SpaceX Wants Permission To Test Satellite Internet 98
An anonymous reader writes: SpaceX has filed documents with the FCC asking for permission to begin testing a project to serve internet access from space. "The plan calls for launching a constellation of 4,000 small and cheap satellites that would beam high-speed Internet signals to all parts of the globe, including its most remote regions." This follows news that Facebook and Google had stepped back their efforts in that arena. SpaceX could prove to be a better fit for the project, given that they need only rely on themselves for launching satellites into orbit. "The satellites would be deployed from one of SpaceX's rockets, the Falcon 9. Once in orbit, the satellites would connect to ground stations at three West Coast facilities. The purpose of the tests is to see whether the antenna technology used on the satellites will be able to deliver high-speed Internet to the ground without hiccups."
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Re:4000 (Score:5, Informative)
I saw a video of the announcement [youtube.com] in Seattle a few weeks ago, and I'm pretty sure he mentioned the number 1,100 km when asked about the altitude. But since then I've heard 6~700 km from another source. Anyway, the idea is to be high enough so that you can join any two points on the globe in only 3~5 hops. He said this would be faster than terrestrial backbone, where you typically have 15 or 20 hops between A and B, each of which adds latency in the form of processing time, not to mention that light travels almost twice as fast in vacuum as it does in fiber.
Re:4000 (Score:5, Informative)
Just re-watching the video: He gets into the specs at around 3:30, citing a goal of 1Gbps @20~30ms latency a couple of minutes later. At around 9:30 he specifically mentions 1100 km for the altitude.
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Yes, low orbit is a must.
Over 15 years ago, at the school I worked for, we were offered satellite-based Internet via DirectPC (a DirecTV subsidiary). The speed was amazing by late-1990s standards, 400Kbps sustained! But latency was a killer, at approximately one second minimum. Routing was also nightmarish, as the uplink was phone-based (thus not requiring immense power to transmit, and keeping the lag well, not acceptable, but almost).
I hope "low orbit" is close enough to the Earth to dillute all that late
Re:4000 (Score:5, Interesting)
With spaceX's new proposal you are looking at 2.2 ms as the minimum earth to ground delay + presumably something up to 15-16,000 km (15-16 ms) if your packets had to travel to the exact opposite side of the globe. Add in a 1-2 ms delay for each hop between satellites due to the actual switching and he could be much much much faster for intercontinental packets.
Plus I'm assuming under this scenario that there will be hundreds of terrestrial transmittal points to use versus just a few base stations to make the terrestrial hops even less.
I'd wager that financial market trading traffic alone could pay for a significant portion of this bill at super premium rates, especially overseas traders. Not to mention traffic from ships, planes, rural 1st world locations all paying a premium. They can implement zone pricing pretty easily because they will always be able to able to triangulate a transmission down to the inch. With a network that dense it would greatly surpass the accuracy of the existing GPS constellation.
Re:4000 (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd wager that financial market trading traffic alone could pay for a significant portion of this bill at super premium rates, especially overseas traders. Not to mention traffic from ships, planes, rural 1st world locations all paying a premium. They can implement zone pricing pretty easily because they will always be able to able to triangulate a transmission down to the inch. With a network that dense it would greatly surpass the accuracy of the existing GPS constellation.
I had not thought of that idea before in terms of a potential customer for this set-up. That is an excellent point. Iridium could have been used for something like this (which also has a digital data component), but given the technology capabilities available at the time Iridium was being built, they could only get about 4800 baud for individual customers... something that makes the bandwidth latency sort of irrelevant. High bandwidth and low latency combined with global coverage would indeed be a good customer.
The major competitor to this concept in that regard is an even older technology though, mainly the 19th Century concept (updated to using 21st Century materials) of the cable laying ship. An awful lot of fiber cable has been laid down across all of the oceans of the world between major cities. It is only when you can't access that fixed terrestrial network that something of this nature really becomes useful (as you've mentioned).
