FCC Authorizes SpaceX's Ambitious Satellite Internet Plans 102
The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved an application by Elon Musk's SpaceX, allowing the aerospace company to provide broadband services using satellites in the U.S. and worldwide. "With this action, the Commission takes another step to increase high-speed broadband availability and competition in the United States," the FCC said in a statement. CNBC reports: This marks the first time the FCC has allowed a U.S.-licensed satellite constellation to provide broadband services through low-Earth orbit satellites. "We appreciate the FCC's thorough review and approval of SpaceX's constellation license. Although we still have much to do with this complex undertaking, this is an important step toward SpaceX building a next-generation satellite network that can link the globe with reliable and affordable broadband service, especially reaching those who are not yet connected," Gwynne Shotwell, President and Chief Operating Officer at SpaceX said in a statement.
SpaceX will begin launching the constellation it dubbed "Starlink" in 2019. The system will be operational once at least 800 satellites are deployed. Starlink will offer broadband speeds comparable to fiber optic networks.The satellites would offer new direct to consumer wireless connections, rather the present system's redistribution of signals, transforming a traditionally high-cost, low reliability service.
SpaceX will begin launching the constellation it dubbed "Starlink" in 2019. The system will be operational once at least 800 satellites are deployed. Starlink will offer broadband speeds comparable to fiber optic networks.The satellites would offer new direct to consumer wireless connections, rather the present system's redistribution of signals, transforming a traditionally high-cost, low reliability service.
What is this, really? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot yet to be revealed. If this system really requires a pizza-box-sized antenna, it's good for home use and some automotive use (that would fit fine on an RV, etc.) and a lot of uses that currently use a cellular modem. But consider that Elon might be attempting to do an end-run around all of the world's cellular telephony companies. If there's enough system gain to use a cell-phone-sized antenna, it's a real game changer.
If you believe Elon (and we know not to always believe him), this is going to pay for Mars. If it works with a handheld terminal, maybe it could.
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Not a problem. You put the antenna on top of your mandatory, surgically implanted, tinfoil hat and don't use the internet during thunderstorms.
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If you believe Elon (and we know not to always believe him), this is going to pay for Mars.
Musk seems to have more ambitious projects that one single human being could handle alone.
Has anyone really taken a good look at Musk . . . ? I am starting to think that he is really a Beowulf Cluster of Musks . . .
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He can spin off instances of himself, Dr. Manhattan-style.
Nobody works alone (Score:5, Insightful)
Musk seems to have more ambitious projects that one single human being could handle alone.
That's why he hires people. Very little of consequence in this world is ever done by a single person. We Americans tend to like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists but the reality is that we depend heavily on each other for even the most basic of necessities.
Elon's job is not to do these projects but rather to hire the people who can do them. Think of his job like that of Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs. He allocates capital, set a direction for the company, and hire the right people to make it happen, and sells the vision of the company. He likes to get involved with the engineering because that helps him understand how well his employees are doing their job (and because its fun) - similar to Steve Jobs in that respect but that isn't his real job. Elon's real job is to provide capital where it is needed, hire the right people, and to act as chief sales person. And he seems to be rather good at that.
Top management works as a team (Score:2)
Musk often makes decisions alone.
No he doesn't. He makes the final decision but NOBODY who is a CEO of a company that size makes decisions alone or without help on a regular basis. There are lots of people providing him data, opinions, and context to every decision he makes. If you think otherwise then you have never seen top management of large companies in action up close. They spend a huge percent of their day in meetings gathering information and opinions. Even legendarily domineering CEOs like Steve Jobs listen more than they or
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Serious satellite broadband with a handheld antenna?
I mean, I guess it's possible that they have a radical breakthrough up their sleeves, but the launching-right-now Iridium NEXT is looking at only 128 kbit/s to phones, the 1.5 Mbit service to moving ships using 22-inch diameter device and the 8 Mbit service limited to fixed stations.
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The 22 inch diameter device is a steered patch antenna. Consider that it adds 20 dB to the link budget. Add that much power and gain to the downlink. It's partially antenna gain, because the footprint of the SpaceX satellite is much smaller than Iridium, and partially transmitter power.
