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SpaceX Asks FCC To Allow 5 Times More Internet Terminals for Starlink's Satellites (cnbc.com) 150

Posted by EditorDavid from the up-links dept.
CNBC reports: SpaceX said Starlink, its nascent satellite internet service, has already seen "extraordinary demand" from potential customers, with "nearly 700,000 individuals" across the United States indicating they are interested in the company's coming service. Due to the greater-than-expected interest, SpaceX filed a request with the Federal Communications Commission on Friday — asking to increase the number of authorized user terminals to 5 million from 1 million. User terminals are the devices consumers would use to connect to the company's satellite internet network...

SpaceX is beginning a private beta test of Starlink's service this summer, which it says will be "followed by public beta testing." Elon Musk's company told the FCC that Starlink will begin offering commercial service in the northern United States and southern Canada" before the end of this year, "and then will rapidly expand to near-global coverage of the populated world in 2021...."
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SpaceX Asks FCC To Allow 5 Times More Internet Terminals for Starlink's Satellites More

SpaceX Asks FCC To Allow 5 Times More Internet Terminals for Starlink's Satellites

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  • Left out of the summary (Score:5, Informative)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Monday August 03, 2020 @07:50AM (#60359997) Journal
    The summary missed this part, but if you take a look at the actual application, you'll see that it actually reads: "...and then will rapidly expand to near-global coverage of the populated world in 2021. MWUH-HA-HA-HA!"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I somehow doubt that countries like China and Russia are going to let them operate there. It will be interesting to see if they block people from paying for the service or if they go as far as jamming it.

      Satellite internet could be the new longwave radio for international propaganda efforts. Maybe Russia decides to offer cheaper service, or even free service, with data harvesting and a captive portal.

  • Editorial standards are awful (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Monday August 03, 2020 @08:00AM (#60360017) Homepage

    Going from one to five million is not "five times more". It is four times more, or five times as many. I'm pretty sure my third grader knows English and basic arithmetic better than whatever editor was responsible for that error.

    • Re:Editorial standards are awful (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Monday August 03, 2020 @08:59AM (#60360167) Journal

      This seems to be a problem across languages. German speaking regions get this wrong all the time as well.

      It kinda fits with the lack of comprehension when it comes to statistics. What are averages, median, sample sizes, distribution.

      Most people just look at you with a vacant expression on their faces when you ask these rather pertinent questions.

      Just look at what is happening with covid. People are both scared too much and too little. The former because they haven't looked at or understood a single curve and the latter because they just don't want to be inconvenienced.
      What I don't see is an appropriate, rational level of caution.

      • German speaking regions get this wrong all the time as well.

        Why is it German speaking regions that "get this wrong"?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Grammar, and ambiguities in word definitions across languages. Statistics may as well be its own dialect, for that matter.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The most misunderstood one seems to be "X% more". Most people don't seem to know if 100% faster or 200% faster is twice as fast.

        Then again I've noticed that a lot of people, many of them native English speakers, can't say decimals right. They say things like "one point seventy three" instead of "one point seven three".

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by pezpunk ( 205653 )

      Keep tilting at imaginary windmills, bro.

      "Five is five times more than one" is a perfectly acceptable expression. At *WORST* it's ambiguous. Your outrage is petty and superficial.

    • 5 digit UID and you're complaining about the editors? You must not visit often.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      Not nearly as annoying as describing 1 million as "five times fewer" than 5 million, which is also very common.

  • The Finite Capacity of LEO (Score:3)

    by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Monday August 03, 2020 @08:12AM (#60360045)
    Please understand - this post is IN NO WAY intended to be critical of SpaceX and their Starlink plan.

    Even with very carefully defined and monitored orbits, even with improved precision that allows earth-bound tracking to know exactly where all satellites happen to be orbiting, the capacity of LEO is going to have a finite limit. Beyond a certain point, the probability of a collision will increase to the point where a single mistake could lead to the sort of failure that was dramatised in "Gravity").

