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Musk files to provide Internet service from space
- jes 11y agoMusk claims to want to launch 4,000 or so satellites. The Goddard Space Flight Center indicates that there are 2,271 satellites in orbit now. I'm wondering to what degree this would make it more likely to have a negative feedback loop of satellite destruction in the case of a satellite being hit by space junk.
- greglindahl 11y agoThe problem has to do with cross-section -- these satellites will each be small, a few hundred kilograms each. In comparison, cubesats are 1-3 kg, and big satellites, which are most of the existing ones, are a few tons of mass each. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome Also, with satellites at 1,100 km, they'll be above all the crap in LEO.
- shabble 11y agoand solves the other problem of Big High internet, which is latency. At 1000km you could have single-hop round-trips in <10ms.
- shmerl 11y agoWhat is the orbit for current satellite ISPs?
- oh_sigh 11y agoIridium SATs are in LEO at 485 mi
- greglindahl 11y agoAt 2.4 kilobits, Iridium is not a major player in satellite Internet.
- Scoundreller 11y agoThough there's only one civil ground station, so the latency to your wired neighbour can still mean an around-the-world trip.
- shabble 11y agoI think they're mostly in geosynch/geostationary at 36,000-42,000km or so, with latencies of 250-350ms (pure travel, not including queuing or processing delays)
- Swannie 11y agoInmarsat's Global Xpress system is geostationary. http://www.inmarsat.com/service/global-xpress/ http://www.inmarsat.com/service/global-xpress/ No specifics on the site about the exact altitude, but probably in order of those listed here.
- NamTaf 11y agoGeostationary, so ~36000km
- kayoone 11y agoah interesting. My main concern when reading this was latency, which has traditionally been crap with satellite ISP. In todays world i also feel that once you have a certain bandwidth (say 10-20Mbps) the benefits of a latency of <50ms vs 200ms outweigh those of more bandwidth because literally everything, from loading web content, chatting, making calls, realtime anything, is more responsive. So the latency being so much better with this (hopefully) excites me :)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mapt 11y agoThere are a lot more large pieces of space junk in LEO than that. We track about an order of magnitude more than that above 5cm diameter. Exploded upper stages, debris from collisions, discarded separation bits and pieces, no-longer-active satellites. 4000 is still a large number, especially at a higher LEO altitude where junk lasts forever. There's a reasonable case to be made for shifting to a regime where we require that satellite providers remove more mass and more pieces of debris from orbit than they put into orbit. But we don't want to split the baby and force them into bankruptcy either. The weak interim guidance might be that built-in deorbiting devices are required for anything with more than a ~10 year orbital lifetime. This doesn't end the Kessler Syndrome cascade, but it at least doesn't contribute very much. Presently there is only a ~25 year voluntary initiative, and adherence is not universal. The most advanced initiative in this area is the geosynchronous graveyard belt, which the FCC enshrined into law for US telecom providers, but even that fails a large fraction of the time.
- adoggman 11y agoI believe they would be low enough that if they failed they would pretty quickly fall back into the atmosphere, and be replaced on the fly. I'm pretty sure I heard this in his talk about it in Washington on youtube.
- greglindahl 11y agoNo, that's not the case at 1,100km. That's true only for LEO.
- ourmandave 11y agoIf this were to ultimately succeed in cheap internet everywhere, it doesn't bode well for other projects like Google's Loon. https://www.google.com/loon/ https://www.google.com/loon/ Unless they can do it cheaper I suppose.
- jes 11y agoAdditional article: http://spacenews.com/spacex-google-matchup-sets-up-satellite-internet-scramble/ http://spacenews.com/spacex-google-matchup-sets-up-satellite...
- dublinben 11y agoIs there no room for competing networks offering global internet access?
- greglindahl 11y agoGoogle invested in SpaceX in order to fund this Internet satellite project.
- dzhiurgis 11y agoCall me crazy, but wouldn't it make sense to have servers on the satellite? Solar energy + lower latency. Cooling is still a problem in vacuum though.
