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Satellites Are Becoming the New Cellphone Towers

132 points by frasermarlow 3y ago

frasermarlow 3y ago
Larger antennas and better beamforming are routing calls through orbit
- hackernewds 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Probably nothing. I know I sound a little cavalier here, but c'mon, if you're going to repeat the "oh noes, radio waves are giving me $TERRIBLE_DISEASE!" conspiracy theory stuff, you gotta provide some peer-reviewed, replicable (and replicated) research to back it up. We've had a huge variety of radio frequencies shooting through various layers of the atmosphere for generations at this point. Sure, some frequencies have only been around and pervasive relatively recently, and we should be watching for longer-term effects. But there's nothing reputable to suggest that the stuff floating around now is unsafe. For reference, the stuff coming down from satellites is much lower frequency (usually IEEE L-band; 1-2GHz) than even WiFi (IEEE S & C bands). Sure, power levels are a bit higher -- though significantly attenuated by the time it gets to ground level -- but if WiFi isn't causing problems, it's vanishingly unlikely that satellite transmissions would be dangerous to humans. To summarize: I'd be more worried about sunburn and skin cancer when I forget to put sunblock on in the summer.
    - nntwozz 3y ago
      Just wait until the plebeians find out about neutrinos.
      - xarope 3y ago
        sir, put down that radioactive banana and step away slowly (apologies if someone has already put this up: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/)
    - pests 3y ago
      We have some things happening like decreased sperm counts, lowering of IQ, increased prevalence of certain diseases, etc. No one really knows what are causing them... Is there any chance, at all, it might be related to radio waves? Long term, generational effects. I do not personally believe it's possible or happening but I've always been a fan of conspiracy fiction.
      - lxgr 3y ago
        Very likely there isn't, but if there was, I'd look at the transmitters right next to you, not at the ones hundreds of kilometers away in the sky. The radiation received from the former vs. the latter is so many orders of magnitude larger, the comparison only makes sense on a log scale – and even then it's very, very small. If you want to minimize the risk of adverse health effects, turn off your smartphone and computer (not because of the radiation, but because you'll be exposed to less worrying conspiracy theories).
      - audunw 3y ago
        Seems more likely that those are caused by things in our environment that we know are disruptive, like PFAS and certain plastic additives. Also bad diets and ultra processed food. There’s plenty of things to worry about where we do actually have studies showing they’re worth worrying about. Radio waves are basically proven safe by now. Like, think about it.. people now regularly sleeping with their phone right next to their head, and use Bluetooth headphones all day. They blast their entire house with Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, ZigBee and wireless speaker signals. If these radio waves were as bad as people thought some years ago we’d all be walking blobs of cancer by now.
      - kelnos 3y ago
        > Is there any chance, at all, it might be related to radio waves? I don't know, but throwing around FUD isn't going to teach us anything useful.
        pests 3y ago
        Who is throwing around FUD? I said society has a couple mystery illnessess. Is that FUD? I asked if radio might be causing something on the level of generations. Is that FUD? Is it not okay to ask questions and be curious?
    - lxgr 3y ago
      > Sure, power levels are a bit higher Quite the contrary: Power levels are just as high as they need to be for phones to still be able to receive them. We're talking dozens of watt of transmission power spread over hundreds of square kilometers. That's microwatts per square meter, of non-ionizing radiation no less. It's not even worth thinking about.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Given the transmission powers and distances involved and the fact that it's non-ionizing radiation, you're probably more likely to develop skin cancer from the UV radiation reflected by the full moon than to experience any type of effect from these satellite-based cell towers.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    Signals at 1000 Terahertz should definitely be avoided. It is rather unfortunate that they're broadcast so strongly around the entire globe on a daily basis. Stick to signals below 790Thz and they're generally pretty safe as long as the power isn't high enough to cause burns.
    - ivandenysov 3y ago
      There are places where you can avoid this radiation for half a year. But they are pretty cold.
      - kube-system 3y ago
        If you are interested, I can sell you a natural mineral cream to apply to your skin which will block the signals from modifying your DNA.
        freedomben 3y ago
        I'm interested, but you should create some sort of measurement system so I know how strong the cream is. Maybe something like "Spectral Prophylactic Filtration" or "SPF" for short
- akira2501 3y ago
  Calls have been routed through orbit from handheld devices for decades now. Ironically, Iridium used SpaceX to launch one of their recent LEO constellations. This seems to be strictly about high data rate applications and the certainly soon to be extremely goofy world of "6G."
