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Anyone wanna offer me their hypothesis on what Amazon and other tech companies gain from offering internet to people who probably aren't valuable consumers?

buboard 7y ago
It s a ruse. The US will win the landgrab for controlling the communication networks of up and coming regions like Africa before the Chinese do
- mtgx 7y ago
  Not a bad point at all, especially with Amazon joining at the hip with the U.S. government lately.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  Better the US than China, honestly. For all its faults, the US is still a (flawed) democracy with a free press. Its capacity for abuse is at least moderated.
jandrewrogers 7y ago
Satellites are outside the regulatory authority of countries they operate over. They can do far more of value than merely provide Internet access to poor people.
- penagwin 7y ago
  Satellites also have to be specialty built for their purpose. You can't just take a small communications satellite, attach a small camera, and have a spy satellite. Well you "could" but it would be so crappy that it'd be useless. Also LEO satellites lose their altitude rather quickly, not a great investment for spy satellites. > Satellites are outside the regulatory authority of countries they operate over. Except the United States (Assuming the satellite was made/operated by a US entity such as a citizen or business), so they still have PLENTY of regulations to follow.
  - godelski 7y ago
    But they would be good for measuring graphical changes and some weather. Though NOAA has a lot of this already covered and better.
  - Phlarp 7y ago
    These would make poor imaging satellites you are correct, but what could possibly be more valuable intelligence than a global scale firehose of data. Just the metadata of packet routing across the constellation would have huge value to intel agencies. To say nothing of the implicit value in denying an adversary access to that information.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      There's far more efficient ways of tapping global data than launching satellites. Just build undersea fibre if surveillance is your goal.
- michaelt 7y ago
  Are you imagining they'll provide uncensored internet in China or something? I agree it's mechanically possible, but Amazon isn't the company I'd have expected to do it.
  - ancientworldnow 7y ago
    It's also dependent on consumers being able to purchase the receiving dish, hide its installation, and the government not to jam the signals. That's a lot of ifs.
aalleavitch 7y ago
They probably are valuable customers. Tech companies have literally no reach where the internet does not touch. If they want to expand to their full (terrifying) power, they would need to give internet access to everyone, and then control it.
- repsilat 7y ago
  Terrifying power? Amazon has succeeded by getting customers what they want, and doing it cheaper, faster and more conveniently than their competition. Of all the tech companies to be cynical about, they most obviously make people's lives better, and expanding their reach (along with the "ancillary benefits" of giving people access to the internet...) is a moral good. Really, this knee-jerk paranoia is difficult to understand. If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business. If it pisses people off it'll go out of business. If it tries to break the law it'll go out of business. It has limited power -- effectively none compared to any kind of government -- and no ambitions, incentives or clear paths to acquire that kind of power.
  - aalleavitch 7y ago
    "If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business. If it pisses people off it'll go out of business." This is the central myth of the free market. Part and parcel of a massive internet company is having control over the flow of information, how can people protect their rights if they don't even know they're being violated, or if they're being distracted from protecting themselves by lies and manipulation? That is essentially the stated goal of a company's PR, and the sort of technology that goes into actively manipulative practices that we just accept out of tradition (the entire concept of marketing is a violation of "invisible hand") has now reached the level where people stand no chance, the amount of money and research that goes into making you make decisions that are in a large corporation's interests over your own are something any particular individual could never possibly match.
    - adventured 7y ago
      > This is the central myth of the free market. Tell Sears and Kmart that it's a myth. Top US retailers in 1970: Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, McCrory's, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, May, Dayton-Hudson (Target) Only one of those remains on the list now (in an entirely different form at that). The Internet has changed nothing fundamental about whether a retailer can be replaced by competition. And no, Amazon's warehouses don't make it impossible to compete with any more than Sears previously having thousands of physical stores supposedly protected them via reach / scale that others couldn't match. For retailers, the Internet is a better catalog. Sears rode the last version to temporary dominance, Amazon rode this version to temporary online dominance.
