SpaceX Tests Broadband Satellite Network, Claims 'First To Operate' Status (geekwire.com) 97
SpaceX says 57 of its 60 broadband data satellites are now communicating with their ground stations -- and that this grants them special privileges when other companies launch their own satellite telecommunication networks.
An anonymous reader quotes GeekWire:
In an emailed update, SpaceX said Starlink is ready to go into a testing phase that involves streaming videos and playing video games via satellite.... "Now that the majority of the satellites have reached their operational altitude, SpaceX will begin using the constellation to start transmitting broadband signals, testing the latency and capacity by streaming videos and playing some high-bandwidth video games using gateways throughout North America," SpaceX said... SpaceX said "Starlink is now the first NGSO [non-geosynchronous satellite orbit] system to operate in the Ku-band and communicate with U.S. ground stations, demonstrating the system's potential to provide fast, reliable internet to populations around the world."
That statement isn't intended merely as a marketing boast: In documents filed earlier this month with the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX says its "first to operate" status with the FCC means it can "select its frequencies first" if there's a conflict with other satellite telecommunication networks in low Earth orbit. SpaceX's claim on that score has set off a flurry of regulatory filings from its rivals in the market for satellite broadband services, including the international OneWeb consortium and Canada's biggest satellite operator, Telesat.
In one of this month's filings, OneWeb charged that SpaceX was being "irresponsible" by going ahead with a Ku-band system under conditions that would interfere with OneWeb's previously launched [six] satellites. But SpaceX shrugged off OneWeb's objections, as well as Kepler's. It said neither OneWeb nor Kepler qualified for the FCC's first-choice status because their ground stations weren't in the U.S... The exchange of FCC filings illustrates how tangled the regulatory environment for satellite internet broadband services can get. And things could get even more tangled if additional players including Amazon and Boeing join the fray.
That statement isn't intended merely as a marketing boast: In documents filed earlier this month with the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX says its "first to operate" status with the FCC means it can "select its frequencies first" if there's a conflict with other satellite telecommunication networks in low Earth orbit. SpaceX's claim on that score has set off a flurry of regulatory filings from its rivals in the market for satellite broadband services, including the international OneWeb consortium and Canada's biggest satellite operator, Telesat.
In one of this month's filings, OneWeb charged that SpaceX was being "irresponsible" by going ahead with a Ku-band system under conditions that would interfere with OneWeb's previously launched [six] satellites. But SpaceX shrugged off OneWeb's objections, as well as Kepler's. It said neither OneWeb nor Kepler qualified for the FCC's first-choice status because their ground stations weren't in the U.S... The exchange of FCC filings illustrates how tangled the regulatory environment for satellite internet broadband services can get. And things could get even more tangled if additional players including Amazon and Boeing join the fray.
oneweb lol (Score:2)
Starlink has an order of magnitude more birds than oneweb already. It's obvious who the leader is here. Farewell, oneweb, I never heard of ye.
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Kinda reminds you of the first gen Iridium.
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That too, but if the guy likes it who are you to judge?
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Even if they have the right to do that in the US, SpaceX won't have the right to operate their satellites over some other countries.
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Those are really, really small values of "existing" and "network" you're using there.
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"Even if they have the right to do that in the US, SpaceX won't have the right to operate their satellites over some other countries."
The network doesn't have much of a presence and they likely will have those rights in the end. The US is still the biggest market by far and the other efforts aren't viable assuming SpaceX wins this. The end game is likely going to be SpaceX buying out their rights or just acquiring them.
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If they stop at 60 it's still kind of useless. They say with a few hundred it will start paying for itself. The moment they can beat existing latency between the large stock markets, the network is worth tens of billions. That would fund the 12,000 sats they officially have planned, and Starship to launch them.
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They also have high-bandwidth laser sat-to-sat cross links
Minor correction: They will have high-bandwidth laser sat-to-sat cross links. The first set of sats launched does not have that hardware on board. Later ones will.
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What sort of insane asylum escapee keeps track which other users on Slashdot are fans of which companies?!
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Nothing in that comment confirmed or denied the contents of the list. It was solely an observation about the nature of the lunatic who would create such a list in the first place. Just like this comment. Crackhead.
First satellites will have higher latency. (Score:3, Informative)
The eventual latency savings will come from the satellite-to-satellite optical interlinks, because that allows avoiding the higher latency of physical data lines. The satellites are in low orbit where the light delay to that altitude is small and more than overcome by the savings.
However, that requires (1) the whole network be in place to route the signal around in orbit, and (2) optical interconnects. The first batch of satellites does not have the hardware for the interconnects in place, so it will still have the normal ground-based latency: it's just a relay that the local base station goes through and then back down to a ground station. So we won't see the full latency picture until more of the network is operational.
