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SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
- whiddershins 10y agoI don't understand the math. 800 satellites at 23 gbps seems to be able to provide 1 gbps to 18,400 connections at any given time. This seems to be many magnitudes off from what would be needed to have any impact. What am I missing?
- bumblebeard 10y ago"Once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low-latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally,” SpaceX told the FCC. “Subject to additional development work, SpaceX plans to design and manufacture its own satellites, gateway earth stations, and user terminals.” Home Internet customers would receive a "low-profile user terminal that is easy to mount and operate on walls or roofs." I guess the numbers depend on what "final deployment" means. Presumably more satellites with higher bandwidth.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nabla9 10y agoSpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed and very high price.
- bumblebeard 10y agoI was wondering about the price too. If the bandwidth is actually going to be as limited as the numbers in this article imply then it'll probably be out of reach for most of the people who need it.
- icanhackit 10y ago> [...] and very high price Even if that's true they've effectively subsidized their rocket business and gained more experience through a greater number of launches. Often Elon is trying to kill more than one bird with every stone he throws - maybe he knows he'll need a solar network to support a Mars colony. This is how he gains the tools, people and experience to eventually roll it out.
- aerovistae 10y agoDoubt it. Elon's made his fortune by replacing existing products with superior alternatives. He's said in every case that driving cost down is one of the most important parts of creating something people want. Why do you think he wouldn't do the same here? He knows everyone hates existing telecoms. He's trying to create a better alternative.
- quonn 10y ago> He knows everyone hates existing telecoms. Not true everywhere. I'm paying < $40/month for a 100 MBit connection and I don't hate my telecom.
- ctchocula 10y agoCompetition makes a big difference. Just over a year ago with Google Fiber rearing up, my ISP offered 150Mbps for $35. This year with Google Fiber downsizing, the big American ISPs are back to their duopoly: 25Mbps for $40 or 10Mbps for $30. Hopefully SpaceX is able to force them to lower rates for everyone.
- legolas2412 10y agoIt's not going to replace internet for cities/towns. Think of the latency! It is directed towards middle of nowhere areas where nobody provides fiber.
- nitrogen 10y agoIf the satellites are in LEO, latency won't be that bad. At 700km height mentioned elsewhere in the thread, added latency might be 10-20ms based on halving the numbers at https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r100277-Whats-the-latency-predicted-with-LEO-satellites https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r100277-Whats-the-latency-p... (from 16 years ago).
- rconti 10y ago30ms of latency is mentioned in the article, due to the low orbital altitude.
- joshualross 10y agoThe full constellation would be 4,425 satellites.
- digler999 10y ago1gbps may mean the theoretical max physical-layer link from a terrestrial client to one or perhaps multiple, satellites, assuming 100% signal strength, no other users, etc. More than likely it would be 1gbps asymmetric from the bird and a much lower upload speed, just like DSL.
- gibybo 10y agoPeople aren't generally using a 1 gbps connection at 100% capacity 100% of the time. If we assume customers use an average of 1 TB of data per month and the time they use it is pretty spread out (seems reasonable since they are going to be spread out accross timezones eventually), you can serve about 6 million customers with 800 satelites @ 23 GBPS, and with 4400 @ 23 GBPS you could do ~33 million. Admittedly these numbers are all best case scenarios (except maybe the 1 TB average, that's probably generous), but even if you divide by 2 it's a decent number of people.
- andrepd 10y agoStill. What's the cost of deploying 800 sattelites vs cost of fiber infrastructure for 6 million people?
- piptastic 10y agoIt depends on how far apart those 6 million people are and how much infrastructure is already in place.
- spynxic 10y agoSince satellites handle most worst-case distance scenarios with respect to fiber, it is reasonable to assume a connection spanning the world (including access to remote areas)
- soperj 10y agoSo long as it breaks even, SpaceX comes out ahead, since they're deploying the sats, and learning how to build the sats in a mass produced way.
- randall 10y ago+ economies of launch scale.
- Tuna-Fish 10y ago
- lanna 10y agonobody uses their connection at full capacity 100% of the time
- mey 10y agoThat sounds like a challenge
- brianwawok 10y agoWell people that leave torrents on 24/7 can.
- sly010 10y agoBut a lot of people use it at near full capacity on Sunday evenings when a new episode of Westworld is out.
- samfisher83 10y agoWhat if everyone starts streaming 4k?
- NeutronBoy 10y agoThe same way terrestrial data links work - you work out your usage patterns and make compromises. You can't guarantee 100% bandwidth available 100% of the time. This is some of the rationale behind data caps. While you can still exceed the available bandwidth if all your customers get on and use their connection to the max, a data cap forces your customers to meter their usage out over the month and reduce the impact of this concurrent usage pattern.
- Nokinside 10y agoIt will be expensive bandwidth no matter what. The way they can make this work is if they 1) are targeting traditional satellite internet customers (ships on the sea, commercial aviation, etc) and 2) integration with 5th generation mobile networks trough wireless network virtualization. Mobile network provider can sell a service where traveling customer pays extra for connection that works in the middle of nowhere. When the device is within normal cell network or WiFi, connection goes trough those networks, when they are sailing with their yacht, it can jump from the picocell in the boat or backpack to the satellite network. At any given time there may be millions of customers who pay little extra for coverage and just few tens of thousands who actually use it.
- bigiain 10y ago"commercial aircraft carriers" That made me stop and think for a bit...