marcosdumay 7y ago
Define "valuable". If you gather a lot of people with just a bit of money each, they'll collectively have a lot of money.
bparsons 7y ago
Telecoms are among the most tightly regulated and jealously held national level industries. If you can put up a global network in a few years that pushes down 4 and 5G speeds, the national telecom companies become obsolete. There will be some holdouts, but eventually it will become stupid for many places to invest in terrestrial infrastructure just to protect a technologically inferior domestic telecom company.
- Sabinus 7y ago
  There will still be bandwidth limitations. Same with 5g whenever that comes. Fibre isn't going anywhere.
usrusr 7y ago
Oh, they will be valuable customers: poor people are too poor to afford choice. If Amazon offers "internet access" for x¤ monthly, and "Amazon internet access" for x/3¤, what option will poor people take? After that, all of their online spending will be as profitable as selling groceries in the company town store.
mobilefriendly 7y ago
I live in West Virginia and have no household access to broadband internet service. (No cable or DSL available here) The square mile around me has dozens of homes with incomes above the US median. Our area is not especially rugged, but the West Virginia government is both corrupt and incompetent. We are all cheering on Starlink and this new effort from Amazon. The only question is whether 5G will get here first!
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Why not use 4G? Starlink's bandwidth (price per gigabyte) is probably not going to be great.
gpm 7y ago
Not valuable? Ships, oil rigs, airplanes, remote vacation destinations (e.g. ski lodges), etc have lots of money and a good concentration of rich people with lots of money.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Yeah and there's already a lot of providers of satellite internet. But, Starlink has not published their pricing, so it's unclear how much of the market will they capture.
  - gpm 7y ago
    Sure, there are competitors. Starlink (or any other proposed LEO constellation) offers a fundamentally better product as a result of low latency (ballpark 640ms vs 20ms). Which they get as a result of being in low earth orbit instead of geosynchronous orbit. Starlinks costs per unit bandwidth are almost certainly far lower, meaning the ability to out compete on price. I don't see the existing constellations remaining competitive for long.
    - H8crilA 7y ago
      > Starlinks costs per unit bandwidth are almost certainly far lower Interesting, how do you know that?
      - portyllo 7y ago
        It's not true. LEO systems are far more CAPEX intensive than GEO, and neither Starlink, Oneweb, Telesat, or Kuiper will be cheaper than Viasat-3 and will not be able to compete in terms of cost per Gbps.
        H8crilA 7y ago
        Do you have any good sources on that? Not that I doubt you, but would like to read more on the subject.
godelski 7y ago
There's a few, but mostly AWS. If you're going to put up satellites to do low latency internet, they need to be in LEO. (Speed of light is slow and GEO is far away) This ends up allowing you to provide internet in most locations as well. Kinda a spin-off. So they want to provide high speed internet to any first world without having to build tons of physical towers (you still need them). I also wouldn't be surprised if Sl Americans who live in sparsely populated areas use Amazon as a primary place to obtain things (I know I did). So now we can also do things like provide high speed and low latency internet to ships, islands, and people all over the world. Remember that most of Amazon's business is AWS, not Amazon.com. Less than half the world population is on the internet. More users means more servers. Easy to see the the major advantage. Amazon doesn't care if they're using Amazon.com but if they're using AWS. Which there's a good chance they will. Tldr: AWS is where they currently make their money and where more users will just increase that capital.
dharmab 7y ago
One of Starlink's planned markets is global high frequency trading. The latency of radio and laser transmission in atmosphere and space is much lower than undersea fiber optic cables. (Light moves significantly slower through glass than through air.) Even with the longer distance and retransmission they stand a good chance of being lower latency across oceans than undersea cables.
- godelski 7y ago