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Not yet. For now, "direct-to-cell" and its competitors are all about text/voice/low-data-rate applications in areas that so far haven't had any coverage at all, given the extremely low signal strength involved due to the extreme distances, low transmission powers, and omnidirectional device antennas.
    - akira2501 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio... Launched 1998.
      - lxgr 3y ago
        Yes, I’ve used it myself :) That’s the type of service these new services are going to be providing in their first phase, just (if all goes well) with unmodified mobile devices. I’d guess we’re some time away from broadband data to unmodified phones, but in the end, it’s just a function of available power per square meter in the downlink, i.e. how many satellites can be launched and how tightly their beams can be focused, and of reflector size in the uplink (since the transmit power of 4G/5G devices is fixed at about 1-2% that of Iridium).
        piltdownman 3y ago
        Supposedly ASTS SpaceMobile have achieved broadband data to unmodified phones months ago, although they've provided no evidence of such other than a few PR photos and some fairly light-weight tweets from their partners such as AT&T and Vodafone.
  - 3y ago
aaron695 3y ago
> AST SpaceMobile’s first satellites had antennas with surface areas of 64 square meters Pic- https://spacenews.com/ast-spacemobile-secures-communications-with-prototype/ https://spacenews.com/ast-spacemobile-secures-communications... Pic from earth - https://twitter.com/tzukran/status/1731409049004982558 https://twitter.com/tzukran/status/1731409049004982558
- cubefox 3y ago
  And their ambitions are even higher... > For example, AST SpaceMobile’s first satellites had antennas with surface areas of 64 square meters, followed by second generation satellites with 128 m2 antennas, with plans for going up to 400 m2 I guess when the Starship rocket is available and if they have a reliable folding mechanism, this could happen. The question is probably whether they can keep the cost under control .
dheera 3y ago
I certainly hope we don't rely only on satellites, in case of a solar flare that destroys all the satellites.
- blackoil 3y ago
  Satellite can't beat bandwidth or latency of a cell tower in neighborhood connected to fiber connected to edge node few km away.
  - guappa 3y ago
    But most people don't know that. Not yet at least.
  - looofooo0 3y ago
    Yet, https://physicsworld.com/a/alpine-adaptive-optics-experiment-paves-the-way-for-terabit-per-second-satellite-links/ https://physicsworld.com/a/alpine-adaptive-optics-experiment....
    - trashtensor 3y ago
      I really don't understand the first paragraph, > Researchers in Switzerland have transmitted and received optical data at rates of more than 10 Tbit/s between an Alpine peak and an observatory at the University of Bern – a distance of 53 kilometres. This is more than five times further than would be needed to set up a satellite-to-ground communication link Google says Starlink satellites are 550km in altitude... Is this to do with turbulence below 10km?
      - joecool1029 3y ago
        Not turbulence, air density. Oxygen molecules, dust/pollution, weather.... all of that attenuates light and RF.
        trashtensor 3y ago
teeray 3y ago
Maybe the carriers’ marketing departments will hand out little 4 bar stickers to put in the upper corners of your phone while they loudly proclaim “full bars everywhere!” Of course, conveniently continuing to ignore latency in the mobile core, which is what increasingly impacts end user quality of service more than “bars.”
- lxgr 3y ago
  These satellites are around 500 km up. Round-trip latency is less than 10 ms if you’re somewhat close to a ground station, and if you’re not, odds are you’re not that close to your application server either and would have comparable latency in fiber.
  - phildenhoff 3y ago
    I never before considered that "the edge" may become a constellation of Starlink satellites. Round-trip latency is a lot better if your messages are only going 500km. That said — can you imagine deploying your service to ~5200 satellites? yikes
vsnf 3y ago
I was recently in a country that strictly controls internet communications. Like, total lockdown absolutely forbidden levels of control. I spent my time there constantly wondering about the inevitable advent of ubiquitous wireless communication via things like Starlink and what the effects would be on these totalitarian regimes. Edit: I didn't mean to focus on Starlink specifically. Eventually it won't just be Starlink up there, and likely our mobile devices will need less and less power to communicate with those satellites. So I'm less interested in the effects of Starlink and more on satellite communications generally.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Assuming Starlink is really willing to violate local frequency licensing requirements (which I doubt they'd dare for all but the most internationally isolated countries without anti-satellite weapons), given the low transmit powers, local wireless jammers should be relatively easy to implement.
  - dkbrk 3y ago
    > given the low transmit powers, local wireless jammers should be relatively easy to implement. Not true. Both the transmitter and receiver (in both directions) utilize phased arrays. This means the receiver is very good at rejecting noise angularly separated from the expected location of the transmitter. Geometry dictates that jamming could be somewhat effective against upload (i.e. if the jammer is located roughly within the size of a spot beam from the transmitting dish), but is almost completely ineffective in the download direction. This is all fairly theoretical since much of the details aren't publicly available; but as evidence I point to the fact that Russia has poured a huge amount of money into EW and, despite having considerable motivation to deny Starlink access, has consistently failed to prevent its widespread use by Ukrainian troops on frontlines mere kilometers from its own forces.
