SpaceX Files FCC Application For Internet Access Network With 4,425 Satellites (geekwire.com) 121
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: SpaceX has laid out further details about a 4,425-satellite communications network that's expected to provide global broadband internet access, with its Seattle-area office playing a key role in its development. The plan is explained in an application and supporting documents filed on Tuesday with the Federal Communications Commission. In the technical information that accompanied its application, SpaceX said it would start commercial broadband service with 800 satellites. That service would cover areas of the globe from 15 degrees north to 60 degrees north, and from 15 degrees south to 60 degrees south. That leaves out some portions of Alaska, which would require a temporary waiver from the FCC. Eventually, the network would grow to 4,425 satellites, transmitting in the Ku and Ka frequency bands. "Once fully deployed, the SpaceX system will pass over virtually all parts of the Earth's surface and therefore, in principle, have the ability to provide ubiquitous global service," SpaceX said. The satellites would orbit the planet at altitudes ranging from 714 to 823 miles (1,150 to 1,325 kilometers) -- well above the International Space Station, but well below geostationary satellites. SpaceX said it would follow federal guidelines to mitigate orbital debris. Each satellite would weigh 850 pounds (386 kilograms) and measure 13 by 6 by 4 feet (4 by 1.8 by 1.2 meters), plus solar arrays, SpaceX said. Operating lifetime was estimated at five to seven years per satellite.
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I'm faced with a conundrum. Are you as pants on head retarded as Matt Damon and actually believe Palin said that or were you attempting, and failing, to use hyperbole?
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" Are you as pants on head retarded as Matt Damon and actually believe Palin said that or were you attempting, and failing, to use hyperbole?"
She actually said: "You can actually see Russia from Land here in Alaska."
Video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Which is perfectly true: Diomede_Islands [wikipedia.org], for one. They're only a couple of miles apart.
Competition with their own clients? (Score:1)
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With this move, won't SpaceX be competing with their own clients like Iridium?
I think you mean Dysprosium (there are only 66 satellites in that constellation, not the originally planned 77 to get it to the right number for Iridium).
Motorola hasn't been lofting more satellites into the constellation since the late 1990's, and at one point was threatening to de-orbit the whole system. And they've already had in-orbit failures which can't be corrected by the in-orbit spares, so in some cases: coverage is pretty spotty. Although Iridium NEXT was supposed to start launching via SpaceX's
So in 10-20 years time... (Score:2, Insightful)
... that'll be another 4425 bits of space junk. Genius idea - utterly pollute near space just so some company can make a short term profit on something thats a nice to have rather than essential infrastructure.
"SpaceX said it would follow federal guidelines to mitigate orbital debris"
And how does it plan to do that exactly? They're too high to be sent down to burn up in the atmosphere and too low to be sent off into a parking orbit.
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Yeah, I'm a bit surprised by "Operating lifetime was estimated at five to seven years per satellite." Surely with 4425 satellites, that means between 632 and 885 satellites needing to be replaced each year. Seems like a lot.
Re: So in 10-20 years time... (Score:1)
Quantity is how they get the price down I guess!
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Quantity is how they get the price down I guess!
Then let's tack onto their low price per unit the price of cleaning this crap out of orbit and see what effect that has on SpaceX's bottom line.
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Re:So in 10-20 years time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So in 10-20 years time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Preventing dead satellites from accumulating in the middle of their constellation isn't incentive?
Re:So in 10-20 years time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Cute, but in the real world, industries are often built entirely around long-term investment. A deep sea oil rig, for example, may not give its first drop of oil for over a decade after they sink vast sums of money into it.
Unless SpaceX plans to be out of business in a decade or so, they have incentive.
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Re:So in 10-20 years time... (Score:5, Interesting)
The ironic thing is that it is definitely in their interest. If they hose things and satellites start getting destroyed with debris going everywhere in that orbit, Kessler Syndrome will be definitely a show-stopper and not just shut SpaceX down, but pretty much endeavor that goes past the atmosphere. This is already happening, with the ISS already having a solar panel get perforated by debris, and occasionally having to do maneuvers to avoid larger items.
Unless someone has a magic cure for getting space debris to just give up and fall into the atmosphere, fuck-ups by any satellite maker can affect every single space venture there is to the point where launching anything into space becomes an impossibility.