  I did the math on this. It probably wouldn't be good for hft. The highly profitable hft is done on the floor of the nyse. There's some from Boston but they typically use directed radio instead of fiber-optic. Satellites will be even slower, but maybe cheaper if you're sending date from California or Australia. But it's still probably cheaper (and more profitable) to put a machine on the floor or even just in NYC. I'm not sure why hft would be a major pitch. These people fight for floor space at the nyse because that much latency matters.
  - etaty 7y ago
    Think London to NYC, or NYC to Tokyo. Fiber will be slower. https://youtu.be/QEIUdMiColU?t=196 https://youtu.be/QEIUdMiColU?t=196
    - godelski 7y ago
      What I'm saying is that it's faster to just buy a server in NYC.
      - eloff 7y ago
        The idea is you profit on acting on cross market trading before anytime else can. It's not about latency to any single market.
        godelski 7y ago
        Seeing something before someone else can IS latency. That's why servers on the NYSE floor (or ANY SE floor) are really expensive. Because it gives you an advantage. It isn't humans reacting and buying in HFT, it is computers. The humans are constantly updating algorithms, but HFT means it is the computers doing the reactions (based on algos written).
thefourthchime 7y ago
High speed trading. You can send a packet faster from London to nyc via a LEO network than an underwater fiber.
- myaccount80 7y ago
  Why are there people investing so much money on these things, filling up the space, just for some stupid trading. Why is humanity doing this ??
  - megablast 7y ago
    $$$
  - harryh 7y ago
    "just for some stupid trading" is one of the underlying forces beneath the success of all modern economies. Without it almost everything you buy would be more expensive.
    - llukas 7y ago
      They referred to HFT only - how does it contribute to "success" of modern economies? It just sucks out value due to stock market implementation.
      - __d 7y ago
        That argument can apply to any improvement in efficiency of a process. Admittedly any contribution of HFT to economic success (other than that of the traders themselves, of course) is probably fairly marginal, but more efficient markets are probably a good thing.
    - myaccount80 7y ago
      Are you considering “having cheaper stuff” actually progress in terms of humanity ?
BurningFrog 7y ago
Won't this offer internet to everyone on Earth?
- ancientworldnow 7y ago
  For those who can afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a receiving, sure. (starlink, for example, will require a pizza box sized dish at what they hope will be a price of a few hundred dollars)
  - shaklee3 7y ago
    It won't be that cheap. I'd bet money on it.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Due to bandwidth limitations, most of these systems won't work well in densely populated areas. The orbits also have an inclination that won't take them over more extreme latitudes
thinkling 7y ago
Once they have their own satellite-based cell network, they can take another stab at launching a mobile phone. The Amazon Fire2 phone will be able to use this proprietary network. Amazon could then go for entry into mobile markets by selling phones with data service included free, trying to become a third major mobile platform. Alternately, Amazon is developing their Alexa-fronted Internet-of-Things (home automation, etc.). This network could serve those devices and make their setup easier. (No need to connect them to your wifi network. Amazon could claim their IoT is inherently safer because they control the entire network that they operate on, so your security camera won't get hacked. (Note that Amazon owns the Ring doorbell products.)
- greglindahl 7y ago
  Imagine how many customers will jump at the chance to carry a pizza box-sized antenna for a cellphone!
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    Honestly, if I could get home wifi speeds in my car, I would. I hate watching Netflix and having pauses as I drive on the highway.
Nican 7y ago
Real engineering made a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs I recommend watching. The channel does really good explanations.
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  I quite liked that video. It was indeed worth watching.
ghobs91 7y ago
They're playing the (somewhat) long game. While the portion of the world that doesn't internet access right now is generally poor, adding an internet connection to that populace will drastically speed up their development. This then gives Amazon new customers. Their options are either wait around for 3rd world governments to build the infrastructure to get them those customers, or do it themselves faster.
AYBABTME 7y ago
Lower latency internet backbone for cross continental links. Latency around the world via satellite is less than via optical fiber, since speed of light in fiber is much less than in a vacuum. For AWS, it's a huge selling point for many customers if they can offer lower global latencies than anyone else! Think of all the algorithmic traders, the canonical example.

