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This is monumental - I claim every major advance in communication technology immediately precedes a major progress for society. This will make the 'Internet' t
by bpd1069 9y ago
This is monumental - I claim every major advance in communication technology immediately precedes a major progress for society.
This will make the 'Internet' truly global and ubiquitous.
So excited for the developing world.
- ryanlol 9y agoIt's a sad state of affairs if this FCC approval is a major advance in communication technology.
- godzillabrennus 9y agoRegulation can enhance confidence and breed investment interest.
- wallace_f 9y agoPeople aren't perfect, and some are terrible, so it makes sense to have government. However, it is reasonable to be critical of government removing your rights to work. Actually, it is a civil duty. I am not sure where the line should be drawn, but it has certainly gone too far. Should you need gov approval to download an IDE, or sell an app? What about to braid hair?[1] I would bet that as soon as government begins infringing on the rights to work which affect HN usere, suddenly everyone here would be a civil libertarian. 1-https://www.theroot.com/tennessee-has-fined-residents-almost-100-000-for-braid-1823829972 https://www.theroot.com/tennessee-has-fined-residents-almost...
- kakarot 9y agoWhat does any of that have to do with launching satellites and distributing radio bandwidth, both of which need regulation in order to provide safety for the masses?
- wallace_f 9y agoI'm sorry, but it's completely self evident. The point was that the natural right to perform/produce a service/product should be the null hypothesis (as opposed to government removing that right and granting it at their discretion) in any such case; and while on the extremes the answers may seem obvious (launching communication satellites vs braiding hair), it's often not always so. Finally, I concluded that people should ideally care about this before it adversely affects them. In other words, the OP's post was not without reason.
- kakarot 9y agoI'll ask again, what does any of that have to do with launching satellites and distributing radio bandwidth?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wallace_f 9y agoI can't think of a better way to explain it. Maybe you should re-read the comment chain to help you understand this conversation.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- freehunter 9y agoYou don't own the radio spectrum. Neither do I. No one individual does. We can license it, but since there's such a great opportunity for harm, it's controlled by the government. You're against the government deciding on "removing your right to work", but the alternative is your neighbor or your competitor making that decision for you and overloading "your" spectrum. And you have no recourse to complain, all you can do is push more power, which impacts more people. And your competitor pushes more power, so you push more power and now no one gets to use it. Libertarian ideas always seem to end in a corporate power struggle while everyone else gets locked out. That doesn't sound like a good outcome to me.
- wallace_f 9y agoYea, if you see the other comment I replied to, I tried to make it more clear that this case is obviously to the benefit of everyone. What you describe is a simple tragedy of the commons market failure, which need be regulated, and is not unique to radiowaves. I think the point I was trying to make is missed. Should someone, the OP, criticizing the FCC's role for doing this be downvoted/ridiculed? No, I think it's an important job, because we should always question when rights are taken away from the people and handed over to government. Maybe it's all too far gone and this is a better discussion to have for a Mars colony, but I still have faith.
- bri3d 9y agoAs many of us learned from the unauthorized Swarm Technologies satellites the other week, the FCC approve satellite launches. So this is effectively SpaceX getting the final sign-off they need to launch this service - I think that can count as an advance. I think there are a lot of arguments to be made about the world-changing nature of this project but I'm not sure FCC approval is the best one to downplay.
- greglindahl 9y agoDid you notice the part of the article that talked about this being a conditional approval, not the final one?
- walrus01 9y ago99.9% of the time FCC conditional approvals for new tech will eventually convert into final approval. It's just a procedural thing.
- etskinner 9y agoI dont think parent meant that the FCC approval itself is what should be celebrated, but rather that the technology needed FCC approval to move forward, and every step closer is something to celebrate
- mrep 9y agoThe Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government created by statute (47 U.S.C. § 151 and 47 U.S.C. § 154) to regulate interstate communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the media, public safety and homeland security, and modernizing itself. [0] Lots of that communication moves through electromagnetic radiation which practically anyone anywhere can use/interfere with. This is a textbook case of a common good which if unmanaged would be effectively destroyed due to the tragedy of the commons [1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commiss... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- jessaustin 9y agoFCC was formed to discourage competition in telecom, and that is mostly what it has done for over 80 years.
