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SpaceX Will Announce Micro-Satellites for Low Cost Internet Within Three Months
- nodesocket 12y agoAny idea on up/down bandwidth?
- kashkhan 12y agoat any time 200 of the 700 will be above land and half of those over desert/tundra. so basically 100 sats will serve 1 Billion people. Assuming each can do 10Gbps that's 1Tbps divided by 1B. so average of 10kbps per terminal. which is enough for basic web, texting, twitter and voice. Won't be enough for netflix or torrenting.
- benjamincburns 12y agoI think that's a good lower bound, as it assumes no packet scheduling, and that everyone on Earth will be attempting to consume all the bandwidth available to them all of the time. It also assumes that the "backhaul" between satellites wouldn't saturate under such a load. I'd wager that under those assumed numbers you'd more realistically be able to expect somewhere between 100Kbps and 1Mbps.
- kashkhan 12y agothe first problem is the evening peak when everyone tries to get on at the same time and watch netflix/youtube. The second problem is the link equation from your hemi antenna handset to the satellite 1000km away that passes by in 100s. Yes with packet scheduling you can get higher peak bandwidth, but 1Mbps sustained over the course of a 5 minute youtube video is going to be hard. It's much better to target the whatsapp crowd. That facebook will pay for.
- mrfusion 12y agoWould some kind of caching help with this? I guess it doesn't do much good to cache data on a satellite? It still has to send it to each user?
- callesgg 12y agoBased on current technologys and their numbers 5 kb/s to 5mb/s based on usage. Current consumer technology gives 300b/s to too 500 kb/s Depending on how much you want to pay. *speeds in bytes not bits
- psykovsky 12y ago> *speeds in bytes not bits Then you should use the correct metric prefix, kBps, not kbps. It would save you from having to give unnecessary explanations.
- 4ad 12y agoSurely you mean kB/s, not kBps. Nobody uses kBps because it's misleading. The question always boils down to kB/s vs. kbps. In this respect, your parent also unfortunately used kb/s, which is also a misleading and confusing unit. People really should be using only kB/s and baud.
- psykovsky 12y agoNobody and everybody are always exagerations when you talk about what people "use". The / means per, so it means exactly the same as the p. What's misleading about it as long as you capitalize the units correctly?
- 4ad 12y agoThe standard units, as in units defined by various international standards like ISQ are B/s and b/s. bps is defined to mean b/s. Note that there is no Bps in any ISQ standard. The only reason b/s has an bps alias is to reduce confusion. Greater hamming distance means less potential for confusion. Now you want to add the confusion back. Luckily, units are standardised by international bodies, not individuals, and the industry seems to be happy with the standards and uses them. Very seldom I have seen kBps (and in the few cases where I have seen it, it was wrong anyway). kb/s, while correct, I have only seen used by mistake, or by malice (e.g. ISPs intentionally misleading customers). Luckily, most professionals agree on only using B/s and bps, and no other combination, correct or not.
- ljd 12y agoI'm hoping it's low earth orbit, which is a significant reduction in latency versus geosynchronous satellites.
- Implicated 12y agoThis was my first concern as well, the latency.
- easytiger 12y agoYea i'm sure the people in Africa currently relying on LW radio will notice.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- throwaway_yy2Di 12y agoIt's supposed to be a constellation of ~700 satellites, that definitely suggests low orbit. (Rationale: With high orbits like GEO, a single satellite covers half the planet, so there's no obvious reason to have hundreds of them. But LEO is much nicer for many reasons (latency, launch cost). If you could cover the whole planet from LEO, that'd be the logical choice; and planning ~700 satellites at once suggests that's the aim).
- danielweber 12y agoAn architecture that requires more launches is directly in SpaceX's interests.
- tsotha 12y agoThe problem with low orbit is increased drag. This is basically why Iridium went bankrupt trying to charge $7/minute for phone calls - the lower you are the more fuel you need to expend for station keeping. A satellite that would last decades in geostationary orbit may only last four or five years at 120km.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- martinald 12y agoVery interesting. The latency may be <10ms which is good enough for most applications. ViaSat1 has an overall capacity of 140Gbit/sec and that was launched in 2011. I'd imagine that higher capacities are possible (though considering they are very low weight, that may restrict the amount of beams it can push out). However, the continual problem with satellite internet is that the satellites have a life expectancy of 15 years or so. While 140gbit/sec+ is probably enough now, it certainly won't be much in a few years time (when you have to consider that the bandwidth is shared across an awful lot of potential users). Edit: I'd also add that while the proposed market is for areas without current internet connectivity, people do need to realise that a lot of Africa has very good 2G/3G coverage and some areas have very good LTE coverage. The problem historically has been backhaul capacity a) from the towers back b) from the core network back to the internet a) is still an issue as in Africa most if not all backhaul from the towers is provided via microwave relay and daisy chaining them, which causes capacity problems (most of the West has fibre or similar connecting each tower) b) is slowly being improved with much better fibre runs around Africa. Considering that most very basic smartphones will have LTE chipsets by the time this system is up, it may be more cost effective to use LTE than this system. This system is likely to require expensive ground terminals that need to be fixed in place.
