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SKA Telescope To Offer Neighbors Cheap Broadband
An anonymous reader writes The Square Kilometer Array is a giant telescope currently being built in the middle of the Karoo in South Africa, which when complete will be 50 times more sensitive than any existing Earth-based telescope. The problem is that it's so sensitive, the thousands of antennas need to be protected from terrestrial radio interference. Given that cell masts and technologies like TB white spaces are the only way people living in the remote areas near SKA are going to be able to get affordable net access, this is a bit of a problem. In order that its neighbors aren't completely cut-off, SKA is offering them subsidized satellite broadband instead. Which is nice.
What exactly makes this a "space" telescope? Does the submitter (and the "editor" who accepted the article) believe that South Africa is in outer space? Or maybe they believe the word "space" simply indicates that the telescope is used to look at things in space? I'm not sure which would be more idiotic, but I can't think of any other explanations.
just a ghost in the machine.
I am aware that resources theft has been a problem in poor areas, where recyclables like copper are routinely stolen, but still, wouldn't it have been cheaper, in the long-term, to trench DEEP, build monitored deep equipment vaults with sensors back to the security office of the telescope for access monitoring, and do fiber backbone to the neighborhoods, handing off to either some radio frequency that's not a problem or using copper or fiber for the last mile? Once the infrastructure is in, assuming it's done right, it should be fairly low-maintenance and difficult to steal, and if the only copper is either the last-mile or within the residence like a FIOS or google-fiber solution then there's much less actually worth stealing.
Actual single-mode fiber cable isn't very expensive when new and really isn't worth much when used, so attempting to scrap it out wouldn't be worthwhile.
The array covers over 3000km. I doubt trenching fiber to every resident in that area would be cheap at all.
The telescope when finished (2025) will need more total bandwidth between its antennae than the entire remainder of the internet is projected to need at that time.
It will be dedicated fibre, about 50 000 km of it.
What we're talking about here is connecting the (very few) isolated farms and villages within one or two hundred miles of an antenna. With a population that
distributed it isn't a last mile issue it's a last hundred miles issue.
Also the moon is actually too small. Even if you spread the dishes over the whole far side you couldn't get as big an aperture as they get with part of the array in Australia and part in Africa.
Not that I'm defending the "The SKA is stupid, we should build it on the moon" point-of-view, but for the record, the SKA isn't going to do aperture synthesis between the Australian and African arrays. The bi-continental location of the telescope(s) is largely a politically-driven decision.