7 ms·
This is good news for the USA, but it's GREAT news for countries where the government regularly cuts off and controls the Internet for political purposes. If re
by bmcusick 9y ago
This is good news for the USA, but it's GREAT news for countries where the government regularly cuts off and controls the Internet for political purposes. If receivers can be as small as a personal laptop, expect a thriving black market in them in places like Iran and Egypt.
Such receivers can also act as backhaul for mesh networks, providing access to un-censored information in times of turmoil and peace alike.
- bane 9y agoThey'll probably just end up turning off service over certain geographic areas.
- _archon_ 9y agoWhy would they do this? EDIT: Data customers would pay for access on an individual basis. Helicopter-parent countries might cry foul, but what leverage do they have? It's not like they were going to launch things with SpaceX and they can threaten to stop.
- elevensies 9y agoI think they need licenses to use the radio spectrum. I believe Iridium set up a system in China so that all calls are routed through Chinese systems, so there is some historical precedent. The government of China also has anti-satellite weapons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi... .
- linkregister 9y agoA nation using an anti-satellite weapon against another entity's satellite would be an unlikely, enormous escalation.
- ouid 9y agoAnd one with profoundly self-destructive consequences too.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoOTOH one country enabling communication infrastructure to another country's citizens without approval of their government would be rightly considered as violation of national sovereignty and could presumably be seen as an act of war.
- Retric 9y agoRadio has long been used to communicate propaganda across state lines. The relative ease of signal jamming is why it's not seen as an aggressive act.
- chii 9y agoBut its the citizen of the country who initiated the communication, and the act of providing a service cannot be made as an excuse for war. At best, the citizen get prosecuted for illegal communication.
- alasdair_ 9y agoAnything can be used as an excuse for war. You really think North Korea wouldn't damage a satellite giving its citizens open internet access if it had the ability to do so?
- astrodust 9y agoLawsuits, or indirect pressure like limiting Tesla sales. They could always keep operating anyway, but it's only a matter of time before these governments set up jammers.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThey can jam whatever frequency the networks operates on. Or embargo any receiver/tramistter that could be used to connect to the network. Yes, some people would be able to work around any attempt at blockage, but that wouldn't scale to providing non-technical people with cheap/unrestricted internet.
- shmerl 9y agoThe whole point above was about the black market. I.e. one that circumvents government attempts to ban it.
- seiferteric 9y agoQuestion for anyone who might know, would jamming work if you used highly directional antennas? Seems like it wouldn't really.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThe antenna is already highly directional - those are LEO satellites we're talking about, you need to constantly track them. How phased array antennas respond to jamming is unfortunately beyond my knowledge.
- seiferteric 9y agoThat's my point, if you have high gain in a particular direction, wouldn't interference coming from a different direction be mostly rejected? The point being, this could offer internet to people in repressed countries that can't practically be blocked or tampered with. If they coupled this with a free tier with low bandwidth it could be huge, assuming people could smuggle in the equipment to make it work.
- bryondowd 9y agoIf you couldn't jam the receiver, could you jam the satellite itself while it is over your territory? Direct enough signals at the satellite from your country that it can't respond to actual users? Sort of a DDoS attack?
- dingaling 9y ago> Data customers would pay for access on an individual basis. At a subscriber level, monthly billing to 'SpaceX Broadband, Redmond' might be cause for inquisitive State Police to visit. At a state level, the legality of jamming / interfering with satellites over national territory has never been definitively established. So SpaceX might find it easier to just turn-off over hostile nations than have them upset the network.
- oatmealsnap 9y agoBitCoin?
- shmerl 9y agoAnd mining built into receivers...
- Asooka 9y agoYou'd set up a system where you pay the black market dealer and they in turn pay SpaceX from an account outside the country.
- seiferteric 9y agoIt would be really cool if they offered a free tier with like say 200kbps or something.
- adolph 9y agoIt would be a way to address problem of the National Radio Quiet Zone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...
- planteen 9y agoCurrent satellites don't do anything special over the National Radio Quiet zone. Why should the SpaceX ones?
- alkonaut 9y ago> but what leverage do they have? The buying, selling and using of satellite internet equipment will be outlawed in countries that don't allow free access to the internet (unless of course the internet satellite company signs agreements to impose the blocking of choice of the regime in question). SpaceX might be safe from the Turkish, Chinese or Egyptian governments, but the users won't be.
- chii 9y agoBut what incentive would satellite communication providers have to agree? Wouldn't it be better to facilitate a black market by not putting any blocks?
- kwhitefoot 9y agoSometimes one government has more common ground with the government of another country than it has with its own citizens. A country that does not want its citizens to have SpaceX provided Internet could lobby the US government to require it to be blocked. You can bet that the US government will want to exert control over it anyway to some degree so even if they are not always sympathetic to other governments requirements that lack of sympathy is a negotiating position not a matter of principle.
- viraptor 9y agoI'd say it's more of problematic than great news for places with state controlled study. But it has potential. Where it's Great news is places which already can use only satellite internet, but have very poor experience. Rural Australia for example. Having low local (or even global) latency would be amazing.
- H4CK3RM4N 9y ago25ms is pretty close to my broadband latency across Australia(Brisbane to Sydney).
- nojvek 9y agoI'm pretty sure NSA will want a backdoor in the system. If it can do what they say it can do, they are basically the new pipes of the Internet. It's too good for NSA and our current US govt to leave untouched.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jacobush 9y agoSay hello to ultra-fine real-time triangulation of your position. Of course privacy protected with the same care and zeal that protects your Tesla.
- cma 9y agoThey are transmitters and receivers. It would be like putting a "kill me" beacon on your house if the government opposed it.
- ldh 9y agoSo maybe don't use it from your house?