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This is complete nonsense. There is not enough demand for all those satellites and capacity, so it's very hard to understand why they are making such a filing.

This is complete nonsense. There is not enough demand for all those satellites and capacity, so it's very hard to understand why they are making such a filing. As of today, there is probably ~ 1 Tbps of usable capacity in space (wordlwide). With such a big constellation they could provide 100x this capacity, but who is going to buy it? How are they going to compete with fiber-delivered Internet in big cities? They cannot offer the same QoS, so you do not want space delivered Internet if you can have it through terrestrial networks.

nikanj 7y ago
Supply creates demand. Rural areas in the US and Canada get no fiber
- SupersonicScrub 7y ago
  Not to mention the massive populations living in underdeveloped areas in Africa.
  - dvdbloc 7y ago
    Not to mention the populations in Urban America that simply don’t have access to fiber.
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  Even developed areas in the US typically are stuck with one broadband provider. If you do have a second one, everywhere I've lived it's been DSL service and I've never heard anything good about it aside from being cheaper than Comcast.
  - portillo 7y ago
    Exactly, that is the real problem, the lack of competition from terrestrial networks. In the US the ISPs operate as a monopoly. In most big cities in Europe you have 3/4 providers to choose from, which reduces costs and increases the quality of service.
ctdonath 7y ago
How do current ground wired customers like their internet provider? On the whole, they don’t. What percentage of the world population has internet access of any kind? of land area? of anything over 1Mbps? Huge untapped markets there. I see this building up like onset of digital photography: nobody expected supplanting film & paper, yet the whole world switched seemingly overnight. Kodak went from most valuable brand to “who?” fast. Once people see Starlink working fast, reliably, and anywhere they’ll switch en masse. Personally, as a 100% telecommuter, the only thing stopping me from moving where I want is internet connectivity. One billion customers divided by 40,000 Starlink satellites is a very manageable 25,000 users each. Sometime please run the numbers on supporting 100Mbps for each, plus latency. Given that, I expect a huge migration of customers.
rhacker 7y ago
Well the current providers that supposedly own that bandwidth are not willing to give anyone unlimited plans unless it's after 6pm and before 6am. Beyond that they want to charge like it's a cell phone.
cholmon 7y ago
~45% of the world's population lives in rural areas. That's a lot of potential customers, myself included; I live 30 minutes north of a US state capitol, and my only option for terrestrial internet at home is 1.5mbps DSL (which I currently pay $70/mo for), or my cell carrier (which is spotty and unreliable in my house), so I'd definitely consider SpaceX Internet.
- borkt 7y ago
  I live 60 miles from san francisco and can't even get DSL - Satellite and cell only, cell is no service 40% of the time, 1 bar 60%
smachiz 7y ago
I think you're making a lot of assumptions here. First off, these constellations will (in theory) have fewer tradeoffs vs terrestrial networks. At only 350-800 miles up, they are much lower latency than current satellite based Internet. These in theory add similar levels of latency as DOCSIS - and tolerable levels to most internet based applications. It won't replace fiber for very latency sensitive applications - but being able to deliver a tremendous amount of bandwidth virtually anywhere with a penalty of only ~7-10ms is very compelling. Secondly, in rural areas, everyone has a view of the sky. Very few have compelling fiber, or even cable/DSL options. This could dramatically reduce the cost of backhaul services to ground based cellular stations - and improve connectivity in a variety of other ways. If it's cheap enough.
- portillo 7y ago
  I don't think that latency is a decisive factor for most people / networks (as long as its below certain threshold). Most people will tell you it's a price-based decision. On the other hand, roughly 85% of the population worldwide is already covered by 3G or 4G networks. I am not sure that space will be able to offer lower prices for backhaul if the infrastructure is already there. A fiber PoP / tower has much lower OPEX than launching, operating a constellation of satellites.
  - xoa 7y ago
    >On the other hand, roughly 85% of the population worldwide is already covered by 3G or 4G networks. First, and less importantly, source. Because phone companies love to toss out coverage numbers that are pure, unadulterated bullshit. But second that's less important because 3G and 4G are both completely uncompetitive for broadband. LTE is basically the minimum there. And awful data caps and congestion remain a serious issue all over the place. >A fiber PoP / tower has much lower OPEX than launching, operating a constellation of satellites. Is it? I mean, seriously. A lot of SpaceX's plans are based on estimated launch costs via Super Heavy, so necessarily somewhat speculative. But the target is sub-$100/kg, and at least in terms of fundamentals (like cost of fuel, Raptor effectiveness, estimated cadence) that doesn't look ridiculous. Each Starlink satellite apparently has a mass over around 230 kg. Add a bit of extra mass for some bigger sats in the mix, double the launch cost to be a bit more conservative, and we're still talking a launch cost per satellite of well under $60k a piece. They necessarily have everything needed to operate their design lifetime, because there is no maintenance that can be done on them. They're operating low enough that solar weather shouldn't be too constant a concern, and of course will never face OPEX costs like vegetation clearing or weather damage or corrosion or the like. Also doesn't face NIMBY tower politics either. Is it actually more expensive then running fiber and building/maintaining a tower? For very high density locations probably, but there's a pretty sizable population in the US alone for whom it seems on napkin math it could be very competitive.