buboard 7y ago

It s a ruse. The US will win the landgrab for controlling the communication networks of up and coming regions like Africa before the Chinese do

mtgx 7y ago
Not a bad point at all, especially with Amazon joining at the hip with the U.S. government lately.
ForHackernews 7y ago
Better the US than China, honestly. For all its faults, the US is still a (flawed) democracy with a free press. Its capacity for abuse is at least moderated.

jandrewrogers 7y ago

Satellites are outside the regulatory authority of countries they operate over. They can do far more of value than merely provide Internet access to poor people.

penagwin 7y ago
Satellites also have to be specialty built for their purpose. You can't just take a small communications satellite, attach a small camera, and have a spy satellite. Well you "could" but it would be so crappy that it'd be useless. Also LEO satellites lose their altitude rather quickly, not a great investment for spy satellites. > Satellites are outside the regulatory authority of countries they operate over. Except the United States (Assuming the satellite was made/operated by a US entity such as a citizen or business), so they still have PLENTY of regulations to follow.
- godelski 7y ago
  But they would be good for measuring graphical changes and some weather. Though NOAA has a lot of this already covered and better.
- Phlarp 7y ago
  These would make poor imaging satellites you are correct, but what could possibly be more valuable intelligence than a global scale firehose of data. Just the metadata of packet routing across the constellation would have huge value to intel agencies. To say nothing of the implicit value in denying an adversary access to that information.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    There's far more efficient ways of tapping global data than launching satellites. Just build undersea fibre if surveillance is your goal.
michaelt 7y ago
Are you imagining they'll provide uncensored internet in China or something? I agree it's mechanically possible, but Amazon isn't the company I'd have expected to do it.
- ancientworldnow 7y ago
  It's also dependent on consumers being able to purchase the receiving dish, hide its installation, and the government not to jam the signals. That's a lot of ifs.

aalleavitch 7y ago

They probably are valuable customers. Tech companies have literally no reach where the internet does not touch. If they want to expand to their full (terrifying) power, they would need to give internet access to everyone, and then control it.

repsilat 7y ago
Terrifying power? Amazon has succeeded by getting customers what they want, and doing it cheaper, faster and more conveniently than their competition. Of all the tech companies to be cynical about, they most obviously make people's lives better, and expanding their reach (along with the "ancillary benefits" of giving people access to the internet...) is a moral good. Really, this knee-jerk paranoia is difficult to understand. If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business. If it pisses people off it'll go out of business. If it tries to break the law it'll go out of business. It has limited power -- effectively none compared to any kind of government -- and no ambitions, incentives or clear paths to acquire that kind of power.
- aalleavitch 7y ago
  "If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business. If it pisses people off it'll go out of business." This is the central myth of the free market. Part and parcel of a massive internet company is having control over the flow of information, how can people protect their rights if they don't even know they're being violated, or if they're being distracted from protecting themselves by lies and manipulation? That is essentially the stated goal of a company's PR, and the sort of technology that goes into actively manipulative practices that we just accept out of tradition (the entire concept of marketing is a violation of "invisible hand") has now reached the level where people stand no chance, the amount of money and research that goes into making you make decisions that are in a large corporation's interests over your own are something any particular individual could never possibly match.
  - adventured 7y ago
    > This is the central myth of the free market. Tell Sears and Kmart that it's a myth. Top US retailers in 1970: Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, McCrory's, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, May, Dayton-Hudson (Target) Only one of those remains on the list now (in an entirely different form at that). The Internet has changed nothing fundamental about whether a retailer can be replaced by competition. And no, Amazon's warehouses don't make it impossible to compete with any more than Sears previously having thousands of physical stores supposedly protected them via reach / scale that others couldn't match. For retailers, the Internet is a better catalog. Sears rode the last version to temporary dominance, Amazon rode this version to temporary online dominance.

marcosdumay 7y ago

Define "valuable". If you gather a lot of people with just a bit of money each, they'll collectively have a lot of money.

bparsons 7y ago

Telecoms are among the most tightly regulated and jealously held national level industries. If you can put up a global network in a few years that pushes down 4 and 5G speeds, the national telecom companies become obsolete. There will be some holdouts, but eventually it will become stupid for many places to invest in terrestrial infrastructure just to protect a technologically inferior domestic telecom company.

