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I don't see the novelty on this at all. Geostationary satellites are pretty much the standard for satellite internet for years. I had a broadband connection lik

I don't see the novelty on this at all. Geostationary satellites are pretty much the standard for satellite internet for years. I had a broadband connection like that on my first job, 15 years ago. It's off course very welcome if they can get higher transfer speeds, cleaner and lighter satellites and newer technologies to the mix, but that's it. The biggest problem with satellite internet: the latency, is not going to be solved. Which is fine, I must say, since they are in the business of bringing Internet to where there's none. But these new Internet users will arrive without access to the Internet's most incredible features, such as real time voice and video communication, interactive website experiences and online gamming.

black_puppydog 9y ago
Funny how you say those are the most incredible features. For me (and obviously this is personal preference, so please don't take offence) these are "nice to have" features. What I'm really after are (and have been, since I kinda grew out of FPS games) * google/$INFORMATION * Wikipedia * podcasts * spotify/torrent/$MUSIC * blogs/twitter * youtube/netflix/torrent/$VIDEO pretty much in that order. None of which would be a problem on satellite (albeit less convenient) but would make a day/night difference for me. As for the "interactive website experiences", that's usually the part I like the least about a website, which is why I use uMatrix most of the time, making pages more readable (or, depending on the JS affinity of the people making them, completely unreadable)
gedmark 9y ago
Most large GEO's today still use purely analog repeaters. Having a true digital payload where we're doing digital signal processing on board the satellite is a significant step forward. To get to the lower costs that we're aiming for, going to software defined radios was a necessary step. That's because it gives us the ability to build many satellites that are as identical as possible without hardwiring in the specific frequencies like they do with analog satellites today. It's hard to overstate the importance of that technology for what we're doing and the low cost targets we need to hit to get unconnected people online.

black_puppydog 9y ago

Funny how you say those are the most incredible features. For me (and obviously this is personal preference, so please don't take offence) these are "nice to have" features. What I'm really after are (and have been, since I kinda grew out of FPS games) * google/$INFORMATION * Wikipedia * podcasts * spotify/torrent/$MUSIC * blogs/twitter * youtube/netflix/torrent/$VIDEO pretty much in that order. None of which would be a problem on satellite (albeit less convenient) but would make a day/night difference for me. As for the "interactive website experiences", that's usually the part I like the least about a website, which is why I use uMatrix most of the time, making pages more readable (or, depending on the JS affinity of the people making them, completely unreadable)

gedmark 9y ago

Most large GEO's today still use purely analog repeaters. Having a true digital payload where we're doing digital signal processing on board the satellite is a significant step forward. To get to the lower costs that we're aiming for, going to software defined radios was a necessary step. That's because it gives us the ability to build many satellites that are as identical as possible without hardwiring in the specific frequencies like they do with analog satellites today. It's hard to overstate the importance of that technology for what we're doing and the low cost targets we need to hit to get unconnected people online.