12 ms·

So, part of Musk's long-term play here has got to be, eventually, to include a Starlink terminal into every Tesla, right? Probably without even charging any sub

So, part of Musk's long-term play here has got to be, eventually, to include a Starlink terminal into every Tesla, right? Probably without even charging any subscription. You and your passengers get free broadband internet in the car, and Tesla get a high-bandwidth channel to every vehicle on the road, allowing them to stream live, high-fidelity telemetry data back to their HQ and push out software updates as and when they need to.

devoply 7y ago
Broadband in car all over US and Canada. Yes please!
- sneak 7y ago
  Broadband outside of cars all over planet Earth; much more important both from an economic standpoint and a geopolitical one.
sdan 7y ago
One day they could possibly teleop cars autonomously (streaming sensor data to servers through the starlink terminals, then processing and sending output data back to the cars through the starlink terminals). Obviously latency is a huge factor in this, but it could be possible.
- deelowe 7y ago
  I think starlink is aiming for latency on par with terrestrial solutions (e.g. sub 30 ms rt).
- tlrobinson 7y ago
  Interesting possibility. I don't think it would make sense for teleop to be the normal mode of operation, since it would consume a ton of bandwidth, but maybe they could use human teleoperators to handle occasional edges cases between "level 3" and "level 5" autonomy, in particular for the autonomous ride-sharing network. They could colocate the teleoperators at Starlink ground stations to minimize latency, and prioritize teleop traffic.
- debatem1 7y ago
  My initial reaction was to make a joke about this, but the math is on point. At the speed of light latency to/from the satellite (3.5ms) and a vehicle speed of 60mph, that's about 4 inches of vehicle travel. Sounds pretty great-- probably better than almost any human driver. At terrestrial latency (30-60ms), thats a few feet, maybe nearing 10. You're still in the margin for human reaction times. Doubling that to account for compute latency and such is actually still in the noise for car brakes available today. Cool how far things have come.
ec109685 7y ago
There’s already an LTE modem ok every car, so in populated areas, you’re covered — no fancy satellites needed. Never have needed a faster Internet in a Tesla and all passengers will be carrying their phones anyway.
- rymate1234 7y ago
  Cars are able to drive outside of populated areas, so the satellites might be useful for that purpose
  - seveneightn9ne 7y ago
    Teslas aren't really able to drive far outside populated areas.
    - karkisuni 7y ago
      watch cpg grey drive on a desolate road in Nevada. can't get much further outside of population in the lower 48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_naDg-guomA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_naDg-guomA
      - OrgNet 7y ago
        You can only drive about 1h30m if you want to make sure that you are able to come back from where there are no chargers...
        deftnerd 7y ago
        That's really a weird way of looking at it. Most people won't drive in one direction and turn back and refuse to use a super charger. https://i.imgur.com/leKbJ4k.jpg https://i.imgur.com/leKbJ4k.jpg (Map from April this year) Most super chargers are within about 120 miles of each other, so at 65mph, you have about 2 hours between them. They've done a pretty impressive job building out the infrastructure
indolering 7y ago
No, they can only service a limited number of customers within a given region. The only users of Starlink, et al. in major metropolitan areas will be backbone providers.
- ecpottinger 7y ago
  I suggest you count the number of nodes they can support with that many satellites. Stop thinking like an old tech.
  - indolering 7y ago
    "This system, if successful, would provide people in low to moderate population densities around the world with affordable high-speed internet access, including many who have never had internet access before," - Tom Praderio, SpaceX engineer Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-launches-test-satellites-for-internet-constellation/?redirect=1 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-launches-t...
    - briffle 7y ago
      What point of that quote leads you to think they also can't provide high-speed access in non-rural areas?
      - hobofan 7y ago
        I'm guessing the "low to moderate population densities" part?
        vsl 7y ago
        He’s emphasizing the use case that matters. That he doesn’t mention something of little interest (yet another broadband provider in urban areas) doesn’t mean it’s not something possible.
jdietrich 7y ago
It's far more ambitious than that. In the developing world, we've seen a leapfrog effect in telecoms - they skipped over fixed-line phones and went straight to mobile phones. It's far easier to blanket a rural area or a dense slum with 3G signal than to run wires to every house. That poses a problem when you need fast fixed broadband - there's only so much mobile spectrum to go around, you can't really cheat the Shannon-Hartley theorem, so you end up with tight data caps and unreliable performance. Rolling out fixed infrastructure can be prohibitively expensive, so a lot of areas are stuck on mobile-only. Low-orbit satellite broadband potentially breaks this dilemma. The low orbit provides tolerable latency (within 30ms of fixed broadband), there's an abundance of spectrum in the Ku and Ka bands and you can steer a tight beam with a phased array. Starlink and OneWeb could potentially offer a satellite broadband product that is competitive with fixed-line broadband on cost, latency and bandwidth, but that is available almost anywhere on earth. Becoming the default broadband provider for half the world's population is Kind Of A Big Deal - maybe enough of a big deal to bankroll a Mars mission. I think there's obvious potential for this to be Kind Of A Big Deal on a purely personal level. Is your local cable monopoly absolutely terrible? Within a couple of years, it might not be a monopoly any more. Huge amounts of rural real estate becomes a heck of a lot more attractive if literally everywhere has good broadband. This might just be one of those once-in-a-generation technologies that meaningfully changes human geography.
- woile 7y ago
  I want to add that self driving cars, plus high available broadband, might mean a lot of people moving back to rural areas. With self driving cars you can go out, drink alcohol, socialize, and get back home whenever you want, you can even sleep in the car
  - baq 7y ago
    sleep in the car and not pay hotel tax or property tax? travesty.
    - dexterdog 7y ago
      Not for long
martythemaniak 7y ago
No, that's not the plan. To work with these low-orbit fast moving satellites, the antennas would be then size of a model 3 hood, pretty fancy/expensive and probably more than a little power hungry. The cars will use LTE, although the backbone of those base stations could very well be Starlink. Maybe future iterations will have extra hardware for terminal friendly applications, but I'd guess you'll see level 4 autonomy in a model 3 before they can upgrade Stsrlink to do that.
stcredzero 7y ago
I would also like to see low orbit shielded datacenters. These would have relatively high mass and streamlined design, which would allow for radiation shielding, and reduce the necessity of boosting orbital trajectory. They would also have very high bandwidth line of sight laser communications. This would allow them to migrate the state of virtual servers to the next satellite over. So applications consisting of a cloud of server processes can incrementally migrate to virtually "hover" at very low altitudes above the earth. Assuming Starlink also works, I suspect the first company to make this work would make an absolute killing.
- isostatic 7y ago
  > I would also like to see low orbit shielded datacenters Why? Build on the ground with a fibre, far cheaper and far lower latency.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    Can't be served a warrant. Arguably superior physical security. Can have line of sight comms with the entire region, which are both more direct and have faster signal speeds than fiber. For certain global applications, a low orbit cloud consisting of many datacenters has some advantages. The virtual servers could virtually migrate to "hover" wherever they are needed, or to wherever would minimize latency.
    - isostatic 7y ago
      Do you have any idea how orbits work?
      - stcredzero 7y ago
        Do you have any idea how orbits work? Yes. But your reading comprehension is spotty. Look at the cousin comment: The way the "hovering" would work, is that the entire state of one virtual server would be serialized, then sent via line-of-sight high bandwidth comms to the next satellite to go over the region of interest. This way, the entire application's server cluster could incrementally migrate to remain over one geographic area, but do so at a much lower altitude than geosynchronous orbit.
DeonPenny 7y ago
Turn every supercharger station into a LTE provider then put a dish on it and you're there. I'm glad spaceX isn't on the public market though. So we'll actually have a chance of seeing some of these ambitious goals come true.

