6 ms·
That's amazing, As a foreigner living in China, I'm wondering if such network can be technically prevented from being used in covered land/countries? How cool
by cocoggu 7y ago
That's amazing,
As a foreigner living in China, I'm wondering if such network can be technically prevented from being used in covered land/countries? How cool would it be to finally get an unrestricted access to the Internet here.
But I'm probably just dreaming.
- debatem1 7y agoIt can be legally prevented, although the enforcement mechanisms are murky. To the best of my knowledge they've never made a public claim either way.
- consumer451 7y agoI imagine the same countries[0] that don't allow satellite phones won't allow Starlink. [0] https://www.outfittersatellite.com/Countries-with-Satellite-Phone-Restrictions_b_11.html https://www.outfittersatellite.com/Countries-with-Satellite-...
- Thlom 7y agoI believe the issue in f.ex. India is not censorship and population control, but rather a slow bureaucracy and in-fights between different government departments and the military. That said, things are changing in India. BSNL were just issued a license for offering IFMC services, including KA-band and L-band services.
- diggan 7y agoMost probably, to use Starlink, they would have to abide by local laws and regulation. So in the case of China, I don't think the connection would be any different from what you can find consumer ISPs today. Or Starlink simply skips China.
- tlrobinson 7y agoAFAIK foreign satellite phone operators don't modify their service over China, but satellite phones are illegal to possess in China. I'd expect Starlink terminals would also be illegal to possess in China.
- dsl 7y agoThere is existing satellite internet coverage over China. It is just illegal to own a device that can communicate with it without explicit permission.
- omk 7y agoOh I so wish, but satellite communication is restricted (requires special license) in most countries. So this is still out of reach from the masses.
- gauravphoenix 7y agoThat makes me wonder if the signals from such satellites can be jammed by nation states.
- dsl 7y agoUnless SpaceX has implemented high speed frequency hopping (which would 10x the cost of end user devices), they can easily be jammed. It isn't hard to overpower a single from space with a ground based transmitter.
- ecpottinger 7y agoIt is also easy to control the direction your receiver see it's signals from, to properly jam a satellite you need to fly the jamming equipment high in the air on a plane/balloon. A ground based jamming will have to be very powerful or close to block a receiver that is pointed to the sky.
- baq 7y agohow about overpowering jamming signal aimed at the sat? genuine question, no idea about the physics here
- avar 7y agoEven if you implement frequency hopping it'll do nothing for China blocking it. The end users need to hop to the same frequencies to receive the signal, which means that a jammer can do the same. This sort of thing works for militaries (e.g. for GPS) because you can assume that the receivers are secure, i.e. they're guarded by people carrying guns. That's not really a viable plan when a hostile state can just buy a receiver with the built-in hopping algorithm from a retailer.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoIt depends on how conspicuous the transmitter/receiver is. The authorities could just roll up and confiscate your antenna if such is easily visible and uncommon. Or deploy a jammer in your area. I think it would be about as safe as operating a pirate radio station.
- Tepix 7y agoIt's a flat box the size of a pizza box. If you have a building with a flat roof it should be pretty much undetectable visually.
- Klathmon 7y agoBut it'll also be a device that will most likely blast RF all over the place. I can't imagine finding a transmitter capable of reaching LEO being all that hard for a country.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- stcredzero 7y agoWhat if the whole group of satellites overhead acted as one huge phased array? If that could be made to work, then it could be very hard to detect the uplink and downlink. This would be fiendishly difficult to pull off, however.
- crakenzak 7y agoThey won't be operating in China, as China will blow their satellites up if they open up service in China. Their govt cant imagine a world where people have access to non-state controlled media. What an Orwellian world we live in.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoIgnoring the fact that there are already plenty of Western companies providing satellite internet coverage in China who haven't had their satellites blown up yet...
- Bluestrike2 7y agoDestroying the satellites--or enough of them to sufficiently degrade Starlink's ability to operate in mainland China--would be a very expensive bit of overkill with a great deal of international blowback. Destroying one satellite with an ASAT weapon annoys everyone, but the consequences are somewhat limited; the debris from destroying hundreds or thousands in orbit is pretty much a casus belli. China still maintains enough authoritarian elements that it'd be easier to crackdown any dissidents using Starlink instead. Nation states have been tracking rogue radio signals by spies for decades, and they've got the resources to monitor for them. If Starlink were to pose a problem in China, that's how they'd go about it. Destroying the satellites would be way too flashy. There's also the added benefit--from their perspective--that Starlink's mere presence would be a filter for their domestic surveillance; anyone willing to go through the effort of buying a likely illegal antenna, setting it up, and then trying to disguise it is the exact sort of person they'd want to monitor. Which is a pretty depressing thing to think about.
- wtallis 7y agoThis first batch of satellites doesn't have the planned laser links for communication between satellites, so service in China will only be possible with a ground station in or near China. (The satellites just launched also only operate on two out of the three planned radio bands for connections with the ground.)
- diek 7y agoWhy would they not include the inter-satellite linkage capability? That doesn't make any sense, given that was a solved problem in the Iridium constellation 20 years ago. That was a huge benefit of Iridium, in that it didn't have to rely on the "bent pipe" of just relaying data between a client and a ground station within the same coverage area. It was literally, "if you could talk to one satellite, anywhere in the world, you would have service".
- bdonlan 7y agoThey need to meet a FCC (?) deadline in order to avoid losing their licenses; probably that functionality wasn't ready in time.
- fragmede 7y agoMaybe that's why they need 12k satellites, and it also helps with latency if the signal doesn't traverse the constellation.
- lmm 7y ago> it also helps with latency if the signal doesn't traverse the constellation. No it doesn't. Satellite-satellite lasers can follow a direct route at the speed of light in a vacuum, much like those microwave towers used by high-frequency traders. Done right it'll be lower latency than ground-based fiber optics (which snake over the terrain and only transmit signals at about 2/3 the speed of light).
- Tuna-Fish 7y agoIridium does inter-satellite linkage with RF, Starlink intends to use laser comms. The advantage being much higher bandwidth, and not having to license the spectrum. The laser comms are very much on the roadmap, however they were not ready in time for the first launch, and SpaceX has a hard deadline to meet for getting sats up there, so the first generation is going to just bounce your signal back to a ground station. (Which will bounce it to the next visible sat to push it forwards, unless it has fiber.)
- indolering 7y agoChina can both jam the satellite signals or (as Musk said during a Q&A) blow the satellites up. Selling directly to consumers will not be Starlinks main line of business, it will be backbone connections to local providers. So even if Starlink is unwilling to do any filtering, the local ISPs will do the filtering.
- mr_toad 7y ago> blow the satellites up ! They don’t just sit over China. There’s no way they could just start shooting them down without repercussions.
- numakerg 7y agoChina is the poster-boy of doing things without repercussions. They could shoot down any commercial satellite and suffer barely any consequences.
- Tuna-Fish 7y ago> Selling directly to consumers will not be Starlinks main line of business It absolutely will be. What they have said is that it won't be Starlinks main line of business at the beginning, until the receiver costs have been driven down and the constellation is much more dense. At that point, they very much intend to provide internet access directly to millions of people.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoI remember Neil Stephenson once compared the cutting of undersea fiber optic cabling to the use of nuclear weapons: once one nation does it, every one is going to do it, so no one ever does it. So I think China will innovate and find ways to block access to starlink, without attacking the satellites.