9 ms·

Starlink internet is not meant to replace hard line internet. There is no getting around the physics of cable being so much cheaper/easier. Even terrestrial c

by bargl 6y ago

Starlink internet is not meant to replace hard line internet. There is no getting around the physics of cable being so much cheaper/easier. Even terrestrial cell towers are more efficient and cheaper than satellites. This is 100% meant to supplement existing infrastructure not to replace it. You will almost always get cheaper and faster internet (for both you and the company providing internet) over a cable to your house. If you can't get that, then maybe a cell tower is better, if that doesn't work, then a land based beaming internet may be better, after that I'd look to space based internet. It can probably supplant land based beaming internet, but I don't see this replacing ISPs/4g/5g anytime soon. The target audience for much of this infrastructure is the places you can't put a cell tower, but want to get signal. Ocean based travel being a big one. EDIT: I will contend. 5g could beat out ISPs at cost (which I thought I'd made more clear above). It's about the cost of infrastructure given the population density. I don't have as much knowledge in that area as I do satellite costs. But satellites won't beat out 5G at cost, not even with the reduced cost to space that SpaceX provides. It could with another couple orders of magnitude cost reduction in space. But there's a reason SpaceX is targeting only 5 million Americans and not 300 million.

iRobbery 6y ago
Weren't they also going to track airplanes with it, to avoid new mh-370 cases where they don't know where it went and where it crashed?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- welterde 6y ago
  Didn't it already have Iridium on board as well? I read some claims that the power bus was unstable and thus it shut down the satellite radio multiple times before it could transmit much meaningful data. Which would imply that Starlink wouldn't have changed much in this regard.
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  We kinda know where MH-370 went, just not where it crashed.
xutopia 6y ago
If the price is 5 times cheaper though... what then?
- bargl 6y ago
  There is a set capacity for these satellites, they can accomodate X number of users per satellite which would be a region (I'm making an educated guess) about the size of New Jersey. I think the size is larger than that which means fewer users but I'm trying to ballpark during my lunch break. So if they expect to have 10,000 users (again ballpark) in New Jersey, but they instead get 40,000 they'll increase their costs. If they get 1000 users in say Wyoming, then maybe the costs in Wyoming will be lower. The issue is they have a world wide capacity of 10,000 users at 11 MBs over the size of New Jersey. Again, I haven't run these numbers but these are the kinds of calculations GEO sats make to set prices for say, airplanes traveling from US -> Europe. The difference is that GEO targets specific areas more rather than blanketing the entire earth due to them being stationary. The benefit of Starlink is that it'll have approximately equal signal all over the earth. So if you're in a city it can cover the same number of people per mile as it can in the middle of the ocean.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    I believe the satellites are moving, so there's no "Wyoming satellite customers" in the same way as existing satellite internet. The Wyoming customers will be sharing satellites with several other places as they move in and out of their regions
    - bargl 6y ago
      The constellation is moving but they are moving in a formation. Meaning you have a rotation of 2-4 satellites above your head at any give time. Each satellite can service a radius the size of Wyoming. So you have a limit on the number of satellites and the number of customers per satellite. The article says 5 million in the USA. That makes sense given what I'm thinking. That's about 100,000 per state, but it's not going to work like that. It's a good ballpark for the service they'll provide. My main point, is if it's 100K per (1/50th the US) there will be less bandwidth in cities than in rural regions. This is a HUGE boon to rural areas and will be amazing. This will probably not affect you if you are urban or even suburban.
asldkjaslkdj 6y ago
I think you're underestimating the number of people that live in places where cell companies don't want to be arsed to build a tower.
- yencabulator 6y ago
  Cell companies are also the last people you want to get your "main internet" from. Bandwidth caps, throttling, accounts shut down because actually what they meant is that "unlimited" means "200 GB/month".
- shaklee3 6y ago
  I think you're overestimating how much those people are willing to pay.
alwaysdoit 6y ago
It also raises the baseline across the board by injecting a new competitor to every ISP and wireless service in the world
- bargl 6y ago
  This is 1000% my point. There is now a baseline amount of signal per KM. That signal is now the same everywhere. It will be (about) the same speed everywhere. This is really great for more rural areas and over the ocean.
  - cma 6y ago
    We already had a baseline amount from geosynchronous and Iridium. This is increasing bandwidth and reducing latency, but is not establishing the first baseline.
    - bargl 6y ago
      Gah - I got so caught up in this thread. Finally something I know a fair bit about. Yes, there is a baseline. But that's like saying dail-up is a baseline. Everyone might have it but it doesn't give people access to the modern web. Geo, can be great in some services but it's again not a blanket. They have broad beams but they're moving to spot beams instead and those beams don't move. This constellation is really going to be the same bandwidth capacity across the globe within a given altitude band. Which is awesome.
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    That's not how it works. There are intentionally launching satellites at different inclinations so that they can cover more densely populated areas with more bandwidth. The speed and capacity is absolutely not uniform over the entire globe.
rconti 6y ago
are the physics of cables cheaper and easier? Took me, what, over a decade to get fiber internet in the middle of Silicon Valley.
