FCC Grants OneWeb Approval To Launch Over 700 Satellites For 'Space Internet' (theverge.com) 89
OneWeb has been granted approval from the FCC to launch a network of internet-beaming satellites into orbit. FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement: "Humans have long sought inspiration from the stars, from the ancient Egyptians orienting the
pyramids toward certain stars to the Greeks using constellations to write their mythology. In modern
times, we've done the same, with over 1,000 active satellites currently in orbit. Today, the FCC harnesses
that inspiration as we seek to make the promise of high-speed internet access a reality for more Americans, partly through the skies..." The Verge reports: OneWeb plans to launch a constellation of 720 low-Earth orbit satellites using non-geostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) technology in order to provide global, high-speed broadband. The company's goal has far-reaching implications, and would provide internet to rural and hard-to-reach areas that currently have little access to internet connectivity. Additionally, OneWeb has a targets of "connecting every unconnected school" by 2022, and "bridging the digital divide" by 2027. According to OneWeb, the company plans to launch an initial 10 production satellites in early 2018, which, pending tests, will then be followed by a full launch as early as 2019.
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36,000 kilometers for geosynchronous orbit, versus 200ish km for a low earth orbit.
36000 kilometers is 0.120 seconds at the speed of light, there and back is your 250 ms. Low earth orbit could be much faster.
What I'm wondering though isn't this something nasa/faa should be approving? That's a lot of potential space trash.
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The FCC approved use of the US frequency bands.
The satellite launches themselves area separate issue. They might try and keep the costs down and launch outside the US.
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Wasn't SpaceX planning to do something similar [wikipedia.org]? But with more than 7500 satellites?
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It's Astrolink [wikipedia.org] all over again.
2001 - a tech-wreck oddessy (Score:2)
Also are you sure it wasn't going to be geostationary? With four satellites making it functional I can't really see it being anything else (but I'm no expert).
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I know it was geostationary, but it's still not a very good idea regardless of which system you use. The Iridium system is alive because if covers corner cases, but satellite broadband is basically the same - good for corner cases. All the rest are better off with optical fibers. It was the spread of broadband like DSL and fibers that took out Astrolink combined with some outrageous budget figures and billing ideas. It did die before the billing system became an issue, but the overall point was that the bil
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True enough if you define every rural off-cable spot in the world as a 'corner case.'
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Are you a civics expert from the space internet?
They're not regulating the space that the signals pass through. They're only regulating the signals.
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No, I didn't even address that mistake. I only addressed the claim that regulation of radio broadcasting isn't the same as regulating the space that the broadcast travels through.
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36000 kilometers is 0.120 seconds at the speed of light, there and back is your 250 ms.
If you're talking round-trip ping times to a server for someone on a satellite link it's 500ms due to four trips: up to the satellite; down to the server; up to the satellite; back down to the client. And that's the absolute minimum.
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Re:Latency? (Score:5, Informative)
They intend on using 18 orbital planes at an altitude of approximately 1200 km (750 miles). Doing the math for a 3000 mile round trip at the speed of light gives me 16 milliseconds. Of course, the actual latency will be higher since that 16 ms latency is just the trip to and from the satellites. You also need to add in the distance between both the satellite you connect to and the one that the ground station connects to. Worse case would be the ground station being on the opposite side of the world, in which case the total round trip latency from the user to the ground station would be 96 ms.So in summary, depending upon the relative locations of the user and the ground station the user connects to, the latency added by the satellites is between 16 and 96 milliseconds.
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Minor correction. I forgot to include the return path from the ground station. So the latency, depending upon relative locations of the user and ground station, is 16 to 175 milliseconds.
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The antennas used by the users will be a small phased array (approx 36 cm by 16 cm).
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Orbit is 750 miles up. Sending a packet to and from a satellite takes a round trip of 1500 miles... And then you need to receive a response from whomever you sent the initial packet to. Another 1500 miles. Total round trip distance? 3000 miles or 16ms overhead. Of course, that doesn't include any lateral distance to the actual ground station you're using. Although "ground station" may be a bit of an over statement. I could easily see a modified "user terminal" connected to a ground based high speed internet
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Unless they're going to be playing Unreal World Of Steel Theft Craft 4 why is latency an issue? It's for schools, isn't it?.
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Actually, they're also thinking of homes. And lower latency is better than higher. Their use cases include aircraft (business, commercial, and military), health centers, schools, libraries, and homes. Their intent is to provide internet access anywhere in the world and allow for the use of any application that uses the internet. And there are applications where low latency is required. Otherwise they could simply launch 4 satellites in a Draim constellation and be done with it.
