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Google To Spend $1 Billion On Fleet of Satellites
An anonymous reader writes "Google is planning to spend over $1 billion on a fleet of satellites to extend Internet access to unwired regions around the world. 'The projected price ranges from about $1 billion to more than $3 billion, the people familiar with the project said, depending on the network's final design and a later phase that could double the number of satellites. Based on past satellite ventures, costs could rise. Google's project is the latest effort by a Silicon Valley company to extend Internet coverage from the sky to help its business on the ground. Google and Facebook Inc. are counting on new Internet users in underserved regions to boost revenue, and ultimately, earnings. "Google and Facebook are trying to figure out ways of reaching populations that thus far have been unreachable," said Susan Irwin, president of Irwin Communications Inc., a satellite-communications research firm. "Wired connectivity only goes so far and wireless cellular networks reach small areas. Satellites can gain much broader access."'"
It's also a neat way to boost the sale of satellite transmission and receiving equipment. Will individuals need the equipment, or will an ISP of sorts swoop in monopolize the communication with the satellite?
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Only when they complete some sort of "giant data laser" will people wise up, maybe.
Kind of like a social network of satellites :)
Seriously, this makes a lot of sense. At the low altitudes that these will fly, the power necessary to reach the satellites will be much lower than geosynchronous or even Iridium satellites. Mass producing small satellites probably is cheaper than building a few big ones, as well.
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Said Elon Musk, perking up.
There are a lot of places here in the US, where even basic DSL or cellular service is fairly hard to come by, and if one goes with a conventional satellite provider, it becomes very expensive very fast.
This is something that I have high hopes for... done right, and assuming the uplink/downlink antennas are not too expensive, this would allow a baseline of Internet access in a whole region. Latency is "meh", but it is a lot better than what a lot of places have right now.
Will they provide those people with cost-effective end user devices, too? I'm thinking that a lot of the under-served are 2nd / 3rd world, or extremely rural 1st world. Places where infrastructure of any kind is severely lacking. It would be nice to get these people onto the internet, of course, but I think they might benefit more from electricity first. When you live somewhere where you pay for electricity as per litre of diesel in your geny, I don't think internet access features high on the list of "Things I use electricity for".
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
They've brought a surprising amount of electrical power - first wired, now often solar - to remote parts of the globe simply because refrigeration helps them sell enough more product to make the investment worthwhile. This can be quite a good thing if the infrastructure remains open enough.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
So I know where this might be going.
Have you read my blog lately?
I recall reading a while back about a project like this. They wanted to put satellites in orbit that would be continously streaming a pre-selected amount of internet (wikipedia and other such actually useful websites) so that you wouldn't necessarily get two-way communication, but you'd get access to all the latest and greatest from online resources.
How about freeing the rest us from the tyranny of Comcast? I am tired of being under their thumb.
Sounds an awful lot like Iridium satellites: cell phone connectivity in the middle of nowhere. Their business plan must have overlooked that there is hardly anyone in the middle of nowhere, so they went bankrupt. The primary result is satellite flashes (iridium flares) that are brighter than Venus.
A few companies have proposed this type of system, most notably ICO Global Communications. It hasn't ended well.
Granted, Google is a much more established company than some collection of venture capitalists, but manufacturing, launching and managing constellations of satellites is extremely complex. You can't do it alone and at least one company along the way will over-promise and under-deliver. That stalls the overall program and problems just snowball from there.
Google obviously has experience managing some mapping satellites, but scaling up to dozens and hundreds is not straightforward.
Would there be one launch per satellite? I don't have the first clue about the price to do something like that but 1-3 bill sounds pretty low.
Looks like when Google bought Motorola it also inherited the madcap team that conceived the irridium project.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Depends on the orbit, if it is a very low orbit, say 180km altitude, the latency will be 4*180000m/c=2.4ms. Note that this assumed that both the user and the ground segment station are covered by the same satellite. if the sat needs to relay to other satellites the latency will obviously increase, but thats not different than latency through fiber optic cables, you just need slightly longer distances since the satellite is at a higher altitude than the ground below it, but only little compared to the radius of the earth.
counting on new Internet users in underserved regions to boost revenue, and ultimately, earnings.