- bargl 6y ago
  Yes. All this beaming technology is available on earth (4g/5g) but we don't use it for our home internet... Why is that? Cost of bandwith per person to infrastructure. If you're in Silicon Valley then you probably get GREAT cell service, why not use a hotspot as your internet. That signal to your phone is orders of magnitude cheaper than space based signal.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    > If you're in Silicon Valley then you probably get GREAT cell service You'd think so, but we have the same problems as everyone else. In fact, I get much better reception in Sacramento and Las Vegas than in the Bay Area.
    - bargl 6y ago
      No, you don't have the same problems as everywhere else. You said it took 10 years to get fiber, there are rural places where that's not an option. There are places where there is no sewer and houses must have septic. There are places where there is no water and houses must have wells / rain capture. Those are the target audience for this technology. Not people who are waiting to go from 60 -> 100 -> 1000 Mbps. This won't compete there, not based on the specs of these satellites and their 10 year plan.
      - jedberg 6y ago
        I was specifically addressing your claim that one could just use an LTE hotspot. I'm aware that there are rural communities that have worse infrastructure than the bay area.
        6y ago
darkwizard42 6y ago
Would this improve the internet quality on planes? Just wondering how that could get better... its absolutely crap most of the time
- mdorazio 6y ago
  Poor quality of internet on planes is usually due to too many people on the plane trying to do high-bandwidth things at the same time when the connection was never designed for that level of saturation. Domestic flights usually connect to ground-based stations to provide in-flight wi-fi, which probably have similar throughput capabilities to Starlink, so I don't think this would help much. International flights use satellite connections, though, and this would definitely help there.
  - dzhiurgis 6y ago
    I'm still a bit puzzled why ground based stations didn't catch on. Seems it should be much simpler - there's tons of towers already, flights paths are predictable and much lesser distance between plane and sat. That said my experience with internet was very positive - anywhere from free 4K streaming to $20 per 17hr flight enough to do remote SaaS development. I guess US airlines keeps American tradition of depriving people of good internet.
Reason077 6y ago
> "You will almost always get cheaper and faster internet (for both you and the company providing internet) over a cable to your house." Not true for me, and I live 10 minutes walk from the financial centre of a major world city. Because there's no fibre installed to my building, unlimited ~300 Mbps 5G wireless internet is both cheaper and faster than any available fixed alternative. Even if fibre was available, the 5G would probably still be cheaper!
- bargl 6y ago
  >If you can't get that, then maybe a cell tower is better, if that doesn't work, then a land based beaming internet may be better, after that I'd look to space based internet. It is cheaper for a company, to run fiber to your house than to build a cell tower that handles ALL the people within that region given a certain density of houses. It doesn't mean it's cheaper for your building to do it. In the context of space vs ground infrastructure. Ground (including cell tower) is much cheaper. And they'll add 5G to the financial centers of the world before they add it to Wyoming. The reason companies don't "advertise" hostpots as an alternative to fiber/cable is bandwidth. It works great if you read HN, but if everyone did it, they'd start running more fiber, or cost of cell data would go way up.
  - Reason077 6y ago
    > "companies don't "advertise" hostpots as an alternative to fiber/cable" They do around here! http://www.three.co.uk/store/broadband/home-broadband http://www.three.co.uk/store/broadband/home-broadband https://www.vodafone.co.uk/gigacube/ https://www.vodafone.co.uk/gigacube/
    - bargl 6y ago
      Sorry, My experience is mostly US based. I looked into this heavily in my area 2+ years ago. T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon say their hotspots are not meant for this in my region. At least that was 2 years ago in Sub-urban Seattle and 3 years ago D.C.
bronco21016 6y ago
The problem is you're basing your argument solely on the physical act of running cable/wires everywhere. When you look at the cost of just hiring a crew to dig the ground or string wire on a pole you are correct. It's significantly cheaper and more reliable. However, add in the human factor, government. The mess of rules, regulations, and right-of-way make it considerably more expensive to run wires everywhere.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  The cost of hiring a crew to dig up the ground runs to hundreds of dollars per foot. At $1MM for a satellite that can serve thousands of people is a lot cheaper.
  - wolco 6y ago
    If they all lived in the same location. If the cost is hundreds per square foot and each customer is 1000ft away from each other than thecosts become hundreds of thousands per address. Line of sight or cell tower might work but when it doesn't a satellite will.
- bargl 6y ago
  I worked at a GEO company. They have a HUGE department just to work with governments to buy or keep their spectrum. The rules and regulations for spectrum are insane, and not just build this cable here in my county/state/country, but now this beam goes across borders what do I do? Oh wait, this region is contested by China/India we have to sell differently to each government. Cost of labor => It's a calculation of how many people can be served per 1 mile (any unit) of cable. If that number is 20, cable wins. If it's 5, hotspot may win (which also uses cable FWIW). If it's 0.5 then these new satellites win. 5G may try to take more market from ISPs but they know they'll have to innovate to keep customers. I can 100% see cell towers being cheaper than cable, but not in every situation. It's about supplementing not replacing infrastructure.
busterarm 6y ago