the8472 7y ago
They deliver better latency than current sat-based internet. They also want to use fixed phase array antennas instead of large dishes or tracking dishes. This is a new kind of service that has not existed before.
- portillo 7y ago
  Yeah, we will see the price of those phase array antennas.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    DSL modems are a similar technology leap - they used to contain high end FPGA's, DSP chips, and high speed analogue to digital converters, and they'd cost hundreds of dollars. Now a cheap DSL modem is $10, and it's all a single SoC. Phased array satellite modems will follow the same price curve.
    - portillo 7y ago
      I hope that ends up happening, it will be a bigger innovation than all these constellations!! I don't think it will happen in the next 3 years though. I think that most of the manufacturers are focusing on the high-end market, and first terminals will be in the thousands of dolars.
      - londons_explore 7y ago
        I think it will happen, because phased array systems are being developed for 5G, next-gen WiFi, etc. Lots of players in the ASIC design game are designing similar hardware, and in the volumes spacex presumably wants to order, I think they'd be totally happy to spin a chip putting together a few hundred phase shifters and amplifiers in-front of a regular DSL modem SoC.
uoaei 7y ago
Not enough demand? The 3 or 4 billion people without internet don't get to participate in the conversation? Big cities could benefit if a lot of the load on existing networks shifts to Starlink. Better service for everyone. Not everything is simply competition / winner-take-all in market economics, even if that's the tendency.
- marvin 7y ago
  Yep. This is the kind of "create new markets" move that seems to not make sense, but will be a spectacular success if it pans out. And no one else will be able to compete. There is only one company in the world that will be capable to economically launch 30,000 satellites in a single-digit number of years.
- derekp7 7y ago
  Not to mention, that cell towers may be a lot cheaper to operate over Starlink.
  - ctdonath 7y ago
    Their cost though is limited range/coverage and very limited non-mobile data plans. I want 100Mbps 1TB/mo anywhere.
  - elsonrodriguez 7y ago
    Are you sure? Keep in mind current cell phone coverage is spotty, with many unserved or underserved areas, and towns where Verizon is clearly better than AT&T, or vice versa. Running that kind of cell tower network might be cheaper, but running a cell phone network that spans every inch of the globe would be an engineering and logistics feat that would almost be impossible to profit off of. Even maintenance-wise, servicing a cell tower requires keeping a bunch of contractors around to drive to drive, fly, or even boat to remote areas, and climb a hundred feet once they get there. With starlink, they can just piggyback replacement satellites on customer payloads. Also, there are around 4 million cell towers in the world to achieve spotty coverage, whereas starlink is targeting 40k satellites for global coverage. I'd have to believe that launching 40,000 similar payloads via similar methods has huge vertical integration advantages over the extremely heterogeneous approaches we use to put up those millions of towers.
uoaei 7y ago
Another point which may be missing from the analysis: if I were Musk and I wanted 3000 satellites in orbit I'd probably also make a filing for 10x that and see how much I can get / how much I will need to meet demand.
bluedino 7y ago
Even if we have ~1Tbps total satellite network capacity, what kind of bandwidth can one user on the ground have to themselves?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tw04 7y ago
>How are they going to compete with fiber-delivered Internet in big cities? Who is this mystery company building fiber-delivered internet in big cities? You must not be talking about the US, because: #Google #CenturyLink #Verizon Were the major players building out, and all have stopped. That's ignoring the tens of millions of people who don't live in the city and have 3Mbps DSL as their best case scenario. And that's ignoring the mess in Australia and Canada. There will be PLENTY of demand for high speed, low latency satellite.
- portillo 7y ago
  I am not talking fiber to the home, I am talking a fiber backed infrastructure, like cell towers and such. If the solution was to provide Internet wirelessly, we would have that right now. The cell phone infrastructure provides much higher data-densities than any satellite network will ever be able to provide.
  - tw04 7y ago
    I'm not following your point. The whole reason Starlink is being launched is for home broadband. Every cell provider in existence has ridiculously low caps - starlink is supposed to be uncapped. You're the guy telling someone he doesn't need a dump truck for his landscape business because we have public buses.
    - portillo 7y ago
      You could provide home broadband using a wireless, mobile-network like system if you wanted to. It is not happening because it's very difficult to do that with the spectrum allocated for mobile services. A network of towers can provide higher capacity densities than what SpaceX's 30k satellite systems will be able to. In big cities, they will fall very sort of the capacity required. The current 4,409 satellite proposal has beams of ~700 Mbps, and each of those covers a surface larger than the whole NYC metropolitan area. The capacity scales linearly with the number of satellites in line-of-sight (LoS). Right now, with the 4,409 satellite system you can have ~40 satellites in LoS, so they can provide ~28 Gbps of throughput to the whole city. Even with 30k satellites, they will only be able to provide ~196 Gbps. That is not enough to offer any uncapped data plan.