- mattsfrey 9y agoAgreed. While not as profound as bringing access to the developing world, this will also be a major win for people looking to live alternative lifestyles, i.e. perpetual traveling, van life etc, where keeping a consistent internet connection is the one thing holding many back.
- walrus01 9y ago> live alternative lifestyles I know exactly the meaning that you intend here, but at first I thought "how exactly is this going to be beneficial for polyamorous triads of hemp farmers who attend burning man every year?"
- olympus 9y agoYou can get decent 4G internet plans already in most parts of the world. While this will have better coverage of rural areas, mobile internet is very adequate for the van lifestyle.
- lev99 9y agoThat really depends on how much bandwidth you need. Several aspects of remote working like video conferencing large file transfers are too demanding for 4G in terms of bandwidth and transfer caps.
- IntelMiner 9y agoWouldn't the latency of a sat connection interfere with something real-time like video conferencing?
- neo4sure 9y agoI would like to know how this technology will affect the great firewall of China, does anyone have any ideas?
- nradov 9y agoNot much effect. The Chinese government will prohibit import and possession of the ground terminals. Smugglers will bring in a few but not enough to really bypass the Great Firewall for many people.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Retric 9y agoIf you can get a 1Gbps up-link and VPN within China that's going to be harder to track down and could service a lot of people. However, I suspect SpaceX will however allow China to monitor/limit connections. Further, China has a lot more power to crack down on purely internal operations would deter many.
- walrus01 9y agoThe problem is twofold from a China perspective: a) the rooftop CPE needs to be reasonably large and have high gain to be used effectively, and needs clear unobstructed line of sight to as much of the sky and horizon as possible. and b) It needs to transmit, it will transmit in very known frequency ranges, and the chinese authorities have plenty of budget to buy portable spectrum analyzers, horn antennas and to reach people how to use them. It only takes a couple of hours maximum to reach somebody how to use a portable spectrum analyzer to physically locate and identify transmitters in almost any band.
- Retric 9y agoA) A thin tarp or pant etc could obscure the shape without blocking radio waves. B) These things need to transmit up, so you can reasonably block most signals in other directions. Aircraft would work, but again not cheap. The real issue is more on the human side and network monitoring. Lots of encrypted network traffic to a ransom location would be suspect. PS: For once tinfoil might actually be useful vs government spying :)
- hinkley 9y agoCareful. Major advances in communication technology also precede major military upsets. Only the victors labelled those as progress.
- IAmGraydon 9y agoA few examples?
- hinkley 9y agoSomething one of my history teachers used to go on about. I’m not sure I can do him justice now that I’m thinking about it. Big military upsets due to superior intel. Sometimes by new means. I’m wondering now if he was paraphrasing Napoleon (the secret of war lies in the communications). Roman roads, pigeons, semaphore, radio, all used to project military power in profound and overwhelming ways. Radar, sonar (if you’re willing to stretch the definition a little). CDMA (invented by Hedy Lamarr during WWII for torpedos, but not used until the Cuban missile crisis). Cryptanalysis to defeat the Germans. ARPAnet was built to be literally bomb proof.
- iamdave 9y agoYour earlier post seems to intimate that technological leaps like this precede the start of wars, but your follow up comment intimates that technological leaps like this help win wars, and now I'm not sure I'm exactly following which one is supposed to be your central point to this. Could you clarify this and help me understand your viewpoint a bit better?
- hinkley 9y agoHonestly my first reply was a moment of progress fatigue. Tech fatigue really. Tech is amoral. Tech means change, but change doesn’t mean progress. I’ve been watching tech for a long time and we tell ourselves a lot of half truths. My good friend showed me a private demo of the first web browser that supported images. I was around people who wanted to change the world and it was all thrilling. But I can still recall conversations about how we were all going to slay Big Brother, but instead we made him stronger than ever. It’s really painful to look at your role in that. I’d bet money that half of them still don’t. And that was why I started my post with “careful”. War is just a conterexample. Especially if you have sympathy for the losing side. Tech will only be good if you exert yourself toward making it so. Here we are with three threads a day talking about how Facebook used their technology for negligence or evil depending on your point of view.
