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Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

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Re: Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

#31

Post by varjag »

bigbillheck wrote: post #29
abeppu wrote: post #3

Maybe this is crazy, but should we be thinking of satellite connectivity the same way we think about public utilities? - For a lot of public utilities, the point is that building several parallel sets of infrastructure would be really wasteful. It makes sense to build it once, hopefully well, and let everyone use it. - One might think this only is true of strictly terrestrial infrastructure like phone landlines or wa…

> Had the US not provided In this hypothetical you'd need to assume that there was also no civilian access to GLONASS, BeiDou, or Galileo.

Which is a fair assumption. GPS going civilian in the 1980s was an incredible thing, so was the lifting of selective availability two decades ago. Without American govt spoiling the market there'd be little incentive.

Re: Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

#32

Post by ultrarunner »

DaveExeter wrote: post #23
abeppu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I described this poorly. That's my fault. I think the fixation should be less on the 'free to use' portion of GPS, and more on the fact that for many of us there's basically one satellite-based location system to which we have access, in the same way that there may only be one set of phone landlines in my neighborhood, and one municipal water supply. Phone service and water are not free to use, but we also didn't…

> Would we be better off (i.e. pay less for connectivity from a constellation with more satellites and better coverage) if there was one larger one? We certainly would not be better off. Because with a monopoly, you pay the highest price and get the worst service!

What is seen is a generally workable GNSS solution, especially after the removal of selective availability (note: this is a good thing, but by no means necessary; BeiDou still suffers from intentional degradation).

What is not seen is a potentially better service that doesn't cost $1 billion a year which wasn't created. GPS radios are fairly power hungry, slow to sync without ephemeris, and accuracy can vary especially near buildings and terrain. But it works well enough and is entrenched enough that a private improvement would struggle to make financial sense.

A utility of this scale also creates a single point of failure, which came to bear during the Galileo outage a few years ago. What some call needless competition is seen by others as redundancy & robustness. The water provider in Flint, MI should have gone out of business and been replaced for pumping lead into peoples' homes, but instead the situation became a political football. The only cost to bad actors was the expenditure of political capital; all but one minor charge was dropped.

There are lots of trade offs, so the ways we'd be better off change depending on the way the system is defined. I do think the consideration of what might have been is interesting nonetheless.

Re: Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

#33

Post by wumpus »

Klimentio wrote: post #5
abeppu wrote: post #3

Maybe this is crazy, but should we be thinking of satellite connectivity the same way we think about public utilities? - For a lot of public utilities, the point is that building several parallel sets of infrastructure would be really wasteful. It makes sense to build it once, hopefully well, and let everyone use it. - One might think this only is true of strictly terrestrial infrastructure like phone landlines or wa…

Do you have the feeling that you miss Satelite or that you use it a lot? Because while i agree on GPS and all the others (and it happened anyway), i'm lost on why i would care about satelite? I do prefer optic fiber when possible.

You can use satellites in many ways without realizing it.

Examples:

* Rural cell towers that use satellite backhaul

* Airplane wifi over the ocean

* Newscasts which use video uploaded via satellite, from places like Afganistan

Re: Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

#34

Post by wumpus »

abeppu wrote: post #3

Maybe this is crazy, but should we be thinking of satellite connectivity the same way we think about public utilities? - For a lot of public utilities, the point is that building several parallel sets of infrastructure would be really wasteful. It makes sense to build it once, hopefully well, and let everyone use it. - One might think this only is true of strictly terrestrial infrastructure like phone landlines or wa…

Electric power from the grid comes in only a couple of ways, but there are a ton of different kinds of satellite communications: broadband in several bands, narrowband in a billion bands, satellites that talk to low power devices, satellite phones in either S or L band, etc.

Re: Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

#35

Post by ultrarunner »

Klimentio wrote: post #5
abeppu wrote: post #3

Maybe this is crazy, but should we be thinking of satellite connectivity the same way we think about public utilities? - For a lot of public utilities, the point is that building several parallel sets of infrastructure would be really wasteful. It makes sense to build it once, hopefully well, and let everyone use it. - One might think this only is true of strictly terrestrial infrastructure like phone landlines or wa…

Do you have the feeling that you miss Satelite or that you use it a lot? Because while i agree on GPS and all the others (and it happened anyway), i'm lost on why i would care about satelite? I do prefer optic fiber when possible.

I have two specific needs for remote data connections (uploads in both cases). In one, satellite connectivity makes a ton of sense, and I think we are on the cutting edge of it being viable. This need is fairly tolerant of low bandwidths & high latencies.