    To be clear: I'm not claiming that we're near that limit - in fact I wouldn't profess to know what that limit is. But, because this is a finite limit, how do we as a planet go about deciding who gets to deploy satellites to LEO and what purposes those LEO vehicles should be put to?

    At the moment we seem to have an approach which says, "If you can reach LEO and if you can convince your local, national regulator that what you want is OK, then you can launch..." But the problem is that "local regulators" - which will have only national goals in mind - will not have the motive (or inclination) to adopt a pragmatic, sensible, sharing approach to LEO capacity.

    It might seem a bit strange for me to be writing here and now suggesting that we need to implement a supra-national agency [United Nations led, perhaps] to ensure that access to space and LEO is equal for all. But if we fail to do this and LEO "fills up", then all it would take would be one single mistake and space could be blocked from us for years...

    I appreciate that this may seem a bit extreme and may come across as a bit of a doomsday prediction. I don't think the risk is short-term-urgent. However, I do think that it's important for us as a species to "step up" and get in front of this before it becomes a problem. For example, a supra-national regulatory agency could mandate that any vehicle destined for orbit must have a mechanism on board such that when the useful life of the vehicle expires, it can either be slowed down and forced to burn up in atmospheric re-entry, or boosted entirely out of planetary orbit completely.

    If we're willing to do this, then the LEO has a future. if not, we're screwed.

    • Re:The Finite Capacity of LEO (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Monday August 03, 2020 @08:19AM (#60360071) Homepage

      "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." - D. Adams

      Even LEO space is big.

      • Suppose, just suppose, you're walking down to the chemist's when out of nowhere, a hexnut or a bit of cowling from a 70's-era Soviet satellite passes through your skull at 18,000 miles/hr (~8000 m/sec).

        • Suppose, just suppose, you're walking down to the chemist's when out of nowhere, a hexnut or a bit of cowling from a 70's-era Soviet satellite passes through your skull at 18,000 miles/hr (~8000 m/sec).

          The odds of an espresso machine exploding as you walk by and that literally happening to you are HIGHER than the odds a satellite gets hit by a random hex nut. Because... repeat after me, space is big. Also because orbits aren't random. Everything up there, be it junk or operational, is subject to the iron law of gravity. Orbital mechanics can not be denied. Meanwhile Space Force tracks everything. You know where it is now and have a very good idea where it will be next week. Satellites and the ISS r

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        LEO isn't that big. Every time the Space Shuttle went up it came back full of little holes and dents where orbital debris has hit it.

        The problem is that when something breaks up the debris can be very small and spread very wide, and they are orbiting very fast. Starlink is fairly low so debris should burn up relatively quickly, but we are still talking potentially years.

        As ytene says, since it's down to local agencies to give permission there is no real limit on the number of satellites that can go up or ho

        • If say India decides that 100m is adequate separation then there isn't much anyone can do about it other than complain.

          You either don't read the news much, or you have a short memory. Most recently Russia, but the US and China also have all demonstrated that statement to be untrue.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Are you suggesting they might shoot it down? Shoot down a satellite whose orbit passes close to one of yours? I don't think you have thought this one through.

      • Even LEO space is big.

        So big that tracking space junk is already a problem and that NASA need to work around. wait wot? I thought you said it was mind mindbogglingly big? Doesn't sound very big at all.

    • Re:The Finite Capacity of LEO (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Malenx ( 1453851 ) on Monday August 03, 2020 @08:27AM (#60360097)

      SpaceX has a strong interest in keeping the LEO space clean. They already have a decommission plan in place to return their satellites to earth once they are phased out.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Which is great but satellites fail or sometimes get hit by stuff and break up. And they can't do anything to address the problem that the GP brought up - what if say India decides it is going to launch 100,000 satellites and become a world leader in low cost satellite internet services? There is no way to deny Indian companies that opportunity, all you can do is ask the Indian space regulator to cripple the country's space development because you got there first.

        We do need some international cooperation on

      • They already have a decommission plan in place to return their satellites to earth once they are phased out.