If they were doing this out of a sense of humanitarianism thinking the internet is so important that they want to do some altruistic investment, that's one thing.
If they are thinking they have a significant revenue opportunity in regions without infrastructure to otherwise participate in the internet, that seems a dubious investment. It seems that such areas are underserrved because they can't afford it. Spending a large amount of money to work around one fairly small facet of their reality seems like it would be challenging to recoup. I suppose as a reach they could believe that internet access would accelerate some elevation in socioeconomic conditions for such areas, though that would be a bit of overconfidence in what access to the internet could help a society overcome...
I personally am surprised at just how much of the population is enthusiastic about the increasing breadth and depth of control over our lives being assumed by a very small number of companies (e.g. amazon, google, apple). In internet technology in particular it is sort of sad to see since that has had so much of its functionality well federated and we are generally seeing it degrade into proprietary walled gardens with 'trusted' companies owning their little piece of ecosystem wholly.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Oh they will be relevant... They hold the spectrum space your satellite's are going to need....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
can't spy on people's internet use if they don't have internet.
Since they invested in balloon, it seems it is far cheaper. And they can control the trajectory using this method https://smartech.gatech.edu/bi...
I'm on the west coast of the US, and I can ping the Chicago Tribune in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... ) -- and, presumably, there are zero switches/routers floating between me and a satellite, whereas there are quite a few from the west coast to the midwest.
Of course, the satellites will be further away than this if they are not directly overhead, but still -- I think 2 seconds is definitely on the long side.
Exactly. I wonder why Google and Facebook haven't figured out what Hulu has down to a science...but anyway I hope they generously continue to bleed money onto the world's impoverished masses!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Ballmer is spending 2 Billion on a sketchy basketball team, Apple is spending 3 Billion on sketchy, mid-quality headphones, and Google is spending less than that and getting a fleet of friggin satellites? I think that Google wins this round.
Pretty sure you have the math off. It's about 250ms each way to GEO, so that makes a 1 second ping time, not 2 seconds. Plus, I know this because one time I actually did a ping from wireless internet at a highway rest area. (What true geek wouldn't?) In LEO, the latency will be a lot less because ~150mi altitude vs ~25000mi is a big difference. And of course GEO isn't such a great idea unless you have a fixed dish antenna.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I don't think a Billion is enough to do much more than a proof of concept. Google is going to have to pony up a few more bills or this will be a huge boondoggle. But if anybody has the money it's Google.
Next up will be the purchase of the spectrum space needed for this. I'm thinking LightSquared has some licenses they could get by talking to the bankruptcy judge..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Why didn't they just buy ViaSat, their space and ground segments, and their Exede brand? Charlie Ergen isn't going to sell HughesNet anytime soon.
It must be nice for your stock to be so excessively overvalued to have so much money to throw around on all these ancillary projects.
Kriston
"Google and Facebook are trying to figure out ways of reaching populations that thus far have been unreachable,"
Why? Keep in mind I see no altruism here, so what's the motivation? Is this some sort of gold rush to capture the uncovered areas? What would a large corporation expect to monetize in an area that has little to no infrastructure?
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Some poor people are poor because they always buy what you're selling.
Good one.
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The cheap bastards. If they'd added a couple of billions, they could have gotten a headphone company.
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster.... oh, never mind.
On the subject of Beowulf clusters: now that Tolkien's translation is available, do we need a new stupid /. meme?
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It is more likely Apple bought that company for tax purposes.
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Will these puppies also have some form of GPS in them? Not only will they know what filth you are posting but they'll know where you posted it from.
Once they're deployed, you can look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome anywhere in the world
...but be quick about it.
...if they also gave everybody access to the feeds from the cameras that will likely be pointed at Earth. But I bet various governments won't let that happen. Might be possible for citizens to break the encryption on the camera video data though.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
These satellites will orbit over the same areas served by the geosynchronous satellites used by Hughes Net and Wild Blue. If Google can beat their prices that's millions more potential customers. I know I'm sick of a 475 Mb daily cap for $80 a month.
Then they could also message NSA and military drones to beam guide something else down.
I like it that Google will eventually skip over cable, DSL and all other terrestrial modes. Because fuck those guys. Seriously.
