7 ms·

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

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
  - seniorivn 7y ago
    live in a country without hotel, property and all the other stupid taxes? What a nonsense...
- sharcerer 7y ago
  Could this lead to low population density cities?
  - westpfelia 7y ago
    Not a chance. People will still live in the cities. It just means that city which went from 5,000 people to 2,000 people in the last 20 years might go back to 5,000.
jen729w 7y ago
I had to check that the Kind Of A Big Deal wasn’t a GSV.
- monkeycantype 7y ago
  .
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Obviously, this means that we need to advance technologically to the point that we can fix that problem. By building a GSV and naming it Kind Of A Big Deal.
indolering 7y ago
> Low-orbit satellite broadband potentially breaks this dilemma. ... Starlink and OneWeb could potentially offer a satellite broadband product that is competitive with fixed-line broadband on cost, latency and bandwidth. But it doesn't, despite the marketing of Starlink as a "broadband" network they simply can't service high population density areas. So it might be a backbone to a 4G tower and possibly usable by consumers in rural areas, but it won't be installed on the roof of a car nor offer connectivity to individual consumers in urban regions.
- newaccoutnas 7y ago
  > but it won't be installed on the roof of a car How come?
  - indolering 7y ago
    Because it won't work in high-density urban areas.
  - LeonM 7y ago
    It won't be a reliable connection because the car moves around. Stuff like trees, tall building, bridges and tunnels will disrupt the signal. So for cars, a ground based cellular connection will work more reliable. Antenna alignment could also be a factor, which becomes more difficult if the antenna is attached to a moving object.
    - skykooler 7y ago
      The antenna has to constantly realign anyway due to how fast the satellites in low earth orbit move. Given that they're using phased array antennas, which can be steered electronically nearly instantaneously, there should be no issue tracking a satellite from a moving vehicle.
    - SEJeff 7y ago
      As mentioned earlier by dsr_, at 340km, a 1.5 degree beam covers a circle of just under 9km diameter. Let's call it 50 square km. If a single satellite can cover a 9km diameter, I think it will be just fine for vehicles. Especially so as the idea is for overlapping satellites. Also, much of the starlink bandwidth will be used for extra cellular / wireless / internet backbone areas. Areas that need long haul fiber optics to have bandwidth suddenly won't, so it will actually improve existing internet service providers as well since their addressable market will increase.
ecpottinger 7y ago
I am part of a group setting a tiny house community. We found being more than a hour from any major city center was not a problem for most of the people interested in our setup. But limited mobile phone service and no high speed internet limits a lot of people. StarLink hopefully comes along by the time we start our planned future expansion.
- mcny 7y ago
  How big is the project? Have you looked at running your own fiber? I imagine the residents wouldn't mind not having to manage their own WiFi...
  - ecpottinger 7y ago
    We are at South River Ontario Canada. At present we are three owners each building own house, we have 5 different people interested right now joining us to build their homes and our planning is no more than either 50 quarter acre or half acre lots which will let us leave about 15 acres untouched. The real short term is just Wifi, with ethernet cables for the further homes. Once we get more people, we will look into fiber for everybody.
    - cheez 7y ago
      How did you get together to build this community?
    - richardkmichael 7y ago
      How can I find out more about your project? I am in the area, and this sounds very appealing.
    - Empact 7y ago
      Point-to-point Wifi is powerful and is being deployed as an alternative to fixed lines in some places. E.g. see the Ubiquiti products. https://www.ui.com/products/#airmax https://www.ui.com/products/#airmax
    - deleted 7y ago
grandinj 7y ago
> you can't really cheat the Shannon-Hartley theorem No, but you can work within it's limits to achieve some fairly spectacular things. I predict that if low-orbit sat service starts bringing competition to rural areas, we will see the cell companies start using spatial diversity antennae to dramatically up the available bandwidth.
- vvanders 7y ago
  I'm not sure how solving problems with multi-path and/or LOS helps here. The fundamental problem with rural is that the $ invested : customers served($ out) is drastically lower as population density diminishes.
  - grandinj 7y ago
    Spatial diversity does more than help with multi-path issues. It multiplies your available bandwidth by sub-dividing the space around the base-station.
    - vvanders 7y ago
      Bandwidth doesn't help you with HAAT[1] and the fact that you need to build out towers every couple miles or more depending on your terrain. Towers are not cheap to build or maintain, if you only get a couple hundred people per tower it may not make sense to do(and why you don't see a lot of community WISPs except in unique cases). [1] https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/haat-calculator https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/haat-calculator
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
I read an HN comment before that convinced me it's physically impossible for this system to work for more than a couple million devices at VERY low bandwidth (I think the quote was like 0.1mbps). Is this true? I was all aboard the SpaceX hype train until that comment. I remember looking into his argument, and it seemed like everything checked out.
- westpfelia 7y ago
  I mean if you live in a place where you just dont get internet even 100 kbps can be game changing. Sure you cant stream netflix. But being able to some degree go on the internet is pretty big.
- superkuh 7y ago
  Did the arguement stem from the problems of sharing bandwidth due to free space broadcast (instead of wires where everyone can re-use the same bandwidth)? Because, if so, the spot beams for the Starlink sats down to the ground terminal are only ~15 km in diameter. The uplink back to the sats may be a bit more constrained and won't scale. But downstream should be fine.
- eutropia 7y ago
  I'm sure that very smart person thought of problems in 5 minutes in an internet comment that the engineers who just put 60 satellites in orbit with didn't consider about their total addressable market...
thebigspacefuck 7y ago
Satellite internet is already available in rural areas and it doesn't seem to make that big of a difference. Most people care more about the culture that populated areas provide more than internet speeds. Personally I pay $30 a month for 15 Mbps. I remember EarthLink or Prodigy being like $15-20 a month for 56Kbps. I remember leaving the modem on all night to download a 30MB demo of Monster Truck Madness in Elementary School. Now speeds are ~250 times what they were and the price has only doubled in the past 20 years? That's f-ing amazing. Prices are not getting out of control if you stick to the bottom end. I'm not even sure what I'd do with gig internet. For areas going from no internet to satellite internet it's probably going to be amazing, but going from high latency satellite internet to low latency satellite internet will not be a huge game changer. Adoption of http2 would probably help the quality of existing satellite internet more and be cheaper than this endeavor. As everyone started moving to HTTPS, the handshakes take much longer on a high latency connection and multiplexing would help alleviate that issue.
- epicide 7y ago
  > I'm not even sure what I'd do with gig internet. We're going to find out and that's the most interesting part.
  - thebigspacefuck 7y ago
    Agreed, but at this point in time I can't think of any "killer apps" for it. It seems silly to pay so much for something I wouldn't be able to use today.
    - Kye 7y ago
      I couldn't imagine replacing TV with streaming HD video or downloading free multi-gigabyte sample packs just to see what's in them before before multi-megabyte connections and affordable half terabyte hard drives. Most new or improved technology is speculative. No one knows what people will use it for 10 years later. Guesses rarely pan out.
      - 7y ago
woliveirajr 7y ago
What will it mean to youtube, facebook, google, amazon, netflix, if all those sparse clients with slow internet become a broadband client... And, even more, a client that is driven away by some sort of capping? Of redirection to another site? Ads from another company? Because net neutrality isn't exactly a thing everywhere, worldwide.
hairytrog 7y ago
It'll just be a new monopoly owned by SpaceX. Great