    - ale42 3y ago
      This is in ideal condition, but how good is the rejection of other signals by the beamforming circuits in the receiver? Intuitively, I'd think that a powerful enough local jammer (I really mean local, not at some kilometers, EM fields weaken with the square of distance, so very quickly) would manage to create interferences despite the beamforming.
ulf-77723 3y ago
Interesting Read! How will this change influence companies like American Tower? How fast will they need to adapt? 5 years, 10 years, 20 years?
- joecool1029 3y ago
  I doubt Crown Castle and American Tower will be much affected, it might reduce some new rural deployments, but other contracts like Firstnet also increased requirements for rural buildout, so it's not going away. Indoors isn't going to be covered by satellite beams.
system2 3y ago
[flagged]
- MadDemon 3y ago
  Have you ever heard of this thing called sun? It sends down radiation many times stronger and at a frequency that actually damages human cells.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Sure, but that’s natural skin cancer. Much better for you than the synthetic kind.
    - MadDemon 3y ago
      Radio waves have been around for a very long time, but I have yet to hear of a study that links them to cancer.
      - system2 3y ago
        We've never been blasted RF by thousands of satellites in human history. We don't have enough data for now but this is just the beginning. When Starlink competitors start sending more satellites we might have a real problem. Just a few years ago, smoking next to a pregnant woman was acceptable as doctors didn't link cigarettes with cancer.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        The amount of RF energy absorbed by your body from satellites 400km away is really negligible compared to that phone in your pocket. If you worry about RF exposure, worry about the transmitter that everyone carries with them all the time now. Even the neighbours WiFi will deliver you much more RF energy in your house than Starlink sats do.
greatNespresso 3y ago
Something I have wondered about is how can a layman like me could communicate with a satellite? I would need an antenna of some sort I believe but then what's the protocol?
- lxgr 3y ago
  Depends entirely on what you want to do! There are amateur radio satellites that you can legally communicate with using a technician’s license and equipment for around $100 (essentially a UHF/VHF FM walkie-talkie and an external antenna, i.e. just analog voice). If you have a fairly modern iPhone, you can already share your location to a satellite out of the box. And if unidirectional communication counts, you already do it every time you use GPS :)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- katbyte 3y ago
  But a garmin inreach mini, pair your phone, and then start texting people via it’s app :)
- numpad0 3y ago
  IIRC there are some open packet data protocol intended as cost saving measures, but nothing mandatory or ubiquitous as Ethernet or RS-232C in PCs. A primer/tutorial level for hobbyist satellite communication is weather satellite reception using RTL-SDR. 1: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weather-satellite-images/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weat...
- ianburrell 3y ago
  There are amateur radio satellites. You would need to get your amateur radio license, although you can listen without it. Then you need handheld radio. Two, or more expensive dual band, if want to transmit. It is possible to use the builtin antenna. But lots of people use directional Yagi antennas, you can build cheap one. Most of satellites you don’t talk to, the satellite repeats signals. People talk to each other, mainly to make contacts, using the satellite. It is also possible to talk to ISS.
CraigJPerry 3y ago
It’s hard to bet against human determination but on the face of it, it seems out of reach to put satellite voice calls in a package the size of an iPhone. The power requirements and thus the bulky batteries of existing satellite phones could be reduced by switching to protocols which trade off bandwidth for higher error correction abilities through encoding and I don’t think existing satellite phones use the most bandwidth efficient encoding available so that could be another improvement. There’s still the free space path loss between the surface of earth and a Globalstar or Starlink which my best guess estimate is in the order of 130db (can anyone more knowledgeable share a better estimate? I assumed bottom end of L-band, a height between Starlink and Globalstar, and used unverified dBi values for antennas at both ends). Then there’s latency but I don’t think that’s a show stopper for many common use cases of voice and data.
- lxgr 3y ago
  > The power requirements and thus the bulky batteries of existing satellite phones could be reduced by switching to protocols which trade off bandwidth for higher error correction abilities No, you can’t trade bandwidth against error correction. What you can do is use channel coding/error correction to trade effective signal-to-noise strength against data rate (at constant power). But since your data rate demand is fixed for voice, and the uplink transmit power is fixed too (by 4G/5G specs), you need to raise the received signal strength. The only thing that can help you there are more directional receive antennas on the satellites, which is what these new generations are doing.
  - AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
