar satellites cross each other, they will be in direct communication with each other for only brief periods of time. There are ways to cope with routing changes in IP, but I don't know if it'd be seamless enough.

Re: Elon Musk said SpaceX's multi 1000 satellite Internet service will be IP-less

#30

Post by swarnie_ »

zeristor wrote: post #25

Is this a case of doubling down, whilst SpaceX waits for the demand to launch satellites at the lower price grows. Its one thing to be able to launch satellites far more cheaply than other companies, perhaps the economics demands certain number of launches a year to keep capacity up and price down? The question is what happens when they launch all 1000 satellites?

I've always seen this as two things. The first being space x filling in gaps in their launch schedule as you've pointed out.

The second is to launch a commercial services which can provide a constant, predictable income to fund other projects. The upfront capital must be huge but with debt markets still this cheap i'm not surprised they're investing.

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