- AceJohnny2 10y agoYou mean like the Raft? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
- bigiain 10y agoExactly where my head started going... Then "No hang on. The rest of this comment isn't making sense now, back up bak up backup. Oh... _that's_ less interesting." :-) (Gah - and don't you hate it when people stealth-edit their comments and make you look insane? For the record, the parent originally said "commercial aircraft carriers" instead of "commercial aviation". I may be insane, but there's a completely plausible explanation for this comment thread and it can't be used as evidence of my lack of sanity, ok?)
- Tuna-Fish 10y agoThe frequencies they intend to use limit them to antennas roughly the size of a pizza box, which is a little bit too unwieldy for a backpack...
- Veratyr 10y agoTo take home users as an example, the residents generally sleep 8-10 hours a day, work 9 hours a day, commute ~1 hour a day, leaving only about 6 hours of free time at home a day. Assuming they spend that entire time watching 4K Netflix (25Mbit), they'll have used ~2TB in a month, or ~6Mbit/s total. Averaging bandwidth out over the whole month, each satellite would be able to support 3800 people. With the 4400 satellites they intend to deploy, they could support 16 million people. Of course you generally need to provision for peak bandwidth rather than average so these numbers aren't even close to accurate but I think it's a rough explanation for why you don't need to fully provision every link.
- tim333 10y ago2TB/month is a lot. Home data caps tend to be more 10 - 40GB and I've got 4GB data on my phone which is fine for most stuff except video. I doubt the service will be very cheap - sat services are usually more than cellphone data.
- cortesoft 10y agoYeah, most people sleep at the same time. Working for a CDN, we see our POPs gets about 4x traffic at peak compared to low times.
- freehunter 10y agoMost people sleep at the same time in one given geography, but if you're looking at the world, those times are pretty well distributed. Assuming I'm sleeping 8 hours a day, even the continental US only has 5 hours per day when everyone is asleep when you account for time zones. But APAC, ME/Africa, and Europe are all pretty reliably awake at that time.
- cortesoft 10y agoYeah, but that doesn't mean you can just put all the satellites right above the part of the world that is awake - so you are still going to not have a perfectly efficient system.
- elihu 10y agoLots of people have mentioned over-subscription, but another consideration is that while 1gbps connection speeds may be offered, they're likely to have other speeds as well at different costs. For a lot of people, even 100kbps would be an improvement over what they have (which might be dial-up, might be satellite with 2-second ping times, or might be nothing). I myself probably wouldn't notice much difference between 5mbps and 1gbps, as long as youtube works. This could be a big deal for the huge under-served population in rural America and in developing countries. Incumbent telcos would have to have service at least as good/cheap as SpaceX's internet service to stay in business. I hope they introduce a low-cost, relatively low bandwidth plan that's accessible to the world's poor.
- legolas2412 10y agoIt might be good for people living in remote places in USA. But the world's poor have internet connectivity, 3G/LTE is cheap and widely available. Don't go by US prices for data. Cellular plans here in India are cheap.
- sly010 10y agoSatellite communication at the moment is very expensive (like dollars per kilobyte expensive) not because of the limitations of long distance wireless communication in general, but because most of our satellite equipment up there is old and outdated. At some point as we developed world wide communications, laying down long distance fiber became cheaper than deploying communication satellites, and the existing satellites had enough capacity for the demand at the time. We stopped shooting up sattelites, but we developed much better wireless technologies (e.g. MIMO) down on earth, and SpaceX now has the means to deploy those in space and undercut the competitions offerings that is still being used heavily for specific use cases (e.g. broadcasting, marine, etc applications) It doesn't even have to be cheap, it just has to be cheaper than the competition. It's not quite world changing, but it's still a massive business (i guess) and would provide spaceX with some steady revenue stream. If it eventually becomes cheap enough for mass market that's just icing on the cake. Also note that any competition also will have to pay SpaceX for deployment, so SpaceX wins no matter what.
- planteen 10y agoIt's nowhere near that expensive (dollars per kilobyte). I used the GlobalStar network on a project. The bigger cost for overage is 0.35 cents per second on data. The effective rate for a scp transfer (e.g., after all overheads) is about 750 bytes/ second. So you are looking at less than half a cent per KiB. http://www.globalstar.com/en/index.php?cid=1470 http://www.globalstar.com/en/index.php?cid=1470
- sly010 10y agoI didn't know that. I got my numbers from [0]. Perhaps dollars are an overstatement, but your numbers are also for a best case scenario, when you have an application where you need to send data infrequently, in bulk, in an area with good coverage (not at sea) and no guarantees. [0] http://www.rock7mobile.com/products-rockblock-plus.php http://www.rock7mobile.com/products-rockblock-plus.php
- robotresearcher 10y agoYou're missing the current very high cost of crappy satellite bandwidth. This isn't competing with downtown fibre, it's competing with current solutions for way-out-of-town stuff, which are either very expensive or very low bandwidth or both. Source: am outdoor robot researcher.
- lettergram 10y agoDoes anyone know: (A) the potential lifespan of these satellites are? (B) Why has this not been done to date? I assume SpaceX expects that it'll be relatively affordable since they can reuse rockets. (C) Will this impact the launch capabilities of future rockets (4500 satellites are a lot)? My assumption is that the low earth orbit will likely aid in destroying those satellites as opposed to leaving them up there at end-of-life
- djloche 10y agoThey plan to deorbit after ~5-7 years, will replace with better, newer tech sats. It hasn't been done because the launch capacity and costs to date hasn't allowed for it. These will be launched via FH or BFR, which will be able to launch up many, many more at a time compared to the current F9.
