8 ms·

Having this kind of network is a good thing but the idea that any kind of satellite or wireless can replace wires is just fantasy. Delivering just 10Mbps to 10

Having this kind of network is a good thing but the idea that any kind of satellite or wireless can replace wires is just fantasy. Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. And that's just a tiny fraction of the market. Physical cables/fiber represent several orders of magnitude more capacity and always will. So satellite is great for remote areas or unique situations but absolutely not a substitute for running cables.

Alupis 6y ago
And even in remote areas, building out VDSL2 networks with relatively decent speeds (200Mbps down and 100Mbps up[1]) would be better, honestly. Most homes already have a phone line and can support a DSL network... and in some countries a phone line is mandated by law, so the infrastructure already exists. But, DSL is not nearly as "sexy" as thousands of satellites... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDSL%20offers%20speeds%20of%20up,25%20kHz%20to%2012%20MHz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDSL%20offers%20s....
- chuckhendo 6y ago
  I mean, you're not wrong, VDSL in rural areas would be great! But it also hasn't happened.
- grahamburger 6y ago
  I haven't personally deployed VDSL2, but I have deployed DSL and other data-over-twisted pair systems including recent G.fast, G.hn and MOCA. I strongly doubt that VDSL can achieve those kinds of speeds reliably at the distances and densities needed to provide this service to the areas that need it most. In rural areas the copper lines are too long and too old to achieve these speeds (but they're fine for voice/POTS, so there's no mandate to upgrade.) Twisted pair is also really susceptible to noise and crosstalk, so in more densely populated areas once you start doing DSL to a lot of customers whose cables are bundled together they start to interfere with each other and everybody's service gets bad. In both cases the problem is signal to noise ratio - long cables mean poor signal, density means high noise, and twisted pair copper just isn't designed to deal with either very well.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    What about VDSL2 Vectoring (G.vector)? Seems like it mitigates most of the crosstalk problems - but I admit I'm not an expert on DSL deployments. It seems VDSL2 can achieve maximum throughput at run lengths under 1000ft from the DSLAM, with maximum performance beginning to degrade after. That sounds sufficient for most of the people currently stuck with slow access right now in the US (more rural areas outside major cities, but not actually remote as-in nearest neighbor is 1 mile away). Also... surely solving this problem is cheaper than sending thousands of satellites into orbit every few years as they decay.
    - grahamburger 6y ago
      > It seems VDSL2 can achieve maximum throughput at run lengths under 1000ft from the DSLAM, and maximum performance degrades after that over distance. That sounds sufficient for most of the people complaining of slow access right now in the US I would guess that this isn't right, but honestly I don't have the data either. My rough guess would be that only around 5-15% of people have <1000' of copper to their DSLAM, and I from what I've experienced with other technologies the speeds degrade very quickly after the max length, and only even work up to the max length in absolutely ideal scenarios. What I've seen of current copper infrastructure in the U.S. is pretty bad - lots of hand twisted copper lines with the ends exposed and rusting out, for example - that kind of thing would add the equivalent of at least several hundred feet of additional cable, and is very difficult to fix en-masse. Honestly my gut feeling is that you pretty much have to run new cables to something like 80% of the U.S. to get good Internet service everywhere, and obviously if you're running new cables you should just run fiber. Looking at the cost of that compared to launching satellites - and accounting for the additional benefits of the satellites, like connectivity in extremely remote places and on the ocean - I'm not sure the satellites don't come out ahead. EDIT TO ADD: A comparison point on the 1000 feet number is that this is in the same ballpark as how close a 5G tower needs to be to get real 5G service to your home or your cell phone. Current 4G towers are nowhere near that dense, and it's going to take huge amounts of money to get them that dense, even in the most densely populated areas.