A lot of what you're saying isn't actually true here. Light moves significantly (47%) slower through optical fiber than through space. This drastically reduces the latency of long distance connections. We're talking NY round trip to Japan in the same time it takes NY roundtrip to the UK now. The cost of backhaul and ongoing maintenance of cables is a lot more than SpaceX launching their own satellites by an entire order of magnitude.
- bargl 6y ago
  >A lot of what you're saying isn't actually true here. You're talking latency not bandwidth. There is only so much spectrum to go around. My understanding is that there is only a certain amount of bandwidth to go around and there are diminishing returns on adding people beyond a set capacity. I am not arguing that fiber is faster, I'm arguing that fiber has is cheaper at the bandwidth/cost in more dense areas. I don't believe we will see satellite based communication in cities (at a large % of population) for a long time. Now I'm willing to believe someone who's worked closer to this than I have and to learn, but I've done enough in the satellite industry to not take what you're saying without seeing more evidence.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    I worked for an ILEC providing cable/dsl/fiber service and just the rough napkin math around SpaceX's launch costs makes it look significantly cheaper. Besides the whole digging and laying cable costs, last mile work is expensive. You have to employ huge crews. Construction crews constantly dig up & cut your infrastructure "by accident" and the cost of recovering the fines from them is as much as the fines pay out. Having to send an emergency crew of three guys out for 18 hours of work to re-splice a 72-ct fiber every other weekend adds up. That doesn't happen in space.
    - bargl 6y ago
      >last mile work is expensive. What do you mean there?
chris_va 6y ago
A cell tower today is basically a selective directional broadcast of ~2.5GHz backed by a microwave backhaul, conforming to local topography and about ~3 miles away. An internet satellite is a phased array broadcast of ~20Ghz with a microwave backhaul without regard for local topography and about ~600 miles away. ... I am not sure there is obviously a better choice here, if the launch costs no longer dominate.
- bargl 6y ago
  >... I am not sure there is obviously a better choice here, if the launch costs no longer dominate. I'm basing my entire comment on existing costs due to SpaceX efficiency. We'd need (IMO) more cost reduction.
btian 6y ago
What sort of physics? You can multiplex wavelengths for wireless just like cable right? Granted you'd need to buy the licenses for those frequencies, which should be fairly cheap in rural areas. I don't think Elon would approve this project if cable is always cheaper and easier.
- bargl 6y ago
  Why not? He doesn't have to reach everyone, just some portion of the population that's profitable. My argument should have been this is only (imo) going to get at most 10% of the worlds population. That's based on the signal interference in space. Scale gets costly. EDIT: Then I'm done replying for real. This thread has been fun but I need to stop myself at some point. Thanks for replying. physics => Co-channel and adjacent satellite interference to be specific, the closer you put your satellites the more signal they have to handle. These things are built to scale for the worlds population and you can't just add more satellites without scaling the whole constellation. If it was built to scale for NY city then they'd need to support that population density on every single satellite. But if they build it for Wyoming and steal those customers then they need to only scale for that and allow ISPs to keep NY city residents. While it's cheaper for cable companies to lay wire close to hubs, it's cheaper for satellites to hit people the more spread out they are. So the physics of this constellation are such that it's cheaper for them to give more rural people a baseline of internet rather than upsetting ISPs. I think that's wishful thinking by many people who hate ISPs. I'm not saying it's cheaper for cables to hit everyone everywhere in the world, or this system wouldn't exist. As I said earlier, it's meant to supplement a weakness in our current infrastructure by blanketing the world with cheap internet that works at lower population densities. I used this metric in another thread, but if you're on Septic Starlink is probably for you. If you're on sewer then you're already surrounded by a density of infrastructure that probably makes ground based communication cheaper. No I'm not going to bet that someone on HN doesn't have a counter example for me, but overall I think this would probably make sense.
- welterde 6y ago
  Fiber optic cables have a much much higher usable bandwidth than the wireless spectrum. The useful radio spectrum for Starlink is somewhere between 10 and 20 GHz. Fiber optic cables have more than 4THz of usable spectrum. And it's no affected by things like fog, rain, strong wind (at least if you don't cheap out and stick it on poles), etc.
vwat 6y ago
But you’re missing the reality of the situation. Hypothetically cable is better and cheaper but in reality it isn’t because of corruption and the fact that cable has to occupy a physical space which forced the involvement of governments which makes everything terrible. Starlink will finally provide good competition to these bastards in rural areas... im in Des Moines metro area where cable sucks for no reason. I can’t wait.
dmix 6y ago
One of the big excuses for the telecom/ISP monopolies in Canada is that they help serve rural areas (same deal with Canada Post). I'm curious to see if this ends up having any effect on the current system. Technically you could just directly subsidize access to the rural areas, for those who can't afford the much cheaper new satellite systems themselves, instead of giving these anti-consumer monsters free reign on the whole country in exchange for managing expensive infrastructure just to serve a small percentage of the population.
martinko 6y ago
"5g could beat out ISPs at cost" Fixed line ISPs share much of the same infrastructure with 5g/4g providers. The only difference between them is the last mile, so it's not like 5g providers magically dont need any backhaul infrastructure and could provide dramatically lower prices.