nikanj 7y ago

Supply creates demand. Rural areas in the US and Canada get no fiber

SupersonicScrub 7y ago
Not to mention the massive populations living in underdeveloped areas in Africa.
- dvdbloc 7y ago
  Not to mention the populations in Urban America that simply don’t have access to fiber.
wlesieutre 7y ago
Even developed areas in the US typically are stuck with one broadband provider. If you do have a second one, everywhere I've lived it's been DSL service and I've never heard anything good about it aside from being cheaper than Comcast.
- portillo 7y ago
  Exactly, that is the real problem, the lack of competition from terrestrial networks. In the US the ISPs operate as a monopoly. In most big cities in Europe you have 3/4 providers to choose from, which reduces costs and increases the quality of service.

ctdonath 7y ago

How do current ground wired customers like their internet provider? On the whole, they don’t. What percentage of the world population has internet access of any kind? of land area? of anything over 1Mbps? Huge untapped markets there. I see this building up like onset of digital photography: nobody expected supplanting film & paper, yet the whole world switched seemingly overnight. Kodak went from most valuable brand to “who?” fast. Once people see Starlink working fast, reliably, and anywhere they’ll switch en masse. Personally, as a 100% telecommuter, the only thing stopping me from moving where I want is internet connectivity. One billion customers divided by 40,000 Starlink satellites is a very manageable 25,000 users each. Sometime please run the numbers on supporting 100Mbps for each, plus latency. Given that, I expect a huge migration of customers.

rhacker 7y ago

Well the current providers that supposedly own that bandwidth are not willing to give anyone unlimited plans unless it's after 6pm and before 6am. Beyond that they want to charge like it's a cell phone.