      - 6y ago
- LinuxBender 6y ago
  True, but their first customer is the U.S. Army which tells me this networks primary purpose is the same as the original intent of the internet itself. A mobile network that is available and reliable anywhere. Civilians usually get to do all the beta testing and provide feedback that improves the technology. Also many of the places I have been looking at moving to don't even have POTS lines. This would fill the gap where POTS and VDSL is not available. I would certainly use VDSL if that were an option and use Starlink as a fallback in a very remote area.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    > Also many of the places I have been looking at moving to don't even have POTS lines Where are you, if you don't mind telling. I had thought, perhaps incorrectly, that in the US it was required by law to have POTS lines run to all homes - which led to it being installed during construction.
    - LinuxBender 6y ago
      The land I am looking at is in the south western part of Wyoming. Could you link the law? My understanding is that once a line is run, there is a process to decom the line, but that no line is required for a home. Many homesteaders do not have phone lines or on-grid power. The only requirements I am aware of are around septic systems.
      - Alupis 6y ago
        Interesting. I couldn't find the exact law to link to, but did turn up this WaPo article talking about 4 states starting to relax the requirement. > The universal landline requirement has been repealed in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. There, new homeowners have no guarantee that they could order phone service at affordable rates, consumer advocates say. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/landline-rules-frustrate-telecoms/2012/04/12/gIQAG2XvDT_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/landline-rul...
        6y ago
- jedberg 6y ago
  I think they serve different purposes. Satellites serve areas where they can't run wires or it's insanely expensive for too few people. Think very rural areas and war torn areas. Imagine being able to get unblocked internet in China by using satellites? Or in Belarus. Or the middle of Amazon (rainforest)?
  - Alupis 6y ago
    Will Starlink even be able to legally sell internet services in China? Would they not have to comply with CCP's censorship policies and disconnect people at their will? I strongly disagree with CCP's policies here, but that's not for us to decide.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      I was thinking of the opposite use case -- an American traveling to China for work and getting uncensored internet. But I mean once a Chinese citizen gets their hands on the equipment, I'm not sure how China would stop them. I suppose they could have roving bands of listening posts looking for the uplink signals. I'm sure someone could figure out a way to take payments for them. Many rich Chinese citizens already have bank accounts outside of China.
      - Alupis 6y ago
        Pretty sure an American company deliberately subverting another nation's laws to make a profit isn't going to be looked well upon, even if it is unjust CCP laws. Regarding an American traveling to China - I think you're still beholden to the host country's laws, no? You can't break their local laws just because you're from out of town. Not to mention the punitive actions CCP could take against Tesla (as they try to build out a business there) to put pressure on SpaceX to stop allowing Starlink access in China. That wouldn't be fair either, but Musk is CEO of both organizations and I'm not sure the CCP would distinguish them separately.
      - bdamm 6y ago
        SpaceX isn't going to piss off China. The satellites are really just repeaters to the local base station. Starlink will be firewalled off from the world just like the rest of China (when the terminal is in China.)
- rtsil 6y ago
  > And even in remote areas, building out VDSL2 networks with relatively decent speeds (200Mbps down and 100Mbps up[1]) would be better, honestly. I live in the suburbs of Paris and the length of the phone line is still too long for VDSL2 (it's only available for distance less than 1 km) so I am not sure how feassible that is in rural areas.