- sajal83 12y ago<10ms is assuming that the satellite you connect to is directly accessing a base station... if the signal needs to be routed across the world to get to the base station then its a lot higher than conventional fiber.
- agildehaus 12y agoEh, then just continue adding base stations to improve latency. Easy problem to solve.
- kashkhan 12y agoviasat is a bit heavier than the 100kg sats that will be done here. Doing 100Gbps with $1MM is unlikely although it might be possible in 5 years. 15 year lifetime in 1000km orbit is not very likely, 5-7 year tops given propellant requirements. for ~1000 satellites @ 100kg each that's about 2 saturn V launches so not crazy launch economics. I guess they can do 30 sats per plane x 30 planes. That will give you the stable rings you need for backhaul. son of teledesic may finally see the day with spacex :)
- tmmm 12y agoSerious question, are satellites allowed to be above other countries, like Russia, China etc.?
- kashkhan 12y agoyes. space is free for all above 100km. It's like international waters beyond 20NM. No you can't shoot. Shooting is an act of war, just like sinking a ship in the mid atlantic.
- tmmm 12y agoCan you shoot other satellites (above 100km) without any repercussions then (with your own satellite above 100km)? Or, what would happen if I sent my own satellite, and it hit Elon's by accident? I am asking these questions, because I am not sure big countries would be very happy if their people's internet requests went through USA's company.
- bad_alloc 12y agoProperty rights still apply in space: Any vehicle you launch is yours and you can be held accountable for damage you do to somebody else's vehicle. Proving that somebody killed your satellite on purpose should be pretty difficult though.
- repsilat 12y agoIs that really how it works in practice? There's no legal system with any real international jurisdiction. I'd have thought if state actors were going to be "held accountable" it would be done diplomatically, and that non-state actors would be held to account by the states in which they reside.
- ceejayoz 12y ago> There's no legal system with any real international jurisdiction. Not entirely necessary. Most nation states have enough property spread over the world that suing them can be sufficient. For example: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/feds-win-seize-ave-tower-tied-iran-article-1.1458097 http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/feds-win-seize-ave-tower...
- higherpurpose 12y agoI trust Musk a little more with something like this than Google or Facebook, but I'm not sure what he'd do when he'd be confronted by the NSA, especially when his SpaceX is so tied to government contracts.
- psykovsky 12y agoWhy are you talking like it didn't happened yet?
- cpach 12y agoWhat’s the difference from your current ISP in this regard? To avoid surveillance you need to use a secure protocol like TLS, but even then the attacker might access the server on the other end (e.g. via physical access).
- grey-area 12y agoYou can assume at this point that any significant communications network like this has traffic recorded by at least FVEY and probably other agencies too. They could probably intercept traffic leaving ground stations, even if the company didn't want them to. If that's important to you (say you're a lawyer, accountant, doctor, business, politician, judge, journalist etc ;), you'd be better to use encryption than worry about the network layer which you have no control over.
- throwaway_yy2Di 12y agoSo, this seems to be an evolution of Greg Wyler's WorldVu Constellation, Musk's comment follows reports that he's looking into lending support to a small-satellite venture established with the goal of providing global Internet access. The venture, known as WorldVu Satellites, was founded by former Google executive Greg Wyler... http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/spacex-working-satellite-project-elon-musk-says-n244106 http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/spacex-working-satellit... Wikipedia details about what that was: * Originally planned 360 satellites * Originally estimated cost $3 billion, 2019-2020 timeframe (as of 2014) * Low-earth orbit (LEO), 800 km / 950 km * Ku band 12-18 GHz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldVu_satellite_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldVu_satellite_constellatio...
- tn13 12y agoPlease note that experiments of this sort will be far more expensive and sometimes be outlawed if government goes ahead with its plan to declare internet as "utility"by masquerading it as "net neutrality". Experiments like these could be more feasible if large cos like FB, Google invest in it with greater control.
- BinaryIdiot 12y ago> sometimes be outlawed if government goes ahead with its plan to declare internet as "utility" They're only discussing this for wired broadband so no worries there.
