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Elon Musk's Proposed Internet-by-Satellite System Could Link With Mars Colonies
MojoKid writes You have to hand it to Elon Musk, who has occasionally been referred to as a real life "Tony Stark." The man helped to co-found PayPal and Tesla Motors. Musk also helms SpaceX, which just recently made its fifth successful trip the International Space Station (ISS) to deliver supplies via the Dragon capsule. The secondary mission of the latest ISS launch resulted in the "successful failure" of the Falcon 9 rocket, which Musk described as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) event. In addition to his Hyperloop transit side project, Musk is eyeing a space-based Internet network that would be comprised of hundred of micro satellites orbiting roughly 750 miles above Earth. The so-called "Space Internet" would provide faster data speeds than traditional communications satellites that have a geosynchronous orbit of roughly 22,000 miles. Musk hopes that the service will eventually grow to become "a giant global Internet service provider," reaching over three billion people who are currently either without Internet service or only have access to low-speed connections. And this wouldn't be a Musk venture without reaching for some overly ambitious goal. The satellite network would truly become a "Space Internet" platform, as it would form the basis for a direct communications link between Earth and Mars. It's the coming thing.
Talk about Lag Time!
But, I bet the Ads would make it through.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Of course, the idea that satellite Internet could replace land based connections is silly, as the idea that satellites in LEO could beam data to Mars.
The real thing about cheap satellite Internet is censorship.
In an fantasy world, a transmitter should be cheap, small and unlocalisable from ground.
In the real world, some goverment would kill people for merely possessing an antenna.
And hundreds of microsatellites is more space junk, making even more dangerous orbital tourism.
Is this the Teledesic saga all over again (early funding by Bill Gates & others)?
Good thing too. Wouldn't want it going up there bareheaded.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sputnik was launched in 1957. Data transmission in fiber optics first started in the mid 1960s. Clearly, the space-based approach is an older, more antique way of doing things.
So I don't understand the pro-space leanings of the people on this site.
Stop the insanity! Set up your shit on the moon first and learn something about propulsion and life support, which would include a 15 theater cineplex and KFC, by the way.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
that does not exist is hidden within the system somewhere.
I guess it could be a backhaul for slow low priority internet traffic, but no customer in the 1st world would put up with the latency and lag given the current "centralized service" architecture of all internet services from Google, Facebook, WebMail, YouTube, "The Cloud" etc.
It could be great for bandwidth expansion with a more distributed network model than what we have now for Internet services. Email and file transfers that don't need instantaneous speed compared to interactive web pages would be natural uses for such a high latency service that would also need to be cheaper than faster terrestrial options.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
But just add "Mars Colonies" to the headline and now it's stuff that matters? Mars colonies are how many years away?
Elon Musk as a Real Life Tony Stark? LMAO. What has Musk actually designed from this laundry list? Nothing! He got lucky and has deep pockets to pay for other people to build his fantasies. Great that he's doing them, but that doesn't make him a Tony Stark. (Sounds like a bunch of sycophants with sicko fantasies.)
Oh good, he got the hard part done. Now let's get started colonizing, smooooooth solar sailing from here on out!
. . . and ZMODEM, and other latency-friendly protocols. . . .
reaching over three billion people who are currently either without Internet service or only have access to low-speed connections ....
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
All of these articles have that tinge of 1950's science fiction: we'll all be living in magnificent under-water cities in 10 years, and everyone'll have a jetpack!
All we need to do is build an underwater city...and jetpacks. But in reality it's that our cities will be under water in 10 years.
This Sig does not Exist.
All these things make me worry about Kessler Syndrome. Maybe we need some kind of international LEO traffic control body, to regulate and assign safe orbits, track junk, and whatnot.
I have no idea who Tony Stark is. But I do believe Elon seems to be the embodiment of another genius with the same initials - Tom Swift!
Doesn't matter how far away it is if it is cheap and my cell phone can receive the signals.