- mattzito 10y agoI saw on another hn post about this that the satellites will have a 5 year lifespan, but will be decommissioned at the 1-2 year mark to insure they can be deorbited safely
- macawfish 10y agoseems so expensive for such a short lifespan
- lettergram 10y agoI'm curious if they can launch multiple at once. I assume they can, and on top of that, once they can reuse rockets My guess is the cost might be as little as a million (or less) for a satellite in orbit. That would be, what, $9 billion? That sounds like a lot, until you realize they can spread that cost over 2-3 years and have millions (if not billions) of people paying for internet. This would replace cellphone plans too remember... So that means SpaceX could probably charge a nice $100 - $300 a month and people would clamor for it. Seriously, this would probably make 10x return (easy) per satellite, if not more. Even 10 million people at $100 per month is $12 billion a year. Multiply that across a two to five year lifespan of a satellite and you'll have a very profitable business.
- katzgrau 10y agoFree, global internet access is the next step toward a smarter, more progressive planet. I don't even care about the speed - if the only thing users could access was wikipedia, I'd still personally donate to the project. I cannot emphasize how important democratizing knowledge is to me (and many others).
- sgt101 10y agoOk, given the election I have to ask.... Who's knowledge will we democratize?
- sergiotapia 10y agoDuh whatever Google and Facebook deem to be real news of course. The Ministry of Truth will root out all these evil white supremacist sites like Breitbart and Fox News. I long for the day when only Salon and Slate are considered sources of truth.
- andrepd 10y agoRisible tirades like these is why people don't take you seriously.
- nindalf 10y agoI've heard of Breitbart. Isn't that the site that encouraged people to "hoist the Confederate flag high and proud" because the Confederacy was a "patriotic and idealistic cause"? Same one right?
- sergiotapia 10y agoThat's the one! Breitbart is all about killing foreigners and hating non-white people, right?
- mark_edward 10y agoWell that's what the Confederacy was about.
- dark_star 10y agoHere's the thread on r/spacex that has a bunch of analysis: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/5d9724/spacex_has_filed_for_their_massive_constellation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/5d9724/spacex_has_f...
- nthdesign 10y agoWill this high number of low-altitude satellites cause a tracking and collision nightmare for the world's space agencies? Sorry, I recently finished "Seveneves" and I have space debris anxiety right now.
- duskwuff 10y agoDead satellites and debris in low altitude orbits will experience orbital decay and burn up in the atmosphere within a few years. High-altitude objects (e.g, at GEO) are more of a concern.
- flukus 10y agoUnless some debris from that gets pushed into higher orbits, then collides with something else and the process repeats.
- Symmetry 10y agoIn GEO everything is going in the same direction at the same speed so there's really no danger of collision. It's all the satellites whizzing over Earth's pole in different directions that have resulted on the only accidental collision.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoOnly if poorly managed. It's 4000 objects in an area greater than the surface of the Earth - so still very sparse. And they're low enough to deorbit from drag in 7 years, so if something did get lost or blow up, it would fix itself naturally.
- djloche 10y agoHere is the FCC filing: http://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATLOA2016111500118&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number&utm_content=bufferda647&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer http://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/report...
- abc_lisper 10y agoMan, you have to tip your hat to Elon Musk and his teams. They manage to consistently up the scales - its almost like accelerating towards future!
- ygaels_armpit 10y agoThe guys a freak. He's about the only optimistic thing going on at the moment, it seems.
- eknight15 10y agoNo kidding, South Park's episode this week kind of pointed that out.
- setq 10y agoI don't know how they're going to get 25/35ms hops. If they're using low orbits to reduce latency, the surface coverage is going to be lower so they're going to have to mesh them in some way to span large areas. That means routers and intelligence which means uplink, interlink, downlink hops in both directions. 600ms here we come again.
- tarikjn 10y agoHere is the part you missed: "Optical inter-satellite links permit flexible routing of traffic on-orbit."
- setq 10y agoIt's still EM radiation. Takes the same amount of time to propagate between two points in a vacuum. Line of sight optical in space is going to be very difficult. Even relativistic effects need to be considered at very high frequencies as they can cause phase shifts. Managing that on a mesh hurts my head.
- tarikjn 10y agoThought you meant ground re-routing, I am the one who read you initial comment too fast, and missed the mesh part. Anyway, what makes you think that routing at such a low orbit should be significantly slower than ground-routing?
- bosdev 10y agoIt's all very clearly spelled out in the document. They are going to operate them in low earth orbit, each satellite covering a small area.
- ygaels_armpit 10y ago30ms and Telstra is out of business in Australia. Finally, bring it on. Actually, give me 2000ms and a Musk plan, I'll take that over Telstra.
- ryan-c 10y ago
- toufka 10y agoHow do you get an uplink? I generally thought of satellites as providing pretty good downlink, but high latency because the uplink was through some alternative network - eg. phone/dsl lines.
- hueving 10y agoHigh latency was because it was in geosync orbit, not because of the asymmetric uplink. In fact, the asymmetric uplink was to try to improve the terrible latency.
- devicenull 10y agoNo, phone/dsl lines have very low latency. The latency is purely a factor of time to get to the satellite. Uplink bandwidth has been an issue in the past (phone/dsl is fairly slow speeds, at least in the places you'd want satellite internet)
- viraptor 10y agoIt depends on the satellite. The higher they are, the higher the latency / lower power / lower effective speed. Spacex plans for very low orbit. They're going for 1,110-1,325 km heights, which should give them the planned <20ms latency. Existing Iridium is at 781 km and offers rather slow and expensive, global connections. But they provide phones, with reasonable-sized antennas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications
- seiferteric 10y agoHow will this be affected by weather?