Sabinus 7y ago
There will still be bandwidth limitations. Same with 5g whenever that comes. Fibre isn't going anywhere.

usrusr 7y ago

Oh, they will be valuable customers: poor people are too poor to afford choice. If Amazon offers "internet access" for x¤ monthly, and "Amazon internet access" for x/3¤, what option will poor people take? After that, all of their online spending will be as profitable as selling groceries in the company town store.

mobilefriendly 7y ago

I live in West Virginia and have no household access to broadband internet service. (No cable or DSL available here) The square mile around me has dozens of homes with incomes above the US median. Our area is not especially rugged, but the West Virginia government is both corrupt and incompetent. We are all cheering on Starlink and this new effort from Amazon. The only question is whether 5G will get here first!

H8crilA 7y ago
Why not use 4G? Starlink's bandwidth (price per gigabyte) is probably not going to be great.

gpm 7y ago

Not valuable? Ships, oil rigs, airplanes, remote vacation destinations (e.g. ski lodges), etc have lots of money and a good concentration of rich people with lots of money.

H8crilA 7y ago
Yeah and there's already a lot of providers of satellite internet. But, Starlink has not published their pricing, so it's unclear how much of the market will they capture.
- gpm 7y ago
  Sure, there are competitors. Starlink (or any other proposed LEO constellation) offers a fundamentally better product as a result of low latency (ballpark 640ms vs 20ms). Which they get as a result of being in low earth orbit instead of geosynchronous orbit. Starlinks costs per unit bandwidth are almost certainly far lower, meaning the ability to out compete on price. I don't see the existing constellations remaining competitive for long.
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    > Starlinks costs per unit bandwidth are almost certainly far lower Interesting, how do you know that?
    - portyllo 7y ago
      It's not true. LEO systems are far more CAPEX intensive than GEO, and neither Starlink, Oneweb, Telesat, or Kuiper will be cheaper than Viasat-3 and will not be able to compete in terms of cost per Gbps.
      - H8crilA 7y ago
        Do you have any good sources on that? Not that I doubt you, but would like to read more on the subject.

godelski 7y ago

There's a few, but mostly AWS. If you're going to put up satellites to do low latency internet, they need to be in LEO. (Speed of light is slow and GEO is far away) This ends up allowing you to provide internet in most locations as well. Kinda a spin-off. So they want to provide high speed internet to any first world without having to build tons of physical towers (you still need them). I also wouldn't be surprised if Sl Americans who live in sparsely populated areas use Amazon as a primary place to obtain things (I know I did). So now we can also do things like provide high speed and low latency internet to ships, islands, and people all over the world. Remember that most of Amazon's business is AWS, not Amazon.com. Less than half the world population is on the internet. More users means more servers. Easy to see the the major advantage. Amazon doesn't care if they're using Amazon.com but if they're using AWS. Which there's a good chance they will. Tldr: AWS is where they currently make their money and where more users will just increase that capital.

dharmab 7y ago

One of Starlink's planned markets is global high frequency trading. The latency of radio and laser transmission in atmosphere and space is much lower than undersea fiber optic cables. (Light moves significantly slower through glass than through air.) Even with the longer distance and retransmission they stand a good chance of being lower latency across oceans than undersea cables.