- tomaskafka 12y agoOf course. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing
- RegW 12y agoA better explanation in "Yes, Prime Minister": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE ... and perhaps relevant to the discussions of states tampering with other people's satellites.
- tn13 12y agoDoes not really matter. Each economic recession sees vast expansion of government powers and we lose economic freedom. But the boom does not see the opposite. The knife that is being put into hear will not be taken out, more will follow.
- tfinniga 12y agoI don't see how that follows. My understanding of net neutrality was that the source of the packet couldn't be allowed to affect the delivery of the packet. In this case, if the satellite connection is more expensive, the user will pay that higher cost. The price is for the uplink, not depending on what bits flow across it. How is that at all affected by net neutrality?
- ghshephard 12y agoWill be interesting to see if there is an option for road warriors that won't involve a cumbersome satellite dish. Regarding Latency - I spend greater than 50% of my life on > 500 msec latency connections (IPSec VPN back to California, often over Cellular) - so anything that beats that is a win.
- callesgg 12y agoSweet, I have actually been looking in to getting a ingmarsat modem. However they are so expensive that it might actually be worth waiting a few years for a better alternative.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- tomaskafka 12y agoLol, of course not, this is a prototypical SPOS (Single Point of Surveillance).
- spacefight 12y agoNice, but will they have a netflix cache on board? ;)
- netcan 12y agoQuestion: Assuming the UN, an individual state or private donors want to support economic development in underdeveloped states with poor infrastructure, would funding free or very cheap internet access be useful? One of the problems with badly run, weak and/or underfunded governments is lack of infrastructure. Mobile access arrived before rads, sewage or mains electricity in places because of the easier infrastructure that depends less on these things. Is this that kind of a thing?
- gloverkcn 12y agoYes, free/very cheap internet access would be very useful. One of the keys to economic development is access to credit/micro-finance. It's often not economical for banks to have a branch nearby so basic financial services are lacking. Sometimes the government provides something rudimentary (the post office in India is also a bank of sorts). A lot of the cell towers don't support data in these regions so even if there is phone service there's no internet, or if there is it is prohibitively expensive. Internet could drive the cost down of a regional branch/or enable a stripe for the masses kind of thing (where the shops could get some low cost internet device that also acts as a card swiper and/or credit card) This would also enable a lot of education possibilities which is also limited due to limited resources and poor internet options. Children could attend more advanced schooling in classrooms where the teacher is there via telepresence (Cisco is/was working on something like this) Adding to that simple doctors visits. A doctor supporting one region could see more patients from all over more quickly identifying issues before they get out of hand. Typed on iPad.
- DanBC 12y ago> One of the keys to economic development is access to credit/micro-finance. http://www.irinnews.org/report/95067/development-microfinance-possibilities-and-limitations http://www.irinnews.org/report/95067/development-microfinanc... > "[There is] no clear evidence that microfinance has any positive or negative impacts," said Maren Duvendack, ODI [Overseas Development Institute] fellow and author of a recent systematic review of microfinance, while David Roodman, of the Centre for Global Development, added: "I [wouldn't] say microfinance doesn't work, I would say it does not systematically reduce poverty. We do not have credible academic evidence that microcredit on average lifts people out of poverty... We [also] do not have evidence that microfinance is systematically making people worse off."
- jimmcslim 12y agoA great idea, but I wonder what Elon Musk's ideas about addressing the possibility of the Kessler syndrome; collisions between orbiting debris at an exponential pace ultimately leading to the denial of safe orbits to humanity. Given SpaceX this is clearly something he should be deeply concerned about, but is he addressing it in any way, or just adding to the problem? I'd say he is having a positive impact with his focus on reusable rocket stages, therefore less debris in orbit... a cloud of micro-satellites (how manueverable?) might be going in the other direction.
- imanaccount247 12y agoI'm under the impression that they are not in a stable orbit, so they won't become a problem.
- vishbar 12y agoThis may be a silly question, but when it's said that these are not in a "stable orbit", what is the mechanism of decay? I'd imagine if they were in an elliptical orbit, they'd simply continue that way forever in a "perfect" system. I'd imagine tidal forces would be too weak and the satellites too small for them to have any effect. Are they passing through the atmosphere and experiencing atmospheric drag?
- aba_sababa 12y agoYep. Solar wind also contributes. It's possible to set the solar panels to be orthogonal to these forces which can induce maximum drag.
- danielweber 12y agoEven the moon has enough gravitational distortions that satellites there degrade and crash.