by bargl 6y ago

iRobbery 6y ago

Weren't they also going to track airplanes with it, to avoid new mh-370 cases where they don't know where it went and where it crashed?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
welterde 6y ago
Didn't it already have Iridium on board as well? I read some claims that the power bus was unstable and thus it shut down the satellite radio multiple times before it could transmit much meaningful data. Which would imply that Starlink wouldn't have changed much in this regard.
dzhiurgis 6y ago
We kinda know where MH-370 went, just not where it crashed.

xutopia 6y ago

If the price is 5 times cheaper though... what then?

bargl 6y ago
There is a set capacity for these satellites, they can accomodate X number of users per satellite which would be a region (I'm making an educated guess) about the size of New Jersey. I think the size is larger than that which means fewer users but I'm trying to ballpark during my lunch break. So if they expect to have 10,000 users (again ballpark) in New Jersey, but they instead get 40,000 they'll increase their costs. If they get 1000 users in say Wyoming, then maybe the costs in Wyoming will be lower. The issue is they have a world wide capacity of 10,000 users at 11 MBs over the size of New Jersey. Again, I haven't run these numbers but these are the kinds of calculations GEO sats make to set prices for say, airplanes traveling from US -> Europe. The difference is that GEO targets specific areas more rather than blanketing the entire earth due to them being stationary. The benefit of Starlink is that it'll have approximately equal signal all over the earth. So if you're in a city it can cover the same number of people per mile as it can in the middle of the ocean.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  I believe the satellites are moving, so there's no "Wyoming satellite customers" in the same way as existing satellite internet. The Wyoming customers will be sharing satellites with several other places as they move in and out of their regions
  - bargl 6y ago
    The constellation is moving but they are moving in a formation. Meaning you have a rotation of 2-4 satellites above your head at any give time. Each satellite can service a radius the size of Wyoming. So you have a limit on the number of satellites and the number of customers per satellite. The article says 5 million in the USA. That makes sense given what I'm thinking. That's about 100,000 per state, but it's not going to work like that. It's a good ballpark for the service they'll provide. My main point, is if it's 100K per (1/50th the US) there will be less bandwidth in cities than in rural regions. This is a HUGE boon to rural areas and will be amazing. This will probably not affect you if you are urban or even suburban.