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
- seniorivn 7y ago
  live in a country without hotel, property and all the other stupid taxes? What a nonsense...
sharcerer 7y ago
Could this lead to low population density cities?
- westpfelia 7y ago
  Not a chance. People will still live in the cities. It just means that city which went from 5,000 people to 2,000 people in the last 20 years might go back to 5,000.

jen729w 7y ago

I had to check that the Kind Of A Big Deal wasn’t a GSV.

monkeycantype 7y ago
.
DuskStar 7y ago
Obviously, this means that we need to advance technologically to the point that we can fix that problem. By building a GSV and naming it Kind Of A Big Deal.

indolering 7y ago

> Low-orbit satellite broadband potentially breaks this dilemma. ... Starlink and OneWeb could potentially offer a satellite broadband product that is competitive with fixed-line broadband on cost, latency and bandwidth. But it doesn't, despite the marketing of Starlink as a "broadband" network they simply can't service high population density areas. So it might be a backbone to a 4G tower and possibly usable by consumers in rural areas, but it won't be installed on the roof of a car nor offer connectivity to individual consumers in urban regions.

newaccoutnas 7y ago
> but it won't be installed on the roof of a car How come?
- indolering 7y ago
  Because it won't work in high-density urban areas.
- LeonM 7y ago
  It won't be a reliable connection because the car moves around. Stuff like trees, tall building, bridges and tunnels will disrupt the signal. So for cars, a ground based cellular connection will work more reliable. Antenna alignment could also be a factor, which becomes more difficult if the antenna is attached to a moving object.
  - skykooler 7y ago
    The antenna has to constantly realign anyway due to how fast the satellites in low earth orbit move. Given that they're using phased array antennas, which can be steered electronically nearly instantaneously, there should be no issue tracking a satellite from a moving vehicle.
  - SEJeff 7y ago
    As mentioned earlier by dsr_, at 340km, a 1.5 degree beam covers a circle of just under 9km diameter. Let's call it 50 square km. If a single satellite can cover a 9km diameter, I think it will be just fine for vehicles. Especially so as the idea is for overlapping satellites. Also, much of the starlink bandwidth will be used for extra cellular / wireless / internet backbone areas. Areas that need long haul fiber optics to have bandwidth suddenly won't, so it will actually improve existing internet service providers as well since their addressable market will increase.