    To be clear, what's happening here is people are accustomed to using "bandwidth" to mean bits/second but bandwidth has a much more specific meaning in the RF world, akin to calling Ethernet "SSH". Bandwidth is the actual number of kilo/mega/gigahertz the signal occupies on the spectrum and is largely a function of symbol rate, but the actual data rate has many more variables.
    - lxgr 3y ago
pasquino 3y ago
Why you should if you don't have to ? Satellite phones are a thing at least since the 90s, but nowadays you prefer some kind of communication via Internet, possibly using wifi. Ok, emergency call, place out the civilisation, but those are same use case present 30 years ago. If you don't have to you want to use real cell towers or wifi. Also I think that to cover the communication needs of a single western rich country they have to increase the number of satellite drastically, with lot of side effects. So really satellites aren't new cell towers. Besides, is that type of infrastructure so profitable to justify its creation ? I want to say, if I wasn't able to do an emergency call the problem was dead battery, not absence of signal, in other cases I use the ol' dirty Marconi's wireless telegraph: the radio. Obviously , if I have a way to send sms from desert place, it's a "nice to have feature" not a necessity for the majority of us, so, again , how the company want to monetise from the infrastructure that is greatly expensive ?
- ale42 3y ago
  Totally agree with your point of view. Another thing to consider is how much the bands dedicated to cell phones are already saturated in dense urban environments. I don't see how a few thousands satellites would be able to scale if they were to replace our actual cell towers (some of them consisting of local cells on utility poles, etc.). And also, satellites dedicated to search and rescue to locate emergency beacons already exist, and you don't need many of them to cover the whole planet.
  - Animats 3y ago
    > Another thing to consider is how much the bands dedicated to cell phones are already saturated in dense urban environments. That's what 5G is supposed to be for. In dense areas, there are supposed to be a large number of tiny cells operating in the 5GHz-6GHz range. The main application for this is stadiums, so the fans can be getting video on their phone while watching, or not watching, the dame. Most of the NFL stadiums now have this. Other parts of cities, not so much yet.
- katbyte 3y ago
  I essentially pay a bunch of money to garmin so i can text people while camping and offroading and send tiny amounts of data to update my position on a map. I got a iPhone 14 for a backup satellite sos method. In Canada there are 100s of km of roads between towns with zero cellphone service, often for hours at a time. Having space based communication in a cellphone to fall back on would be extreme valuable and life saving to many. I know I already pay a bundle for it and many of my outdoorsy friends do the same. I can be driving to a friends house a few hours away and be out of signal for half of it, being able to call for help if I encounter or get into an accident is pretty important and building cell towers would be far more expensive then some satellites
wkat4242 3y ago
I wouldn't call it "The new cellphone towers" as if satellite service will replace ground based. Because it won't. Starlink direct to cell will still cover huge areas per cell which is great for remote areas but not for high density like cities. It will not have strong enough signals to penetrate buildings. And it won't provide enough bandwidth for more than texts at least not for now. It's an augmentation of the land based service, not a replacement.
- vmfunction 3y ago
  > And it won't provide enough bandwidth for more than texts at least not for now. So are we back to 14k modem speed for Satellites data now? Hopefully this will bring back website that is focus being on being lightweight, and just display information (or gemini type of alternative), and discourage the SPA development fiasco that has happened.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    SPAs should/could in general be more tolerant of restricted bandwidth, and more responsive in that environment. If you download all the UI elements, layout, and styling up-front, and then only have to communicate with the server to fetch structured data that tells the app how to change the user interface, that's strictly better. The issue, of course, is that most pages (regardless of whether they're SPAs or not) require a large amount of bandwidth to download assets. But I would expect that a low-bandwidth SPA would be more responsive than a traditional low-bandwidth website where it has to reload the full page every time you do something.
    - bmicraft 3y ago
      Caching your assets will probably get you about 90% of the way there without having to rewrite everything to be a SPA. Or - as a user - the LocalCDN addon
  - addandsubtract 3y ago
    Or we just preload jQuery onto phones and go back to the CDN days :P
Jemm 3y ago
Likely won't work indoors where humans spend most of their time.
- frasermarlow 3y ago
  It certainly won't work inside my 100 year old townhouse where my WiFi router signal can't reach from one floor to the next!
jMyles 3y ago
I don't love this model. It feels so censorable and state-adjacent. All states need to do is convince whoever controls the satellites to accept their terms. It's such a small number of points of failure. The mesh model, where every rooftop is a node routing encrypted traffic to neighbors, feels much more sustainable / forward-looking to me.
- Etheryte 3y ago
  The mesh model is a nice idea, but does not work in low/no population areas, plus across long distances. Coincidentally that's exactly where satellites shine.