The targeted service lifetime of the satellites is around 5 years, so they plan further HW and SW development even as the constellation is deployed, and then after when older sats are de-orbited and replaced by newer, better ones. And SpaceX will have a huge launch cost advantage on anyone else for doing so.
Re: First satellites will have higher latency. (Score:1)
It's still going to be better latency than existing satellite based broadband though. Round trip to geostationary orbit is about 2 seconds, roundtrip to starlink in its very low orbits will be about 100-150ms
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Actually you are making up numbers, not out of nowhere because you are using calculations to make them up but you are making them up nontheless. You need actual measurements of real deployments rather than math to avoid fabricating numbers and the real installations I've seen have been closer to his 2s.
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Real installations include other sources of latency than just the speed of light which is why you must use real data and not just theoretical data.
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1-2s is closer to what I've seen with simple ping tests to common public endpoints (google, yahoo, etc) from a number of actual sat internet installs with different providers. It may be that all the delay isn't coming purely from signal propagation.
That said 480ms-560ms would still provide a horrible experience.
Re: First satellites will have higher latency. (Score:1)
Sorry, but speed of light travel to LEO takes a bit over 6ms. Even if there is no horizontal distance to travel, the round trip delay is already about 25ms, which is more than some gamers already get. Add in the horizontal travel time plus routing overhead and it won't be any benefit. It might have benefits at global diatances, but most gamers play on regional servers to have the best ping times.
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Sorry, but speed of light travel to LEO takes a bit over 6ms. Even if there is no horizontal distance to travel, the round trip delay is already about 25ms
Light speed is 300,000 km/s so 300 km/ms, for these satellites in a 550 km orbit that means under 2 ms away and 8 ms round trip. Granted, SpaceX has proposed many layers of satellites so it's hard to keep track of them all but never >1800 km or 6 ms out. Of course it remains to see what the latency of the actual service will be with protocol overhead, interference, congestion and whatnot but it looks like it'll be good enough for casual FPS playing. Wireless is never 100% reliable though so if I was an e
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Indeed. I'm on Exede (Viacom) and the latency makes all non-turn-based games unplayable over the network. It even significantly impacts browsing because so many pages require numerous connections to multiple sites in order to load all the content required to render them.
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"The speed advantage is predicated on there being fewer satellite hops to go sat to sat"
You are right of course and this is unlikely because people haven't just thrown their hands up in the air and given up moaning about all the hops they must transit on the ground. Important services have local presence for most people right on the ground.
Actually, it is possible this might be disruptive because many entities depend on those local hops not just to speed things up but to distribute load.
That said this could
Space-based internet and censorship (Score:1)
SpaceX is missing an opportunity to help people living under conditions of severe internet censorship, the kind where wikipedia is blocked or any discussion of "human rights". They could have simply refused to switch off the downlinks in those areas.
Unfortunately they caved like all the other big tech companies do when they want access to lucrative new markets. The ground transceivers won't be sold in places like that nor will the satellites handshake to stations there without first going through a local
Re: Space-based internet and censorship (Score:2)
First before you complain too loudly remember that space X has to build it first. At 60 satilletes a a launch that is merely 75 launches to get basic level operations in place. It is 200 launches to get full service up.
Then once it is done. SpaceX can legally operate on those countries. And the new black market in those countries will contian either bypass hardware/software or hardware imported from other countries.
Re: Space-based internet and censorship (Score:2)
Well wait until the network is up and then push for them not to enable censorship/monitoring. What good does it do to box them into a corner now when it will only jeopardize their ability to launch the network at all? How does that help the censored?
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First of all, getting people online is probably the best way they can find alternative news and get in contact with the global community. Those who only have local TV, radio and newspapers are sure as hell not going to find it. Secondly there's no way they could operate "undercover" to sell something the government would ban, they'd basically have to be smuggled in and service given free because paying for it would be a dead giveaway. It's not like you can keep the antenna a big secret either, since it need
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This isn't that easy. First, even with phased array antennas there's a lot of spreading. Locating people who use this service by airplanes would be dead simple for the governments. Second, you'd need to deliver the hardware to these countries and would need to do that secretly by smuggling them in. And they would need to pay you in some way.
This really is not like any old satellite TV dish. Big business necessarily means you have to play by the rules even if you don't like them. This is true for Apple, for
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"Second, you'd need to deliver the hardware to these countries and would need to do that secretly by smuggling them in. And they would need to pay you in some way."
You make it sound like people don't do all of this with simple gaming hardware already. Prepaid service cards and hardware bought with bitcoin.
Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
From wikipedia:
"Compared with C-band, Ku band is not similarly restricted in power to avoid interference with terrestrial microwave systems, and the power of its uplinks and downlinks can be increased. This higher power also translates into smaller receiving dishes and points out a generalization between a satellite's transmission and a dish's size. As the power increases, the size of an antenna's dish will decrease".
Using this band will allow customers to use relatively small and cheap dishes. If they can keep others out of this band now that would seem like an important first mover advantage indeed.