As a means to deliver that last mile architecture, it really opens up possibilities.
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With Geosynch satellites that adds up to roughly 45 milliseconds at a minimum for the signal to get from the base station to the satellite and back down to you.
Your math is wrong. [satsig.net] It's 240ms round trip straight-on from the equator, directly below the bird, up to 280ms with both ends at extreme angles. (Damn, I thought it was 250-ish each way, not round trip.) GEO is around 35,000 km, or 70,000km round trip, and the speed of light is about 300,000kps. So that's 7km divided by 30km/sec, or around 233ms, which is pretty close for rounded numbers.
This is exactly why LEO is the holy grail for satellite internet: latency. The downside is they keep moving around and yo
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Your math is wrong. [satsig.net] It's 240ms round trip straight-on from the equator, directly below the bird, up to 280ms with both ends at extreme angles. (Damn, I thought it was 250-ish each way, not round trip.)
It depends on your definitons of "each way" and "round trip". In particular we don't tend to have servers collocated on the sattelites. so the typical satelite internet scenario is client->sattelite->base station->server->base station->sattelite->client.
So it's a minimum of
120ms client->sat
120ms sat->base
120ms base->sat
120ms sat->client
Assuming delays on the ground are negligable that is a minimum of 480ms round trip time to a server on the internet for a two way geostationary
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(Damn, I thought it was 250-ish each way, not round trip.)
It's 250-ish round trip to the satellite and back, but comms satellites aren't very interesting to talk to. It's 250-ish each way to the server and back. Around half a second of delay before you can get a response to a message while working over a geosynchronous satellite link.
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Many years ago (mid 2Ks or so), I found that a highway rest area had wifi available. Suspecting that it was geosat-based, I pinged my home server. Yep, just over 1000ms. GEO is about 250ms away as the photon flies, times two for the outbound round trip, and times two again for the response round trip.
The phone uplink for DirectPC was basically a cheat to get rid of one of those round trip delays. Not all satellite internet systems did that, and I can recall seeing pairs of junked interface boxes where the
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"It will have to be Low orbit ..."
SES has been offering internet service via geostationary satellites in Europe for over a decade.
http://www.ses-broadband.com/1... [ses-broadband.com]
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I'm really hoping that they'll launch another 5001 satellites after the first 4000, because Internet.
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Another question I have is, do we really need this in the first place?
Re:4000 (Score:4, Interesting)
Space is really, *really* fucking big. Even low earth orbit at any given altitude is vast; it's literally larger than the surface of the planet. Add altitude shells to that - go up a few KM and you're now a few KM away from anything in the lower shell, even at closest point of approach - and there's an astonishing amount of room in space.
You wouldn't ask if there's room for 4000 more ships on the ocean, despite the fact that there's a lot less ocean and a lot more things crossing it vs. what we have in LEO. You wouldn't even ask if there's room for 4000 more cars on the road in the continental US, despite there being many orders of magnitude less space on US roads than there is in any given LEO altitude. Satellites, functional or not (including debris), move in predictable patterns, and functional satellites have thrusters that allow them to alter or maintain their course.
Agreed, of course, that the satellites should be capable of de-orbiting. But seriously, this "is there enough space in LEO?!?" meme is kind of dumb, at least right now. Let's assume you put each satellite in the middle of 20x20 KM non-overlapping exclusionary zone (omitting the third dimension for now). 400 KM^2 per bird. 1,600,000 KM^2 total. Sounds big, right? You could fit that entire collection, with a hundred thousand square KM left over, into Alaska. Don't get me wrong, Alaska is a big place, but it's not *that* big on the world scale. That's all in one orbital shell.
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And it is through the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) that most countries coordinate the usage of global spectrum usage. This includes the USA, particularly with regards to almost anything having to do with spaceflight where you have spectrum usage that crosses international boundaries... like will most definitely happen in the case of this satellite constellation.
In the USA, you work through the FCC to make those ITU filings though.