- buvanshak 9y ago>This will make the 'Internet' truly global and ubiquitous... So does it makes the exploitation that comes with it... Providing internet to the unmotivated masses only results in their exploitation..not in their empowerment.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoYour claim seems too broad to be justifiable.
- buvanshak 9y agoThe idea is that most of the people (think around 99.5 percentage) of the people ll be hooked to the insta-gratification stuff provided by the internet, ending up perpetually distracted, manipulated, with new insecurities instilled and existing ones blown up, ad fed human beings... So as I said again, it ll result in the exploitation of 99.5 percentage and may be empower the rest to attempt something that was impossible before...
- wmf 9y agoIt's still going to be more expensive than wired Internet. In the developing world where PTTs impose crazy prices they will impose those costs on top of whatever SpaceX charges.
- adventured 9y agoNo chance it's going to be more expensive than comparable wired - fiber or cable - Internet. You're leaving out the vast cost to build & maintain the wired infrastructure. Tax payers & consumers in those developing nations have to pay for that. That cost has to be included with the monthly fees to do a serious comparison.
- lev99 9y agoThe cost of building wired infrastructure has an inverse relationship with population density. This might be more expensive than wired internet in dense cities. The metal of city buildings and the high density of transmitters might make the performance lower in cities than suburban/rural areas. The Manhattan and Tokyo speed tests are more important to me personally than The Grand Canyon and Indian Ocean speed test.
- lovemenot 9y agoA key strength of the proposed network is its ubiquity, which makes it most competitive in un(der)served markets than in high-density cities. They can't just hover more satellites over Tokyo, so the service would inevitably become fully loaded there.
- walrus01 9y agoIf you really want to get excited for the developing world - research the number of new submarine fiber cables that have connected coastal cities in many major African nations in the time frame from 2004 to 2018. That's a lot of capacity. Now a big part of the problem is outdated regulatory regimes and government-controlled telecoms that are keeping prices artificially high, and keeping out competition in the 4G/LTE market and ISP market.
- bjelkeman-again 9y agoAs some who sells B2B SaaS in Africa (among other places): There is no question that a lot is happening, but there are huge swats of countryside in many parts of Africa that are not covered yet. The question is, who gets there first, and at what price.
- madushan1000 9y agoI'm from a third world country(Sri Lanka) and we already have really cheap LTE access, the connection I'm using right now(on my phone) gives me something like 1GB/1.5USD at average 4MBPS. What sucks is the speed and reliability, speed always fluctuate and even though most of the island is now covered by 3G, LTE is not a given. It has been improving a lot though because we have relatively good competition between mobile ISPs(something like 10 providers all island) and more than a quarter of the population has smartphones and demanding bandwidth.
- slr555 9y agoI was visiting a friend in Sri Lanka in 2004 and he was checking cricket scores on his phone in the middle of the jungle. I still can’t get a signal the whole way between KC and Omaha. We Americans sometimes ave a distorted view of the world.
- pharke 9y agoIt's funny you mention that route, it's about 185 miles which is about how wide Sri Lanka is. Living in the US also gives us a distorted view of how large the typical nation is.
- jandrese 9y agoFor reference for Americans that's about the distance from Providence to New York City. Or San Diego to Oxnard for left coasters. Drives that people wouldn't think anything about, and where you would probably have cell service for the vast majority of the drive.
- stingraycharles 9y agoCan confirm. My Cambodian wife’s family lives in the jungle and have 4G and she has perfect skype video calls with them. It costs them $1 a month and they get 5GB for that. These developing countries are going all-in on mobile and it’s a good thing. They really don’t need these sattelites, but for Americans apparently it’s good for leveling the ISP playing field.