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Anyone who thinks the RF causes cancer in the first place will already have a tin foil hat.
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"Using this band will allow customers to use relatively small and cheap dishes. "
All Teslas will have one built-in.
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Nah, it'll be an upgrade and add another $5k to the $70k price tag on the $35k Tesla you are buying.
I don't even take offense with the options and upgrades but the FTC should at least require them to list the actual prices you pay for the cars not the "third party incentives and gas savings" price.
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Laser communication between satellites is already in use [wikipedia.org].
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Not by SpaceX
I feel a great disturbance in the net (Score:4, Insightful)
As if dozens of satellite tv and broadband providers just shit a brick.
If this lives up to it's promise, a lot of issues like lack of competition in markets and rural broadband will go away...
Re:I feel a great disturbance in the net (Score:5, Informative)
There's an underserved market of people in rural areas without access to broadband. The only other viable alternative is fixed wireless, but that has topography issues. It's easy to assume that people in rural areas are backwards hillbillies, but that's not the case. Also lack of internet access is a barrier to a lot of people who'd want to live a rural lifestyle I'd imagine.
Case in point, I'm about 15 miles away from the nearest city and my options for internet access were between dial up, and Hughes. Hughes would have been well over $100 a month for a slow, metered plan (and due to jitter VPN woiuld be a no go -- meaning remote work would be impossible.) Dial up, is .. well dial up.
Something like Starlink would be an absolute god send. But push come to shove, I'd take living in the wilderness without broadband over living in a city with fiber any day of the week. Starlink means the best of both worlds. (or at least access that's vastly superior to anything else out there).
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From what I understand, the primary revenue center is reduced latency links between financial markets(They spent millions on an under-sea cable with slightly lower latency, but star-link should have the ability to cut the current latency roughly in half, because light in a vacuum is a lot faster than light in a fiber-optic cable).
(High-frequency traders paying huge sums so that they can communicate faster between the major financial markets)
The ability to also sell otherwise unused bandwidth to under-served
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Nobody is ever gonna use this shit network. It will suffer the same problem satellite service always suffers. Loss of signal the second a cloud appears overhead. I stick with cable.
Ku band signals aren't affected by simple cloud cover. They do suffer from rain fade [wikipedia.org] in heavy rain (> 100 mm / 4 inches per hour), but this fade effect can be managed by increasing transmission power.
Since where I live we have annual rainfall of about 13 inches, there's basically no possibility of sufficiently-heavy rainfall to create rain fade problems. YMMV... but 4 inches per hour is really heavy rain.
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More like service providers shit a brick. If they ever manage to get their sat-to-sat communication link running these sats will likely bypass a lot of the measures they've put in place to provide local caching and traffic distribution. This has the potential to seriously screw with their demand and usage patterns.
As you said, the providers can stop worrying about "lack of competition" arguments and providing rural broadband.
A career understand US regs (Score:2)
Elon Musk has made a career out of understanding the arcane policies and procedures of the US government and making sure his companies wring out every dollar and advantage it can. This is simply the latest example of Elon Musk's proficiency in this area.
Good on him. He's making real companies that do things few other companies is were successfully doing when he started.
Amazon isn't worried about ... (Score:2)
... Boeing. Boeing's satellites will first dolphin and then power dive vertically back to Earth.
I love SpaceX but... (Score:2, Informative)
This entire internet venture of SpaceX seems to be a dick move to everyone not SpaceX. Litter the sky with satellites everywhere, who cares about astronomers. Claim some special "first mover" status even though they aren't first but get to claim it due to a technicality to shit on other people's existing networks.
Elon, what are you up to? Don't turn into those arrogant startups who think they can roll out internet through technicalities while ignoring everyone else. This entire case reminds me of that compa
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Real astronomers (as opposed to people pretending to speak for them) have already said that Starlink isn't that bad. Yes, there will be even more satellites than now, but compared to what's racing about the skies right now anyway (sats, airplanes) this isn't the end of the world. You can't have your cake and eat it too. As long as we will exist as a global civilization we will have satellites and there will be more and more of them. They're just too convenient and useful to not have them.
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OneWeb had nearly a decade and they only launched six sats to orbit.
Furthermore, it's in the public's best interest to utilize the bandwidth available to its maximum potential. Far worse a crime than claiming spectrum out from under someone else is for someone to sit on spectrum indefinitely without providing service to users.
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SpaceX has reduced the price of commercial launches by half. And is poised to offer 100k kg to low earth orbit for even less.
They could launch nearly 9 Hubble space telescopes (11k kg) at a time. Starship will be able to deliver large observatories to the moon with zero atmosphere or pesky LEO satellites. The cost of funding that capability is going to be born on 1-2 years of minor visual noise.
As to technicalities, OneWeb has been throwing up ridiculous technicalities objections to Starlink from the star
International jurisdiction needed (Score:2)