Obligatory (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Money pit. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I doubt Musk is looking to create a satellite based Internet service. I think it more likely that he's using this network to serve as a testbed for an interplanetary network that covers Earth Mars. The global Internet service just provides him a way to monetize the project to fund its furthered development.
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You're right and wrong. He wants a system that covers both Earth and Mars, but he also wants to run a satellite internet service. As he said at the Seattle announcement a few weeks ago, we don't know exactly what we'll need to build a city on Mars, "But one thing's for sure, it'll take a whole lot of money." So he intends to use the ISP satellite network to fund the overall Mars mission.
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You're right and wrong. He wants a system that covers both Earth and Mars, but he also wants to run a satellite internet service. As he said at the Seattle announcement a few weeks ago, we don't know exactly what we'll need to build a city on Mars, "But one thing's for sure, it'll take a whole lot of money." So he intends to use the ISP satellite network to fund the overall Mars mission.
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have satellites with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!!!
If Space-X can't win on merits alone, lasers....
Homer was a victim of blatent disinformation. (Score:2)
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And assuming they can make a landing soon, there'll be a lot of high risk re-re-refurbished rockets that they might load up with cheap cubesats and if it works it works, if it doesn't no biggie. If there's no customers, why not make your own market?
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anyway no one has come close to "trying".
Unfamiliar with Iridium [wikipedia.org] I see. Interestingly SpaceX has the contract to launch the next generation Iridium constellation which this proposal will directly compete with.
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Most of those services were aimed at government/corporate customers for high service fees, a relatively small market. If they're able to work out the bandwidth issues, keep the service fee reasonable and not have too much latency the market will have millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of customers. At $35 with even 10 Million global customers that would be $350 Million in revenue a month, or over $4 Billion a year. I think the entire system is supposed to cost somewhere around $10 Billion. With thos
Better get those lobbyists ready, Comcast (Score:2)
Looks like you may have a new competitor soon.
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No way. The latency would be ridiculous for most use cases. This is only actually marketable for a couple of situations -
1. Orbital internet service. The ISS can surf porn.
2. Remote internet service. The researchers at Macmurdo can surf porn.
3. Circumventing state filters on internet content. The Chinese can surf porn.
4. Interplanetary internet service. The Mars rover and future moon/Mars colonies will eventually be able to surf porn.
Re:Better get those lobbyists ready, Comcast (Score:4, Insightful)
The latency would be ridiculous for most use cases.
Are you sure? A round-trip latency of 13ms to the base station(s) seems fairly reasonable to me. These are Low Earth Orbit satellites with an altitude between 99 and 1,200 miles, not geostationary ones at 22,236 miles; that's 1/18th the distance, and thus latency, of existing satellite Internet providers like WildBlue or HughesNet. At the minimum LEO altitude the latency would be another order of magnitude lower still (around 1ms). Even the high-LEO delay is significantly less than the 20-40ms time to the first router reported by traceroute for my Qwest DSL connection.
The trade-offs of LEO include a requirement for many more satellites for the same coverage, the necessity of hand-offs as the satellites pass overhead, and lower orbital lifetimes / higher fuel consumption due to increased atmospheric drag.
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Good point - I was assuming geosync orbits.
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Right. They're not really putting any pressure on Comcast or any other terrestrial ISP, crap as they may all be. They *are*, however, hopefully going to be putting some pretty strong pressure on the one segment of the internet-providing market that currently has an even stronger monopoly than any of them: cruise ships. Even Comcast doesn't feel like it can charge you per minute of connectivity, a la early 80s AOL - and generally for early 80s AOL speeds, too! Cruise ships do.
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When Comcast is looking as a wonderful alternative to me right now compared to the absolutely miserable experience I have with Century Link, I can see at least for my community that this will indeed be some realistic competition for terrestrial ISPs. All they have to beat is $100 per month for more than 800 kilobits/s of service to be economically viable for my family.