The uplink bandwidth doesn't have to be as high, so you can get by with a lower uplink budget.
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Another thing to consider is that not all of SpaceX's customers have to be on the ground, accessing the network through those terminals. Starlink could provide broadband internet connectivity to any satellite in LEO with a compatible optical link. For example, Iridium could launch a few of their own satellites with Starlink transceivers and get a massively redundant internet connection without any additional groundside hardware of their own.
And with multiple transceivers per Starlink satellite and a guarant
Re:What is this, really? (Score:4, Insightful)
>If you believe Elon (and we know not to always believe him)...
I used to think that... but find me a tweet (even the joke ones) that hasn't turned into reality.
Car in orbit past Mars? check
Flamethrower? check
Boring company? check
He's rich enough to turn his jokes & whims into reality. I now take all of his tweets seriously - especially the jokes.
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but find me a tweet (even the joke ones) that hasn't turned into reality
Any of the Model 3 production estimates
Re:HIGH cost, low orbit! high speed, high latency! (Score:2)
FIFY... This will be a costly way to provide internet service. It may be cheaper in rural areas or for mobile customers who depend on cellular or geosynchronous based providers now, but the customer base will be limited in this cost range.
Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
"With this action, the Commission takes another step to increase high-speed broadband availability and competition in the United States," the FCC said in a statement
Increase competition!?!?! Wasn't Ajit Pai was put in charge of the FCC precisely to prevent such a catastrophe from befalling the existing well established structures of localised telecommunications monopolies? Competition on a nationwide level would seriously impair their ability to shaft the consumer!
Re: Huh? (Score:1)
They don't think he can do it. He will, and they will all go out of business :D
When facts contradict theory (Score:2)
An impartial observer would conclude, that he was not. Do we have any such observers here, though?
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Light pollution from artificial satellites are nothing in comparison to the masses of man made lights on the surface hitting every dust particle and clouds going upwards.
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and yet I'm able to see it pass overhead with the naked eye
Only when it's lit. It's not lit most of the night, because of simple geometry.
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My suspicion is that the 800 satellites is to deal with the low data caps, you don't need that many satellites to cover the Earth as we've seen with the Iridium system. So it must be that they need this many to be able to handle the usage they're expecting. So I'm not sure the data caps are likely to be a problem. That's said, cost seems highly likely to be an issue because I can't imagine this endeavor being cheap. my best guess is that this will compete with the current satellite internet providers who ar
Get straight to the important part (Score:1)
Will Amazon have to collect sales tax if it is operating in space?
Don't like the name (Score:3)
They picked "Starlink"? I mean, this is literally a "Skynet". Hope it wasn't licensing that stopped them.
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It was already taken [wikipedia.org] for an existing constellation
Next up... (Score:2)
Oort Compute Cloud (OC2) and Oort Cloud Storage (OCS).
What's the latency? (Score:2)
Latency has been the biggest issue with previous satellite internet services. What's it like with this system?
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Because this is low earth orbit instead of the current geostationary system for satellites latency shouldn't be much of an issue, calculations done for this up thread put the latency for a round trip ping at about 8-12 milliseconds which is effectively nothing when you look at the grand scheme of things. In fact, depending on how they want to route packets, you could actually get decreased ping times when reaching servers on the other side of the planet, has signals actually travel faster through empty spac
I'm surprised.. (Score:2)
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..no, shocked, shocked I tell you, that Ajit Pai didn't specifically and categorically deny SpaceX from doing this, then turn around and announce that Verizon, or AT&T, or Comcast is going to do precisely the same thing, and how it'll "increase competition and innovation".
That probably wouldn't work well as those other players will have to use SpaceX rockets. Better to let SpaceX start, then use anti-trust issues to get the rocket cost down for others.
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Indeed. Satellite-satellite relays are a minority of traffic, not the majority. Where possible, the communication is a single hop - between the user and a base station located on an internet backbone. Now, this station may be a significant distance from the user, but it's all still line-of-sight.
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Indeed. Satellite-satellite relays are a minority of traffic, not the majority. Where possible, the communication is a single hop - between the user and a base station located on an internet backbone.