- gnarbarian 9y agonot just the developing world. there are large swaths of the US without decent broadband either. Also large areas with no internet whatsoever beyond satellite. (and I mean really shitty really expensive satellite) ubiquitous internet will make remote weather stations, drones and a multitude of other things far more cost effective or possible. (especially here in Alaska)
- walrus01 9y agoACS and GCI have recently spent a great deal of (partly subsidized) money to build high capacity point to point microwave to reach a number of fly-in type communities: https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2017/03/19/with-federal-help-alaska-telecoms-plan-big-expansion-of-rural-broadband/ https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2017/03/19/with-federal... https://www.adn.com/features/business-economy/2017/03/18/for-rural-alaska-broadband-the-middle-mile-is-everything/ https://www.adn.com/features/business-economy/2017/03/18/for... The goal for these is to build network bridges to alaskan terrestrial fiber, getting to Fairbanks and/or Anchorage, from where connections are possible into Alaska's subsea fiber cables to WA state and the Seattle area. Implemented properly this can be significantly faster than satellite, bringing a 1 to 2 Gbps full duplex connection to each town with licensed microwave bands. From the perspective of ACS and GCI and similar operators, it can pay for itself pretty quickly because they can stop paying monthly-recurring geostationary satellite transponder kHz leases.
- mozumder 9y agoThe developing world needs fiber instead of satellite. This isn't going to change much over their current LTE speeds. This type of satellite internet is far too expensive far far too limited bandwidth to be useful for them. The energy cost of RF broadband is so much higher than fiber. Really, the audience for this are ships and other remote regions, not anyplace that has a road going to it.
- Robotbeat 9y agoNah, You’re thinking of different constellations like OneWeb. This constellation is being way overbuilt by SpaceX. They want gigabit speeds and way cheaper data than LTE. They want to compete with fiber (at least in non-super-dense areas). From Spacex’s perspective, they’re happy to build it so large that it only breaks even (even though I think it’ll do better than that) because it gives them something to launch on their huge, fully reusable rocket that they’re building.
- mozumder 9y agoNah, they can want infinite speeds, but they're only going to get a few megabits of speed. It will be much slower than LTE, since the satellites are going to be about 100 miles away. LTE towers are only a few miles away. How do you expect it to have higher bandwidth than LTE with communications a hundred miles away? It doesn't matter that they're putting in 4000 satellites, since those satellites are still 100 miles away from the terminal. Again, I want everyone to be clear: This is going to be MUCH slower and more expensive than LTE. Like Iridium, this project is only useful for remote areas that can't be reached by roads. Very few people will benefit from this project. It won't change society. This is another one of Elon Musk's garbage projects that doesn't really advance the state-of-the-art.
- lorenzhs 9y agoLatency and bandwidth are two separate things, and the distance to an LTE tower has approximately nothing to do with latency to the server you’re connecting to, which btw is likely much further away than 100 miles. Now factor in that light moves 50% faster in air or vacuum than it does in fibre optic cables. The satellites are also going to be at a height of around 1000km (600 miles). But I t takes light only about 3.3ms to travel that distance. 30ms latency end-to-end should be realistically achievable this way. That’s more than a good residential connection but good enough for just about any application other than latency-sensitive multiplayer games. There’s valid skepticism of SpaceX’s plan, but none of your points are among it.
- grecy 9y agoI've just driven through 21 countries in West Africa. [1] Every single country has 3G, a few have 4G. Often the speeds were faster than what I get in Canada. A pre-paid SIM costs $1, data is anything from $1-$10/GB in a pre-paid bundle. So I think the biggest difference the SpaceX Constellation can make is price. A huge percentage of the population in virtually every dirt street town has a smartphone with facebook and whatsapp. [1] theroadchoseme.com
- NullPrefix 9y agoThis service could be aimed at "Internet third world" countries like US or UK.
- tomcooks 9y agoI don't see how corporations meddling with the government can produce any good for the developing world, apart from generating profit for themselves masked as charity. Digital natives will be offered a walled garden, terrorcorp version of "the internet" as we know it (e.g. Facebook meddling with Albanian government). Decentralized alternatives, like Freifunk, are the best option in my opinion.
- icc97 9y agoBare in mind that Space X doesn't really care about trying to control the internet - their focus is making money from putting stuff in space so they can build the BFR. So a better comparison as others have said is comcast and mobile broadband providers. The more competition the better as far as I'm concerned.
- hordeallergy 9y agoDoubt it. I was downloading Linux distros among various other things in a developing country in the 90s. This might be useful for the most isolated areas.