Elon Musk's Next Mission: Internet Satellites 74
An anonymous reader writes: According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk is looking at a new project: smaller, cheaper satellites that can provide internet access for people all across the world. "Mr. Musk is working with Greg Wyler, a satellite-industry veteran and former Google Inc. executive, these people said. Mr. Wyler founded WorldVu Satellites Ltd., which controls a large block of radio spectrum. In talks with industry executives, Messrs. Musk and Wyler have discussed launching around 700 satellites, each weighing less than 250 pounds, the people said. That is about half the size of the smallest communications satellites now in commercial use. The satellite constellation would be 10 times the size of the largest current fleet, managed by Iridium Communications Inc. ... The smallest communications satellites now weigh under 500 pounds and cost several million dollars each. WorldVu hopes to bring the cost of manufacturing smaller models under $1 million, according to two people familiar with its plans."
Another Teledesic? (Score:5, Interesting)
Shades of Teledesic!
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic
The idea is not new, the technology is probably better, especially for efficient solid state RF transmitters, success depends on the spectrum available and the money. Do note that one of the gotchas in satellite internet access is that it is not easy to for apartment dwellers to get an adequate signal, whereas rural users should rejoice, as they usually get left out by the wireline/cable providers..
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Of note, high efficiency station-keeping engine technology has exploded in recent years, there's at least six cubesat kickstarter projects, mostly in the 2U-3U size which can at least partially get out of LEO on just a tiny, tiny amount of "fuel". Ion/electron propulsion has made huge advances in the last 15 years and is expected to bring the cost and size of communications satellites way, way down.
Right now fuel + engines + station keeping makes up 50% or more of a communication's launch mass. With
enslavement of the poor (Score:3)
well, we live in a ridiculous time in history where some people can actually make money shooting things into space, or providing internet to people groups that any other sane superpower would have handily enslaved for their laborious productivity (IMF is close but not nearly physically painful enough).
If anyone can do it, it'll be Musk. He does what he Musk, because, he can [youtube.com]...for the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
But there's no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the Science gets done.
And you make a neat gun.
For the people who are still alive.
I'm not even angry.
I'm being so sincere right now.
Even though you broke my heart.
And killed me.
And tore me to pieces.
And threw every piece into a fire.
As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you!
Now these points of data make a beautiful line.
And we're out of beta.
We're releasing on time.
So I'm GLaD. I got burned.
Think of all the things we learned
for the people who are still alive.
Go ahead and leave me.
I think I prefer to stay inside.
Maybe you'll find someone else to help you.
Maybe Black Mesa
THAT WAS A JOKE.
HAHA. FAT CHANCE.
Anyway, this cake is great.
It's so delicious and moist.
Look at me still talking
when there's Science to do.
When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I'm not you.
I've experiments to run.
There is research to be done.
On the people who are still alive.
And believe me I am still alive.
I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
I feel FANTASTIC and I'm still alive.
While you're dying I'll be still alive.
And when you're dead I will be still alive.
STILL ALIVE
what?
oh, that must have been the beer...
All very nice (Score:4, Interesting)
But I don't relish the possibility of something like this having a kill switch. We need an internet that nobody can interfere with, independent of the current business model, we also need the same for food, shelter, energy, and transportation, so I guess I'm barking up a tree without a paddle.
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The internet is designed so that it's fault tolerant, and trying to build a network that nobody can interfere with is nearly impossible and not worth the effort.
Regarding apartment dwellers, who cares? They're not the target market and they're already well served.
The question is whether the internet-by-satellite folks are going to lose the race to provide ubiquitous broadband service to everybody as the ground based networks get built out, just like Motorola lost billions on Iridium.
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It is not fault tolerant when you only have one provider selling the service. The seller has internet anywhere in the world now. We already have the tech. And we receive it via supply side economics. That is its single biggest point of failure. More money is spent on blocking the internet than building it. That is what we have to change.
Re:All very nice (Score:4, Funny)
It is not fault tolerant when you only have one provider selling the service.
So I should be paying multiple ISP's for redundant internet access at home?
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No, we need to do it differently. Ultimately it will be a neural mesh. The impediment is purely economic/political. There is no technical reason for anybody on the whole planet to be without internet right now. It is strictly business. In the meantime you should at least do what you can to prevent monopoly/duopoly contracts. You have to pry the market open to all comers, including the state where needed, like out in the sticks. But... I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. Anyway, that's what
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Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black..