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Just how low is low orbit? For geostationary I think you get around 250ms latency just to hit the satellite.
Geosynchronous would be the easy way to do it, but a low-orbit constellation is the price of reducing latency to tolerable values. A part of that price will be designing a compact receiver that can deal with two-way communications with moving satellites.
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The Giza-Orion thing aside, what most Egyptologists seem to agree on is that they used the stars to fix the North-South orientation of all their pyramids. (Because that orientation drifted over the years they stared building them, following the precession of the earth axis)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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...[I]n Egypt, the Pharaohs
Had to import Hebrew braceros.
Didn't you learn that song in school?
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Ajit Pai said in a statement: "Humans have long sought inspiration from the stars, from the ancient Egyptians orienting the pyramids toward certain stars to the Greeks using constellations to write their mythology"
Christ, how's that for purple prose! Should a regulatory body be using language like that? Surely they should just keep to the facts of the matter.
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Surely they should just keep to the facts of the matter.
I suspect talking this way shows a certain contempt for the intellect of others.
700 satellites?! At what cost? (Score:1)
A "cheap" LEO communication satellite costs around $50 million, so 700 satellites would be $35 billion...
We are talking big money here. Somewhere between the GPS and the Apollo program. This kind of budget is usually reserved for international projects or large countries (i.e. US, China). So a private company...
I am sure there are economies of scale to be made but I don't believe in magic. I expect it to be government-scale money no matter what.
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at 700 satellites, economies of scale come into play, so cost per additional satellite is probably a lot cheaper than $50 million or whatever.
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Iridium satellites cost about $5 million per piece. So your cost estimate is about 10 times to high. Launching and operating will cost a pretty penny too but if the system supports about 10 million subscribers the cost of a subscription will be in the same order as a dsl or cable subscription.
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The cost of the Iridium project went well into the billions (I've seen $4B) for 77 satellites. The $50 million per satellite figure is not too far off. The $5 million per satellite probably only covers only the manufacturing and not the tooling, R&D, logistics, etc..., anyways, it is obviously not representative of reality.
Iridium NEXT has a budget of $3 billion, a little cheaper but still in the same ballpark.
I am always skeptical when people announce huge savings. First, it isn't like private companie
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I think a major problem with making cheap satellites is that you need specialized ("space rated") parts, and that vendors of these parts will charge inflated prices, just because they can.
This is a problem that SpaceX had with their attempts to make cheap rockets. Their solution was to develop a lot of things in-house. They also buy parts from other vendors, but they make it clear they want a fair price, otherwise they'll walk away and find another solution.
Re:700 satellites?! At what cost? (Score:4, Informative)
From the illustrations on OneWeb's website it appears that we're essentially talking about a few hundred slightly oversized cube-sats that could potentially be thrown up a few dozen at a time by SpaceX's Falcon 9 heavy or a similar booster, so you could easily end up with a smaller price tag than Iridium. Still likely to have a total price tag of a few billion, but not tens of billions, and potentially still commercially viable if you can resell enough bandwidth at the low, low prices that are all that their primary customers can afford. It's all going to depend on the unit cost and how many they can launch per booster - if they can bring both of those down low enough, provide enough bandwidth, and some higher end services (real time global tracking of ships and aircraft, perhaps?) then I don't see why it wouldn't be viable.
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People who need voice, the cloud, data all the time in very isolated areas. A device might have to log data all day until its finally connected to a network later.
Now services can communicate in real time, all day.
Very restricted and expensive remote telco services will face competition. The days of changing a lot for speed and not much d
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Thanks for sharing your dreams with us. Keep it up, it's very entertaining.
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Oneweb is not using the "individually hand crafted" model for the their satellites, they're using a lower standard of "medical grade equipment". This makes sense given the large number of satellites they intend on using. The cost per satellite (not counting the launch costs) is estimated to be about $500,000 each. So the cost for 720 of them is $360,000,000. Of course, the actual cost will be higher since all those satellites need to launched into orbit.
Several per launch (Score:2)
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Definitely multiple per launch. They way I would do it is launch as many as possible up to 40 (total number of satellites in a single plane) into either a slightly higher, or slightly lower orbit than the final desired operational orbit. Then each satellite waits until it reaches a designated location and then performs a hohmann transfer into the desired slot for each satellite. If the rocket can carry more than 40, then have it drop off a cluster of 40 satellites, perform a plane change maneuver, drop off
Kessler Syndrome (Score:2)
Should we be worried about the "Kessler Syndrome"? That's where the density of objects in a given orbital volume gets to the point where a single collision causes a large amount of debris which in turn causes more collisions which ...