132 points by frasermarlow 3y ago

frasermarlow 3y ago

Larger antennas and better beamforming are routing calls through orbit

hackernewds 3y ago
[flagged]
- kelnos 3y ago
  Probably nothing. I know I sound a little cavalier here, but c'mon, if you're going to repeat the "oh noes, radio waves are giving me $TERRIBLE_DISEASE!" conspiracy theory stuff, you gotta provide some peer-reviewed, replicable (and replicated) research to back it up. We've had a huge variety of radio frequencies shooting through various layers of the atmosphere for generations at this point. Sure, some frequencies have only been around and pervasive relatively recently, and we should be watching for longer-term effects. But there's nothing reputable to suggest that the stuff floating around now is unsafe. For reference, the stuff coming down from satellites is much lower frequency (usually IEEE L-band; 1-2GHz) than even WiFi (IEEE S & C bands). Sure, power levels are a bit higher -- though significantly attenuated by the time it gets to ground level -- but if WiFi isn't causing problems, it's vanishingly unlikely that satellite transmissions would be dangerous to humans. To summarize: I'd be more worried about sunburn and skin cancer when I forget to put sunblock on in the summer.
  - nntwozz 3y ago
    Just wait until the plebeians find out about neutrinos.
    - xarope 3y ago
      sir, put down that radioactive banana and step away slowly (apologies if someone has already put this up: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/)
  - pests 3y ago
    We have some things happening like decreased sperm counts, lowering of IQ, increased prevalence of certain diseases, etc. No one really knows what are causing them... Is there any chance, at all, it might be related to radio waves? Long term, generational effects. I do not personally believe it's possible or happening but I've always been a fan of conspiracy fiction.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      Very likely there isn't, but if there was, I'd look at the transmitters right next to you, not at the ones hundreds of kilometers away in the sky. The radiation received from the former vs. the latter is so many orders of magnitude larger, the comparison only makes sense on a log scale – and even then it's very, very small. If you want to minimize the risk of adverse health effects, turn off your smartphone and computer (not because of the radiation, but because you'll be exposed to less worrying conspiracy theories).
    - audunw 3y ago
      Seems more likely that those are caused by things in our environment that we know are disruptive, like PFAS and certain plastic additives. Also bad diets and ultra processed food. There’s plenty of things to worry about where we do actually have studies showing they’re worth worrying about. Radio waves are basically proven safe by now. Like, think about it.. people now regularly sleeping with their phone right next to their head, and use Bluetooth headphones all day. They blast their entire house with Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, ZigBee and wireless speaker signals. If these radio waves were as bad as people thought some years ago we’d all be walking blobs of cancer by now.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      > Is there any chance, at all, it might be related to radio waves? I don't know, but throwing around FUD isn't going to teach us anything useful.
      - pests 3y ago
        Who is throwing around FUD? I said society has a couple mystery illnessess. Is that FUD? I asked if radio might be causing something on the level of generations. Is that FUD? Is it not okay to ask questions and be curious?
  - lxgr 3y ago
    > Sure, power levels are a bit higher Quite the contrary: Power levels are just as high as they need to be for phones to still be able to receive them. We're talking dozens of watt of transmission power spread over hundreds of square kilometers. That's microwatts per square meter, of non-ionizing radiation no less. It's not even worth thinking about.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Given the transmission powers and distances involved and the fact that it's non-ionizing radiation, you're probably more likely to develop skin cancer from the UV radiation reflected by the full moon than to experience any type of effect from these satellite-based cell towers.
- kube-system 3y ago
  Signals at 1000 Terahertz should definitely be avoided. It is rather unfortunate that they're broadcast so strongly around the entire globe on a daily basis. Stick to signals below 790Thz and they're generally pretty safe as long as the power isn't high enough to cause burns.
  - ivandenysov 3y ago
    There are places where you can avoid this radiation for half a year. But they are pretty cold.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      If you are interested, I can sell you a natural mineral cream to apply to your skin which will block the signals from modifying your DNA.
      - freedomben 3y ago
        I'm interested, but you should create some sort of measurement system so I know how strong the cream is. Maybe something like "Spectral Prophylactic Filtration" or "SPF" for short
akira2501 3y ago
Calls have been routed through orbit from handheld devices for decades now. Ironically, Iridium used SpaceX to launch one of their recent LEO constellations. This seems to be strictly about high data rate applications and the certainly soon to be extremely goofy world of "6G."
- lxgr 3y ago
  Not yet. For now, "direct-to-cell" and its competitors are all about text/voice/low-data-rate applications in areas that so far haven't had any coverage at all, given the extremely low signal strength involved due to the extreme distances, low transmission powers, and omnidirectional device antennas.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio... Launched 1998.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      Yes, I’ve used it myself :) That’s the type of service these new services are going to be providing in their first phase, just (if all goes well) with unmodified mobile devices. I’d guess we’re some time away from broadband data to unmodified phones, but in the end, it’s just a function of available power per square meter in the downlink, i.e. how many satellites can be launched and how tightly their beams can be focused, and of reflector size in the uplink (since the transmit power of 4G/5G devices is fixed at about 1-2% that of Iridium).
      - piltdownman 3y ago
        Supposedly ASTS SpaceMobile have achieved broadband data to unmodified phones months ago, although they've provided no evidence of such other than a few PR photos and some fairly light-weight tweets from their partners such as AT&T and Vodafone.
- 3y ago