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Re:So in 10-20 years time... (Score:5, Informative)
Have you bothered reading the PDF ? It has a quite long description of the deorbiting parameters, which involve putting them in elliptic orbit with perigee of 300km, meaning if they miss and only reach 400km, they're only good for 2.9 years before orbital decay.
I made some calculations, lowering the perigee from 1075km to 3000km is actually relatively cheap, some 200m/s Delta V. Depending on the Isp of the engine, and the total mass (not clear if the 386kg are with or without propellant), we're speaking of 25-40kg op propellant. Make that 30-50kg and aeorbraking is not even needed because you're impacting the ground. Barely significant compared to the total mass.
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Real rocket scientists prefer lithobraking over aerobraking every time.
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Yes I do play KSP. But I did take and finish a MOOC.
To be noted, I should have written 300km, not 3000km
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Fine by me. If they can pull this off, we'll have some decent mass-production going on in the satellites and rockets departments, the prices of all things space will go way down.
And we can always send up a scavenger satellite to repair/deorbit/gather the dead satellites. And if all else fails, 4000 pieces of space junk isn't really that much; space is big, bigger than most people can imagine. Might be problematic if a few of them smash up, but then the smaller pieces will de-orbit that much quicker.
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Go buy yourself a clue sonny.
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Your hair looks great!
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Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
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Perhaps, but I'm just too depressed to think about that.
I'll go buy new shoes, I guess.
Not geosynchronous? (Score:2)
Rural Africans etc. will install satellite tracking dishes and there'll be a half minute interruption every few minutes as satellites fly by? Or it doesn't need line of sight?
Re:Not geosynchronous? (Score:4, Interesting)
Libya was going to give Africa telephone, television, radio-broadcast, telemedicine and long-distance learning (WIMAX) without the West's corporate profit taking.
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You could just read the document, you know.
The antennas aren't physically steered, they're steered by adjusting the relative phases of the individual sub-antennas.
Its ironic isn't it (Score:2)
Musk touts his green credintials with Tesla, yet then he proposes something like this. Hypocrite of the first order.
Re:Holy crap from the back of my envelope (Score:5, Informative)
First off, it's not "in addition to", it's "instead of". Earth fiber networks don't run on fairy dust either, they also consume power. The internet is one of the biggest power consumers on Earth. That's just the way it is.
Doing my own math. You could fit ~141 in a Falcon Heavy to LEO. They don't say how many are actually planned, or even whether they plan to use Falcoln 9 or Heavy. Taking into account the higher altitude and practical considerations, let's say 60 satellites per flight on Heavies. So that's about 75 flights. Per FH flight, RP1 mass is ~400 tonnes and LOX mass ~935 tonnes. LOX is cheap and low energy to produce, so let's focus on the RP1. Total that's 30k tonnes of RP1. Which is 1,4TJ, or about 380 MWh higher heat value, which is 100-200MWh electricity generation potential. I didn't find how much energy Chicago consumes per year, but a reference on MIT's School of Engineering states that NYC consumes 60 TWh electricity per year. So I think you're way off in your estimate.
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I dunno- I went with 4425 satellites x 386 kg/satellite x 1150km = ~2TJ, no? Sure, for NYC I'm missing a factor of 100,000, but I'm also assuming no rocket weight, fuel weight, wind resistance, and, for that matter, ideal thrust. Are you sure I'm that far off?
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2TJ is 556 MWh.
4425*386*1150000*9,81/1.000.000.000.000 is 0.2TJ anyway, if you're just looking at altitude (which is a terrible way to approach orbital vehicle energy analysis)
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SpaceX or not, the number of satellites in orbit is going to significantly increase. Today's satellites are far lighter and more capable than before, demand is higher than ever before, and launch prices are falling across the board. Also, it's critical to note that LEO satellites like this are generally much smaller and cheaper to launch than GEO satellites.
How can this be competitive? (Score:4, Interesting)
2/3rds of the satellites will always be over water and have their bandwidth utterly wasted. A significant part of the rest will be over areas where almost nobody lives, or nobody can afford to pay for internet with hard currency. Meanwhile all 400m Europeans that live in the populated 5m square kilometers have to use the same 20 to 100 satellites.