Yes, where I live internet service is that crappy. The data gets through, but it is insanely slow and often is far less than 800 kilobits i
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There's already satellite internet (Score:1)
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It would take a way to break the speed of light - Pretty tricky problem, that one!
As a former Hughesnet customer, yes, the cap sucks, but overall the system has acceptable bandwidth. The real problem? The god-awful latency.
Nothing any ISP can do will ever solve the basic limitation of physics that a satellite somewhere around 40,000km has a round-trip time over half a second (130ms per trip, times a minimum of four trips - Re
Re: There's already satellite internet (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re: There's already satellite internet (Score:1)
Internet signals to all parts of the globe, (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think FCC has jurisdiction over "all parts of the globe"
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i didn't realize the US internet access sucked so badly.
I mean, even thailand has such 3g coverage that this is pointless here.
plenty of other places though.. or if they can compete with speed/price.
Re:Internet signals to all parts of the globe, (Score:4, Informative)
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Well they do in California, which is where the uplink and downlink would be happening. So there's that.
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From those numbers, could one figure out the antenna footprint size on the surface?
You can't calculate it exactly but you can get a rough idea of the order of magnitude.
First you need to know what reference that effective radiated power is relative to. I'm not sure what the FCC convension is on this but lets assume the reference is isotropic. That would mean that the peak power density ove the sphere is 275 times the average power density.
Then we need to consider the radition pattern. In reality it won't be a simplle case of "signal here no signal there" but will gradually decay and witho
Challenges... (Score:5, Informative)
Google and facebook have realized that some problems are not (economically) surmountable.
The problems are the following: The closer you fly your satelite to the earth, the more resistance it has from the atmosphere. The density of the atmosphere reduces by a factor of 100 each 46 km of height. So at "100km", you have about 10000 times less air than at the surface. Some people call that space. At 200km the air pressure is about 100 million times less than what it is over here. That is enough to have a reasonable decay rate of weeks/months/years. "skylab" came down after a few decades, right?
The further away you fly your satellites, the longer the travel times will be for the signals. This equates to ping-times. Hmm. 200km is 0.6 ms, quite acceptable. Both ways. 1.3ms. Still fine. Double the distance to 400km for slower decay times, and you're still about 10 times faster than a normal ADSL line. Acceptable. Not a problem. (the problem here is the same for everybody. The satellites will then play "pass the hot potato" to one that's flying above the ground station and beam your packet down to earth. Assuming your halfway around the globe, that will be about 10000 km. That's with 66ms (round trip) already more than what you get with a residential ADSL line. Still not too shabby.)
The problem with putting satellites high is that the distance to the user becomes large. You want them as close as possible.
The closer you put them, the more you need. -> 4000 of them. This however is not just a one-time investment: because they are low, their orbits decay and they fall back to earth on relatively short notice. If you need 4000 of them, they are not going to be large. So they are small. If you have a cubesate (10cm cubed) weighing 1kg, its orbit will decay just like a 100kg satellite of 10x100x100cm (flying the wrong side towards the front). But a bigger satellite is likely to be 100x100x100cm and weigh not 100, but 1000kg. The extra weight helps keep it in orbit, the extra size in the flying direction does not make a big difference. So the small satellites decay fast as well!
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Older satellite internet systems used technologies borrowed from "TV broadcasting". What they effectively did is broadcast everybody's downlink via the satellite and everybody-for-himself had to use a land-line for the uplink. The idea being that you like having a big downlink pipe and it might be acceptable to have "only" 56k uplink.
All that is going overboard, as I understand things. Yes, people are going to transmit their uplink bits to the satellites: the stated goal of these projects is "internet ever
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There are two way satellite internet systems.
The thing is, a lot of things people do aren't latency dependent. Sure it takes a little while to start up, but once you've got it established, you can get really good bandwidth (satellite ar
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Rereading my own message: Near: "You want them as close as possible."
I forgot to mention: "because the required power to transmit to the satellite increases with the distance."