aaron695 3y ago

> AST SpaceMobile’s first satellites had antennas with surface areas of 64 square meters Pic- https://spacenews.com/ast-spacemobile-secures-communications-with-prototype/ https://spacenews.com/ast-spacemobile-secures-communications... Pic from earth - https://twitter.com/tzukran/status/1731409049004982558 https://twitter.com/tzukran/status/1731409049004982558

cubefox 3y ago
And their ambitions are even higher... > For example, AST SpaceMobile’s first satellites had antennas with surface areas of 64 square meters, followed by second generation satellites with 128 m2 antennas, with plans for going up to 400 m2 I guess when the Starship rocket is available and if they have a reliable folding mechanism, this could happen. The question is probably whether they can keep the cost under control .

dheera 3y ago

I certainly hope we don't rely only on satellites, in case of a solar flare that destroys all the satellites.

blackoil 3y ago
Satellite can't beat bandwidth or latency of a cell tower in neighborhood connected to fiber connected to edge node few km away.
- guappa 3y ago
  But most people don't know that. Not yet at least.
- looofooo0 3y ago
  Yet, https://physicsworld.com/a/alpine-adaptive-optics-experiment-paves-the-way-for-terabit-per-second-satellite-links/ https://physicsworld.com/a/alpine-adaptive-optics-experiment....
  - trashtensor 3y ago
    I really don't understand the first paragraph, > Researchers in Switzerland have transmitted and received optical data at rates of more than 10 Tbit/s between an Alpine peak and an observatory at the University of Bern – a distance of 53 kilometres. This is more than five times further than would be needed to set up a satellite-to-ground communication link Google says Starlink satellites are 550km in altitude... Is this to do with turbulence below 10km?
    - joecool1029 3y ago
      Not turbulence, air density. Oxygen molecules, dust/pollution, weather.... all of that attenuates light and RF.
      - trashtensor 3y ago

teeray 3y ago

Maybe the carriers’ marketing departments will hand out little 4 bar stickers to put in the upper corners of your phone while they loudly proclaim “full bars everywhere!” Of course, conveniently continuing to ignore latency in the mobile core, which is what increasingly impacts end user quality of service more than “bars.”

lxgr 3y ago
These satellites are around 500 km up. Round-trip latency is less than 10 ms if you’re somewhat close to a ground station, and if you’re not, odds are you’re not that close to your application server either and would have comparable latency in fiber.
- phildenhoff 3y ago
  I never before considered that "the edge" may become a constellation of Starlink satellites. Round-trip latency is a lot better if your messages are only going 500km. That said — can you imagine deploying your service to ~5200 satellites? yikes

vsnf 3y ago

I was recently in a country that strictly controls internet communications. Like, total lockdown absolutely forbidden levels of control. I spent my time there constantly wondering about the inevitable advent of ubiquitous wireless communication via things like Starlink and what the effects would be on these totalitarian regimes. Edit: I didn't mean to focus on Starlink specifically. Eventually it won't just be Starlink up there, and likely our mobile devices will need less and less power to communicate with those satellites. So I'm less interested in the effects of Starlink and more on satellite communications generally.

lxgr 3y ago
Assuming Starlink is really willing to violate local frequency licensing requirements (which I doubt they'd dare for all but the most internationally isolated countries without anti-satellite weapons), given the low transmit powers, local wireless jammers should be relatively easy to implement.
- dkbrk 3y ago
  > given the low transmit powers, local wireless jammers should be relatively easy to implement. Not true. Both the transmitter and receiver (in both directions) utilize phased arrays. This means the receiver is very good at rejecting noise angularly separated from the expected location of the transmitter. Geometry dictates that jamming could be somewhat effective against upload (i.e. if the jammer is located roughly within the size of a spot beam from the transmitting dish), but is almost completely ineffective in the download direction. This is all fairly theoretical since much of the details aren't publicly available; but as evidence I point to the fact that Russia has poured a huge amount of money into EW and, despite having considerable motivation to deny Starlink access, has consistently failed to prevent its widespread use by Ukrainian troops on frontlines mere kilometers from its own forces.
  - ale42 3y ago
    This is in ideal condition, but how good is the rejection of other signals by the beamforming circuits in the receiver? Intuitively, I'd think that a powerful enough local jammer (I really mean local, not at some kilometers, EM fields weaken with the square of distance, so very quickly) would manage to create interferences despite the beamforming.

