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One satelite only seem to be able to handle 20Gbit meanwhile a single fiber can handle 20Tbit and you get a lot of fiber cables for $10 billion. One advantage
by z3t4 7y ago
One satelite only seem to be able to handle 20Gbit meanwhile a single fiber can handle 20Tbit and you get a lot of fiber cables for $10 billion. One advantage with satellites thoug are that there's nothing for warlord or censoring states cut off. Time to re-watch the movie "enemy of the state" ...
- sschueller 7y agoIt's operated by a single company which cares about profit. You can't tell me that the US government isn't capable to pushing Tesla to censor something they don't like or that Tesla will do it willingly to enter a market like China.
- Analemma_ 7y agoGet rid of this idea that satellite internet is somehow more resistant to censorship or control than wired internet, it’s totally false. In censorship-minded countries, this service will be completely illegal, and it will be enforced on both the client-side (the necessary tech to communicate with the sats will be impossible to acquire legally) and server-side (SpaceX will be forbidden from doing business in the country, and banks and payment processors will be forbidden from having anything to do with them).
- SECProto 7y agoThis isn't meant to replace fibre (except maybe for some high speed intercontinental trading purposes). This is high speed Internet for people in rural areas, where they'll pay for the bandwidth and latency improvements. This isn't going to let them jump past national regulatory agencies. It will help them avoid local regulations and right-of-way issues that helped kill Google fiber. Where did you get the $10 billion number from?
- gbear605 7y agoI believe $10 billion is approximately the cost of the whole satellite network, definitely not a single satellite.
- SECProto 7y agoI just want to know where that estimate comes from - as far as I know, any estimate of cost is a WAG. For example, my WAG with today's new info: - 167k per sat construction cost - 20 mill per launch (at-cost WAG) - 333k launch costs per sat - 500k per sat total cost these numbers give a final 12000 sat constellation cost of 6 billion. The initial 1600 sat constellation comes to 800million But if my assumptions are off, it could be way less or more. If they make the satellites even cheaper, or at cost launches are less, or they end up being able to launch on Starship, it's significantly less. If sats cost more, or launches are more, then the cost goes through the roof.
- zaroth 7y agoEven $10 billion for global high speed low latency network coverage at the aggregate bandwidth they are planning is extremely cheap. Comcast spends ~$8 billion on CapEx annually.
- zaroth 7y agoI searched for a while to try to find stats on Comcast's aggregate network capacity, either in amount of data transmitted or the peak/average bandwidth utilization. I'd be curious to compare this to theoretical capacity of the SpaceX network.
- hef19898 7y agoThe intercontinental trading might be the market to really make money from.
- stesch 7y agoWhen there are 12,000 of them deployed wouldn't there be more than one above you all the time? Couldn't the connection from Earth spread the traffic among multiple satellites?
- OrgNet 7y agonothing to block, except wireless signals