Because the satellites are not geostationary they'll need to use omnidirectional antennae which puts some hard limits on bandwidth, while a lot of people will get FTTH and 5G mobile networks in the next decade.
Iridium can get away with these shortcomings because they target the customers that doesn't care about prices. But I kind of doubt that market can support 4000 satellites
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Because the satellites are not geostationary they'll need to use omnidirectional antennae
What? Who told you that? There will be over 4,000 sats. They're not going to be highly directional, but they'll still be able to point them at the planet.
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I know, right?!? He just keeps conning unsuspecting engineers into doing things other companies thought were impossible!
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There won't be any satellites.
They said there wouldn't be any cars, and then they said there wouldn't be any more cars, and then they said surely there wouldn't be any more cars, oh and they'll never land a rocket on a barge and what was that again?
Now, that's not a guarantee of future performance, but I find your argument even less convincing.
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Oh there will be cars. The first electric car was built in 1834. Eventually the Model 3 will be out too, even though it will be inferior and more expensive to the already released Chevy Bolt.
I honestly hope that's true. I just watched a video (and plan to watch another) on the electric Smart which is just coming out, sadly they've made it larger but it has a london black cab-level turning radius which is sexy as all get-out, for a small enough value of sexy to apply to a smart car. Hopefully there will be a rash of EVs hitting the market soon no matter what Trump does. China is now driving the automotive market's future, and they want EVs alongside everything else.
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Musk does have a bit of a habit of announcing Sci-Fi projects in grand strokes but never actually explaining how he's going to fix the problems that plagued earlier attempts.
The relaunchable rockets are the probably most realistic goal he's currently trying to achieve and that still hasn't worked out - the only rocket they've actually attempted to launch a second time blew up. And this after NASA had been doing the relaunching space transport thing for decades, and had to come to the conclusion that even if
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They haven't launched or attempted to launch ANY recovered boosters yet. The CRS-7 and Amos-6 boosters were new built.
There have been full length static fires of the recovered cores, however.
-R C
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You're slipping, you forgot to call him a "space nutter."
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Those satellites, assuming they're not serving ships and small islands, will also be routing data for the rest of the constellation. They're not just bouncing data back down on the same satellite, the data goes up from the client and travels from satellite to satellite until it hits a peering point.
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Bandwidth (Score:2)
What kind of bandwidth / latency does that translate into?
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Speed of light can easy be googled.
So for a hight of 1000miles, 1600km, one hopp up is 0.02 seconds, one hop down also 0.02 seconds, I doubt the satellites are communicating with each other and transfer a signal to the other side of the planet, if they do, it is like 14,000km distance, which is another 0.3 seconds.
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Typical satellite ping times are to geostationary, not LEO.when you add over 20,000 miles each way to the trip, you tend to add some latency.
LEO ping times wouldn't be all that bad.
The big question that might affect the latency though will be how many downlink stations they have. If a signal has to bounce around the constellation until it reaches one downlink station in one place on the planet, that will add a lot of latency, but if they set it up so that each satellite is always (or almost always) within r
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round-trip latency of radio signal at that altitude: abt 6-7 milliseconds. But that's just ground -> 800km -> satellite. Then there's device speed, satellite-to-satellite signal and other factors. But in the end the latency could be competitive.
As for speed.. who knows which devices, how many users etc.etc. I bet it will start at 1mbit
4425*850=4 million pounds of satellite (Score:4, Interesting)
4425*850*4000=$150,450,000,000. Then add the cost to send up another 4427/7=630 satellites per year (630*850*2000(because they'll get costs way down if they can send up that much material)=$1 billion dollars per year. They need to spend 150 billion dollars initially and an ongoing 1 billion dollars per year.
In 2014 SpaceX had a "market cap" of (optimistically) 12 billion dollars [fool.com]. Let's assumt that 12 billion dollars have already been justified. Now rumors [profitconfidential.com] of an IPO [moneymorning.com] have been heard, so let's assume a massive over-the-top [investopedia.com] IPO: 13 billion dollars. Then add in a billion dollars. (assuming every penny they can scrape together goes to this plan) 12+13+1=26 billion. Using realistic numbers for launch costs and hyper-optimistic numbers for funding, they're about 125 billion dollars short. And I don't see Trump signing a 125 billion dollar Space-X pork bill. If we're very optimistic about launch costs that hypothetical bill could go as low as a still-highly-unlikely 75 billion dollars.