- bdamm 6y ago
  Even if DSL can get there, reliability of the connection in rural areas is often very suspect. A tree falls over in a winter storm, a bad crash that takes out an exchange box, a pole just plain falls over due to shifting ground, or maybe construction takes out a main trunk... these problems happen in cities too, but in a city you have maybe 1 km of infrastructure to worry about. In rural areas you could have 100 or 200 km of infrastructure just waiting for a calamity. Even just as a reliable alternative Starlink would be a big boon to rural users.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    > Even just as a reliable alternative Starlink would be a big boon to rural users Starlink is susceptible to cloud cover, rainstorms, lightning and other things that would interfere with signal quality (or render it unusable for periods of time). Seems buried lines (either POTS for DSL, Coax for Cable, or Fiber) is the best solution. We just need to figure out how to incentivize it being built.
    - bearjaws 6y ago
      As someone who lived 50 minutes inland in Florida, no way. Our DSL and cable options were limited, Comcast said they offered cable, but when they got to the line near the house, the signal was so poor they were unable to make it work without 50k in labor. Then ATT came with DSL, the connection has routine outages for hours at a time. There is a technician servicing the DSLAM pretty much every week, there is literally no way ATT makes money where I used to live. Everyone owns 20+ acres, there's basically 10 homes in 1 square mile. And then the Hurricanes... Every 4 years all of the lines get blown down and it takes ATT 1-2 months to get it back online... There is way too many advantages for satellite in rural areas. If I had to guess, there was over 200 outages (anything over 10 minutes IMO is an outage) in the 6 years I lived there.
      - Alupis 6y ago
        Sounds like you have experience with above-ground lines. I specifically said buried lines - which are mostly immune to environmental issues.
- vetinari 6y ago
  In rural areas, we have LTE-based FWA. 10 MHz wide channel with 256-QAM can push 100 Mbps down.
  - yencabulator 6y ago
    I'd argue if you get 100 Mbps down, you're not all that rural.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      European rural :) It is a valley, tho, and if there wasn't that one tower, there would be 0 bps.
- Ekaros 6y ago
  The range just isn't there even for suburbs. The high speeds are only achieved with line length of less than 500m, and at 1600m it's similar to ADSL2... So not really a effective solution.
grahamburger 6y ago
Economies of scale work massively in your favor in this situation. You definitely do not need to sell the bandwidth 1:1, and the more customers you aggregate the more you can oversell. With 1gbps upstream bandwidth you can comfortably provide 1000 customers with 10mbps Internet service and they will virtually never see speeds lower than 10mbps.
jliptzin 6y ago
Your math assumes all 100 million customers will be downloading at 10Mbps at the same time, all the time. Obviously that is not the case.
- e12e 6y ago
  Not "all the time", but at any one time - at the same time (eg: watching superbowl - but of course any kind of multicast/broadcast is a little different). At any rate, it's mostly about the bandwidth each satellite has to route. I don't know what the likely number of subscribers for any one LEO sattelite will be? Will it really be on the order of 100 million notalso served by 4g cellular, dsl and other broadband? Say for new York state its a large area and population total but the area where you might want/prefer satellite service isn't very densely populated?
  - ckdarby 6y ago
    Couldn't the satellites themselves cache content that are for world wide events like this? Edit: Even further, if they're launching 12000 of these couldn't that be a CDN network itself?
    - freemint 6y ago
      No, because HTTPS caching is not possible.
      - ckdarby 6y ago
