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Here's one way I could see this killing Comcast, even in major cities: As a homeowner, you by a small box which lives under the eave of your roof. The box has
by tbabb 9y ago
Here's one way I could see this killing Comcast, even in major cities:
As a homeowner, you by a small box which lives under the eave of your roof. The box has high-bandwidth, low-latency satellite uplink to SpaceX which gives you your internet.
The same box also has a terrestrial wireless repeater which serves the local neighborhood. Internet is available through your "tower" to neighbors and passers-by. You and SpaceX split the revenue from the traffic.
Basically, it's like a solar roof, but for internet. Photons/bits rain down from space onto your roof, and you sell the energy/bandwidth back to the local area for a price that amortizes your investment.
In areas very poorly served by internet, or with very poor broadband choices, there could be an especially strong financial incentive to be the guy on your block with a SpaceX repeater.
It would certainly scale a lot better than every house having an uplink-- customer connections are instead concentrated into micro-regional nodes. If there's a node in your area, you buy internet from them. If there's no node around, you invest in becoming one.
This could drastically decentralize and cheapen internet across the globe, if done right. It could be extremely disruptive to telecoms, and profitable for SpaceX.
- walrus01 9y agothis model already exists (google "WISP micro pop"). One of the primary problems with doing this at a large scale is that the bandwidth via satellite will not be that great, compared to what's possible with current terrestrial technology. the second is that the micro POP needs some kind of serious battery backup and a way to meet five nines or better reliability. you can't start hanging downstream customers off of the rooftop radio system on some random person's house unless you can be absolutely certain that the main uplink won't be unplugged by somebody's kid messing around with a power-over-ethernet injector underneath a desk. one of the challenges with a wisp micro POP approach for current last mile FCC part 15 unlicensed band operators is that you need to (a) keep the equipment powered independently of whatever the POP-host customer might be messing around with inside of their house, and (b) provide a good sized UPS for it, and (c) ensure that the POP stays in place and contractually "survives" the original resident moving out, either new tenants or new homeowner. The (c) part requires a fairly long and ironclad commercial lease agreement that becomes attached to the property title, which is not something either ISPs or homeowners take lightly.
- TimMeade 9y agoI thought i read somewhere spacex is shooting for sub 30ms latency gig connections.... for < $100....
- lorenzhs 9y agoMaybe not so much for homeowners given the regulatory issues you describe, but combining this with solar panels and a backup battery could be a cool way to provide cell service to sparsely populated areas using satellite backhaul. I wonder how expensive that would be, it would be fantastic if it changed cost calculations sufficiently to make it financially viable. Oh, and it’s a SpaceX/Tesla synergy, so Musk fans will be delighted ;)
- gsich 9y agoWhy 5-9s? I doubt any home connection has this, let alone the satellite.
- walrus01 9y agoAn ISP serving from 5 to 30 downstream customers needs the micro pop to be up and online at least five nines, if not, something has gone terribly wrong.
- gsich 9y agodoubt
- syshum 9y agoDepends if it is data only or if you will be offering Voice Services. If you are going to offer Voice Service e911 regulations come into play on Residential Services. Most state require additional reliability as part of the service. Thet is why my Fios Service has a Battery Backup for the voice circuits (even though I do not have them active)
- t3rmi 9y agoHow can satellites have low latency? The current average ping times seem to be around 900ms. Isn't this almost unusable?
- sonium 9y agoSpaceX satellites will have a very low orbit. That’s also why they need so many.
- t3rmi 9y agoThanks. It looks like their orbit is around 800 miles compared to the usual 22,000. Expected latency seems to be around 25ms. Would satellites be used for first hop only? I image latency would quickly increase if used for multiple hops.
- sjwright 9y agoI imagine SpaceX could eventually perform the majority of routing in orbit, with packets returning to earth for the "last mile". If they're successful, you could potentially see a high bandwidth SpaceX link on the roof of every major data center on the planet. They could be self-reliant for connections to every major online service. If they're very successful, you could potentially see data providers like Netflix and CloudFlare joining SpaceX in orbit, most likely embedded into a future SpaceX satellite...
- mtanski 9y agoNetflix ISP CDN in space. Now that'd be something seriously cool.
- jessaustin 9y agoIt's funny; Netflix is one provider that doesn't need low latency so they would be fine with more traditional satellite orbits.
- Yizahi 9y agoOnly if wireless would actually work, instead of fading in half after one wall and 10m distance. Also, imagine how crowded the limited 2.4GHz spectrum will become with all additional networks and connections.
- mcny 9y agoWhich is why we should not have done the "auctions" and made more of the lower frequency available nonexclusively.
- stephen_g 9y agoI think you're perhaps over-estimating how much bandwidth the system will have. Satellites are limited by power, earth ground-station uplink/downlink, the amount of spectrum they have for customer access in each spot-beam, etc. Definitely for rural and less densely populated areas you could potentially get hundreds of Mbps per subscriber, but even for the crazy high number of satellites they're talking about in their constellation, at this point you're probably only going to get tens of megabits per subscriber in a densely populated city with any decent take-up rate...
- ctdonath 9y agoHaving bandwidth is paramount. I've long opined network routers should have an "ad-hoc" mode (preferably on by default) whereby users can create a decentralized network, leveraging whatever long-range/high-bandwidth connection that can be accessed. With enough market penetration, the need for a direct service provider drops (from per-endpoint to per-region or even per-backbone; poor description of intent noted).
- ejo4041 9y agoXfiniti wifi has this pretty much. If you have an xfiniti account, you can connect to anyone's xfiniti wifi. That saved me from installing internet in a small commercial shop because the neighbor had xfiniti and we had an account. It would be nice to see other providers do this, but a lot of tech users have reservations about other people using their routers.
- swiley 9y agoSatellite internet: a radio based internet connection (like cellular or wifi) but now instead of having the antenna/base station sitting on something it's hurtling around the earth at an unimaginable speed and a rather large distance from everything connected to it. This might disrupt cellular and satellite ISPs and it will affect wired ISPs in the same sense that cellular affects them now which is all pretty exciting, but I don't think it will do anything beyond that. TL;DR: insanely great for sensor networks, exciting for mobile internet (especially at sea), not quite irrelevant for home internet unless you live in the middle of nowhere like my parents.
- jandrese 9y agoEven for your parents you need to consider the cost. There are a number of satellite internet companies already providing service, but none of it is affordable to your typical rural customer. Often billing is still measured in megabytes, and denominated in full dollar amounts. Think $5/MB, if you buy a lot of data up front to keep the costs down. Even a highly disruptive network that drops the cost by two orders of magnitude will still be expensive.