devoply 7y ago

Broadband in car all over US and Canada. Yes please!

sneak 7y ago
Broadband outside of cars all over planet Earth; much more important both from an economic standpoint and a geopolitical one.

sdan 7y ago

One day they could possibly teleop cars autonomously (streaming sensor data to servers through the starlink terminals, then processing and sending output data back to the cars through the starlink terminals). Obviously latency is a huge factor in this, but it could be possible.

deelowe 7y ago
I think starlink is aiming for latency on par with terrestrial solutions (e.g. sub 30 ms rt).
tlrobinson 7y ago
Interesting possibility. I don't think it would make sense for teleop to be the normal mode of operation, since it would consume a ton of bandwidth, but maybe they could use human teleoperators to handle occasional edges cases between "level 3" and "level 5" autonomy, in particular for the autonomous ride-sharing network. They could colocate the teleoperators at Starlink ground stations to minimize latency, and prioritize teleop traffic.
debatem1 7y ago
My initial reaction was to make a joke about this, but the math is on point. At the speed of light latency to/from the satellite (3.5ms) and a vehicle speed of 60mph, that's about 4 inches of vehicle travel. Sounds pretty great-- probably better than almost any human driver. At terrestrial latency (30-60ms), thats a few feet, maybe nearing 10. You're still in the margin for human reaction times. Doubling that to account for compute latency and such is actually still in the noise for car brakes available today. Cool how far things have come.

ec109685 7y ago

There’s already an LTE modem ok every car, so in populated areas, you’re covered — no fancy satellites needed. Never have needed a faster Internet in a Tesla and all passengers will be carrying their phones anyway.

rymate1234 7y ago
Cars are able to drive outside of populated areas, so the satellites might be useful for that purpose
- seveneightn9ne 7y ago
  Teslas aren't really able to drive far outside populated areas.
  - karkisuni 7y ago
    watch cpg grey drive on a desolate road in Nevada. can't get much further outside of population in the lower 48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_naDg-guomA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_naDg-guomA
    - OrgNet 7y ago
      You can only drive about 1h30m if you want to make sure that you are able to come back from where there are no chargers...
      - deftnerd 7y ago
        That's really a weird way of looking at it. Most people won't drive in one direction and turn back and refuse to use a super charger. https://i.imgur.com/leKbJ4k.jpg https://i.imgur.com/leKbJ4k.jpg (Map from April this year) Most super chargers are within about 120 miles of each other, so at 65mph, you have about 2 hours between them. They've done a pretty impressive job building out the infrastructure

indolering 7y ago

No, they can only service a limited number of customers within a given region. The only users of Starlink, et al. in major metropolitan areas will be backbone providers.