        What I hear you saying is, they'd need to build out an actual CDN service that individual companies would have to sign up and use. This service would allow Starlink to be able to use their own certs themselves or have the owner's certificate. My understanding is Cloudflare's service works this way. I believe this would be a good partnership between both companies. I'm guessing the other approach is similar to Netflix's open connect. Where Netflix is given the option to run what they normally run on their open connect boxes but in a virtualized environment on the satellites themselves. Now, I know that wouldn't seem all that practical if the service was seen as something anyone could sign up and buy because it isn't like these satellites are the same as EC2 instances and it isn't easy to just rack a new one but my gut feeling is that a very tiny portion of content is a substantial amount of bandwidth.
SEJeff 6y ago
There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. Evergreen comment. Encoding and compression software and hardware continue to improve. The only constant in technology is change. Will we be able to do this sort of bandwith to LEO eventually? Yes. Can we do it this very moment? No one has tried.
- otterley 6y ago
  Context is important, though. Network performance advances are always relative. If satellite fully-congested download speed improves 10x while hardwire link performance improves 10x, satellite will still be perceived as "too slow" by some segment. Our experience thus far has been that advances in applications tend to consume the bandwidth available. Whether that trend continues remains to be seen. (To be fair, I have never saturated my bidirectional 1GBps fiber link and I don't foresee ever doing so except for very brief periods of time.)
  - DingoMeansDildo 6y ago
    Give this man a dildo, or a new beer, whatever he needs dudes. Bingo. Good answer.
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  > Encoding and compression software What does that have to do with bandwidth ?
  - SEJeff 6y ago
    Sending less data over starlink (which is not tcp/ip btw). I’d you can make 10Mb suddenly only require 900k of actual raw bandwidth by say adding a fpga or something then you can increase throughout to the users.
    - bryanlarsen 6y ago
      Hopefully in 2020 most internet traffic is encrypted. If encrypted traffic is compressible you're doing it wrong.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
> Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. 50 Gbps * 12000 satellites is 600 Tbps. Most of those satellites will be over the middle of nowhere at any given time. But those customers don't use 10Mbps 24/7 either.
- adventured 6y ago
  It also may not be limited to 12,000 satellites. They're seeking approval for up to 42,000. Oct 2019: "SpaceX submits paperwork for 30,000 more Starlink satellites" https://spacenews.com/spacex-submits-paperwork-for-30000-more-starlink-satellites/ https://spacenews.com/spacex-submits-paperwork-for-30000-mor...
jiofih 6y ago
100Gbps microwave links have been shown on land. If you take that as a theoretical limit, 12k satellites can give you 1200Tbps.
- shaklee3 6y ago
  That's not comparable to sending a signal from space.
manquer 6y ago
One satellite cannot route 900tbps of course , just like your local ISP cannot handle that either . However over 40,000 satellites that’s just 22.5 gps per sat , quite achievable
jasonpeacock 6y ago
And yet such a satellite network is being built and deployed. The people building this have obviously done the math and have a solution which they're implementing while you're busy saying that it can't be done :)
ghthor 6y ago
I'm pretty sure it could with that DIDO technology that Rearden Labs produced. The think the sub company they started it under was Artemis. I always thought they're tech would work very well with satellite constellations.
- shaklee3 6y ago
  Artemis was vaporware. It never made it into the field.
  - ghthor 6y ago
    Vaporware is not an accurate description. I'm pretty sure you they have manufactured hardware that you can deploy for a test deployment. Also pretty sure they're working with the military for weaponization and wireless power transmission.
    - shaklee3 6y ago
      They were supposed to do a large rollout with sprint, and it never happened. The technology itself was vaporware; it only worked in their lab setting.
oh_sigh 6y ago
10Mbps to 100 million customers equating to 900 Tbps would be more akin to serving 1 billion customers, since on average someone isn't even close to saturating their bandwidth.