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Iridium ran out of money before they could get enough satellites up to make the service viable and lost billions. It was also very expensive compared to ground based networks so was only viable in isolated areas, giving them a very limited market. But post bankruptcy is still operational and will start launching it's next generation of satellites (with better data capacity) next year. Elon Musk's SpaceX has been contracted to launch the satellites. Now, twenty years later it is a viable business.
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Iridium had the foresight or luck to get the US Military addicted to it. They have essentially floated it along until it has (sort of) become a viable proposition. Furthermore, the original debt incurred by Iridium has been retired in at least two bankruptcies. The new Iridium managed to get a nice bargain.
Not a very straightforward business model....
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It was only viable in the sense that it generated positive cash flow. They never paid off their creditors.
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No, Irridium's failure was in that they had an extremely low bandwidth design initially, when other higher bandwidth options were becoming available for the majority of applications, at substantially lower costs. Adding to the challenge is the fact that upgrades are harder.
A new generation can be planned out as needing to eventually compete with gigabit networks. $700MM For a constellation (plus launch and ground facilities of course) might make it possible to refine the design and do faster upgrades if w
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But I don't relish the possibility of something like this having a kill switch.
At anytime someone from ATT/ComCrap/Other/Drunk Driver/weather/NSA/CIA/ETC can turn your internet off by accident or on purpose.
There is no such thing as interfere-less internet.
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There is no such thing as interfere-less internet.
That's why we have to make one!
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Even an amateur radio operator mesh network (which exists in places at the moment) would be subject to interference at practical levels. Just because a packet can go somewhere doesn't mean it's a useful communication system. You want it to go where you want it to go. If Nasty Government blocks a mesh network via jamming in a few key cities, then it makes little difference to those in the cities if those packets are visible in Peoria.
The exception, I suppose, would be Netflix. However, if and when the sh
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Even an amateur radio operator mesh network (which exists in places at the moment) would be subject to interference at practical levels.
Yes, I know all that. We live in primitive times. So, then we need to learn to use their jamming signal as our carrier, turning it into a repeater. Mix your signal with theirs(heterodyne) and modulate that frequency... Exploit the plain old sidebands maybe. You can modulate any noise to carry a message if you time your pings right, I would hope... Maybe I'm overly optimisti
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A global network of high-latency torrent servers (Score:3)
We're going to need this to get around Hollywood's increasingly weird hash of restrictions on streamed content. Let's see now: one network we can stream TV episodes from the day after air, another network that makes us wait a week, another network with certain shows mysteriously missing, another network whose commercial always freeze and require an app restart, and all those networks that let you stream so long as your cable company is one of their three Verify Your Provider choices.
If Musk doesn't build this network, Pirate Bay will.
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High latency is right. Back around 1999 I got sick of waiting for Charter to flip the switch on broadband and got Echostar/Dish 2-way. My ping times were around 800ms for the trip to satellites 22,000 miles out. Luckily, I only had to deal with it for a year.
Cranking up a multiplayer game of Serious Sam with my son on our LAN was funny though... the games would appear on the internet, and people would try and join. Satellite wasn't conducive to multiplayer games, for sure.
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Yeah, ping is a issue. A very large one. And if this goes on ahead, its going to be the nr 1 issue. Now, it would not surprise me that the bandwidth could be good, but even then, ping is a big issue.
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Re:A global network of high-latency torrent server (Score:5, Informative)
These will not be high latency. If you have 700 satellites more-or-less evenly distributed around the globe (say from 60S to 60N latitude) and you want a minimum of 45 degree elevation to the nearest satellite, they can be lower than 400 miles altitude, or 600 miles away. Assuming that the system will bounce signals from the satellites to a distributed network of fiber connected ground stations, latency should only be 10ms more than a pure cable transmissions.
Previous satellite internet to geosynchronous satellites are nothing like this.
I agree with other commenters that this is pretty unlikely, but SpaceX and Tesla were quite unlikely to succeed as well.
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Replying to undo accidental moderation.
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Free space communications also have the advantage of a group velocity of c, rather than c / 1.5. This may not seem like much a difference, but it's enough that there is a considerable amount of research going into air-core fiber (although air-core is also promising for high power due to lower non-linearity).
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Just a hint of musk (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, but dropping his rather formidable name into a venture produces instant positive reception.
I wish them every success (Score:3)
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If they start building these, you can rest assured that at least half the engineers working on the project will be on the NSA payroll.