- virtualwhys 12y agoAnything that brings down the ridiculous fees for internet access at sea will be a breath of fresh air for technologists that dream of living and working away from terra firma. As it stands the receiver equipment alone runs $10K to $15K, and then you get whacked with a $3K+/month fee for unlimited access[0] O_o A fleet of SpaceX sateillites should bring that price down significantly. If so, could usher in a new wave of telecommuters that ditch high priced apartment rentals in favor of nomadic living at sea ;-) [0] http://www.groundcontrol.com/FleetBroadband_Service_Plans.htm http://www.groundcontrol.com/FleetBroadband_Service_Plans.ht...
- api 12y agoHmm... I wonder if his old colleague Peter Thiel is going to give seasteading a try. :)
- mpg33 12y agoCould a nation state jam these? Or in other words...could a person in a country who's internet is censored get unfiltered access via these satellites?
- mrfusion 12y agoProbably a dumb question but will the proposed net neutrality title II changes affect this project?
- calinet6 12y agoIt's a great question. Just the idea of a worldwide service brings up hundreds of legal jurisdictions and possible issues. And the limited bandwidth of the satellites may mean that equal service treatment may not be ideal, even if awesomely required by law (we can hope). We'll see how it plays out.
- motoboi 12y agoDoes anyone know if this proposal is similar to 03b in which Google invested this year? Besides that, i'm becoming skeptical on Elon's announcements since hyperloop. Maybe he is just using this old public relations trick: let some information about a future product or project leak to the media to know how the public respond.
- loceng 12y agoIf you can own a market, such as cheaply launching anything into space, you reduce your costs compared to competitors for anything space-related - so why not extend into business that is a billion-dollar and eventually trillion-dollar industry with mining resources from space?
- clavalle 12y ago>Besides that, i'm becoming skeptical on Elon's announcements since hyperloop. Why? He was quite clear in stating that he wouldn't actively pursue hyperloop.
- mark_l_watson 12y agoI suppose with enough satellites and efficient routing the latency would be OK. In the 1980s things were different. I was using servers scattered around the world and the latency was a second or two because of multiple hops from the ground to a few high altitude satellites. Very low cost Internet is a good thing, especially if it is combined with self imposed net neutrality, which I would bet that this team would respect.
- pvnick 12y agoAll these new internet options are quickly chipping away at the ISP oligopoly. Tell me again why we need a ham-handed federal approach to net neutrality?
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoHow can satellites compete? They have exactly one 'cable' for everybody - over the air. That doesn't scale; its already not enough. This will be some niche market for backups or secure link or something; it sure won't be streaming Netflix for hundreds of millions of people. Maybe for hundreds of people.
- pvnick 12y agoAdd satellites to a quickly growing list of unforeseen options that includes google fiber, municipal broadband, etc. and collectively they will soon be enough to make slow/fast lanes a suicidal proposition for major ISPs. The whole raison d'etre for net neutrality is D.O.A. and trying to shove through a bloated set of internet regulations tainted by the corporate lobbying process that defines American politics is unnecessarily and likely damaging to openness and freedom.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoBut they don't really add much. The bandwidth is infinitesimal, compared to your neighborhood cable in a medium-sized city. And they're godawful expensive. What's the point?
- Yadi 12y agoThis is kind of game changing for internet access in developing countries! I'm originally in Iraq and when $#it hits the fan, the government turns of Internet! Now Imagine if one of these babies could talk to a V-Sat and broadcast even when there was no local Internet! There are just so many great uses for these Micro-Satellites.
- razster 12y agoHopefully so, but there may be some control by governments to still block access. I'm sure the States are going to have rules before these V-sats can be launched; no?
- mapt 12y agoThese would be placed in a relatively high LEO of 800 & 950km, 20 satellites per plane on 18 orbital planes (likely 18 launches, but a remote possibility is using a bunch of fuel over multiple maneuvers to do 9 or 6). Orbital lifetimes to Earth decay according to altitude are highly variable, especially with the form factor of the satellite and its mass & profile against the remnant atmosphere, but for typical satellites very, very roughly: 150km minutes to hours 300km days to weeks 450km months to years 600km years to decades 750km decades to centuries 900km centuries to millennia 35,786km (GSO) effectively unlimited Something this high would indeed pose an addition to the Kessler threat by virtue of remaining up there for many doublings of debris density; And redressing that would not be so difficult, in actuality. Chemical deorbit, ion deorbit, electromagnetic tether deorbit, and sail deorbit are all possibilities; The last does not even require orientation control. All that's needed is some incentive for them to implement controlled deorbitting.