Alupis 6y ago

And even in remote areas, building out VDSL2 networks with relatively decent speeds (200Mbps down and 100Mbps up[1]) would be better, honestly. Most homes already have a phone line and can support a DSL network... and in some countries a phone line is mandated by law, so the infrastructure already exists. But, DSL is not nearly as "sexy" as thousands of satellites... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDSL%20offers%20speeds%20of%20up,25%20kHz%20to%2012%20MHz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDSL%20offers%20s....

chuckhendo 6y ago
I mean, you're not wrong, VDSL in rural areas would be great! But it also hasn't happened.
grahamburger 6y ago
I haven't personally deployed VDSL2, but I have deployed DSL and other data-over-twisted pair systems including recent G.fast, G.hn and MOCA. I strongly doubt that VDSL can achieve those kinds of speeds reliably at the distances and densities needed to provide this service to the areas that need it most. In rural areas the copper lines are too long and too old to achieve these speeds (but they're fine for voice/POTS, so there's no mandate to upgrade.) Twisted pair is also really susceptible to noise and crosstalk, so in more densely populated areas once you start doing DSL to a lot of customers whose cables are bundled together they start to interfere with each other and everybody's service gets bad. In both cases the problem is signal to noise ratio - long cables mean poor signal, density means high noise, and twisted pair copper just isn't designed to deal with either very well.
- Alupis 6y ago
  What about VDSL2 Vectoring (G.vector)? Seems like it mitigates most of the crosstalk problems - but I admit I'm not an expert on DSL deployments. It seems VDSL2 can achieve maximum throughput at run lengths under 1000ft from the DSLAM, with maximum performance beginning to degrade after. That sounds sufficient for most of the people currently stuck with slow access right now in the US (more rural areas outside major cities, but not actually remote as-in nearest neighbor is 1 mile away). Also... surely solving this problem is cheaper than sending thousands of satellites into orbit every few years as they decay.
  - grahamburger 6y ago
    > It seems VDSL2 can achieve maximum throughput at run lengths under 1000ft from the DSLAM, and maximum performance degrades after that over distance. That sounds sufficient for most of the people complaining of slow access right now in the US I would guess that this isn't right, but honestly I don't have the data either. My rough guess would be that only around 5-15% of people have <1000' of copper to their DSLAM, and I from what I've experienced with other technologies the speeds degrade very quickly after the max length, and only even work up to the max length in absolutely ideal scenarios. What I've seen of current copper infrastructure in the U.S. is pretty bad - lots of hand twisted copper lines with the ends exposed and rusting out, for example - that kind of thing would add the equivalent of at least several hundred feet of additional cable, and is very difficult to fix en-masse. Honestly my gut feeling is that you pretty much have to run new cables to something like 80% of the U.S. to get good Internet service everywhere, and obviously if you're running new cables you should just run fiber. Looking at the cost of that compared to launching satellites - and accounting for the additional benefits of the satellites, like connectivity in extremely remote places and on the ocean - I'm not sure the satellites don't come out ahead. EDIT TO ADD: A comparison point on the 1000 feet number is that this is in the same ballpark as how close a 5G tower needs to be to get real 5G service to your home or your cell phone. Current 4G towers are nowhere near that dense, and it's going to take huge amounts of money to get them that dense, even in the most densely populated areas.
    - 6y ago
LinuxBender 6y ago
True, but their first customer is the U.S. Army which tells me this networks primary purpose is the same as the original intent of the internet itself. A mobile network that is available and reliable anywhere. Civilians usually get to do all the beta testing and provide feedback that improves the technology. Also many of the places I have been looking at moving to don't even have POTS lines. This would fill the gap where POTS and VDSL is not available. I would certainly use VDSL if that were an option and use Starlink as a fallback in a very remote area.
- Alupis 6y ago
  > Also many of the places I have been looking at moving to don't even have POTS lines Where are you, if you don't mind telling. I had thought, perhaps incorrectly, that in the US it was required by law to have POTS lines run to all homes - which led to it being installed during construction.
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    The land I am looking at is in the south western part of Wyoming. Could you link the law? My understanding is that once a line is run, there is a process to decom the line, but that no line is required for a home. Many homesteaders do not have phone lines or on-grid power. The only requirements I am aware of are around septic systems.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      Interesting. I couldn't find the exact law to link to, but did turn up this WaPo article talking about 4 states starting to relax the requirement. > The universal landline requirement has been repealed in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. There, new homeowners have no guarantee that they could order phone service at affordable rates, consumer advocates say. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/landline-rules-frustrate-telecoms/2012/04/12/gIQAG2XvDT_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/landline-rul...