I'd like to stream Netflix right now but I've already used the 3GB my cell phone provider allows me to use at 3G/4G speeds for the month. So for the next 12 days I am stuck on 2G speeds (enough to play 1 minute then buffer fill for 3, then play for about 1 minute and buffer fill for another 3 minutes).
Streaming doesn't need low latency. Heck it doesn't even need lots of bandwidth. Give me 1 Mbps download rates and I'm streaming well enough to not skip a frame on the 480p video I want to display on my phone.
You might not like it for 3D FPS gaming and in fact I wouldn't either. But when I get home I have a cable modem connection that is low latency and high bandwidth and doesn't even bother to throttle my speed no matter how much I use it (yeah you could probably go over a limit, I just haven't yet).
So don't fret about it being slow. So long as it's cheap enough to not have monthly data caps and fast enough to stream low def Netflix it'd be a godsend to 99% of the users on the planet for email, Facebook, Netflix, etcetera.
So we can have Internet content beamed at us to consume.
Yo can get satellite Internet right now, it is available everywhere. And is perfectly fine if you view the Internet as a sort of alternative TV where distributors provide content for your consumption.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Iridium's investors lost a lot of money, from lack of demand, until September 11. Yes, electronics have become cheaper, both for satellites, and land lines. Consequently, people use a lot more bandwidth than 20 years ago. Bill Gates didn't expect cheap electronics, to squeeze 10s of megabits/sec over old phone lines.
Wireless on Earth costs more than land line. I bet wireless with towers in orbit, instead of on Earth, will be even more expensive.
We haven't even reached Mars yet with a manned craft. How about we do that first before we start trying to figure out how to get fast porn downloads there?
There never will be human colonies on Mars or anywhere else. When the first Apollo missions landed on the moon aliens were right there watching every move the astronauts made..and they weren't happy about humans even being on the moon. Finally, with Apollo 17 they said...OK..That's it.No more humans on the moon or anywhere else beyond low Earth orbit..or they will be destroyed. That's why nobody ever went to the moon or went beyond a low earth orbit since then. The aliens are OK with robots on Mars or the outer planets, but no humans. And I don't think they'd take too kindly to any landings, robotic or otherwise, on Europa or any of the other life-bearing moons of Jupiter or Saturn. These people fundraising for Mars missions know full well that nobody's ever going to be making that trip and they're just collecting that money for themselves.
Space is big
Space is dark
It's hard to find
A place to park
Burma Shave!
Now this would be perfect way to test quantum entanglement... is it really as fast as they claim? None is going to wait 40 minutes for hes emails or latest news videos to start downloading..
So Mr Musk wants to launch hundred of satellites for low cost internet ? So what do people going to use what to browse? over 1/2 earth populations still doesn't have reliable electricity, food, water - and probably doesn't even have a computer.
So why do people wants to browse internet for ? XXX videos ?
feasible or not but a satellite ring would be cool. .. then again ... the satellite-2-satellite (ring-) link could be precision LASERs : )
the "other cheap" satellite internet service needs to relay to ground stations: say if you want to reach london server from hawaii it goes up to satellite and then to ground station then thru "normal" cables to london.
with a ring one satellite would relay to another to another until it reaches one that is above london and beams down on the roof under which is the server.
it means you (as satellite operator) don't need to relay on the big continent spanning phiber optic companies (subsidiary of l3tt3rs).
problem seems to be fitting 1 tbit/sec into a radio-wave link
also one could offer two services:
1) satellite down/up link could be "radio" for individual "usb" dongles, so "low bandwidth"
2) satellite down/up link could be laser to a community ground station from which it gets distributed, so "high bandwidth".
problem w/ 2) is that the lasers and detectors on ground and satellite need to move (since satellite is not geo-synchron) and clouds... but hey we got robots vacuum-cleaning our rooms. can't be that much more difficult having a robot on the roof chasing a laser beam : )
Can't do much about that speed of light thing. Web browsing becomes an email-like experience. Wow, finally everybody gets to experience the internet just like RMS!