The 700 new objects will be put into LEO where, in order to provide worldwide coverage they won't be in a single orbital plane (like the "Clarke belt" or geosynchronous orbit). Instead they, like GPS or Iridium will be crisscrossing with each other (no problem if properly des
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in low LEO the orbits degrade relatively rapidly. Keesler was mostly concerned about 800Km-1000Km orbits, not the 200Km orbits we are talking about for this sort of system. At these low altitudes, the satellites will have to adjust their orbits pretty frequently (probably on the order of monthly vs quarterly for higher LEO satellites)
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Not especially. They are not going to last long in that orbit without fuel to give them a boost every now and again. If they are broken and not doing that they are coming down since there is enough air to eventually slow things down.
Here's one way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
Permission to Launch? (Score:3)
Having always been fascinated by space, I'm always keenly interested in any launches. The SpaceX approach to media, with live-streamed launches, has been mesmerising. But it occurs to me that, as a planet/species, we're now putting more and more into space than at any time since the launch of Sputnik. Of course, different countries have different governmental controls put in place to license companies for aerospace operations. This is entirely sensible, since a mis-fired rocket could easily cause an incident with an aircraft, or land near a populated area, or worse.
But at what point do we realise that we can't simply have endless, uncontrolled launches into space; that perhaps we need to have some form of [perhaps UN-backed] international framework to ensure that there is full coordination and collaboration on our use of local space, orbits and launch windows.
Or did that happen and I just didn't get the memo?
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Considering how similar ICBMs and orbital rockets are, I can guarantee you that all nuclear powers take a very close look at rocket launches.
NASA and ESA also have rules regarding space junk, which is the biggest problem with sending too many things in orbit, and work is being made to turn it into an international agreement.
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But if the government spent the money directly (on hiring more teachers, buying books, fixing leaky roofs) that would be communism which leads to hospital death panels, mandatory gay marriage, and banning SUVs.
If they hire a big contractor to build a humongous boondoggle then it's private enterprise, which is freedom and apple pie and NUMBER ONE!!!!
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Please, don't proliferate satellites.
The satellites that go up will go down.
Then the satellites can kill you as if it is a meteorite.
Of all the fears about space junk, this one is the silliest. A satellite contains a high percentage of empty space, like a ship. When one deorbits, it burns up. Although s meteor is a solid chunk of rock or iron in contrast, very few of them survive to become meteorites.
FCC Grants ... Approval To Launch (Score:2)
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the FAA only has "jurisdiction" inside the atmosphere (roughly) and besides given that these are COMMUNICATION sats it kind of leans more into the FCCs bailiwick.
kind of like the Bus Driver and Sound Man for a band.
No driver the band goes nowhere
No sound the band can't do JACK
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and besides given that these are COMMUNICATION sats it kind of leans more into the FCCs bailiwick
Well, no, not really. Just because you need to get multiple approvals to do something hardly means that someone has an upper hand in the whole thing.
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the FCC approves the licenses for the airwaves when they use US airspace. without that approval, there's no point in the entire project.
Not really, since the world is bigger than the US and you don't really need to limit yourself to US only. Is Iridium US only, or does it generate revenue globally? It does? Well, hardly "no point", then...
** LEARN ** TO ** READ **
I think you meant "learn how to write", since the headline is badly written. Fortunately, getting one person to *write* something correctly is easier than getting thousands of readers to *read* it correctly, so there's that.
Oddly enough, yes FCC (Score:1)
Oddly enough, the FCC is the folks who approve it from an orbital debris standpoint - the thinking is that everyone in space has to have a radio license, so it's a convenient "gate" to enforce the "on orbit life" limit.
These things are up at 700km, so they'll be up a good long time, short of explicit deorbit.
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SPAAAAAACE! (Score:2)
SPAAAAAACE! [youtube.com]
"bridging the digital divide" (Score:1)
Oh good, we're going to use satellites so that the poor can have high latency. We're building a foot bridge to the information highway. And then you get to play Frogger at the end.
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OneWeb claims 30 ms latency, which doesn't sound too bad. My round trip time to slashdot.org is 110 ms, and it's perfectly usable.
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I'd be interested in knowing where you found that 30ms figure. But it does imply that Oneweb is planning a ground station approximately every 1500 miles. That in turn implies about 32 planned ground stations.
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Greg Wyler CEO / Founder OneWeb talks about the production of satellites constellation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
He talks about speed and latency starting after ~40 seconds into the clip.
Is 750 miles low enough to self-heal? (Score:2)
Life imitating art again (Score:2)
Like the comic https://www.xkcd.com/713/ [xkcd.com] said, ISS can now get geoip'd, yieldeing ads to "meet local girls in LOW EARTH ORBIT." ;)
Progress is sad