asldkjaslkdj 6y ago

I think you're underestimating the number of people that live in places where cell companies don't want to be arsed to build a tower.

yencabulator 6y ago
Cell companies are also the last people you want to get your "main internet" from. Bandwidth caps, throttling, accounts shut down because actually what they meant is that "unlimited" means "200 GB/month".
shaklee3 6y ago
I think you're overestimating how much those people are willing to pay.

alwaysdoit 6y ago

It also raises the baseline across the board by injecting a new competitor to every ISP and wireless service in the world

bargl 6y ago
This is 1000% my point. There is now a baseline amount of signal per KM. That signal is now the same everywhere. It will be (about) the same speed everywhere. This is really great for more rural areas and over the ocean.
- cma 6y ago
  We already had a baseline amount from geosynchronous and Iridium. This is increasing bandwidth and reducing latency, but is not establishing the first baseline.
  - bargl 6y ago
    Gah - I got so caught up in this thread. Finally something I know a fair bit about. Yes, there is a baseline. But that's like saying dail-up is a baseline. Everyone might have it but it doesn't give people access to the modern web. Geo, can be great in some services but it's again not a blanket. They have broad beams but they're moving to spot beams instead and those beams don't move. This constellation is really going to be the same bandwidth capacity across the globe within a given altitude band. Which is awesome.
- shaklee3 6y ago
  That's not how it works. There are intentionally launching satellites at different inclinations so that they can cover more densely populated areas with more bandwidth. The speed and capacity is absolutely not uniform over the entire globe.

rconti 6y ago

are the physics of cables cheaper and easier? Took me, what, over a decade to get fiber internet in the middle of Silicon Valley.

bargl 6y ago
Yes. All this beaming technology is available on earth (4g/5g) but we don't use it for our home internet... Why is that? Cost of bandwith per person to infrastructure. If you're in Silicon Valley then you probably get GREAT cell service, why not use a hotspot as your internet. That signal to your phone is orders of magnitude cheaper than space based signal.
- jedberg 6y ago
  > If you're in Silicon Valley then you probably get GREAT cell service You'd think so, but we have the same problems as everyone else. In fact, I get much better reception in Sacramento and Las Vegas than in the Bay Area.
  - bargl 6y ago
    No, you don't have the same problems as everywhere else. You said it took 10 years to get fiber, there are rural places where that's not an option. There are places where there is no sewer and houses must have septic. There are places where there is no water and houses must have wells / rain capture. Those are the target audience for this technology. Not people who are waiting to go from 60 -> 100 -> 1000 Mbps. This won't compete there, not based on the specs of these satellites and their 10 year plan.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      I was specifically addressing your claim that one could just use an LTE hotspot. I'm aware that there are rural communities that have worse infrastructure than the bay area.
      - 6y ago

darkwizard42 6y ago

Would this improve the internet quality on planes? Just wondering how that could get better... its absolutely crap most of the time

mdorazio 6y ago
Poor quality of internet on planes is usually due to too many people on the plane trying to do high-bandwidth things at the same time when the connection was never designed for that level of saturation. Domestic flights usually connect to ground-based stations to provide in-flight wi-fi, which probably have similar throughput capabilities to Starlink, so I don't think this would help much. International flights use satellite connections, though, and this would definitely help there.
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  I'm still a bit puzzled why ground based stations didn't catch on. Seems it should be much simpler - there's tons of towers already, flights paths are predictable and much lesser distance between plane and sat. That said my experience with internet was very positive - anywhere from free 4K streaming to $20 per 17hr flight enough to do remote SaaS development. I guess US airlines keeps American tradition of depriving people of good internet.