- abc_lisper 10y agoExperts at American Institute of Climatology predict that: http://on.cc.com/2eLuZAf http://on.cc.com/2eLuZAf
- viraptor 10y agoIt won't be affected much. http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/spacelink/radiospace.htm http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/spacelink/radiospace.htm We're ok-ish with frequencies up to 20GHz or so. Standard satellite TV is below that. Spacex filed for bands 10.7 – 12.7 GHz and 14.0 – 14.5 GHz for user down/up link (Ku band) and higher frequencies (Ka band) for high powered gateways.
- pmarreck 10y agoAnd hella pingtimes ;)
- arcticfox 10y ago> SpaceX expects its own latencies to be between 25 and 35ms Unless you're doubting their math, that's not a high ping at all. In fact, that's a pretty amazing improvement given that existing satellite internet is >500ms. I didn't realize the difference between LEO and geostationary was that high.
- Neeek 10y agoGeo is really really freaking far out compared to LEO. There are to-scale images floating around that really put it in to perspective.
- pmarreck 10y agoyou are correct, this is interesting. i was mostly making a joke referring to GSO satellite internet
- gozur88 10y agoGeostationary birds are in a 42K+ km orbit. That's almost a quarter second round trip just taking the speed of light into account and assuming the satellite is directly overhead. Back when international phone circuits were mostly satellite, you'd find yourself continually starting a sentence at the same time as the other party because that short delay messed up the flow of the conversation.
- rconti 10y agoShiii now that just happens on every conference call and WebEx on the planet! It is amazing how quickly tech has changed. In about 1991, my father telephoned us from the North Slope of Alaska, via satellite link. The RTT must have been at least 2 seconds. 20 years later I rolled into Prudhoe Bay on a motorbike, looked down at my iPhone, and saw I had 5 bars of 3G service, no satellite delay. And enough free wifi bandwidth to stream Top Gear.
- elihu 10y ago> “Optical inter-satellite links permit flexible routing of traffic on-orbit. Further, the constellation ensures that frequencies can be reused effectively across different satellites to enhance the flexibility and capacity and robustness of the overall system.” Is optical communication between satellites an existing technology that's already known to work, or is this new? Also, is this sort of thing done (or expected to be done) by aiming laser exactly at the destination satellite, or is it more of a non-directional blink-a-really-bright-LED sort of thing?
- ramidarigaz 10y agoThis[1] article does a nice job of covering the subject, but in essence, laser-based communication between satellites has been done and it works pretty well. [1] http://www.osa-opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/may_2016/features/space-based_laser_communications_break_threshold/ http://www.osa-opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/may_2016/feat...
- elihu 10y agoOk, thanks. From that article it sounds like it's already been done in a number of contexts, but it's still in the "early adopter" stage and isn't really widely used yet.
- benatkin 10y agoThere was a plan to do this back in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic
- deegles 10y agoMy dream of an off-grid cabin with internet access inches closer!
- matheweis 10y agoYou can do that today. I work with a guy who lives in an off-the-grid place in what most of us would consider to be the middle of nowhere with satellite for his internet access.
- torkable 10y agolol he blew up zuckerdude's satellite on purpose for sure
- ams6110 10y agoThe mayor and city council where I live have a big hardon for municipal fiber. I have this feeling that if and when they ever get it built they will have spent a ton of money on something that is obsolete on day one.
- Whitestrake 10y agoIf it's truly gigabit, that will be pretty nice, but I doubt it'll obsolete your fibre. For satellite internet, "low latency" is not a very difficult threshold to meet.
- trhway 10y agoand when Musk puts into orbit gigantic solar panels beaming down the energy i wonder how the typical anti-solar-energy argument "Sun isn't always shining" would sound then :)
- zhaphod 10y agoYou should Google for what Elon thinks about space-based solar energy.
- tonydiv 10y agoI worked for a company called Lightsquared that tried to do this. Big problems were faced from lobbyists, maybe SpaceX has more money to protect themselves though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligado_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligado_Networks
- upofadown 10y agoThe big problems came from an attempt to use satellite downlink spectrum in an inappropriate way that would cause problems for adjacent users (GPS in particular). Lightsquared wanted to run high power terrestrial transmitters in that band. They promised the FCC that they could make things work, but the physics of the situation prevented that. Lobbyists were not the issue, a bonehead technical decision was. Presumably SpaceX will be able to avoid any errors that obvious in their use of spectrum for their system.
- hyperpallium 10y agoyesterday's comments: SpaceX FCC Application for over 4000 Internet Satellites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973223
- paulsutter 10y agoHow much will the base stations weigh? Light enough to be carried on a drone? High speed / low latency internet will be important in self-driven cars. Especially with phased array ground stations which can respond faster than the motion of a car. So now a crossover between SpaceX and Tesla? How much cellular cost the Tesla fleet, especially as the model 3 come out?
- elihu 10y agoThat's an interesting point. There are many companies excited to use low-bandwith 5G connection to link up all their IoT devices. A satellite network provides a means to route around the cell phone network, which could be valuable to Tesla if they think it's cheaper than buying data plans for their cars. It could also be an effective backup system in case cell networks are out of range or unavailable. I suppose the interesting questions are: how many individual ground stations will a single satellite be able to support simultaneously? And what are the physical characteristics of the ground station? (Iirc, in the early 2000's, Teledesic was going to use multiple motorized parabolic antennas enclosed in beach-ball sized plastic bubbles to track satellites as they went over. We can do that now without moving parts with beam steering, but the antennas might still be kind of bulky/awkward.)