Park a drone airship (hydrogen, not helium) ~22km up with solar panels on its topside for power and you'd have a really nice comms platform. Mesh network the fleet. Maybe higher up. Maybe you'd call it a satellite but it's not what you'd think of at first glance. The rigid hull of an airship would be a nice evolution from the balloons they've been experimenting with.
It takes just over 100ms to send a signal to geostationary orbit for your round trip time you have to multiply that by four (client-sattelite-server-sattelite-client) giving a minimum theoretical ping time of just under 500ms.
Lower orbits should do better and it should certainly be possible to bring the latency down to a level where it is comparable to the latency experianced when browsing an australian website from europe.
If you are seeing two seconds of latency from your sattelite provider there is some other factor at play besides the raw radio latency to/from orbit.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I don't think you can get internet quality networking with low Earth orbit satellites at the same altitude of the Iridium system. The time overhead so too short it require and extremely high number of them. High Elliptical Orbits [HEO] Such at the USSR built for Arctic communications will keep a satellite in view of 1/3 or more of the Earth for 12 hours.
The cost of HEO satellites is more powerful transceivers on both ends. The advantage is only needing 18 satellites or less cover the world. There is some question in my mind if covering the polar regions and mid ocean areas with full 24 hour coverage is necessary or worthwhile. Just an educated guess if you just covered the land masses 24 hours and picked up the oceans and poles on the quick lower passes of the satellites 12 might be enough.
To deal with cost here is still a lot that can be done to compress text with tokenazation. Use tokens such as 00A3 = 'fiber optic cables' and so on. Much like the old commercial code books. I expect things like mmdf mailer might have to implemented as a store and forward mailer to deal with latency and interruptions inherent to radio links. I ran it for a while and if it were hardened against spam it would be a good mailer.
Lower orbiting HEO's satellites trade off for more of them and require less powerful radio modems on each end. It's a simple linear algebra minimum cost problem. I expect it comes out with lots of satellites that cover 2 or 3 times the area of the Iridium system.
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That is a lot of satellites going up.
Thoroughly with tongue in cheek :-)
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
It's about friggin' time.
Oh, yeah, and there are plenty of people even "in the middle of nowhere", as city-slickers like to say from their Starbucks. How many people "in the middle of nowhere" up in the Arctic can't get anything but unreliable and VERY expensive satellite. And what about down in Antarctic where the options are slow-but-reliable bonded Iridium or fast-but-unreliable NOAA wobblesat (don't remember which one exactly).
We *NEED* a polar-LEO data satellite system that can be accessed from individual users (like Hughesnet, etc) versus just from telcos and ISPs (O3b, etc). Neither fiber nor terrestrial microwave can reach everywhere, and in some places is forbidden by environmental law: satellite can work in this case.
The Iridium satellites do not offer high speed internet access. They were designed for very low data rate phone calls (they use AMBE encoding at 2.4Kbps) and SMS. They also offer data services but they operate at the same 2.4Kbps speed as voice. Globalstar does slightly better at 9.6Kbps.
Currently in the US, the best satellite internet service available is through the current generation of EchoStar geostationary satellites. Those offer speeds up to 15Mbps but suffer from the long latency that is inherent to geostationary orbit; packets have to travel at least 45,000 miles to go from Earth to satellite and back. HughesNet, WildBlue, and dishNET are all selling service on those satellites.
O3b Networks is currently in the process of deploying eight middle-Earth-orbit (8,000km, about 5,000 miles) satellites for Internet service; four are already in orbit and four more are scheduled to launch in July. Their main focus is on serving parts of the world with little or no internet access (the name is derived from "other 3 billion), and they offer their services primarily to local ISPs, not directly to consumers. I believe the cost of the earth equipment is too high for individuals though it might be acceptable for corporations. They claim to be planning to offer speeds up to 1.6Gbps. No price information is publicly listed.
Teledesic was a planned competitor to Iridium that never got off the ground (grin).
The Google satellite system will be useful if it happens and if the pricing is acceptable. Unlike O3B, I believe they plan to offer service directly to individuals; the low-earth-orbit satellites they plan to use should require less costly ground equipment.
I was in both Africa and Germany last summer, and in sunny Germany there were roofs full of PV arrays, while in darkest Africa they were burning kerosene for lights and diesel for their generators.