- kiba 11y agoYou're not going to have much computational capability especially given the mass.
- greglindahl 11y agoIt's much cheaper to build a server into each ground station.
- Rebelgecko 11y agoIf you use regular hardware you'd have to worry about bits getting flipped by radiation, which could cause some big problems depending on what your server is doing. Unfortunately radiation-resistant hardware is super expensive (maybe not a problem) and super slow (probably a problem)
- tdaltonc 11y agoInterestingly, Facebook just announces that they are giving up on a project to do just that. http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-scraps-secret-plan-to-build-satellite-to-provide-internet-in-developing-world-500-million-2015-6?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-scraps-secret-plan-t...
- crorella 11y agoIt looks like the approach was different: instead of having several thousand of small and 'cheap' satellites, they were aiming for an expensive and big one.
- dwg 11y agoPresumably this is because of the cost of launching the satellites (obviously quite a bit more than racking a server in a data center). Nonetheless, if this strategy beats the latency, then I agree that it's the right one.
- greglindahl 11y agoPresumably the one big satellite was intended to be backhaul for the solar planes. They can probably buy that backhaul from someone else with less risk and effort.
- fivedogit 11y agoMy first thought, here, was "Well what about the speed of light? Wouldn't that cause satellite internet service to suck, just like it does now? And isn't that why news correspondents are always delayed?" But then I did the math: Speed of light = 186 miles per millisecond. Satellites orbit at about 380 miles above earth (Source: Hubble). So it only takes ~4 ms for a round trip to a satellite directly above? I did not know that. Weird, wild stuff. If someone knows specifics about why satellite communication is currently so slow (both internet and video), I'd be interested in the EL5 version.
- hughes 11y agoUnless the content you're accessing is hosted on the satellite, it will have to jump several more times over a much longer distance for a complete round trip. Can you factor that in to your estimate?
- dzhiurgis 11y agoNot necessarily, distance between satellites most definitely will be shorter than on ground network.
- yincrash 11y ago~250ms RT latency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Signal_latency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Signa... Hubble is a pretty low orbit. Geostationary orbits are @ 36,000km
- greglindahl 11y agoSpaceX is proposing putting them @ 1,100km. The speed of light is faster in space than it is in optical fibre.
- coryl 11y agoThe speed of light is faster in space than it is in optical fibre. Could you elaborate? Thanks
- dankohn1 11y agoI was Director of Marketing with Teledesic, Craig McCaw and Bill Gates's Internet-in-the-Sky from 1995 to 2000. I'm a huge fan of what Musk is doing, with order of magnitude cheaper launch costs and satellite hardware. AMA.
- shabble 11y agoHow far did you get? What went wrong? What sort of latency/bandwidth did you expect to achieve? Was it relaying via geosynch/higher orbit 'hubs' or peer to peer sideways routing?
- dankohn1 11y agoWe raised $1.6 B, received the largest spectrum allocation in the history of the world (1000 Megahertz, in the Ka band, available globally), and launched one test satellite. But, the biggest problem with these sorts of systems is that there is no MVP. Essentially everything has to work before anything can. Our design was for a network of Low Earth Orbit satellites, which would mean cellular-like latency. We were planning to offer tens of megabytes per second, but it would have been really expensive. Our design used lasers for inter-satellite links, so there was no need for lots of local gateways. In retrospect, the biggest mistake was to try to raise money from the incumbent telecom operators around the world, whose business we should be have been planning to disrupt.