Reason077 6y ago

> "You will almost always get cheaper and faster internet (for both you and the company providing internet) over a cable to your house." Not true for me, and I live 10 minutes walk from the financial centre of a major world city. Because there's no fibre installed to my building, unlimited ~300 Mbps 5G wireless internet is both cheaper and faster than any available fixed alternative. Even if fibre was available, the 5G would probably still be cheaper!

bargl 6y ago
>If you can't get that, then maybe a cell tower is better, if that doesn't work, then a land based beaming internet may be better, after that I'd look to space based internet. It is cheaper for a company, to run fiber to your house than to build a cell tower that handles ALL the people within that region given a certain density of houses. It doesn't mean it's cheaper for your building to do it. In the context of space vs ground infrastructure. Ground (including cell tower) is much cheaper. And they'll add 5G to the financial centers of the world before they add it to Wyoming. The reason companies don't "advertise" hostpots as an alternative to fiber/cable is bandwidth. It works great if you read HN, but if everyone did it, they'd start running more fiber, or cost of cell data would go way up.
- Reason077 6y ago
  > "companies don't "advertise" hostpots as an alternative to fiber/cable" They do around here! http://www.three.co.uk/store/broadband/home-broadband http://www.three.co.uk/store/broadband/home-broadband https://www.vodafone.co.uk/gigacube/ https://www.vodafone.co.uk/gigacube/
  - bargl 6y ago
    Sorry, My experience is mostly US based. I looked into this heavily in my area 2+ years ago. T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon say their hotspots are not meant for this in my region. At least that was 2 years ago in Sub-urban Seattle and 3 years ago D.C.

bronco21016 6y ago

The problem is you're basing your argument solely on the physical act of running cable/wires everywhere. When you look at the cost of just hiring a crew to dig the ground or string wire on a pole you are correct. It's significantly cheaper and more reliable. However, add in the human factor, government. The mess of rules, regulations, and right-of-way make it considerably more expensive to run wires everywhere.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
The cost of hiring a crew to dig up the ground runs to hundreds of dollars per foot. At $1MM for a satellite that can serve thousands of people is a lot cheaper.
- wolco 6y ago
  If they all lived in the same location. If the cost is hundreds per square foot and each customer is 1000ft away from each other than thecosts become hundreds of thousands per address. Line of sight or cell tower might work but when it doesn't a satellite will.
bargl 6y ago
I worked at a GEO company. They have a HUGE department just to work with governments to buy or keep their spectrum. The rules and regulations for spectrum are insane, and not just build this cable here in my county/state/country, but now this beam goes across borders what do I do? Oh wait, this region is contested by China/India we have to sell differently to each government. Cost of labor => It's a calculation of how many people can be served per 1 mile (any unit) of cable. If that number is 20, cable wins. If it's 5, hotspot may win (which also uses cable FWIW). If it's 0.5 then these new satellites win. 5G may try to take more market from ISPs but they know they'll have to innovate to keep customers. I can 100% see cell towers being cheaper than cable, but not in every situation. It's about supplementing not replacing infrastructure.

busterarm 6y ago

A lot of what you're saying isn't actually true here. Light moves significantly (47%) slower through optical fiber than through space. This drastically reduces the latency of long distance connections. We're talking NY round trip to Japan in the same time it takes NY roundtrip to the UK now. The cost of backhaul and ongoing maintenance of cables is a lot more than SpaceX launching their own satellites by an entire order of magnitude.

bargl 6y ago
>A lot of what you're saying isn't actually true here. You're talking latency not bandwidth. There is only so much spectrum to go around. My understanding is that there is only a certain amount of bandwidth to go around and there are diminishing returns on adding people beyond a set capacity. I am not arguing that fiber is faster, I'm arguing that fiber has is cheaper at the bandwidth/cost in more dense areas. I don't believe we will see satellite based communication in cities (at a large % of population) for a long time. Now I'm willing to believe someone who's worked closer to this than I have and to learn, but I've done enough in the satellite industry to not take what you're saying without seeing more evidence.
- busterarm 6y ago
  I worked for an ILEC providing cable/dsl/fiber service and just the rough napkin math around SpaceX's launch costs makes it look significantly cheaper. Besides the whole digging and laying cable costs, last mile work is expensive. You have to employ huge crews. Construction crews constantly dig up & cut your infrastructure "by accident" and the cost of recovering the fines from them is as much as the fines pay out. Having to send an emergency crew of three guys out for 18 hours of work to re-splice a 72-ct fiber every other weekend adds up. That doesn't happen in space.
  - bargl 6y ago
    >last mile work is expensive. What do you mean there?