ecpottinger 7y ago
I suggest you count the number of nodes they can support with that many satellites. Stop thinking like an old tech.
- indolering 7y ago
  "This system, if successful, would provide people in low to moderate population densities around the world with affordable high-speed internet access, including many who have never had internet access before," - Tom Praderio, SpaceX engineer Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-launches-test-satellites-for-internet-constellation/?redirect=1 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-launches-t...
  - briffle 7y ago
    What point of that quote leads you to think they also can't provide high-speed access in non-rural areas?
    - hobofan 7y ago
      I'm guessing the "low to moderate population densities" part?
      - vsl 7y ago
        He’s emphasizing the use case that matters. That he doesn’t mention something of little interest (yet another broadband provider in urban areas) doesn’t mean it’s not something possible.

jdietrich 7y ago

It's far more ambitious than that. In the developing world, we've seen a leapfrog effect in telecoms - they skipped over fixed-line phones and went straight to mobile phones. It's far easier to blanket a rural area or a dense slum with 3G signal than to run wires to every house. That poses a problem when you need fast fixed broadband - there's only so much mobile spectrum to go around, you can't really cheat the Shannon-Hartley theorem, so you end up with tight data caps and unreliable performance. Rolling out fixed infrastructure can be prohibitively expensive, so a lot of areas are stuck on mobile-only. Low-orbit satellite broadband potentially breaks this dilemma. The low orbit provides tolerable latency (within 30ms of fixed broadband), there's an abundance of spectrum in the Ku and Ka bands and you can steer a tight beam with a phased array. Starlink and OneWeb could potentially offer a satellite broadband product that is competitive with fixed-line broadband on cost, latency and bandwidth, but that is available almost anywhere on earth. Becoming the default broadband provider for half the world's population is Kind Of A Big Deal - maybe enough of a big deal to bankroll a Mars mission. I think there's obvious potential for this to be Kind Of A Big Deal on a purely personal level. Is your local cable monopoly absolutely terrible? Within a couple of years, it might not be a monopoly any more. Huge amounts of rural real estate becomes a heck of a lot more attractive if literally everywhere has good broadband. This might just be one of those once-in-a-generation technologies that meaningfully changes human geography.

woile 7y ago
I want to add that self driving cars, plus high available broadband, might mean a lot of people moving back to rural areas. With self driving cars you can go out, drink alcohol, socialize, and get back home whenever you want, you can even sleep in the car
- baq 7y ago
  sleep in the car and not pay hotel tax or property tax? travesty.
  - dexterdog 7y ago
    Not for long

martythemaniak 7y ago

No, that's not the plan. To work with these low-orbit fast moving satellites, the antennas would be then size of a model 3 hood, pretty fancy/expensive and probably more than a little power hungry. The cars will use LTE, although the backbone of those base stations could very well be Starlink. Maybe future iterations will have extra hardware for terminal friendly applications, but I'd guess you'll see level 4 autonomy in a model 3 before they can upgrade Stsrlink to do that.

stcredzero 7y ago

I would also like to see low orbit shielded datacenters. These would have relatively high mass and streamlined design, which would allow for radiation shielding, and reduce the necessity of boosting orbital trajectory. They would also have very high bandwidth line of sight laser communications. This would allow them to migrate the state of virtual servers to the next satellite over. So applications consisting of a cloud of server processes can incrementally migrate to virtually "hover" at very low altitudes above the earth. Assuming Starlink also works, I suspect the first company to make this work would make an absolute killing.

isostatic 7y ago
> I would also like to see low orbit shielded datacenters Why? Build on the ground with a fibre, far cheaper and far lower latency.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  Can't be served a warrant. Arguably superior physical security. Can have line of sight comms with the entire region, which are both more direct and have faster signal speeds than fiber. For certain global applications, a low orbit cloud consisting of many datacenters has some advantages. The virtual servers could virtually migrate to "hover" wherever they are needed, or to wherever would minimize latency.
  - isostatic 7y ago
    Do you have any idea how orbits work?
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      Do you have any idea how orbits work? Yes. But your reading comprehension is spotty. Look at the cousin comment: The way the "hovering" would work, is that the entire state of one virtual server would be serialized, then sent via line-of-sight high bandwidth comms to the next satellite to go over the region of interest. This way, the entire application's server cluster could incrementally migrate to remain over one geographic area, but do so at a much lower altitude than geosynchronous orbit.

DeonPenny 7y ago

Turn every supercharger station into a LTE provider then put a dish on it and you're there. I'm glad spaceX isn't on the public market though. So we'll actually have a chance of seeing some of these ambitious goals come true.