Re:Challenges... (Score:4, Informative)
Depending on the satellite's drag and ballistic coefficient, below around 200km you're talking hours to days, at 300km - days to weeks at the outside. Unboosted, anything between (roughly) 300 to 350km is essentially gone within a year [globalsecurity.org]. That's why Skylab was and ISS is, higher still - in the 400km range.
Skylab's second stage (seperated after the station was in it's final orbit) re-entered after only two years, while the station itself was reboosted on several occasions by docked Apollo spacecraft. Skylab's post occupation lifetime was extended by giving it a larger than normal reboost before the final manned mission departed, and subsequently by carefully maintaining it in a low drag orientation.
The ISS requires regular reboosts [heavens-above.com] to maintain altitude.
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IIRC the SpaceX satellites will feature electric propulsion, but there is very little drag at 1,100km. Without using any propulsion, they wouldn't fully decay for a few dozen millennia.
Opportunities as well as problems (Score:2)
But if you can do point to point communication via same satelite network without needing to go via base station, or if you have several base stations across the globe, then this will have LOWER latency than going via cables especially for long distance stuff say USA <=> Europe.
I assume they plan to launch small satelites, maybe bigger than cubesats, but definitely smaller than 100cm^3 and 1000kg. I
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when it passes over a huge city with lots of clients
Big cities will probably have no clients because there will be better ways to get internet access in a big city. This will be great for rural areas and ships in the middle of the ocean, and thus load will never be concentrated.
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Directional is an option for the satellites. But on the ground you'd have to be tracking all the time, and you'd have a dropout the moment one satellite goes away and another comes into view.
Oh, about the height. Suppose you're at 1000km. Then the area that can see the satellite at at least 45 degrees above the horizon is about 1000km in diameter. This covers an area of about 3 million square km. The earth is about 450 million square km. You'd need about 300 satellites to cover the earth with each spot gett
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Google and facebook have realized that some problems are not (economically) surmountable.
Wrong. Google recently invested $900 million in SpaceX specifically to develop a satellite based Internet backbone. All these articles saying Google abandoned satellite constellations are by people that don't know what they are talking about. SpaceX intends to use less expensive, shorter lived satellites. Yes their orbits will naturally decay. That is a feature, not a bug, for SpaceX. They will constantly replenish with newer, cheaper, better satellites. Google decided that it made more sense to suppo
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Months to years. It's a feature and a bug. The idea is to make both the satellite and launch cost low enough to where they are essentially disposable. This has some advantages - you don't have to have a sat that stores fuel for a decade and where you have to have overly redundant systems to ensure the thing stays up long enough to make money. But - you have to be able to build them and launch them quick and cheap.
Now, where on this spectrum of things does SpaceX fall?
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The current proposal puts these satellites in a higher LEO, almost MEO orbit of about 750 Miles. They would need some kind of deorbit/graveyard orbit as they would be up there for decades or even centuries on their own. Shouldn't be too difficult though, one option would be to give each satellite a small electrodynamic tether or ion thruster that could be used to keep the satellite positioned correctly and at the end of its service life used to deorbit it.
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step 1: build company that launches sats.
step 2: build another company that requires launch capability to be cost effective (give it time.)
step 3: build another company that can generate revenue off of capabilities of 1 and 2 -- repeat
Building your own vertical integration; even if all this basically requires government handouts/subsidies -- i'd argue he's doing far more with them than most companies and contractors do.
Don't ask permission from the FCC (Score:2)
Sure, try there first. But don't rely on their approval.
The feds are so f'ed up at this point that I don't think you can trust them to be rational on the issue. If they don't respond in a timely manner with a "yes"... ask someone else and launch through them. The feds don't own space. You can launch from a lot of places. Talk to the French, talk to the russians, talk to the chinese, talk to the indians.
Make that part of your ask from the FCC... unofficially make it clear you're going to do it. And the only
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They need permission? (Score:2)
I suppose they know what they're doing, but if the FCC says "no", I think they should consider responding with the finger and a launch.