chris_va 6y ago

A cell tower today is basically a selective directional broadcast of ~2.5GHz backed by a microwave backhaul, conforming to local topography and about ~3 miles away. An internet satellite is a phased array broadcast of ~20Ghz with a microwave backhaul without regard for local topography and about ~600 miles away. ... I am not sure there is obviously a better choice here, if the launch costs no longer dominate.

bargl 6y ago
>... I am not sure there is obviously a better choice here, if the launch costs no longer dominate. I'm basing my entire comment on existing costs due to SpaceX efficiency. We'd need (IMO) more cost reduction.

btian 6y ago

What sort of physics? You can multiplex wavelengths for wireless just like cable right? Granted you'd need to buy the licenses for those frequencies, which should be fairly cheap in rural areas. I don't think Elon would approve this project if cable is always cheaper and easier.

bargl 6y ago
Why not? He doesn't have to reach everyone, just some portion of the population that's profitable. My argument should have been this is only (imo) going to get at most 10% of the worlds population. That's based on the signal interference in space. Scale gets costly. EDIT: Then I'm done replying for real. This thread has been fun but I need to stop myself at some point. Thanks for replying. physics => Co-channel and adjacent satellite interference to be specific, the closer you put your satellites the more signal they have to handle. These things are built to scale for the worlds population and you can't just add more satellites without scaling the whole constellation. If it was built to scale for NY city then they'd need to support that population density on every single satellite. But if they build it for Wyoming and steal those customers then they need to only scale for that and allow ISPs to keep NY city residents. While it's cheaper for cable companies to lay wire close to hubs, it's cheaper for satellites to hit people the more spread out they are. So the physics of this constellation are such that it's cheaper for them to give more rural people a baseline of internet rather than upsetting ISPs. I think that's wishful thinking by many people who hate ISPs. I'm not saying it's cheaper for cables to hit everyone everywhere in the world, or this system wouldn't exist. As I said earlier, it's meant to supplement a weakness in our current infrastructure by blanketing the world with cheap internet that works at lower population densities. I used this metric in another thread, but if you're on Septic Starlink is probably for you. If you're on sewer then you're already surrounded by a density of infrastructure that probably makes ground based communication cheaper. No I'm not going to bet that someone on HN doesn't have a counter example for me, but overall I think this would probably make sense.
welterde 6y ago
Fiber optic cables have a much much higher usable bandwidth than the wireless spectrum. The useful radio spectrum for Starlink is somewhere between 10 and 20 GHz. Fiber optic cables have more than 4THz of usable spectrum. And it's no affected by things like fog, rain, strong wind (at least if you don't cheap out and stick it on poles), etc.

vwat 6y ago

But you’re missing the reality of the situation. Hypothetically cable is better and cheaper but in reality it isn’t because of corruption and the fact that cable has to occupy a physical space which forced the involvement of governments which makes everything terrible. Starlink will finally provide good competition to these bastards in rural areas... im in Des Moines metro area where cable sucks for no reason. I can’t wait.

dmix 6y ago

One of the big excuses for the telecom/ISP monopolies in Canada is that they help serve rural areas (same deal with Canada Post). I'm curious to see if this ends up having any effect on the current system. Technically you could just directly subsidize access to the rural areas, for those who can't afford the much cheaper new satellite systems themselves, instead of giving these anti-consumer monsters free reign on the whole country in exchange for managing expensive infrastructure just to serve a small percentage of the population.

martinko 6y ago

"5g could beat out ISPs at cost" Fixed line ISPs share much of the same infrastructure with 5g/4g providers. The only difference between them is the last mile, so it's not like 5g providers magically dont need any backhaul infrastructure and could provide dramatically lower prices.