ecpottinger 7y ago

I am part of a group setting a tiny house community. We found being more than a hour from any major city center was not a problem for most of the people interested in our setup. But limited mobile phone service and no high speed internet limits a lot of people. StarLink hopefully comes along by the time we start our planned future expansion.

mcny 7y ago
How big is the project? Have you looked at running your own fiber? I imagine the residents wouldn't mind not having to manage their own WiFi...
- ecpottinger 7y ago
  We are at South River Ontario Canada. At present we are three owners each building own house, we have 5 different people interested right now joining us to build their homes and our planning is no more than either 50 quarter acre or half acre lots which will let us leave about 15 acres untouched. The real short term is just Wifi, with ethernet cables for the further homes. Once we get more people, we will look into fiber for everybody.
  - cheez 7y ago
    How did you get together to build this community?
  - richardkmichael 7y ago
    How can I find out more about your project? I am in the area, and this sounds very appealing.
  - Empact 7y ago
    Point-to-point Wifi is powerful and is being deployed as an alternative to fixed lines in some places. E.g. see the Ubiquiti products. https://www.ui.com/products/#airmax https://www.ui.com/products/#airmax
  - deleted 7y ago

grandinj 7y ago

> you can't really cheat the Shannon-Hartley theorem No, but you can work within it's limits to achieve some fairly spectacular things. I predict that if low-orbit sat service starts bringing competition to rural areas, we will see the cell companies start using spatial diversity antennae to dramatically up the available bandwidth.

vvanders 7y ago
I'm not sure how solving problems with multi-path and/or LOS helps here. The fundamental problem with rural is that the $ invested : customers served($ out) is drastically lower as population density diminishes.
- grandinj 7y ago
  Spatial diversity does more than help with multi-path issues. It multiplies your available bandwidth by sub-dividing the space around the base-station.
  - vvanders 7y ago
    Bandwidth doesn't help you with HAAT[1] and the fact that you need to build out towers every couple miles or more depending on your terrain. Towers are not cheap to build or maintain, if you only get a couple hundred people per tower it may not make sense to do(and why you don't see a lot of community WISPs except in unique cases). [1] https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/haat-calculator https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/haat-calculator

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

I read an HN comment before that convinced me it's physically impossible for this system to work for more than a couple million devices at VERY low bandwidth (I think the quote was like 0.1mbps). Is this true? I was all aboard the SpaceX hype train until that comment. I remember looking into his argument, and it seemed like everything checked out.

westpfelia 7y ago
I mean if you live in a place where you just dont get internet even 100 kbps can be game changing. Sure you cant stream netflix. But being able to some degree go on the internet is pretty big.
superkuh 7y ago
Did the arguement stem from the problems of sharing bandwidth due to free space broadcast (instead of wires where everyone can re-use the same bandwidth)? Because, if so, the spot beams for the Starlink sats down to the ground terminal are only ~15 km in diameter. The uplink back to the sats may be a bit more constrained and won't scale. But downstream should be fine.
eutropia 7y ago
I'm sure that very smart person thought of problems in 5 minutes in an internet comment that the engineers who just put 60 satellites in orbit with didn't consider about their total addressable market...

thebigspacefuck 7y ago

Satellite internet is already available in rural areas and it doesn't seem to make that big of a difference. Most people care more about the culture that populated areas provide more than internet speeds. Personally I pay $30 a month for 15 Mbps. I remember EarthLink or Prodigy being like $15-20 a month for 56Kbps. I remember leaving the modem on all night to download a 30MB demo of Monster Truck Madness in Elementary School. Now speeds are ~250 times what they were and the price has only doubled in the past 20 years? That's f-ing amazing. Prices are not getting out of control if you stick to the bottom end. I'm not even sure what I'd do with gig internet. For areas going from no internet to satellite internet it's probably going to be amazing, but going from high latency satellite internet to low latency satellite internet will not be a huge game changer. Adoption of http2 would probably help the quality of existing satellite internet more and be cheaper than this endeavor. As everyone started moving to HTTPS, the handshakes take much longer on a high latency connection and multiplexing would help alleviate that issue.

epicide 7y ago
> I'm not even sure what I'd do with gig internet. We're going to find out and that's the most interesting part.
- thebigspacefuck 7y ago
  Agreed, but at this point in time I can't think of any "killer apps" for it. It seems silly to pay so much for something I wouldn't be able to use today.
  - Kye 7y ago
    I couldn't imagine replacing TV with streaming HD video or downloading free multi-gigabyte sample packs just to see what's in them before before multi-megabyte connections and affordable half terabyte hard drives. Most new or improved technology is speculative. No one knows what people will use it for 10 years later. Guesses rarely pan out.
    - 7y ago

woliveirajr 7y ago

What will it mean to youtube, facebook, google, amazon, netflix, if all those sparse clients with slow internet become a broadband client... And, even more, a client that is driven away by some sort of capping? Of redirection to another site? Ads from another company? Because net neutrality isn't exactly a thing everywhere, worldwide.

hairytrog 7y ago

It'll just be a new monopoly owned by SpaceX. Great