godelski 7y ago
I did the math on this. It probably wouldn't be good for hft. The highly profitable hft is done on the floor of the nyse. There's some from Boston but they typically use directed radio instead of fiber-optic. Satellites will be even slower, but maybe cheaper if you're sending date from California or Australia. But it's still probably cheaper (and more profitable) to put a machine on the floor or even just in NYC. I'm not sure why hft would be a major pitch. These people fight for floor space at the nyse because that much latency matters.
- etaty 7y ago
  Think London to NYC, or NYC to Tokyo. Fiber will be slower. https://youtu.be/QEIUdMiColU?t=196 https://youtu.be/QEIUdMiColU?t=196
  - godelski 7y ago
    What I'm saying is that it's faster to just buy a server in NYC.
    - eloff 7y ago
      The idea is you profit on acting on cross market trading before anytime else can. It's not about latency to any single market.
      - godelski 7y ago
        Seeing something before someone else can IS latency. That's why servers on the NYSE floor (or ANY SE floor) are really expensive. Because it gives you an advantage. It isn't humans reacting and buying in HFT, it is computers. The humans are constantly updating algorithms, but HFT means it is the computers doing the reactions (based on algos written).

thefourthchime 7y ago

High speed trading. You can send a packet faster from London to nyc via a LEO network than an underwater fiber.

myaccount80 7y ago
Why are there people investing so much money on these things, filling up the space, just for some stupid trading. Why is humanity doing this ??
- megablast 7y ago
  $$$
- harryh 7y ago
  "just for some stupid trading" is one of the underlying forces beneath the success of all modern economies. Without it almost everything you buy would be more expensive.
  - llukas 7y ago
    They referred to HFT only - how does it contribute to "success" of modern economies? It just sucks out value due to stock market implementation.
    - __d 7y ago
      That argument can apply to any improvement in efficiency of a process. Admittedly any contribution of HFT to economic success (other than that of the traders themselves, of course) is probably fairly marginal, but more efficient markets are probably a good thing.
  - myaccount80 7y ago
    Are you considering “having cheaper stuff” actually progress in terms of humanity ?

BurningFrog 7y ago

Won't this offer internet to everyone on Earth?

ancientworldnow 7y ago
For those who can afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a receiving, sure. (starlink, for example, will require a pizza box sized dish at what they hope will be a price of a few hundred dollars)
- shaklee3 7y ago
  It won't be that cheap. I'd bet money on it.
Rebelgecko 7y ago
Due to bandwidth limitations, most of these systems won't work well in densely populated areas. The orbits also have an inclination that won't take them over more extreme latitudes

thinkling 7y ago

Once they have their own satellite-based cell network, they can take another stab at launching a mobile phone. The Amazon Fire2 phone will be able to use this proprietary network. Amazon could then go for entry into mobile markets by selling phones with data service included free, trying to become a third major mobile platform. Alternately, Amazon is developing their Alexa-fronted Internet-of-Things (home automation, etc.). This network could serve those devices and make their setup easier. (No need to connect them to your wifi network. Amazon could claim their IoT is inherently safer because they control the entire network that they operate on, so your security camera won't get hacked. (Note that Amazon owns the Ring doorbell products.)

greglindahl 7y ago
Imagine how many customers will jump at the chance to carry a pizza box-sized antenna for a cellphone!
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  Honestly, if I could get home wifi speeds in my car, I would. I hate watching Netflix and having pauses as I drive on the highway.

Nican 7y ago

Real engineering made a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs I recommend watching. The channel does really good explanations.

PopeDotNinja 7y ago
I quite liked that video. It was indeed worth watching.

ghobs91 7y ago

They're playing the (somewhat) long game. While the portion of the world that doesn't internet access right now is generally poor, adding an internet connection to that populace will drastically speed up their development. This then gives Amazon new customers. Their options are either wait around for 3rd world governments to build the infrastructure to get them those customers, or do it themselves faster.

AYBABTME 7y ago

Lower latency internet backbone for cross continental links. Latency around the world via satellite is less than via optical fiber, since speed of light in fiber is much less than in a vacuum. For AWS, it's a huge selling point for many customers if they can offer lower global latencies than anyone else! Think of all the algorithmic traders, the canonical example.