TCP become a hugely inappropriate protocol. Something like Rsync over UDP would be way better. Slow start... give me a break. Ditto, most of TCP.
Twitter stops being relevant at all, who cares about tweeting old news, or hearing it. Refining a web search... just don't bother, instead SCP Earth's entire web archive once a year and incrementally update it as bandwidth allows. Not much internet left after all the latency hacks, it hardly seems worth even trying to think of it that way. Basically, you will have Marsnet and Earthnet and data oozing in excruciating non-real time back and forth between them.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It might be slow, but it would be much better than this horrible communist filtered internet we have in China. We are already having to live with a ping of 300ms avg between China and the west coast of the USA. The CCP criminals are gona be SO pissed! Haha! I luv it! :)
This maybe a potential game changer for Telcos/ISPs. There is still a lot of money made in this business.
If SpaceX internet is capable of high bandwidth, no data-limit or a reasonable limit, not too crappy latency and allows me to use it everywhere, then it maybe very interesting.
Except for gaming, this offers what most people need AND you can take it with you (if the equipment to connect is reasonably mobile)!
If I can get an internet connection, that I can 'take with me' on my holidays abroad, which allows me to watch netflix and other IP TV, there is hardly a reason left for me to keep my cable subscription.
Not to mention what this will do for countries where internet access is highly monitored or otherwise hardly available. I'm guessing China is not too thrilled about this initiative.
The latency issue is an issue which will largely solve itself if the latency is not too bad. It can be worked around for most purposes. Maybe not for gaming, but the big websites will quickly adapt.
If I can choose nearly similar options, where one has a bit worse latency, but is available for me wherever I go...
Some time ago I checked the latency of websites I visit a lot. My cable connection has low latency, but obviously there many websites have high latency regardless as they are hosted on a different continent.
I'm sure the latency you get from GEO (> 240ms) is really changing your experience a bit too much. But the latency of LEO is about 40ms (says Wikipedia). That seems a lot, but if I were to visit a website on a different continent over the proposed network, some of that would be mitigated since the signal would travel via this network as well in stead of over multiple routers and connections. That part may be faster. So my overall experience may not be worse. Only sites hosted close by would have a significantly better performance.
A lot depends on the equipment needed to connect. If it is reasonably mobile they could also partner with a lot of companies, such as Amazon (whispernet globally and just one party to deal with), Netflix (Netflix boxes that don't require your own connection) etc.
If they manage to really compete, 10 billion USD is nothing. Local ISPs get bought for that amount.
There are a lot of ifs. But if they offer high bandwidth with high data limits for a competing price, this will mean for a lot of ISPs that there is a new player in town. And one that is global. If he were to sell shares in this initiative, I'd buy some.
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"Elon Musk who has occasionally be referred to as a real life "Tony Stark.""
Enough! We get that your panties get wet when refering to Musk, but no: he is not Ironman, not even close...
Effort has been underway for quite some time - by folks such as Vint Cerf, no less - to facilitate Internet over long delays. Surprisingly, there has been terrestrial (or aquatic) applications in the research as well, for example solar-powered sensor networks that can only transmit during daylight hours.
There's a nice overview architecture draft from 2003, especially interesting bits are in the routing section (12.3-12.4), see https://tools.ietf.org/html/dr... - the eventually published RFC https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf... has nowhere such interesting figures about routing between Earth and Mars :)
Anyway, the underlying arch is relying on putting a "bundle layer" between applications and transport, a layer 5 if you will - and the bundling will attempt to hide the long latencies. Naturally, for interactive applications this won't work, but for everything else why not...There are some implementations at http://www.dtnrg.org/wiki/Code.
Musk is very much 2nd to this party:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/satellite-internet-meet-the-hip-new-investment-for-richard-branson-elon-musk/
Please stop with the Elon Musk circle jerk.
The hard part of communicating with and between Mars colonies over a network of micro-satellites is setting up the Mars colonies.