- visarga 10y agoWhy provide ubiquitous internet coverage for a car that depends on electric charging stations to go anywhere? Remote areas have few charging stations for Tesla.
- grapevines 10y agoSuch a genius move, surprising nobody saw it coming. Just think: he will already have access to a large base of customer's roofs (which SolarCity effectively owns) --- 1 million by 2018. Then, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to an on-demand, fully-cached, mesh network. They're probably not far from being able to provide internet service to all SolarCity customers, just a bit of a modification to the contract.
- deegles 10y agoSince Tesla will be making solar panels that look like tiles, they could also make mesh networking antennas that look like chimneys...
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThat is simply brilliant. Faux bricks which connect together to create a phased array antenna that create a mesh network between connected homes. Now if it was low enough power to run on the heat differential between the flue gases and the ambient air I would know I was in the future.
- ygaels_armpit 10y agoWhat harnesses that?
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThe canonical example of harvesting the heat differential is the biolite stove[1] it uses a thermoelectric generator[2] to provide up to 4 watts (peak) of power. [1] http://www.bioliteenergy.com/products/biolite-campstove http://www.bioliteenergy.com/products/biolite-campstove [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator
- ygaels_armpit 10y agoI'm on beer fuel atm and have only read it briefly, but isn't that pure, free energy? With a solid state device. Why do we not have some of these things around our fridge etc.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago[deleted]
- jpambrun 10y agoCan you even read?
- ahh 10y agoThe answer is in the article, sure (OP: much lower altitude satellites, so much lower RTTs), but that was an incredibly rude way to say so. Please don't do that.
- jpambrun 10y agoI understand that I easily get annoyed, but it is the first topic of the article. I mean.. why even bother to comment if you don't even read the first few paragraphs?
- whatupdave 10y agothe article states that they'll be ~800 miles up, so about 8ms there and back
- dfischer 10y agoIn the article it says that it's because of the current deployment of satellites being at 22k miles high. Tesla plans to launch the satellites at a range of 715-823 miles which will reduce the latency to 25-35ms.
- fluxic 10y agoDidn't SpaceX blow up the rocket carrying Facebook's Internet.org satellites (which more or less were doing exactly this)? https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/a-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-just-exploded-at-cape-canaveral/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/a-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-j...
- teraflop 10y ago"Doing exactly this" is kind of a misrepresentation. SpaceX is launching a fleet of low-earth-orbit satellites. The rocket that blew up was carrying a single satellite, owned/built by an Israeli company and destined for geostationary orbit; Facebook had signed an agreement to lease part of that satellite's capacity for several years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos-6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos-6
- ricardobeat 10y agoThis is odd. I'm pretty sure I read this exact pair of comments in the other thread earlier today... is HN moving things around with a fresh time stamp? EDIT: whew, I'm not going crazy yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973474
- dayaz36 10y agoI was disappointed to see Lightsquared go belly up. I'm glad to see another (more formidable) disrupter in this area!
- mpg33 10y agoAm I the only one that thinks Elon Musk is scattered and overextended? Literally a new grand idea every few months..
- clydethefrog 10y agoHe is a snake oil salesman for geek millionaires.
- snsr 10y agoI'd argue that he's a practical visionary and an inspiration.
- chronolitus 10y agothe snake oil that does 300 miles on a single charge, or the snake oil that lands on a barge from orbit?
- snrplfth 10y agoThey've been working on this concept for several years at their Washington state offices. It's just now that we're seeing hard details.
- kilroy123 10y agoNope. I think that all the time as well. He rushes way too much and he tries to do too many things. It's infiltrating to me because I want him to suceed. He needs to slow down, IMO.
- zump 10y agoDo these positions also require ITAR?
- consto 10y agoI love Musk's plans as much as the next Hacker, but he's proposing to significantly more than double the number of satellites in orbit. I hope he succeeds.
- cflynnus 10y agoHow will countries like China that aggressively censor the internet respond?
- edw 10y agoTry reading to the third paragraph before asking your "honest question": > SpaceX wants to launch 4,425 satellites into low-Earth orbits, with altitudes ranging from 715 miles to 823 miles. By contrast, the existing HughesNet satellite network has an altitude of 22,000 miles. That's about — basic arithmetic alert! — three percent the distance for the SpaceX satellites compared to existing geosynchronous ones.
- icehawk219 10y agoSomething I find interesting about this: what does it mean for countries who monitor and filter/block content (think China)? Presumably since this isn't using their national infrastructure they would lose all control of it, no? I wonder how those countries would respond to SpaceX wanting to let their citizens use the service. Unless I'm missing something it seems to me like they wouldn't really be able to stop it.
- andkenneth 10y agoI would imagine that they wouldn't be able to sell the hardware in china without a contract to redirect traffic through a terrestrial station that's inside the great wall. I doubt that's feasible.
- talamown 10y agoA government still can get control practically. They cannot stop the service itself but can regulate payments from their citizens to the service. It is like online casino. Of course, there may be some loopholes for payment and some citizens who access the service as well as online casino.
- lelandbatey 10y agoOne example of a loophole: Pay with Bitcoin/have someone on the outside of censorship pay for the service and you pay them, then you connect with those paid for credentials.
- rezashirazian 10y agoWhat if SpaceX offers a free tier version. They can possibly double internet traffic with a flip of a switch.
- taneq 10y agoPut three generations of your family in jail if they catch you?