        And a recommissioning plan to compensate. Mind you I hope they open up to 100million customers. Let's see the network get slow and customers get pissed and go back to using normal internet. Then maybe the company will go bankrupt and Musk's litter can burn up after a few years.

      • That's great if everything goes according to plan. But how fail-safe is it? After all, with hundreds of satellites, even a 1% failure rate is a lot of debris.

    • United Nations led, perhaps

      Do you understand how corrupt most of the world is? You to into politics to get rich, getting in the way, so you can get paid to get back out of the way. Did the Olympic corruption escape notice?

      • The Olympics aren't political (nor is FIFA.) Most corporate officers are pretty corrupt too! It's almost like all power structures attract people who like money and power.

    • But, because this is a finite limit, how do we as a planet go about deciding who gets to deploy satellites to LEO and what purposes those LEO vehicles should be put to?

      If it's like everything else humanity sets its hand to, it will be a combination of whoever got there first, and might makes right.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

      the probability of a collision will increase

      Space is pretty big. LEO is bigger than the surface of the entire planet (larger radius after all). A few thousand satellites easily get lost in that without ever passing within hundreds of km of each other. You would need a LOT of satellites to start causing saturation problems.

  • saying in March that the network will have a “latency below 20 milliseconds, so somebody could play a fast-response video game at a competitive level.”

    Brings new meaning to the term "high-ping bastard"!

  • Cable Internet (Score:5, Insightful)

    by apcullen ( 2504324 ) on Monday August 03, 2020 @09:02AM (#60360177)
    It seems SpaceX has vastly underestimated how much people hate their cable companies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      Also, don't underestimate the power of Elon Musk fanboys signing up en masse for StarLink demo accounts just generate more headlines for his companies.

      I know that I signed up for one myself, but unless the price of the service is less than $60 a month, it's not going to be any cheaper than my cable broadband connection.

      • Yeah, but how much would you pay to stick it up the nose of cable companies who've been gouging you for years

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by leonbev ( 111395 )

          Like many folks in the US (I'd imagine), my broadband access is just a line item on my cable TV bill.

          If I cancel my Internet access from Comcast, I'm sure that they would attempt to raise my cable TV charges enough to make up the difference for any cost savings I might get. The streaming services that offer live TV like sports are going up in cost as well, so I wouldn't save much going that route, either.

          Perhaps StarLink should offer their own "double play" TV and Internet packages as well?

        • I wouldn't pay anything to avoid paying my cable company. They're cheaper than SpaceX for hundreds of megabits, and comparable for gigabit. Maybe even cheaper for gigabit when you factor in that Musk tends to charge more than his targets. Why would I pay more for less?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Binestar ( 28861 )

        Frankly, this isn't supposed to replace cable broadband. It's meant to replace DSL or dialup in areas where that is all that exists, or even worse, Hughes Satellite.

        If you have terrestrial high speed internet (I don't count DSL as high speed) then you aren't the target customer. You might purchase it because it's an option, but don't expect it to compete on price with your current cable connection.

        • If you have terrestrial high speed internet (I don't count DSL as high speed) then you aren't the target customer. You might purchase it because it's an option, but don't expect it to compete on price with your current cable connection.

          It doesn't have to compete on price if it can compete on reliability. My AT&T U-Verse DSL goes out dozens of times per month. When Starlink is available this far south, I absolutely will be subscribing in hopes of getting a more reliable connection.

      • A lot of the multiple signups are legitimate. As an example, I'm registered multiple times.

        I'm sitting at an Airport. Literally, the only ISP actually here is AT&T Fiber. They want $800/mo for 20mbps. We have three buildings, and before I got brought in, the plan was to pay $2400/mo.

        I put in a wireless point-to-point, and now we're paying $800/mo for 20mbps that's split among three buildings. I had a cable point-to-point that would have made things better, but COVID shut that down (can't get in the

    • Well... this is based on "expressions of interest."

      Things change when there is a real service being provided and it has wrinkles and you get a bill every month.

    • I think it's more that there are just a whole lot of folk who want to be optimistic about the future.