cholmon 7y ago

~45% of the world's population lives in rural areas. That's a lot of potential customers, myself included; I live 30 minutes north of a US state capitol, and my only option for terrestrial internet at home is 1.5mbps DSL (which I currently pay $70/mo for), or my cell carrier (which is spotty and unreliable in my house), so I'd definitely consider SpaceX Internet.

borkt 7y ago
I live 60 miles from san francisco and can't even get DSL - Satellite and cell only, cell is no service 40% of the time, 1 bar 60%

smachiz 7y ago

I think you're making a lot of assumptions here. First off, these constellations will (in theory) have fewer tradeoffs vs terrestrial networks. At only 350-800 miles up, they are much lower latency than current satellite based Internet. These in theory add similar levels of latency as DOCSIS - and tolerable levels to most internet based applications. It won't replace fiber for very latency sensitive applications - but being able to deliver a tremendous amount of bandwidth virtually anywhere with a penalty of only ~7-10ms is very compelling. Secondly, in rural areas, everyone has a view of the sky. Very few have compelling fiber, or even cable/DSL options. This could dramatically reduce the cost of backhaul services to ground based cellular stations - and improve connectivity in a variety of other ways. If it's cheap enough.

portillo 7y ago
I don't think that latency is a decisive factor for most people / networks (as long as its below certain threshold). Most people will tell you it's a price-based decision. On the other hand, roughly 85% of the population worldwide is already covered by 3G or 4G networks. I am not sure that space will be able to offer lower prices for backhaul if the infrastructure is already there. A fiber PoP / tower has much lower OPEX than launching, operating a constellation of satellites.
- xoa 7y ago
  >On the other hand, roughly 85% of the population worldwide is already covered by 3G or 4G networks. First, and less importantly, source. Because phone companies love to toss out coverage numbers that are pure, unadulterated bullshit. But second that's less important because 3G and 4G are both completely uncompetitive for broadband. LTE is basically the minimum there. And awful data caps and congestion remain a serious issue all over the place. >A fiber PoP / tower has much lower OPEX than launching, operating a constellation of satellites. Is it? I mean, seriously. A lot of SpaceX's plans are based on estimated launch costs via Super Heavy, so necessarily somewhat speculative. But the target is sub-$100/kg, and at least in terms of fundamentals (like cost of fuel, Raptor effectiveness, estimated cadence) that doesn't look ridiculous. Each Starlink satellite apparently has a mass over around 230 kg. Add a bit of extra mass for some bigger sats in the mix, double the launch cost to be a bit more conservative, and we're still talking a launch cost per satellite of well under $60k a piece. They necessarily have everything needed to operate their design lifetime, because there is no maintenance that can be done on them. They're operating low enough that solar weather shouldn't be too constant a concern, and of course will never face OPEX costs like vegetation clearing or weather damage or corrosion or the like. Also doesn't face NIMBY tower politics either. Is it actually more expensive then running fiber and building/maintaining a tower? For very high density locations probably, but there's a pretty sizable population in the US alone for whom it seems on napkin math it could be very competitive.

the8472 7y ago

They deliver better latency than current sat-based internet. They also want to use fixed phase array antennas instead of large dishes or tracking dishes. This is a new kind of service that has not existed before.

portillo 7y ago
Yeah, we will see the price of those phase array antennas.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  DSL modems are a similar technology leap - they used to contain high end FPGA's, DSP chips, and high speed analogue to digital converters, and they'd cost hundreds of dollars. Now a cheap DSL modem is $10, and it's all a single SoC. Phased array satellite modems will follow the same price curve.
  - portillo 7y ago
    I hope that ends up happening, it will be a bigger innovation than all these constellations!! I don't think it will happen in the next 3 years though. I think that most of the manufacturers are focusing on the high-end market, and first terminals will be in the thousands of dolars.
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      I think it will happen, because phased array systems are being developed for 5G, next-gen WiFi, etc. Lots of players in the ASIC design game are designing similar hardware, and in the volumes spacex presumably wants to order, I think they'd be totally happy to spin a chip putting together a few hundred phase shifters and amplifiers in-front of a regular DSL modem SoC.