ulf-77723 3y ago

Interesting Read! How will this change influence companies like American Tower? How fast will they need to adapt? 5 years, 10 years, 20 years?

joecool1029 3y ago
I doubt Crown Castle and American Tower will be much affected, it might reduce some new rural deployments, but other contracts like Firstnet also increased requirements for rural buildout, so it's not going away. Indoors isn't going to be covered by satellite beams.

system2 3y ago

[flagged]

MadDemon 3y ago
Have you ever heard of this thing called sun? It sends down radiation many times stronger and at a frequency that actually damages human cells.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Sure, but that’s natural skin cancer. Much better for you than the synthetic kind.
  - MadDemon 3y ago
    Radio waves have been around for a very long time, but I have yet to hear of a study that links them to cancer.
    - system2 3y ago
      We've never been blasted RF by thousands of satellites in human history. We don't have enough data for now but this is just the beginning. When Starlink competitors start sending more satellites we might have a real problem. Just a few years ago, smoking next to a pregnant woman was acceptable as doctors didn't link cigarettes with cancer.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        The amount of RF energy absorbed by your body from satellites 400km away is really negligible compared to that phone in your pocket. If you worry about RF exposure, worry about the transmitter that everyone carries with them all the time now. Even the neighbours WiFi will deliver you much more RF energy in your house than Starlink sats do.

greatNespresso 3y ago

Something I have wondered about is how can a layman like me could communicate with a satellite? I would need an antenna of some sort I believe but then what's the protocol?

lxgr 3y ago
Depends entirely on what you want to do! There are amateur radio satellites that you can legally communicate with using a technician’s license and equipment for around $100 (essentially a UHF/VHF FM walkie-talkie and an external antenna, i.e. just analog voice). If you have a fairly modern iPhone, you can already share your location to a satellite out of the box. And if unidirectional communication counts, you already do it every time you use GPS :)
deleted 3y ago
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katbyte 3y ago
But a garmin inreach mini, pair your phone, and then start texting people via it’s app :)
numpad0 3y ago
IIRC there are some open packet data protocol intended as cost saving measures, but nothing mandatory or ubiquitous as Ethernet or RS-232C in PCs. A primer/tutorial level for hobbyist satellite communication is weather satellite reception using RTL-SDR. 1: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weather-satellite-images/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weat...
ianburrell 3y ago
There are amateur radio satellites. You would need to get your amateur radio license, although you can listen without it. Then you need handheld radio. Two, or more expensive dual band, if want to transmit. It is possible to use the builtin antenna. But lots of people use directional Yagi antennas, you can build cheap one. Most of satellites you don’t talk to, the satellite repeats signals. People talk to each other, mainly to make contacts, using the satellite. It is also possible to talk to ISS.

CraigJPerry 3y ago

It’s hard to bet against human determination but on the face of it, it seems out of reach to put satellite voice calls in a package the size of an iPhone. The power requirements and thus the bulky batteries of existing satellite phones could be reduced by switching to protocols which trade off bandwidth for higher error correction abilities through encoding and I don’t think existing satellite phones use the most bandwidth efficient encoding available so that could be another improvement. There’s still the free space path loss between the surface of earth and a Globalstar or Starlink which my best guess estimate is in the order of 130db (can anyone more knowledgeable share a better estimate? I assumed bottom end of L-band, a height between Starlink and Globalstar, and used unverified dBi values for antennas at both ends). Then there’s latency but I don’t think that’s a show stopper for many common use cases of voice and data.