Starlink may or may not fall into that category. The lower tier of satellites is designed [fcc.gov] to beam-form down to just 1.5 degrees, an approximate 4 km radius at the 340 km altitude. Maximum ground footprint at that altitude has a radius of ~440km, but according to their FCC filing, it will never use a beam size that large. There's text in there that implies using multiple simultaneous beams, but I'm not finding anything explicit. No time to read it all, and it's dense technical reading.
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It is many simultaneous beams. They can be along any angle up to an arc of, if I remember right, something like 30 degrees.
Concurrent with the launch of the constellations, SpaceX will be building a global network of ground stations, which functionally act like ISPs.
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Latency was my first question. The almighty internet sayeth -- altitude 1200 km, latency 25-35ms. Higher than I'd like and probably doesn't include delays on the ground at the other end of the link. But, very likely workable for most stuff.
My second question -- not so easily answered -- is how they manage contention since CDMA probably won't work.
Cost? Who the hell knows?
Overall, this could be a winner if they can solve about 7000 problems.
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altitude 1200km, 2400km round trip
average distance from east coast to uplinks which are typically in denver, 2800km, 5600km round trip
a typical distance from denver to data center hosting whatever is being accessed, 2500km, 5000km round trip
total distance the bits travel: 13000km.
approximately the same as chicago to amsterdam and back.
tl;dr: you won't get 25-35ms ping. try triple that, at least.
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Signals in copper and fiber do not travel at light speed (in a vacuum). Radio signals in space do.
So eventually, a mesh network of satellites might actually have lower ping times than fiber connections.
As side note, for the average (consumer) internet connection, most latency is in buffer bloat, not in signal traveling time. As anecdotal evidence, I frequently have faster connections to servers at the other side of the Atlantic than to servers in my own country.
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Signals in copper and fiber do not travel at light speed (in a vacuum). Radio signals in space do.
However the differencce is neglectible.
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Er.. the velocity factor in CAT-7 equates to about 3/4 of c in a vacuum.That's close to the best copper can do. Fiber has a refractive index which results in about 2/3 light speed for signal propagation.
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Funny that copper is actually faster than fiber ...
Anyway, as I that for most practical purpose that is irrelevant.
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Yeah, I only really had to pay attention to it recently when designing a high-throughput application, where some of the unavoidable round-trips in our ingestion pipelines need to finish inside of 10-15 microsecs. For most use cases it doesn't matter.
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The big thing is that it eliminates all of your local hops and dumps your traffic straight onto a backbone - at a ground station that's up to a couple thousand kilometers closer to your traffic's destination.
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I can see steerable antennas with narrow outputs becoming the norm rather than the exception.
Re:Get ready newbs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if it is around 100ms ping, that's good enough for most Internet usage (especially if the jitter is low). Outside of FPS/MOBA players, who really cares about sub 100ms pings anyway?
If it is cheap and bandwidth is high this could be a game changer for a lot of places. If you are currently on fibre of course you don't care, this (probably) won't beat that, but if you are living in the outback with shitty 1mbit DSL, then this could be huge. And that's a huge potential customer base that right now doesn't have a lot of great options, plus depending on just how good this is, there are also a lot of folks living in cities with poor connections due to contention that might be interested.
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Outside of FPS/MOBA players, who really cares about sub 100ms pings anyway?
Anyone requiring near real-time interactions, not only for FPS/MMORPG style games, also VR/AR, and anything else such as video conferencing, voice communications, where interactions between people or between people and machines require low latency. The more of these applications are developed and become useful to people, the more demand there will be for low latency networking.
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These satellites will orbit relatively close to earth at 1000-1300km. That's 4ms for a photon, or a 8ms round tripe time. The latency is reported to be about 25ms, but it has the potential to be much lower than that. Furthermore, since these satellites are expected to communicate with each other, this is not just a last-mile solution, but a fully fledged alternative Internet that could even be faster than traditional cables that need to twist and turn and therefore never follow the shortest path. This will
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That's some weird math. So apparently, in your calculations, all SpaceX communications go from "wherever you are", to the US East Coast, to Denver, to the destination? And beyond that, 13000km at speed c is about 43 milliseconds, hardly triple 25-35 - although of course the calculation isn't that simple.