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4425*850*$4000=$15 045 000 000
so $26 billion would be enough.
Re:4425*850=4 million pounds of satellite (Score:5, Informative)
Beyond this, I expect that a lot of these would actually be nearly "free" - I would not be in the least surprised if their plan is to pack these as secondary payloads in existing launches to take up the remaining payload capacity of the launch vehicle.
Also, spending a few billion years on average during operation is a very small amount compared to the amount spent globally on internet infrastructure.
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That is an enormous amount of weight to send up.
It's also an insane amount of launches.
To get all 4425 satellites up within 7 years, they'd have to launch about 52 per month.
Even if they deploy 5 at the same time, that'd still be 10 launches per month.
Currently, they do less than that in a year.
Re:4425*850=4 million pounds of satellite (Score:5, Informative)
There are some issues with these calculations.
1) The per pound price:
- The prices you used are per kilogram, not per pound
- The prices do not take into account the first stage reusability that will presumably become standard by the time the sats are launched
- If we use the Falcon Heavy costs with reusability (e.g. from here [reddit.com]) we get $50mil/(0.7*119930) = about $600 per pound.
- The $600 price per pound includes the SpaceX profit margin. If that is not taken into account the price would be even lower.
2) SpaceX will first launch only 1600 sats to make the system operational. From then on the future expansion can be funded by the operational profits.
Given the above calculations, the launch prices for getting the system to work will be 1600*850*600 = $816 million
That is well within the SpaceX financial capabilities.
Now, the above assumes that the FH launches of the sats would be mass limited, rather than volume limited. I suspect that in reality they would be volume limited, however, thus the price would be higher. In any case it would be much lower than your original estimate.
What's the business model? (Score:2, Interesting)
386 kilograms - 13 by 6 by 4 feet (4 by 1.8 by 1.2 meters)
Launch cost $1.79 million per satellite
or $7.93 billion per constellation which last 5-7 years.
Lets say an average cost of $50 million per satellite, which is very low, were looking at $221.3 billion.
So, let's say roughly $230 billion, just to break even over a 7 year life span would require an annual revenue generation of $32 billion. Given that most people without an internet connection would be in rural areas, or poverty striken areas, we're look
Re:What's the business model? (Score:4, Insightful)
You think a low latency broadband network available to the entire planet's 7,5 billion people is only going to be able to get 91 million subscribers?
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Compared to a $20 a month ISP connection across most of the first world, and no access to computers - let alone Internet - across most of the third-world?
Er... I think they're going to struggle.
And I think a bigger point is that then share's one satellite across - at least - 20,000+ people. Good luck managing the bandwidth on that one...
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So because you're assuming that it'll be more expensive than ISPs in the First World (and let's pretend that the first world is all 100% net connected, why don't we), and because only a quarter of the world's 7,5 billion people currently own a computer, that means that there's no way to get 90 million subscribers?
Compelling argument there.
Let's also pretend that there's no other markets for satellite data service, such as shipping, aviation, backbone data transmission, etc why don't we.
I'm sure all of the p
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Yeah, because I don't specify networks for a living, or tie in leased lines, or pay for broadband.
Shipping, aviation, etc. all have satellite data where necessary.
We're not talking about those areas - at best their things get cheaper, at worst they make no changes to what they are using.
We're talking about 20,000 people (on average, likely more), operating on a limited bandwidth in a licensed channel, simultaneously, with something they expect comparable to a basic broadband connection (Let's say 10Mbps, bu
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Which totally makes you an expert on economics, communications satellites, and launch vehicles! In the same way that living in Alaska makes Sarah Palin an expert on Russia!
It also somehow magically gives you all of the data available to SpaceX involved in making their decisions.
Right, there's absolutely nobody who would pay for always-on bandwidt
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*** "... due to oxygen within the overlay..."
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Just ran into these things - and gee, whatchaknow, backs up everything I said:
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Followup from the same engineer:
Let's look at one internet provider - Comcast (Score:2)
22 million subscribers @$60/month or $720/year for lowest tier of internet.
$14,400,000,000/year in revenue.
