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People 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 tim
by gibybo 10y ago
People 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 agoIn cities, the fiber, or even some form of local wireless, is much cheaper. However, in more rural areas the satellite system can well end up the cheaper choice. The interesting part is what building 4425 satellites does to the economics of making satellites. Right now, most satellites are one-offs, or at most made in a series of 10 or so, handmade to exact specifications for maximum reliability and built for 25+ year lifetimes. This fleet is meant to be mass-produced and built to last a much shorter time, 5-10 years at most. I am very interested in just how low can they drive the cost of making a single satellite.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago"This fleet is meant to be mass-produced and built to last a much shorter time, 5-10 years at most. I am very interested in just how low can they drive the cost of making a single satellite." One of the best points in the discussion. This has potential to produce side-effects more valuable than whatever they were attempting to do. As in, they can fail in their overall goal but a ton of great things would come from success in this part.
- deedub 10y agoInteresting when you say "However, in more rural areas the satellite system can well end up the cheaper choice." You mean a satellite system can well end up your ONLY choice. If you're rural there are no choices besides dial up and satellite. Satellite is a reseller selling hughesnet.
- gibybo 10y agoI think it might be comparable. It's really hard to estimate since we don't know their satellite costs, but $100 million per satellite (launched) is probably a good starting point. That ends up being $13k capital cost per customer. If they can borrow capital at 5% or less, that works out to ~$55/month. But if they succeed with reusable rockets (and it sure looks like they will), they can probably drop the launch cost from $60m to $10m in the near term. If we assume the satellite still costs $40m, that still cuts the total cost in half to ~$27/month @ 5%. Maybe they can mass produce these satellites and get them to $10-20m each, which would reduce it to more like $15/month. Again all these numbers are pretty rough/best case scenarios, but even if we multiply them by 10 we could be looking at 1 gbps connections for $150-500/month. That could be cheaper than fiber infrastructure in a lot of places and still immensely useful in applications where fiber isn't possible (in a car, plane, or boat). That's also assuming 1 TB/customer. In many cases you may just buy the bandwidth in smaller increments at $1-10/gigabyte which is a few orders of magnitude cheaper than current satellite internet and comparable with LTE cell coverage.
- Symmetry 10y agoThey're only going for 51 orbital planes and it's fairly simple to spread out many satellites from a single launch if they're in the same orbital plane. And a Falcon 9 can carry 20,000 kg to orbit whereas each satellite is pretty light. Some people on /r/spacex calculated that the binding constraint is actually the volume of the Falcon 9 payload fairing and they'll be able to launch 20-25 satellites at a go. And I would expect that mass produced satellites to be far cheaper on the margin than bespoke ones. All of which is to say that it's probably more like $10 million per satellite launched.
- coldtea 10y agoDepends where those 6 million people live. I've heard internet in Kilimanjaro is not that great...
- 31reasons 10y agoThis might primarily be for their autonomous vehicles. It makes sense for them not to rely on 3rd party for cost/reliability reasons.
- ortusdux 10y agoHeck, the leap in positioning accuracy 4.4k satellites would make gps obsolete. Civilian gps accuracy is low enough that you cannot distinguish between lanes on a highway.
- Tempest1981 10y agoDo you need to track/tune them all at the same time, or can you mux between them? 12 channel receivers used to be common. Edit: Maybe this has some answers: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/11884/how-many-gps-channels-make-sense http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/11884/how-man...
- legolas2412 10y agoBut isn't it still cheaper to lay fiber cables? For example, 23*4400 = 101Tbps, but I guess many of the satellites will end up above water, so maybe around 60Tbps. One cable by google did that for 300mil$ [1] Maybe it is good for last mile connectivity, which is probably a good target, but only for less populated areas where LTE isn't available. [1] https://www.extremetech.com/internet/231074-googles-faster-undersea-cable-goes-online-with-60-tbps-of-bandwidth https://www.extremetech.com/internet/231074-googles-faster-u...
- gibybo 10y agoYeah the cost advantage is entirely in last mile connectivity. It doesn't really make sense to compare the cost of a single cable to the cost of the end customer getting a connection. LTE is a much better comparison, but I think the cost will actually be pretty similar or cheaper than LTE (see my other post for napkin math) and cover a lot of areas/applications that LTE can't.
- gallerdude 10y agoMaybe it's a lot quicker - Google Fiber has been taking forever. Not that rocket science is easy, but it's probably a lot quicker than striking the earth.
- btym 10y agoLaying fiber isn't going to get your Tesla connected.
- Retric 10y agoUsing the 4400 example. People pay ~20$ per month for under 10GB cellular data. So 100GB for 150 million globally people globally seems viable. If that 150 million is paying 15$ per month that's 30 billion per year. Optionally, I suspect a few customers would pay a lot more for a larger monthly cap. The issue is the antenna needs to be around 2 foot by 2 foot. But, with autonomous cars people may want significant bandwidth in there cars. An hour or two of video a day seems reasonable especially if they can cache popular content. Honestly, if they can get the price down this could be very profitable.
- kbart 10y ago"People pay ~20$ per month for under 10GB cellular data." It depends on a country. Where I live, you can get unlimited 4G Internet for 15-30 eur/month (depending on a provider).