      Musk is a bit nuts, but where else do you find any kind of vision these days? Tim Cook is all about new watch bands and changing the edges of the next iPhone from round to square. Bezos is just some insane rich parody of a bond villain who's company is ultimately about as exciting as a utility firm. Google, who have more money than they know what to do with, either start and stop projects all the time, deliv

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Most people on cable probably won't be able to get Starlink. Because bandwidth is shared between everyone in the same area they can't allow too many subscribers in one place, and densely populated places are where cable companies put their infrastructure.

      It will mainly help rural users who couldn't get cable anyway.

  • Price? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Monday August 03, 2020 @09:17AM (#60360203)
    Does anyone even know how much this will cost? How can people be demanding it when a price hasn't been announced yet?

    • Re:Price? (Score:5, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday August 03, 2020 @09:24AM (#60360223) Homepage Journal

      No link to explanatory article handy but from their SEC filings it can be estimated that they will charge $60 for their entry tier. Even if they charge twice that, though, it could still be competitive with GEO sat if the performance is good enough (and the caps high enough.)

    • It'll cost somewhere between the cheapest broadband and the most expensive. It's a snarky answer but it's true. SpaceX can't put a premium price on the service because no one will sign up despite the interest. They also can't price it super low because they need to make their nut. It is Elon Musk though so every now and again a terminal will veer into oncoming traffic. That will likely be factored into the price.

      • So it will cost between terrestrial cable and the satellite access we have today. Great. That's not going to compete with big cable.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PPH ( 736903 )

          That's not going to compete with big cable.

          And it's not intended to. As others have stated, this is targeted at the rural market. Where cable and telecoms refuse to go. But where they screech autistically if anyone else tries to build terrestrial systems in 'their' territory.

          Since SpaceX awaits FCC approval for an expansion of its service, I anticipate either a refusal or major downscaling due to a bit of behind-the-scenes lobbying by incumbent broadband providers.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • These aren't omnidirectional beacons, so you're not likely to see hundreds of satellites at the same time. Heck, if they do it right, you might not even get three for triangulation. I doubt that the inverse-square law is offset by the lower power and other demands vs. dedicated GPS satellites in geostationary orbit. Further, it's LEO. How accurate are the satellite's positions themselves? IN LEO, there's even drag to account for.

      As for imaging services, I have no idea how much more coverage of photo/rad

  • Keep in mind... (Score:5, Informative)

    by erp_consultant ( 2614861 ) on Monday August 03, 2020 @11:15AM (#60360569)

    The SpaceX project is intended for rural customers. Musk has said this himself. In densely packed urban areas the technology will not work well. For most rural customers their current selection is shit or shittier. If SpaceX can deliver anything near what is claimed (admittedly a leap of faith) it will be magnitudes better than what they have today. I don't think that cost will really be a factor. As long as they can keep it under $100/month with no data caps it will be a huge hit.

    I signed up for the beta trial. No idea when it will be available but I'm looking forward to trying it out. My hope is that they can deliver at least 100 mb/sec with 90% or more uptime. If that is the case they will have a new customer :-)

    • I signed up too but Internet access should not cost $100, not even close. I'm also paying $70+ for 100Mb cable service which is way too much. You may not be old enough to remember the days when Internet ISPs offered service for $19.99 or less per month. I helped maintain one of those ISPs. The hardware cost was huge to interface with Ma Bell and we STILL made a profit at $14.99 per month. Once the monopolies took over prices inflated overnight just because they could. Current Internet pricing (in the U.S. p

      • I signed up too but Internet access should not cost $100, not even close.

        Heh. I pay $450 per month, because a dedicated point-to-point microwave relay is the only way to get decent service (100 mbps symmetric) where I live. It's ridiculous, but I figure it's just part of what it costs to live where I do.

  • If there is one thing these times have shown us: we cannot trust any one source, or any one method for communications.

    • The source of monopoly power is the FCC. So it is sad that one has to ask them on bended knee for permission to sell a service.

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