uoaei 7y ago

Not enough demand? The 3 or 4 billion people without internet don't get to participate in the conversation? Big cities could benefit if a lot of the load on existing networks shifts to Starlink. Better service for everyone. Not everything is simply competition / winner-take-all in market economics, even if that's the tendency.

marvin 7y ago
Yep. This is the kind of "create new markets" move that seems to not make sense, but will be a spectacular success if it pans out. And no one else will be able to compete. There is only one company in the world that will be capable to economically launch 30,000 satellites in a single-digit number of years.
derekp7 7y ago
Not to mention, that cell towers may be a lot cheaper to operate over Starlink.
- ctdonath 7y ago
  Their cost though is limited range/coverage and very limited non-mobile data plans. I want 100Mbps 1TB/mo anywhere.
- elsonrodriguez 7y ago
  Are you sure? Keep in mind current cell phone coverage is spotty, with many unserved or underserved areas, and towns where Verizon is clearly better than AT&T, or vice versa. Running that kind of cell tower network might be cheaper, but running a cell phone network that spans every inch of the globe would be an engineering and logistics feat that would almost be impossible to profit off of. Even maintenance-wise, servicing a cell tower requires keeping a bunch of contractors around to drive to drive, fly, or even boat to remote areas, and climb a hundred feet once they get there. With starlink, they can just piggyback replacement satellites on customer payloads. Also, there are around 4 million cell towers in the world to achieve spotty coverage, whereas starlink is targeting 40k satellites for global coverage. I'd have to believe that launching 40,000 similar payloads via similar methods has huge vertical integration advantages over the extremely heterogeneous approaches we use to put up those millions of towers.

uoaei 7y ago

Another point which may be missing from the analysis: if I were Musk and I wanted 3000 satellites in orbit I'd probably also make a filing for 10x that and see how much I can get / how much I will need to meet demand.

bluedino 7y ago

Even if we have ~1Tbps total satellite network capacity, what kind of bandwidth can one user on the ground have to themselves?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tw04 7y ago

>How are they going to compete with fiber-delivered Internet in big cities? Who is this mystery company building fiber-delivered internet in big cities? You must not be talking about the US, because: #Google #CenturyLink #Verizon Were the major players building out, and all have stopped. That's ignoring the tens of millions of people who don't live in the city and have 3Mbps DSL as their best case scenario. And that's ignoring the mess in Australia and Canada. There will be PLENTY of demand for high speed, low latency satellite.

portillo 7y ago
I am not talking fiber to the home, I am talking a fiber backed infrastructure, like cell towers and such. If the solution was to provide Internet wirelessly, we would have that right now. The cell phone infrastructure provides much higher data-densities than any satellite network will ever be able to provide.
- tw04 7y ago
  I'm not following your point. The whole reason Starlink is being launched is for home broadband. Every cell provider in existence has ridiculously low caps - starlink is supposed to be uncapped. You're the guy telling someone he doesn't need a dump truck for his landscape business because we have public buses.
  - portillo 7y ago
    You could provide home broadband using a wireless, mobile-network like system if you wanted to. It is not happening because it's very difficult to do that with the spectrum allocated for mobile services. A network of towers can provide higher capacity densities than what SpaceX's 30k satellite systems will be able to. In big cities, they will fall very sort of the capacity required. The current 4,409 satellite proposal has beams of ~700 Mbps, and each of those covers a surface larger than the whole NYC metropolitan area. The capacity scales linearly with the number of satellites in line-of-sight (LoS). Right now, with the 4,409 satellite system you can have ~40 satellites in LoS, so they can provide ~28 Gbps of throughput to the whole city. Even with 30k satellites, they will only be able to provide ~196 Gbps. That is not enough to offer any uncapped data plan.