      - 6y ago
jedberg 6y ago
I think they serve different purposes. Satellites serve areas where they can't run wires or it's insanely expensive for too few people. Think very rural areas and war torn areas. Imagine being able to get unblocked internet in China by using satellites? Or in Belarus. Or the middle of Amazon (rainforest)?
- Alupis 6y ago
  Will Starlink even be able to legally sell internet services in China? Would they not have to comply with CCP's censorship policies and disconnect people at their will? I strongly disagree with CCP's policies here, but that's not for us to decide.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    I was thinking of the opposite use case -- an American traveling to China for work and getting uncensored internet. But I mean once a Chinese citizen gets their hands on the equipment, I'm not sure how China would stop them. I suppose they could have roving bands of listening posts looking for the uplink signals. I'm sure someone could figure out a way to take payments for them. Many rich Chinese citizens already have bank accounts outside of China.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      Pretty sure an American company deliberately subverting another nation's laws to make a profit isn't going to be looked well upon, even if it is unjust CCP laws. Regarding an American traveling to China - I think you're still beholden to the host country's laws, no? You can't break their local laws just because you're from out of town. Not to mention the punitive actions CCP could take against Tesla (as they try to build out a business there) to put pressure on SpaceX to stop allowing Starlink access in China. That wouldn't be fair either, but Musk is CEO of both organizations and I'm not sure the CCP would distinguish them separately.
    - bdamm 6y ago
      SpaceX isn't going to piss off China. The satellites are really just repeaters to the local base station. Starlink will be firewalled off from the world just like the rest of China (when the terminal is in China.)
rtsil 6y ago
> And even in remote areas, building out VDSL2 networks with relatively decent speeds (200Mbps down and 100Mbps up[1]) would be better, honestly. I live in the suburbs of Paris and the length of the phone line is still too long for VDSL2 (it's only available for distance less than 1 km) so I am not sure how feassible that is in rural areas.
bdamm 6y ago
Even if DSL can get there, reliability of the connection in rural areas is often very suspect. A tree falls over in a winter storm, a bad crash that takes out an exchange box, a pole just plain falls over due to shifting ground, or maybe construction takes out a main trunk... these problems happen in cities too, but in a city you have maybe 1 km of infrastructure to worry about. In rural areas you could have 100 or 200 km of infrastructure just waiting for a calamity. Even just as a reliable alternative Starlink would be a big boon to rural users.
- Alupis 6y ago
  > Even just as a reliable alternative Starlink would be a big boon to rural users Starlink is susceptible to cloud cover, rainstorms, lightning and other things that would interfere with signal quality (or render it unusable for periods of time). Seems buried lines (either POTS for DSL, Coax for Cable, or Fiber) is the best solution. We just need to figure out how to incentivize it being built.
  - bearjaws 6y ago
    As someone who lived 50 minutes inland in Florida, no way. Our DSL and cable options were limited, Comcast said they offered cable, but when they got to the line near the house, the signal was so poor they were unable to make it work without 50k in labor. Then ATT came with DSL, the connection has routine outages for hours at a time. There is a technician servicing the DSLAM pretty much every week, there is literally no way ATT makes money where I used to live. Everyone owns 20+ acres, there's basically 10 homes in 1 square mile. And then the Hurricanes... Every 4 years all of the lines get blown down and it takes ATT 1-2 months to get it back online... There is way too many advantages for satellite in rural areas. If I had to guess, there was over 200 outages (anything over 10 minutes IMO is an outage) in the 6 years I lived there.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      Sounds like you have experience with above-ground lines. I specifically said buried lines - which are mostly immune to environmental issues.
vetinari 6y ago
In rural areas, we have LTE-based FWA. 10 MHz wide channel with 256-QAM can push 100 Mbps down.
- yencabulator 6y ago
  I'd argue if you get 100 Mbps down, you're not all that rural.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    European rural :) It is a valley, tho, and if there wasn't that one tower, there would be 0 bps.
Ekaros 6y ago
The range just isn't there even for suburbs. The high speeds are only achieved with line length of less than 500m, and at 1600m it's similar to ADSL2... So not really a effective solution.