- fragmede 11y ago> no MVP It seems there are still phases you could do. Instead of trying to bring up an entire constellation at once doing two-way communications covering the entire globe, you could start with just a few broadcast-only satellites. Not competitive with at my house in urban North America where wifi and LTE is ubiquitous, but that's never going to be your market anyway. The receiver on the ground is going to have to be specialized hardware anyway, so build in a battery and a real time clock so it can wake itself up when one of the satellites is in range, and then record everything the satelite is transmitting. Send the entire contents of Wikipedia once a week, send technical manuals, send the week's news, Windows updates, Linux distros; the Internet is so ubiquitous these days but fast access to it is still elusive in remote parts of the world. This wouldn't have been useful in 2000 but 15 years later, a box with an wifi access point and a 1 TB hard drive chock full of information that's relatively up to date? Not as cool as "internet anywhere in the world", but a start. Phase in delayed 2-way communication next, reusing the physical antenna from version 1; adding more satellites as you go. Of course, 15 years later, the cost of putting 1 kg in orbit has also shrunk, and having a WiFi-capable computer in my pocket to look up information on is "normal" - which wasn't so, 15 years ago.
- savage_platypus 11y agoGreat, another pipe-dream to sell to his investor fan club.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoAs opposed to current pipe dreams: * gigafactory under construction * freemont factory producing ~50K vehicles/year * spacex successfully, repeatedly delivering payloads to orbit (and successfully demonstrating their crew escape vehicle recently)
- savage_platypus 11y agoJust because something is being built with other people's money does not make something a success. None of the companies Elon has been involved with have ever actually generated a profit -- they have largely just taken advantage of speculative investors and their willingness to buy into his ideas.
- aarongray 11y agoI think PayPal was kinda profitable and stuff.
- silntbob 11y agoLast time I checked SpaceX was profitable... Just saying...
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago> None of the companies Elon has been involved with have ever actually generated a profit Bullshit; there are companies he's been involved in that have turned a profit. Zip2 made a good profit and a great exit - http://news.cnet.com/Compaq+buys+Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.html http://news.cnet.com/Compaq+buys+Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.htm... X.com / Paypal generates first profits in 2002 - http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y02/m04/i18/s02 http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y02/m04/i18/s02 SpaceX is profitable - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/spacex-profitable-as-musk-pulls-in-nasa-contracts-google-cash http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/spacex-pro... Don't forget SolarCity is turning itself around and will likely turn a profit in a few years (http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/17/what-to-look-for-when-solarcity-reports-earnings.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/17/what-to-loo...). The same for Tesla which is expecting to turn a profit in 2020 (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-wont-turn-profitable-until-2020-musk-2015-01-14 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-wont-turn-profitable-...).
- x0054 11y agoI wonder how it would compare to Exede Satellite service. I have Exede, it's the only thing available here in High Desert :( The speed is very good for what it is, I am getting 16-20 mbps down and 3mbps up. But, the latency is a huge issue for me. Most servers, even once in US, ping at 800ms, this makes it such a pain to do any kind of SSH server admin! With low orbit devices I would imagine the latency should be better, I am guessing, but how much better.
- dangrossman 11y ago> With low orbit devices I would imagine the latency should be better, I am guessing, but how much better. Your satellite's 22,000 miles above the earth. If you were directly under it, round trip latency would be 236ms. If these satellites are 684 miles up, and you were directly under one, round trip latency would be just 7ms. The distance between satellites, and between the satellites and whatever ground stations actually connect them to the 'net, will all be smaller because of the lower orbits. Latency should be much better.
- roamingryan 11y agoFEC and interleaving induced latency will likely become the dominant term for LEOs.
- dzhiurgis 11y agoWhat numbers are we talking? Shorter distance + faster signal thru air can amount up to 30-50% lower latency.
- ohitsdom 11y agoThis article has some pretty good info on the different approaches to satellite internet: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2015-01-22/global-internet-greg-wyler-may-beat-elon-musk-google-facebook http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2015-01-22/global-inter...
- roamingryan 11y agoYou should check out mosh for use on high latency connections: https://mosh.mit.edu/ https://mosh.mit.edu/
- geomark 11y agoFrom the article: "SpaceX would need permission from countries to operate the service, a process that could be difficult, if not impossible." Yep. To operate in many countries an ISP has to block access to a lot of content. It differs greatly from country-to-country. Would they really get involved in that? That would mean taking orders from governments all over the world and implementing blocks per those orders. Or would they forget about providing access in those countries? That's a large number of countries. Added: Forgot to mention one of the biggest obstacles to getting permission in many countries: surveillance. Beaming directly from a user to a satellite that relays to a ground station in another country is going to bypass local surveillance. Another addition: Wikipedia article on internet censorship and surveillance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveil... Note some of the countries listed under "Pervasive censorship or surveillance": India, South Korea, UK and USA.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- greglindahl 11y agoNote that countries have not succeeded in stopping satellite phone users within their borders... for example, the Taliban in Afghanistan use satellite phones extensively.