lxgr 3y ago
> The power requirements and thus the bulky batteries of existing satellite phones could be reduced by switching to protocols which trade off bandwidth for higher error correction abilities No, you can’t trade bandwidth against error correction. What you can do is use channel coding/error correction to trade effective signal-to-noise strength against data rate (at constant power). But since your data rate demand is fixed for voice, and the uplink transmit power is fixed too (by 4G/5G specs), you need to raise the received signal strength. The only thing that can help you there are more directional receive antennas on the satellites, which is what these new generations are doing.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
  To be clear, what's happening here is people are accustomed to using "bandwidth" to mean bits/second but bandwidth has a much more specific meaning in the RF world, akin to calling Ethernet "SSH". Bandwidth is the actual number of kilo/mega/gigahertz the signal occupies on the spectrum and is largely a function of symbol rate, but the actual data rate has many more variables.
  - lxgr 3y ago

pasquino 3y ago

Why you should if you don't have to ? Satellite phones are a thing at least since the 90s, but nowadays you prefer some kind of communication via Internet, possibly using wifi. Ok, emergency call, place out the civilisation, but those are same use case present 30 years ago. If you don't have to you want to use real cell towers or wifi. Also I think that to cover the communication needs of a single western rich country they have to increase the number of satellite drastically, with lot of side effects. So really satellites aren't new cell towers. Besides, is that type of infrastructure so profitable to justify its creation ? I want to say, if I wasn't able to do an emergency call the problem was dead battery, not absence of signal, in other cases I use the ol' dirty Marconi's wireless telegraph: the radio. Obviously , if I have a way to send sms from desert place, it's a "nice to have feature" not a necessity for the majority of us, so, again , how the company want to monetise from the infrastructure that is greatly expensive ?

ale42 3y ago
Totally agree with your point of view. Another thing to consider is how much the bands dedicated to cell phones are already saturated in dense urban environments. I don't see how a few thousands satellites would be able to scale if they were to replace our actual cell towers (some of them consisting of local cells on utility poles, etc.). And also, satellites dedicated to search and rescue to locate emergency beacons already exist, and you don't need many of them to cover the whole planet.
- Animats 3y ago
  > Another thing to consider is how much the bands dedicated to cell phones are already saturated in dense urban environments. That's what 5G is supposed to be for. In dense areas, there are supposed to be a large number of tiny cells operating in the 5GHz-6GHz range. The main application for this is stadiums, so the fans can be getting video on their phone while watching, or not watching, the dame. Most of the NFL stadiums now have this. Other parts of cities, not so much yet.
katbyte 3y ago
I essentially pay a bunch of money to garmin so i can text people while camping and offroading and send tiny amounts of data to update my position on a map. I got a iPhone 14 for a backup satellite sos method. In Canada there are 100s of km of roads between towns with zero cellphone service, often for hours at a time. Having space based communication in a cellphone to fall back on would be extreme valuable and life saving to many. I know I already pay a bundle for it and many of my outdoorsy friends do the same. I can be driving to a friends house a few hours away and be out of signal for half of it, being able to call for help if I encounter or get into an accident is pretty important and building cell towers would be far more expensive then some satellites

wkat4242 3y ago

I wouldn't call it "The new cellphone towers" as if satellite service will replace ground based. Because it won't. Starlink direct to cell will still cover huge areas per cell which is great for remote areas but not for high density like cities. It will not have strong enough signals to penetrate buildings. And it won't provide enough bandwidth for more than texts at least not for now. It's an augmentation of the land based service, not a replacement.

vmfunction 3y ago
> And it won't provide enough bandwidth for more than texts at least not for now. So are we back to 14k modem speed for Satellites data now? Hopefully this will bring back website that is focus being on being lightweight, and just display information (or gemini type of alternative), and discourage the SPA development fiasco that has happened.
- kelnos 3y ago
  SPAs should/could in general be more tolerant of restricted bandwidth, and more responsive in that environment. If you download all the UI elements, layout, and styling up-front, and then only have to communicate with the server to fetch structured data that tells the app how to change the user interface, that's strictly better. The issue, of course, is that most pages (regardless of whether they're SPAs or not) require a large amount of bandwidth to download assets. But I would expect that a low-bandwidth SPA would be more responsive than a traditional low-bandwidth website where it has to reload the full page every time you do something.
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    Caching your assets will probably get you about 90% of the way there without having to rewrite everything to be a SPA. Or - as a user - the LocalCDN addon
- addandsubtract 3y ago
  Or we just preload jQuery onto phones and go back to the CDN days :P

Jemm 3y ago

Likely won't work indoors where humans spend most of their time.

frasermarlow 3y ago
It certainly won't work inside my 100 year old townhouse where my WiFi router signal can't reach from one floor to the next!

jMyles 3y ago

I don't love this model. It feels so censorable and state-adjacent. All states need to do is convince whoever controls the satellites to accept their terms. It's such a small number of points of failure. The mesh model, where every rooftop is a node routing encrypted traffic to neighbors, feels much more sustainable / forward-looking to me.

Etheryte 3y ago
The mesh model is a nice idea, but does not work in low/no population areas, plus across long distances. Coincidentally that's exactly where satellites shine.