The other need requires low power, high bandwidth and low latencies. Satellite is completely nonviable as of now. We might need an upgrade in the physical laws of reality to make it viable.

I imagine 90% of most people's usage would be closer to the latter case than the former. Denser constellations might make the former more palatable in the long run.

Re: Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

#36

Post by teddyh »

xyzzyz wrote: post #6
abeppu wrote: post #3

Maybe this is crazy, but should we be thinking of satellite connectivity the same way we think about public utilities? - For a lot of public utilities, the point is that building several parallel sets of infrastructure would be really wasteful. It makes sense to build it once, hopefully well, and let everyone use it. - One might think this only is true of strictly terrestrial infrastructure like phone landlines or wa…

> which is operated by the US military with an annual budget of roughly $1B -- and we can all use it for free. Non-Americans, yes, but Americans pay taxes to use it. In fact, if you replaced tax-funded model with, say, a markup on each receiver, Americans would pay less than they already do, and only those that use it would pay for it. I find both of these things beneficial. > Had the US not provided for civilian acc…

> Non-Americans, yes, but Americans pay taxes to use it.

Yes, but non-Americans also pay, by living in a world with America, in particular the US military, in it. So the cost is spread fairly evenly, I’d say.

Re: Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

#37

Post by xyzzyz »

jppittma wrote: post #26
xyzzyz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that world, military would just contract with commercial providers and use commercial GPS, same way they already spend hundreds of billions of dollars on products and services provided by private companies.

I can't imagine how one would think that's better than the current situation. Military contracts with commercial providers are an absolute nightmare. Is this not what even libertarians denounce as "crony capitalism?"

Most of technology procurement that military does is through commercial providers. This means that if there is a nightmare project, it will most likely be a done with a commercial partner, because most projects are done with commercial partners. On the other hand, there are plenty military contracts with commercial businesses which aren’t nightmares. For example, US military has a contract with Samsung for mobile devices. It is most definitely not a nightmare.

Government buying from private businesses is no what “crony capitalism” means.

Re: Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

#38

Post by Robotbeat »

abeppu wrote: post #3

Maybe this is crazy, but should we be thinking of satellite connectivity the same way we think about public utilities? - For a lot of public utilities, the point is that building several parallel sets of infrastructure would be really wasteful. It makes sense to build it once, hopefully well, and let everyone use it. - One might think this only is true of strictly terrestrial infrastructure like phone landlines or wa…

If we had, we definitely wouldn’t have gotten the low cost of the Starlink constellation. The industry experts, including Tim F, didn’t think such a thing was feasible. I’ve talked to a Guidance and Navigation expert (a civil servant working for the federal government for space systems) that didn’t think droneship landing (which SpaceX relies on for making reusable rockets—and thus Starlink—economical) was possible.

When you have one big system and no competition, you get status quo solutions. That is, an order of magnitude greater cost. (And this isn’t an exaggeration… compare space shuttle costs for commercial satellites to Falcon 9. STS roughly is 10 to 100 times as expensive per launch with comparable payload.)

But it’s important to keep in mind that the satellite networks are different from GPS and one important way: they are two way communication systems not broadcast. That means that you don’t get the same economies of scale for having just one system that you might for GPS. Having two communication systems that use two different spectrums means double the throughput that a single system would’ve provided.

Re: Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

#39

Post by bsenftner »

macintux wrote: post #22
bsenftner wrote: post #4

The economic advantages of Apple to delay any satellite functionality of their devices until these IoT providers are desperate is the script playing out. It requires no coordination between the larger technology and tech service providers for them to realize the significant value they will realize by being slow to implement satellite related options to their devices and services.

This seems like a particularly cynical take. It seems more likely that Apple is, as they usually are, cautious about introducing an external dependency until they're confident about its reliability, quality, and battery life impact, plus how to make the integration easy for users.

Cynical? yes; profitable? enormously. why partner now when one can own later?

Re: Satellite IoT dreams are crashing into reality

#40

Post by abeppu »

varjag wrote: post #31
bigbillheck wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had the US not provided In this hypothetical you'd need to assume that there was also no civilian access to GLONASS, BeiDou, or Galileo.

Which is a fair assumption. GPS going civilian in the 1980s was an incredible thing, so was the lifting of selective availability two decades ago. Without American govt spoiling the market there'd be little incentive.

And people forget, the Reagan administration only made a point of ensuring future civilian access to GPS after Soviet air forces shot down a commercial airliner (KAL 007) that mistakenly wandered into their airspace. Had such an incident not occurred, it might have been kept for only military use.
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