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astronomers might not like this. (Score:4, Interesting)
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What if you put a large, flat solar panel such that the rest of the satellite is permanently in the shade? Also, make the edges super black. Then all the light gets reflected back toward the sun. It could still occasionally flare, if the panels are aimed slightly towards the earth or aren't smooth, but that could be solved by aiming the panels slightly away from earth. (Or, of course, we could let the astronomers worry about it -- they are predictable after all)
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Photoshop.
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Hmm, don't see it working (Score:3)
I bet you could put together a software satellite simulator to test your design for significantly less than what it'd cost to launch one satellite. The math to describe an orbit isn't particularly hard -- it's basically just trig. Put a couple dozen fake birds in fake orbit, set up your fake antennas on the ground and start pushing fake packets between them. No sense in building a rocket if that tells you it's not going to work.
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I think the point of having 700 satellites is that you will always have at two within line of sight (obstacles not withstanding). So you could possibly get away with two non-tracking dishes. Or, given that these are LEO there may be more than enough signal strength to make beam steering flat antennas more practical (like the Kymeta antenna). They work with MEO, but typically need to be rather large to get decent gain. With LEO they may work great.
Re:Hmm, don't see it working (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, read up on the Iridium system, which already exists. You don't need satellite tracking, you can use an omnidirectional antenna to communicate with low earth orbit. You just need more power.
That said, Iridium ping times are horrible [nasa.gov], but that's more a function of 1980s technology than the speed of light or information theory.
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Uplink? (Score:3)
An array of satellites will provide a very nice downlink. Now how do you do the uplink?
Current satellite internet does it two ways: one, by standard old telephone modem. I suppose you could do it by wireless phone as well, but the basic problem is the same - very low bandwidth. The other way is by a microwave transmitter - which requires professional installation, and is a highly dangerous thing to have in a consumer environment. (Jack goes on the roof to fix a loose shingle while Jill is shopping online... and hey presto, Jack and Jill aren't having kids).
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Same problem as Iridium (Score:4, Informative)
This suffers from the same problems that Iridium had:
* The people in the world with money to buy this already have good Internet access.
* The system doesn't work until it's global: you need to pay for the entire system before you get customers.
Land-based networks can build out a region at a time, starting in the wealthiest areas, creating paying customers who provide the capital for the next phase of expansion. Satellite systems are egalitarian, which sounds nice but is a problem: if you need 700 satellites to cover the globe but can only afford 350, you get global coverage that only works half the time, which nobody wants to pay for. And you have to set your asking price lower than what the poorest community that can't afford cell service can pay, which is a very low limbo bar to get under, and getting lower all the time.
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You might be underestimating the cost benefit ratio for wireline service. Incremental cost to provide service to a customer in the coverage area with fiber ranges from $700-10,000. For satellite you are looking at $300-500 worst-case, anywhere in the world (you are able to provide service).
The advantage of wireline (especially fiber) is you can realistically recapture your investment over 20-50 years. Satellite is more like 5-10 years.
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No doubt fiber is expensive, but what's the incremental cost to provide *cell* service? There's a reason many third-world countries are skipping wireline service altogether. Sure, a cell link can't compete with fiber for speed, but then neither can the satellite. The correct comparison is between satellite and cell, not fiber.
Cool (Score:1)
Focus on the launch platform, get that cheap and you own the World.
3M per satellite in orbit is a very low cost. (Score:1)
Their Falcon Heavy launcher would be able to launch more than 50 of those in one shot bring the launch cost at just under 2M per bird witch is quite cheap.
Ever use sat internet? (Score:2)
Good for movies (except bandwidth is REALLY expensive) and the ping times to space and back make ssh unusable.
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Internet satellite usually come from a single Geosynchronous satellite which is located at a 42,000km orbit. At the speed of light it take 280 msec to cross that distance back and forth and you can add some more delays for the earth network time. This delay doesn't affect streaming or downloads but it will affect lag sensitive operations like ssh, gaming, vpn, voip, etc.
The proposed 700 sat network will most likely be in low earth orbit like the iridium satellites at around 750km. At that altitude, the de
IPv6 (Score:2)
As long as it's got IPv6 built in.
I don't understand why I still cannot get native IPv6 at home. I can tunnel it, sure, but that's a pain in the ass.
I have a /64 IPv6 block from my datacenter. Why can't I get one at home?