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Building a Space-Based ISP
- mnd999 5y agoPuff piece. Starlink is fundamentally not about providing broadband to anyone. It’s landgrabbing a finite resource - low-earth orbit space - before it’s worth is recognised by those who should be regulating it. The broadband itself might be nice or it might be awful. It doesn’t actually matter because that was never the point.
- Diederich 5y ago> Starlink is fundamentally not about providing broadband to anyone. This reply brought to you over a robust, fast, low latency and reliable Starlink connection.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoWait til you have 1000 neighbors vying for bandwidth.
- benlivengood 5y agoThe most pessimistic estimate I've seen paid for by the cable industry is here: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/10208168836021/FBA_LEO_RDOF_Assessment_Final_Report_20210208.pdf https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/10208168836021/FBA_LEO_RDOF_Ass... Only if each subscriber is using an average of 15-20 Mbps during peak times will about 50% of subscribers see some throttling. Interestingly they only showed a single graph of average bandwidth over time from a cable company to estimate needs for SpaceX. No clue if they actually separated it out by time zone for each coverage area in their actual analysis.
- Diederich 5y agoStarlink isn't about directly competing against high density fiber connected internet. It's about everyone else.
- ctdonath 5y agoAnd cheap. $99/mo for competitive data service literally anywhere is amazingly cheap.
- generalizations 5y agoIt's a cynical perspective, but the downvotes are unwarranted. It's worth comparing to McDonalds, where a large proportion of the corporation's worth is in the real estate they hold.
- lucb1e 5y agoOkay but it's not as if mcdonald's bought the land under false pretenses and now uses it for any purpose since it's theirs. Claiming that the internet access is just a pretense for "land" grabbing when the company neither owns the space afterwards nor can switch businesses to something more nefarious and lucrative with the existing devices... it makes no sense.
- zlynx 5y agoIt is about making money. Starlink is a money generating system that makes use of low cost launch made possible by SpaceX. If it does use up most of the low orbit space it is because SpaceX is the only company that is even capable of launching that many satellites and making money on it. Until there is another challenger there is zero point in complaining, because competition is not even an option. Since it is low orbit it is self limiting problem. Any low orbit satellite has a limited lifetime of a few years without power.
- admissionsguy 5y agoIs it scarce, though? Couldn't you put more constellations at the same orbits +/- a couple of kms? In any case, I would expect the spectrum rights to be much scarcer than the space, and they are well regulated.
- cryptonector 5y agoExactly, spectrum is the scarce resource here, and it already is regulated. There is no need for additional regulation regarding that, and there already is regulation of orbits between FCC and FAA.
- jsharf 5y agoThe alternative is waiting literally 10-20 years for anyone else to catch up.
- cryptonector 5y agoOr, hey! slow SpaceX down with regulation!1!!
- bcrl 5y agoWho is even trying to catch up at this point?
- wmf 5y agoSo what is the high-value use of low-earth orbit other than broadband and why doesn't SpaceX do that directly?
- ctdonath 5y agoRight, it's not about taking a major share & expansion of a trillion-dollar industry with payout starting immediately, it's about staking out a thin fraction of (literally) empty space and waiting decades for others to start needing small portions of it. Because $99/month * 12 months * 10 years * 1,000,000,000 customers = $11.88T isn't the point to a man who literally needs a trillion dollars to pull off the grandest mega-project ever.
- cryptonector 5y agoIt's not clear what you're saying. Are you saying that SpaceX will end up consuming too much of a precious resource? Or something else? Anyways, I don't buy that SpaceX will end up consuming too much of a precious resource. Even if it were so, what would be a fair way to share that resource, and who even with?! There's only one announced competitor to Starlink at this time, and they're not even remotely close to being operational. What makes SpaceX able to put up Starlink at such low cost (compared to its earning potential) is that SpaceX has lowered launch costs for itself (and others) by a lot, and they're working to lower those costs even more. What is "fair" when a company works so hard to lower costs and increase availability? Is it to punish them so others get a chance to compete at higher costs??
- ctdonath 5y agoSorry about the mess, that comment was dripping with sarcasm. 1. There's a lot of room up there, and actually claiming & using it is a normal process for civilizing frontiers. 1b. Handwaving about "underappreciated precious resources" is a waste of opportunity. I get the sentiment, but belongs in the 3rd part of the aphorism "lead, follow, or get out of the way." 2. Saying "SpaceX isn't in it for the money" is ridiculous, considering they could gross >$10T in the next decade with it, at ridiculously low expenditure. 2b. In that timeframe, other businesses would be just barely starting to seek out a small fraction of that "precious resource".
- cryptonector 5y agoThank you!