- tdaltonc 11y agoAre those phone companies breaking the law when they let the call on to their network?
- greglindahl 11y agoBeats me - but I do bet that these companies don't have any business presence in Afghanistan. And despite the Taliban being involved, which most countries in the world (and the UN) don't like, it hasn't been stopped. Which gives you an idea of how difficult it would be to stop ordinary people from using such a service.
- shmerl 11y agoI hope it can boost competition. My only concern is latency.
- joshontheweb 11y agoThe ability to go off-grid is becoming more of a reality for me now. I'd love to be able to get a cabin in the middle of nowhere, slap some solar panels on top still have access to highspeed internet. Even if you didn't want to go off-grid, this could open up a lot of developing countries to being more viable remote-working locations. I recently spent some time in Bali and considered moving there for awhile but ultimately couldn't solely because the internet was too slow and unreliable.
- NamTaf 11y agoIsn't the internet by very definition a grid?
- anamexis 11y agoBy which definition? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-grid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-grid
- NamTaf 11y agoThe internet is a grid of computers to which you connect. More than that though, conceptually "off-the-grid" means not accepting a utility serivce from a provider but rather catering for that yourself. An internet connection is arguably a utility, and you'd be accepting it from an ISP. That goes against the concept, which would suggest you should maintain your own isolated network of computers and not connect with the outside world.
- Dylan16807 11y agoYou wouldn't have to be isolated. You could make connections, just not ones that depend on a centralized ISP. But "off-the-grid" typically is talking about physical delivery over wires and pipes, not about things like wireless internet.
- 3327 11y agoPLease please please, destroy, demolish, obliterate: Comcast, verizon, At&t.
- dikaiosune 11y agoQuite exciting. At the same time, did anyone watch Kingsman? I worry about a big play like this in a market with ridiculously high barrier to entry. We might find ourselves in a vulnerable position if we invite monopoly.
- jreimers 11y agoReplacing terrestrial broadband is great, but what happens when your internet stops working because it is raining outside? How exactly do they plan to deal with rain fade while operating in the Ka band?
- ridgeguy 11y agoI'm so ready for this. At the very least, it would bring more ISP competition to underserved /sarcasm extremely remote areas /sarcasm like where I live - that would be Portola Valley, CA - where the only internet provider available to most of us is Comcast. Which all of us hate. I live 16 light-µsec from Stanford (OK, free-space velocity for C), and my neighbors and I have one ISP to choose from. Go, Elon!! I'd light the fuses on the launch vehicles to see this done.
- Bud 11y agoCould he call it Skynet? Please?
- kirk21 11y agoInteresting plot twist. Check this subreddit dedicated to global internet: http://www.reddit.com/r/globalinternet http://www.reddit.com/r/globalinternet
- xbmcuser 11y agoTo me this is just 1 spoke of the wheel he will be providing this internet service to google loon balloons that need base stations on the ground currently.
- Robin_Message 11y agoIt worries me that they are launching satellites for the NSA whilst also build something the NSA would certainly love to tap into – I mean, realistically, the NSA are going to get their hands on the data if they want to, but giving them extra leverage over the company is a shame. It also saddens me they are launching satellites for the NSA full-stop, at least until the NSA has been reined in a bit.
- acd 11y agoBesides enjoying Internet globally, I see hope freeing humanity from government censorship with Internet from satellites. This will also mean we will have cheaper global roaming prices for cellular access as if its more expensive with cell phone data people will just use the satellite based system instead. How much power can such micro satellites transmit with? How much power does the earth based transmitter need to communicate back to the satellite in space?