Regardless, here's how it actually works, for the vast majority of communications. There's one hop from you to the nearest satellite. There's then a hop down not to some random location, but rather a bas
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average distance from east coast to uplinks which are typically in denver
This is supposed to be a global system, so why the hell is Denver, of all places, of special importance here? :-p
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average distance from east coast to uplinks which are typically in denver
This is supposed to be a global system, so why the hell is Denver, of all places, of special importance here? :-p
Middle of the country, the weather is generally not that bad, already a mile high and the network connectivity isn't bad in Denver. Plus a lot of uplink sites already exist there.
However, that's not to say any other central location with good network connectivity wouldn't be workable.
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...the whole point of the system is to provide distributed access, with terminals in offices, schools, residential areas, ships and aircraft, etc. Your data is not going through Denver.
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There are three reasons for Denver...
1. The weather, it's usually dry and clear and that is important because H2O is the nemesis of satellite band RF. So uplinks in Florida, where they exist, are a bit more subject to rain fade issues than the ones in Denver.
2. It's almost in the middle of the country. This means that you can uplink to a satellites over the majority of the country directly (in one hop). When you are looking for the least delay and maximum bandwidth, single hops are better than multipl
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"tl;dr: you won't get 25-35ms ping. try triple that, at least."
Bummer, so this won't be for real-time traders and gamers.
So only 7 billion potential customers, that sucks.
Re: Get ready newbs. (Score:2)
The almighty internet sayeth -- altitude 1200 km, latency 25-35ms
If you do the math properly, the minimum round trip latency is actually more like 8 ms.
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You're right. I didn't do the math at 0400 local with no coffee. And yes 8ms is about right for minimum round trip delay. However, if you think about it for a while, you'll find that the majority of contacts will be made at slant ranges quite a bit longer than 1200km. The geometry is messy. And computing the average/typical range turns out to be even messier. I COULD do it (I think) and so could you most likely. But it'll take a bit of effort. My best guess would be 12-15ms round trip typical. But
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The ground stations will use phased-array antennas [satellitetoday.com] to track the satellite(s) as they pass overhead.
Presumably the system will be smart enough to load balance users across the satellites visible to them to keep the load on any particular satellite as low as possible, though this only speculation.
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I actually do know what a phased array antenna is. I reckon it'll be fine for a fixed ground station. Trying to use a phased array in a moving vehicle or a cell phone-ish device seems to me likely to be conceptually possible but pragmatically unworkable with current technology.
But what the hell do I know?
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That's completely backwards. Being able to electronically form and steer the beam without any physically moving components makes phased arrays particularly well suited to applications where the array is mobile, which is why they're used so widely on aircraft and ships, and they are already being incorporated into cell phones.
Re: Get ready newbs. (Score:2)
However, if you think about it for a while, you'll find that the majority of contacts will be made at slant ranges quite a bit longer than 1200km. The geometry is messy. And computing the average/typical range turns out to be even messier. I COULD do it (I think) and so could you most likely. But it'll take a bit of effort. My best guess would be 12-15ms round trip typical.
That's not bad for a back of the envelope guesstimate. Assuming a 40 degree angle (excessive but ok) the maximum length would be about 1600 km, which bumps an 8 ms roundtrip time up to around 10-11 ms.
Those are of, course, minimum times. Any useful system is going to introduce more delay. But the interesting thing to note is that, at least in theory, communicating with a partner on the other side of the world could actually be faster than using land-based infrastructure.
It'll be interesting to see how it
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You still wont be able to play twitch games in real time globally, but even with say within 2-5 hops it will definitely expand the player base, not to mention anywhere internet would be revolutionary on so many levels.
They are well aware that a 300 mile orbit is horrible on gas millage and that the satellites will either use a lot of f
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Part of the latency is probably due to interleaving for the error correcting codes so it can fix up burst errors.
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Speed of light in a vacuum 186,000 miles per second
Speed of light in a fiber optic cable. 128,000 miles per second
Speed of electricity is much slower
Really what is slowing things down is how many network devices are between you and what you want to be connected two. Yeah this wont beat a local network in your house, but if you are trying to connect to something on the other side of the world it'll beat the pants off terr
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