- 1952wasntU 10y ago
- mrep 10y agonapkin math (chemistry style): (4425 satellites * 23Gbps) / ((60,000PB of fixed internet traffic / 1 month [1]) * (12 months / 365 days) * (1 day / 24 hours ) * (1 hour / 60 minutes) * (1 minute / 60 seconds) * (8 bits / 1 byte) * (1024 Tera / 1 Peta) * (1024 Tera / 1 Giga)) = An astounding O(54% of global internet traffic) [2]! Obviously there are many many more variables in this [3]. Nonetheless this will be super interesting to follow. [1]: my estimated current data usage from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Internet_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Intern... [2]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(4425+*+23)+%2F+((60,000+%2F+1)+*+(12+%2F+365)+*+(1+%2F+24+)+*+(1+%2F+60)+*+(1+%2F+60)+*+(8+%2F+1)+*++ http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(4425+*+23)+%2F+((60,00... (1024+%2F+1)+*+(1024+%2F+1)) [3]: Side note, someone should create a multi user algorithm website (it might be able to be done over google spreadsheets) but adding in extra factors like revenue streams and what not sounds like it would be fun to play around with.
- nabla9 10y agoMore numbers to crunch: - Satellite with LEO orbit covers 1-2 percent of earth surface with 10 degree elevation. - Land occupies less than 30% of earth's surface area. Urban areas occupy less than 3 percent of the Earth's land surface. That's where the customers are. You have to divide at least by 100.
- ethagknight 10y agoI'm not 100% sure I'm following your comment, but with LEO, you don't get to choose a location above earth for each satellite, as you would with GSO.
- WiseWeasel 10y agoUrban areas already have high-bandwidth, low-latency internet service at more competitive rates, let alone 3-5 years from now. I'd think most target customers for this service are in rural areas, as well as those with a need for connectivity while traveling.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- xiaoxubeii 10y agoGreate project and benefit the whole world.
- disordinary 10y agoThat's a lot of satellites, I wonder if they'll have to outsource to other companies like RocketLab who are going to do multiple launches per week from next year.
- flukus 10y agoNow might be a good time to familiarize everyone with Kessler Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
- chx 10y agoTeledesic. SkyBridge. Probably more. Of course the timing is better with SpaceX having its own rockets but it's curious noone mentions how this have been attempted and failed.
- schiffern 10y ago>it's curious noone mentions how this have been attempted and failed Musk mentioned Teledesic the very first day it was announced (back in January 2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=19m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=19m25s >Things to consider about success? Well, I think it's important to assume that terrestrial networks will get much better over time. >You know, one of the mistakes that, say, Teledesic made was not assuming that terrestrial networks would get much better over time. So we need to make sure that the system we design is good even taking into account significant improvements in the terrestrial systems. >But I do there there are some important differences between what we're doing and, let's say, Teledesic. In the case of Teledesic they were trying to talk to phones, and that gets back to that problem of a roof penetrating situation. And particularly when stuff is coming from space, like if you're in a skyscraper and it's got to go through 27 floors to reach you, that's not going to happen. There's nothing that will... you know, short of like a neutrino [laughter] ...a neutrino phone [laughter]. >In the case of Teledesic there were some fundamental issues there.
- thesimpsons1022 10y agomaybe they blew up facebook rocket because of competition
- slackoverflower 10y agoLOL
- disordinary 10y agoSome countries are not going to like this, network infrastructure are important national assets and are often done with high levels of regulation to ensure availability and pricing, so a lot of nations will not think it's in their competitive advantage to have this provided by a foreign entity.
- lucaspiller 10y agoEven within the US I'd be very surprised if the cable companies don't try and somehow block it.
- davesque 10y agoAnd fair pricing?
- mtgx 10y ago> “Once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low-latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally,” SpaceX told the FCC. Maybe this will finally provide the competition US ISPs need, while going around their local monopolies. I hope 1Gbps is actually real, and you won't get more like 50-100Mbps.
- er0l 10y agoEveryone has their worldwide internet solutions, Google balloons and Facebook gliders, but this is easily the most plausible. Musk tends to see his ideas through.
- DonnyV 10y agoWith this many satellites being launched I hope he has a plan to clean them up when they're ready to be decommissioned or worse if a couple hundred get destroyed. aka natural disaster or state sponsored
- Symmetry 10y agoThe plans for decommissioning them are in the technical document. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/spacex-Technical-Attachment.pdf https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/space...
- EGreg 10y agoOK that's it. This is why I need to build a large company and become rich. So I can get all kinds of ideas that I have done, instead of listening to people telling me how hard it would be. They would just get done. http://qbix.com/blog http://qbix.com/blog
- mkj 10y agoWonder if we'll see CDNs in space too. Would solve one side of the transmission problem.
- ooqr 10y agoLagrange CDN
- destitude 10y agoAllowing "cell" phones to need only satellite link instead of cell tower would be huge. Would also finally kill off the nasty cellular companies and their plans in the.
- anchpop 10y agoThe receiving station needs to be 2 feet by 2 feet. This won't be going in your phone
- imw 10y agoThis should not be privately owned. It should belong to the entire human race. Otherwise it will be more of the same fallacious drivel that landed us in our current predicament.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- benchaney 10y agoIt is going to be owned by the people who pay to produce it. I don't really understand the argument in favor of doing it any other way.
- jnicholasp 10y agoIf you have a viable model by which the entire human race can plausibly work together to fund and implement this, the rest of us would love to hear it. There's plenty that's flawed about capitalism, but the thing is that it works better than anything else we've so far thought of for providing actual incentives for people to push the envelope of what's possible and create new things in economically viable ways. If there were some way to equally effectively incentivize regulatory oversight - which we manifestly do not have in existing governmental structures - we'd be in solid shape.