- 3gg 5y agoDon't know about your specific claims, but I also had the same reaction. "This is the world SpaceX’s Starlink program, which has set a goal to provide high-speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable." Can we be honest for once and be up-front about a corporation's real goals? As if <insert technology here> was going to do anything about the gaping inequality and other social problems that actually matter to people. That your comment gets down-voted is certainly telling about the audience here.
- nynx 5y agoStarlink is super exciting from an emerging technologies perspective —— (relatively) cheap satellite production, commercialized laser links, commercialized phased-array tx/rs, among others. These open up very interesting possibilities down the road. These posts always have a thread about people wanting to work for spacex, but because of my pseudo-anonymity, I don’t feel bad about starting it: Does anyone know if spacex does fall or spring embedded software internships?
- p1mrx 5y agoI think the most exciting part is their use of electric ion propulsion to maintain low earth orbit. If SpaceX ever goes bankrupt or something, the satellites will passively deorbit within 5 years or so.
- marsokod 5y agoNo need for that actually. They will deorbit within a year if left completely dead, and within a couple of month if they have a single button "start deorbiting" that uses the electric propulsion. But more importantly, their propulsion allows them to launch at a very low orbit. This is a very good method for a constellation as they can see all the early failures (the beginning of the bathtub curve) happen at a very low orbit and reduce the cost of ground testing. Their orbital debris management strategy is one of the best I have seen.
- cryptonector 5y agoAnd launching to lower orbits means higher payload to orbit per launch which means they can launch more of their constellation per launch. (Although they probably a larger constellation at those orbits just due to how short the orbital periods are.)
- Robotbeat 5y agoYup, and I think this could be improved further by using even lower orbits. Improves latency, debris, and reduces visible time (i.e. closer and closer to only visible during twilight... plus the closer distance increases apparent angular speed and thus reduces dwell time per pixel) for ground telescopes. Requires a bigger propulsive burden, but this is worth it, IMHO.
- HALtheWise 5y agoThe article ends with this nugget about C++ shared memory state management, but I don't have the background to know exactly what they're referring to. Does anyone recognize this pattern and feel able to explain it to mere mortals? > “We also have different tools so that any state that is persisted through the application is managed in a very particular place in memory. This lets us know it is being properly shared between the computers. What you don’t want is a situation where one of the computers takes a radiation hit, a bit flips, and it’s not in a shared memory with the other computers, and it can kind of run off on its own.”
- azernik 5y agoEssentially: They have one address range for shared (i.e. subject to syncing across all replicas) memory, and a separate one for non-shared (single-replica) memory. Cross-replica data is presumably subject to their agreement algorithm, checking that the different computers reach the same (within some error bars) results; you want to arrange things so that there are frequent checkpoints at which the conflict resolution system can say "a bad write happened at this point, I should disregard whatever this computer said from that point until it recovers". i.e. you want local memory to use as scratch space for performance reasons, but to make sure that there isn't a long runway for errors to happen and decisions to be made before the shared-memory checker notices a mistake. To ensure this happens, you want manual control over which memory allocator handles which data.
- HALtheWise 5y agoThat makes sense. One part I'm still not clear on is how you accomplish a "restore" to fix the broken state of a process with a bitflip. Is it enough to simply copy all the shared state memory over as a block and jump into executing it? That seems like it would require the invariant that shared memory never references private memory, and I'm not sure how to statically enforce that.
- ncmncm 5y agoYou probably have hardware that watches ECC flags. For a correctable one-bit flip, it triggers a read-and-then-write. For a two-bit flip, it might just kill and restart the process, or reset the whole machine. As long as it doesn't happen too often, it's fine: the whole system (constellation and ground nodes) are designed to accommodate such events.
- cute_boi 5y ago"Starlink is currently in orbit at 340 miles" Can we please stop using miles etc :( I am tired when people makes mistake like this.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agowhat should they use
- azernik 5y agoKilometers. If they're writing for a US audience and absolutely need miles, put one or the other in parens after the "main" one.
- krapht 5y agoPeople who get irritated over units of measure are themselves irritating. It is not so hard to round, double it 4 times and then divide by 10.
- skissane 5y agoWhen US-based companies put things in US measurements and don't provide metric conversions, it makes me (as a non-American) feel like they aren't thinking about their non-US customers. It appears parochial. Miles I can roughly convert in my head, but I have really no idea what a gallon or a fluid ounce is. I remember a pound is a bit under 500 grams but can't remember how many ounces in a pound. Fahrenheit to Celsius, I know there is a 5/9 and a 32 involved, but I don't remember exactly what to do with them. What makes it worse here is that the original measurement was in kilometres – kilometres are the standard unit for measuring orbital altitudes in the space industry, even in the US-based space industry – and someone has gone to the trouble of converting that to miles and then omitting to include the original measurement.
- lutorm 5y agoFor practical purposes, I get by 99% of the time with 1 (statute) mile == 1.5km.