100+ million broadband users in the U.S.
220+ million cell phone users in the U.S.
Let's theorize a $50/month fee for internet and cell service. That's
$600/year. Let's say these combine to 200 million users.
That's $10,000,000,000 ($10 billion/year)
Re:Looking at the numbers... (Score:5, Informative)
how do you solve the logistical problem of replacing 10 satellites all in completely different positions around the earth in one launch?
You don't. The way Iridium handles it is having some of the satellites in orbit allocated as spares and not in active service. They have 66 active birds plus six spares. The spares run in a different orbit which circles the earth faster than the active constellation but can still easily transfer to the correct orbit, minimizing fuel needs for activating one in exchange for a longer time spent waiting for the orbits to sync up properly for the transfer.
Basically you set things up like a large "cloud" host where there's enough spare capacity that individual device failures just aren't really a priority and you can replace the failed hardware in bulk every so often rather than having to do something one-off immediately.
Just a thought folks (Score:2)
What if Space X incorporates these so called satellites into EVERY rocket launch. Think about it. They send up a rocket, it is launched, encloses a commercial payload. A cap is opened up, it is released. Done.
Wait, we just sent up a cap, and an enclosure. Could we modify our cap to double as a signal dish. Can our enclosure double as solar panels. Can we turn every rocket into an internet providing satellite?
This doesn't seem sustainable (Score:2)
7 year max lifespan, times 365 days a year, is 2555 days of maximum lifespan.
So for 4400 satellites, how exactly are they going to maintain a launch rate capable of sustaining this? This would inevitably require maintenance launches 2 or 3 times per week.
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They'll lose 2 a day. A Falcon Heavy lifter can take 100 at a time, so one replacement flight ever 50 days or so.
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They'll lose 2 a day. A Falcon Heavy lifter can take 100 at a time, so one replacement flight ever 50 days or so.
100 at a time? Each is the size of a MINI Cooper car... Do they fold up smaller for launch?
China’s Censorship (Score:1)
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And now you know why Musk wants to get to Mars....
There are some potential solutions (Score:2)
We in fact desperately need an orbital based internet to break the earth bound telecommunication firms. Expect Cable companies to lobby heavily against this.
Each satellite should have a system to retrieve it to earth. By that, I mean a small system that would be deployed upon failure to push the satellite down to lower earth orbit until it plunges and burns up in atmosphere. This should in fact be a requirement of EVERY satellite.
five to seven years? (Score:2)
"Operating lifetime was estimated at five to seven years per satellite."
Doesn't that seem like a really sort span of time to have to send something into space? That means in like any given year you could be replacing 20% of your satellites? I guess perhaps with the idea that technology would be advancing so a 30 year old satellite might not really support current technology... Anyway still seems a bit crazy...
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"Operating lifetime was estimated at five to seven years per satellite."
Doesn't that seem like a really sort span of time to have to send something into space? That means in like any given year you could be replacing 20% of your satellites? I guess perhaps with the idea that technology would be advancing so a 30 year old satellite might not really support current technology... Anyway still seems a bit crazy...
And, if he says it will cost $20B that also implies $4B / year in replacement costs... I'm sure he is betting on the tech improving (cheaper and longer lifespan) as they move to scale. On that, he's probably right.
Keep seeing folks ask why. Duh...it's obvious (Score:2)
Tesla uses internet to update and monitor their vehicles.
This would give Tesla access around the globe to perform those updates to any Tesla, no matter WHERE in the world it is.
And they would no longer have to pay telecoms fees to use their cellular systems.
Can you say "going out of business" (Score:1)
This just proves that SpaceX will be a short-lived company. I doubt they have the capital to put it in place, let alone maintain it. And for what?
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The 90's called.. (Score:2)
I thought satellite Internet was one of the worst options available? Most expensive, least performance?
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Current satellite internet is that way because all the data is funneled through a handful of satellites up in geostationary orbit. This system uses a much larger number of much closer satellites, so latency's far lower, signal levels and link bandwidth are higher and you don't need a big dish to make your link budget work, and system bandwidth is orders of magnitude higher.
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Teslas
This will enable them to do remote updates, monitoring, etc all over the globe and no longer have to pay telecoms for access to their 4G cellular networks.