- ygaels_armpit 10y agoSometimes, when I get very drunk, I'll watch Warhammer distopian videos about how it all goes wrong. Is it wrong that I think of Musk as The Emperor, come to save us? (Firmly tongue in cheek.)
- mordrax 10y agoSkynet
- noahdesu 10y agoPerhaps the next step will be selling cloud services from in-orbit data centers that have no cooling bill.
- Something1234 10y agoAlthough the temperature in space is very low, the ability to dissipate heat is reduced. So you wouldn't be saving that much, unless my understanding is wrong.
- metafunctor 10y agoI think the heat would be just radiated out passively. Most space hardware, I'm told, needs to operate at -10°C – 50°C, and withstand continuous temperature fluctuations between those extremes caused by solar heat.
- Something1234 10y agoI thought that space would have a low thermal conductivity, meaning that things with a high tdp (big iron) would just hold the heat, and not much would transfer. As I remember from high school physics, radiation is the least efficient form of heat transfer.
- metafunctor 10y agoCorrect. That's why I said the way to lose heat in a satellite is by radiation.
- mnw21cam 10y agoEver heard of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law? This dictates the maximum amount of energy that can be radiated from an object per unit area for a specific temperature. The power is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/stefan.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/stefan.htm... So for example if you have 300W worth of TDP, and a perfect black body radiator of half a square metre, then the radiator temperature is already going to hit your maximum CPU temperature of 50C, assuming it is perfectly shadowed from both the sun and the earth.
- pmontra 10y agoIs this going to scale? "Each satellite will provide aggregate downlink capacity of 17 to 23Gbps". Some 20 Gb/s per satellite times 4425 satellites spread around the globe is not that much bandwidth for any given densely populated area. We're going to keep having our local ISP in cities (they're giving between 0.1 and 1 Gb/s on fiber right now) but it will be great to get connectivity in the countryside and the mountains. And when traveling abroad, if they'll sell a small antenna that can be operated on a battery or connected to a laptop over usb. I wonder if there are chances that those antennas can be made so small to fit into a phone and tablet. Iridium's ones are still pretty big, like the ones of wifi routers.
- schiffern 10y ago>Is this going to scale? ...not that much bandwidth for any given densely populated area. We're going to keep having our local ISP in cities (they're giving between 0.1 and 1 Gb/s on fiber right now) Except the goal isn't to replace fiber in densely populated areas. Musk said this during the initial announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=2m57s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=2m57s >The goal will be to have the majority of long distance internet traffic go over this network, and about 10% of local and business traffic. Probably 90% of people's local access will still come from fiber, but we'll do about 10% of business and consumer direct, and more than half I think of the long distance traffic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=4m39s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=4m39s >And then space is also really good for sparse connectivity. So if you've got large swaths of land where there's relatively low density of users, space is actually ideal for that. >It would also be able to service, like I say, probably 10% of people in relatively dense urban and suburban environments. And so in cases where people have, you know, are sort of stuck with Time Warner or Comcast or something, this would provide an opportunity to... [unintelligible due to cheering] >I wonder if there are chances that those antennas can be made so small to fit into a phone and tablet. As revealed in the above video, it's a rooftop antenna about the size of a pizza box. No wall/roof penetrating spectrum. Of course it automatically aims itself, so as a mobile AP it should be "plug and play" unlike current GEO internet user terminals which need finicky pointing.
- Animats 10y agoWill the inter-satellite links help? They may have to backhaul everything to a surveillance monitoring station, as Iridium does. That could bottleneck the whole system.
- mikeytown2 10y agoThinking about this as a model for the Mars internet and I wonder if there should also be powerful optics's on the satellite for live video streaming and weather. Put a reflex lens on a small sensor and you could get something like a 10,000mm equivalent in a fairly small package. With a lot of satellites you would want a very narrow field of view in order to have a high ground resolution. If you can have a utility satellite that does most of what you need (com & pictures) that seems like a win for mars and earth. Live global video stream sounds pretty awesome.
- onion2k 10y agoLive global video stream sounds pretty awesome. Or a privacy nightmare.
- mikeytown2 10y agoOn mars awesome, earth you are correct
- hubert123 10y agoIt is not unthinkable that the NSA has faked the moon landing and pictures of earth with photoshop / film equipment. You havent been above earth, so how do you know? I think you should be less arrogant at the prospect of somebody having a different opinion than you. Even the astronauts could be fooled, remember that they only ever see space through a sheet of glass, whether it's from inside the space station or their suit. This glass sheet could easily be a screen, showing them images that they expect.
- dwaltrip 10y agoA mirror was placed on the moon. Organizations all over the world have pointed lasers at it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experime...
- wojcech 10y ago> It is not unthinkable that the NSA has faked the moon landing and pictures of earth with photoshop / film equipment. You havent been above earth, so how do you know? I think you should be less arrogant at the prospect of somebody having a different opinion than you. No. Their ignorance is not as important as my knowledge. I didn't go to space, but I can see ships going beyond the horizon and I did do the experiment of two sticks in the ground as a teenager
- didibus 10y agoYou can also just see the moon by staring at the night sky.