grahamburger 6y ago

Economies of scale work massively in your favor in this situation. You definitely do not need to sell the bandwidth 1:1, and the more customers you aggregate the more you can oversell. With 1gbps upstream bandwidth you can comfortably provide 1000 customers with 10mbps Internet service and they will virtually never see speeds lower than 10mbps.

jliptzin 6y ago

Your math assumes all 100 million customers will be downloading at 10Mbps at the same time, all the time. Obviously that is not the case.

e12e 6y ago
Not "all the time", but at any one time - at the same time (eg: watching superbowl - but of course any kind of multicast/broadcast is a little different). At any rate, it's mostly about the bandwidth each satellite has to route. I don't know what the likely number of subscribers for any one LEO sattelite will be? Will it really be on the order of 100 million notalso served by 4g cellular, dsl and other broadband? Say for new York state its a large area and population total but the area where you might want/prefer satellite service isn't very densely populated?
- ckdarby 6y ago
  Couldn't the satellites themselves cache content that are for world wide events like this? Edit: Even further, if they're launching 12000 of these couldn't that be a CDN network itself?
  - freemint 6y ago
    No, because HTTPS caching is not possible.
    - ckdarby 6y ago
      What I hear you saying is, they'd need to build out an actual CDN service that individual companies would have to sign up and use. This service would allow Starlink to be able to use their own certs themselves or have the owner's certificate. My understanding is Cloudflare's service works this way. I believe this would be a good partnership between both companies. I'm guessing the other approach is similar to Netflix's open connect. Where Netflix is given the option to run what they normally run on their open connect boxes but in a virtualized environment on the satellites themselves. Now, I know that wouldn't seem all that practical if the service was seen as something anyone could sign up and buy because it isn't like these satellites are the same as EC2 instances and it isn't easy to just rack a new one but my gut feeling is that a very tiny portion of content is a substantial amount of bandwidth.

SEJeff 6y ago

There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. Evergreen comment. Encoding and compression software and hardware continue to improve. The only constant in technology is change. Will we be able to do this sort of bandwith to LEO eventually? Yes. Can we do it this very moment? No one has tried.

otterley 6y ago
Context is important, though. Network performance advances are always relative. If satellite fully-congested download speed improves 10x while hardwire link performance improves 10x, satellite will still be perceived as "too slow" by some segment. Our experience thus far has been that advances in applications tend to consume the bandwidth available. Whether that trend continues remains to be seen. (To be fair, I have never saturated my bidirectional 1GBps fiber link and I don't foresee ever doing so except for very brief periods of time.)
- DingoMeansDildo 6y ago
  Give this man a dildo, or a new beer, whatever he needs dudes. Bingo. Good answer.
rubber_duck 6y ago
> Encoding and compression software What does that have to do with bandwidth ?
- SEJeff 6y ago
  Sending less data over starlink (which is not tcp/ip btw). I’d you can make 10Mb suddenly only require 900k of actual raw bandwidth by say adding a fpga or something then you can increase throughout to the users.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Hopefully in 2020 most internet traffic is encrypted. If encrypted traffic is compressible you're doing it wrong.

bryanlarsen 6y ago

> Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. 50 Gbps * 12000 satellites is 600 Tbps. Most of those satellites will be over the middle of nowhere at any given time. But those customers don't use 10Mbps 24/7 either.

adventured 6y ago
It also may not be limited to 12,000 satellites. They're seeking approval for up to 42,000. Oct 2019: "SpaceX submits paperwork for 30,000 more Starlink satellites" https://spacenews.com/spacex-submits-paperwork-for-30000-more-starlink-satellites/ https://spacenews.com/spacex-submits-paperwork-for-30000-mor...

jiofih 6y ago

100Gbps microwave links have been shown on land. If you take that as a theoretical limit, 12k satellites can give you 1200Tbps.

shaklee3 6y ago
That's not comparable to sending a signal from space.

manquer 6y ago

One satellite cannot route 900tbps of course , just like your local ISP cannot handle that either . However over 40,000 satellites that’s just 22.5 gps per sat , quite achievable

jasonpeacock 6y ago

And yet such a satellite network is being built and deployed. The people building this have obviously done the math and have a solution which they're implementing while you're busy saying that it can't be done :)

ghthor 6y ago

I'm pretty sure it could with that DIDO technology that Rearden Labs produced. The think the sub company they started it under was Artemis. I always thought they're tech would work very well with satellite constellations.

shaklee3 6y ago
Artemis was vaporware. It never made it into the field.
- ghthor 6y ago
  Vaporware is not an accurate description. I'm pretty sure you they have manufactured hardware that you can deploy for a test deployment. Also pretty sure they're working with the military for weaponization and wireless power transmission.
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    They were supposed to do a large rollout with sprint, and it never happened. The technology itself was vaporware; it only worked in their lab setting.

oh_sigh 6y ago

10Mbps to 100 million customers equating to 900 Tbps would be more akin to serving 1 billion customers, since on average someone isn't even close to saturating their bandwidth.