- Mtinie 10y agoNo, what you are looking at is a giant cardboard cutout held up by thousands of Mylar helium balloons and pulled by a herd of cats connected with fishing line. It also explains the "super moon" effect; the cutout actually is closer, and therefore larger, when the helium supplies start to run low every few months or years. #learneditontheweb /s
- 10y ago
- nithril 10y agoAnd the infosphere will become reality
- shams93 10y agoIf they can pull this off it would be amazing because the technical challenges to meet this goal are pretty considerable if you've ever tried satellite internet in the past it was the worst thing ever. If he can pull this off just the technical feat alone would be pretty amazing given the challenges involved.
- messel 10y agoupdate 23Gbps * 4425 satellites is - 100k simultaneous 1Gbps users - 1 million 100Mbps users - 10 million 10Mbps users Doesn't seem like much of a subscriber base to recoup a fraction of the costs (My) Estimated cost for satellites and ground stations: 50-100+ billion, maintenance cost: few billion/year? Might I propose instead genetically modifying insects to pass photosynthetic light signals in massive swarms controlled by ground stations (just for cool visuals) and spend the rest on ground microwave towers or anything else.
- flawedluck 10y agoYes, yes, yes! This is how progress is done.
- _pmf_ 10y agoWe once heard about a company providing cheap fiber connections to major cities (and providing free WiFi to Africa via hot-air balloons). I think this goes in the same direction.
- brendyn 10y agoCan the beams be intercepted, maybe if the signal scatters a bit, or isn't 100% targeted? Do they need to be encrypted between satellites?
- operon 10y agoNow I want to buy an island and build a new kind of community.
- charlesdm 10y agoI wonder how much it would cost to purchase an island with 10-20 people and build houses on it. Could you live there in a sustainable way? Possibly seems like an interesting way to live.
- operon 10y agoYou can buy a small (~2 ha) undeveloped island for as low as 100,000 USD. Bigger ones cost more depending where they are located. However I saw really big islands (~2,200 ha) for about 2M USD in Chile (I think that is cheap considering that a luxury apartment in my city, Florianópolis, can cost way more than that). Current solar energy solutions and biogas production from waste can form a solid base for a sustainable community.
- charlesdm 10y ago2,200 hectares? Do you have a link for that? That can't be right / seems amazingly cheap (also if compared to that small island, too good to be true). If you split $2m between 20 people you get 110ha for $100k. 110ha is massive.
- operon 10y agoSure, this one in Chile is a good example: http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/isla-verdugo http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/isla-verdugo Has lakes, a small marina, but is far way from any big city. However, with gigabit internet and a bunch of interesting people it can become a very good place. If I had 2M on hand I would start a community there right now.
- charlesdm 10y agoI have a property developer friend who had the idea to create a sort of luxury village in Southern France where successful people from the arts / entrepreneurs etc could meet. People that had achieved financial independence and weren't "part of the system". Sort of like a safe enclave to exchange ideas. He did well + things were progressing, but during the financial crisis in 2007 banks pulled out (€50m in loans) of the deal and wiped him out. I honestly wonder how many people would be interested in living like this.
- PaulHoule 10y agoWill this cause the Kessler syndrome?
- Symmetry 10y agoNo. First off, these satellites are all in the relatively underpopulated upper section of low Earth orbit hugging the lower reaches of the inner Van Allen belt at ~1,000km above the surface. Most satellites in LEO are closer to 300 km up. So there aren't really any non-ElonNet satellites to worry about except for ones in highly eccentric polar orbits and those are few enough to be avoidable. They also have fairly aggressive plans to de-orbit them at the end of their lives which makes me happy. The big danger for Kessler syndrome right now is all the satellites whizzing around Earth in polar orbits that all cross over the Earth's poles.
- leonroy 10y agoSeems a logical step for SpaceX. One of the biggest challenges facing Mars colonization would be internet connectivity over such tremendous distances. A super cheap (relatively) satellite mesh network would be just the thing to handle Earth to Mars communications. Getting out of left field here but could imagine the whole Solar System dotted with these. Add a few sensors to each satellite and you could start detecting and monitoring some pretty interesting metrics.
- dfox 10y agoOne of the big problems with solar-system wide internet is latency. Various protocols assume that there is some upper bound on latency, IP itself assumes that end-to-end latency is less than about 4 minutes (which is'n true for mars at least half of the time), with typical TCP/IP stack implementations requiring significantly less (5 seconds seems to be common requirement for TCP to meaningfully work, 15 seconds is quoted in RFC 791), things like SSL/TLS are latency sensitive enough that multi-hop terrestrial wireless connections can be a problem. Even when all these technical problems are solved (eg. by replacing the whole IPv4/6 with something completely different) there still remains the problem of the user experience completely changing.
- baldfat 10y agoLatency Math (Almost 100ms faster then current technology) EDIT: This is only one way ALSO Grace Hopper telling David Letterman what a nano second is! https://youtu.be/1-vcErOPofQ?t=4m26s https://youtu.be/1-vcErOPofQ?t=4m26s 1 Nanosecond = distance light travels one foot 1 mile = 5260 nanoseconds (In a vacuum) Current Satellite Internet = 22,000 miles or 115720000 Nano Seconds = 115.72 ms SpaceX Low Orbit = 715 to 823 Miles 823 miles = 4328980 nano seconds = 4.3 ms
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- elcct 10y agoHow they are going to log data for NSA and similar agencies?
- freyr 10y agoGoogle and Facebook are experimenting with drones, balloons, etc. to deliver Internet to their next billion customers, who live in impoverished areas with little network infrastructure. If it works, this seems like a much more attractive solution.
- colo12 10y agowhat happen if this satellite is hacked?
- pascalxus 10y agoI'm excited by the prospect of more competition for Broadband. This could do the world a lot of good. :)