SpaceX Worried Fake Competitors Could Disrupt Its Space Internet Plan

Jason Koebler writes: The biggest impediment to SpaceX's plan to create a worldwide, satellite broadband network might not be the sheer technological difficulty of putting 4,000 satellites into space. Instead, outdated international and domestic regulations on satellite communications could stand in the way, according to a new Federal Communications Commission filing by the company. The company's attorneys wrote that the FCC might make it too easy for competitors to reserve communications bandwidth that they will never use. "Spectrum warehousing can be extremely detrimental and unprepared, highly speculative, or disingenuous applicants must be prevented from pursuing 'paper satellites' (or 'paper constellations'), which can unjustly obstruct and delay qualified applicants from deploying their systems."

Comments

Do it like the homestead act

[Karmashock]

This is how spectrum should work everywhere. Have it work like the homestead act.

The concept being that the land is free or you buy it but ONLY if you actually do something with it. Actually acquiring the land requires living and working on the land for a certain number of years and putting it to some use. I believe the term at the time was "improving it". Build roads, put houses on it, build farms, etc. And you own the land.

Spectrum should work the same way in that to qualify for ownership or to maintain a lease on bandwidth you actually have to use it. It really should be first come first serve. And not just someone sending a beacon up there that beeps on a frequency every 10 minutes. Actually do something with it.

And if you stop doing something with it then you should lose the lease.

The whole thing should be regional as well. This doesn't apply to space communications so much as radio and cell towers and tv stations. But if I'm in rural Alaska for example... just to pick an extreme example... why would the FCC tell me to not broadcast on a frequency that no one uses? The fact that I'm not paying for it or that some other service bought the national rights to that frequency are besides the point. They in that context don't actually broadcast to that area. So... why do they have a lease to do it?

This is one of the bigger issues I have with the FCC in that it is very urban centric in its conception of policy and it is very inflexible as regards seeing that unused spectrum is returned to the "radio wave commons."

Re:Do it like the homestead act

[Karmashock]

The point is not to get money. The point is for people to not have leases they're not using.

When they did the homestead act, the point was not to raise money. the point was to rapidly settle and exploit large tracts of land.

That is my attitude towards the spectrum. I want it saturated. It want it used everywhere. Not owned everywhere. I want it used everywhere.

That means in low demand areas spectrum should be either given away for free or sold at a very low price.

In high demand areas you can sell it to the highest bidder that will ACTUALLY use it. If you're not ACTUALLY PERSONALLY going to use the spectrum then get the fuck out of the auction hall before I order an officer to mace you just for contempt.

vast swaths of the spectrum go unused because they're owned by people that don't use them. You should lose your lease if you do that. I don't care if you paid for it. The terms of the lease should be ACTUALLY using it.

The point of the FCC was not to generate revenue but rather to organize and civilize the use of radio spectrum. Ideally we should have 100 percent saturation with every frequency being used by someone.

In the case of very urban areas, it is going to make sense to let people bid those frequencies up so that more valuable uses of the frequency take a preeminent position. However, in areas that are less built up... suburban or rural areas... you should have so much open bandwidth that people can run their own 4G networks for example if there is room for it.

By all means have them integrate with the the national regs so that anyone with a 4G modem can link to it so long as they pay the roaming fees. I think most people that set up such a thing would be quite happy to operate under those conditions.

And you'd FULL national 4G coverage if you did that.

Which isn't so much of a big deal in urban areas that take that for granted. But you could have rural areas where their only broad band option would be something of that nature. If it is hosted by company in their own community for their own community... the rates might be reasonable and the maintenance expenses of a few 4G broadcast towers versus running fiber up every dirt road for 20 miles in every direction is no comparison.

Re:Do it like the homestead act

[Anonymous Coward]

A similar scheme was tried with water rights for irrigation in Western NSW. Water rights were parcelled up with land use, and as average irrigation use was much less than the permit size the full allocation was never used.

Upon deregulation the price of water was allowed to float and commercial interests moved in. Small owners put their allocation up for auction and the large interest bought them all.

This led to an immediate shortage of water in the system due to the water rights being over sold.

I forsee a similar problem with bandwidth in the near future.

Cart before horse.

[westlake]

Space debris

The Joint Space Operations Center, part of United States Strategic Command (formerly the United States Space Command), currently tracks more than 8,500 objects larger than 10 cm in LEO. However, a limited Arecibo Observatory study suggested there could be approximately one million objects larger than 2 millimeters, which are too small to be visible from Earth-based observatories.

Low Earth orbit

Musk believes he can launch and maintain a constellation of 4,000 satellites in low earth orbit and still make a profit while others are pursuing simpler and cheaper broadband solutions, which can be deployed more rapidly and with less environmental impact and no one sees a problem in this?

Re:Not a problem

[hey!]

It's manifestly not true that nobody would pay for global Internet access if it had latency, even up to geosynchronous orbit. Most Internet applications are *throughput* sensitive, not *latency*. If it's good enough for television, it'd be good enough for Netflix if you could pay for the bandwidth.

You know what *is* latency sensitive? Telephony. And certain brands of satellite telephone services have employed geostationary (i.e. very high orbit) satellites for years. Yes there's some delay, but it's tolerable. Round trip to geostationary orbit is just a tad longer than 1/4 second.

IIRC SpaceX's satellites are planned to be 1100 km up. Since "Low Earth Orbit" is from 160 to 2000 km, that'd put those satellites pretty close to smack dab in the middle of LEO.

Re:4000 satellites? Quit now.

[hey!]

Well, the Iridium constellation was built using a manufacturing technique that dropped the cost per satellite down to $5 million apiece. With 20 years of advancement in automation and technology, it should be possible to build a comparable satellite for much less, especially if you amortize the development costs over more units. And it probably really helps to have your own launch company that will become more competitive on a per launch basis with more guaranteed launches on its schedule.

There's a certain kind of entrepreneur who sees possibility as a matter of willpower -- people who think they can will any desired reality into being with enough money and shouting. I don't think Musk is one of those. I think he's one of those that turns his ideas into a big model and figures out when he can do them. Yeah, I know, Hyperloop, but so far he's just throwing billionaire pocket change at that.

Idle speculation

[goodmanj]

Sorry, SpaceX, you know I love you but you're trying to cook the rules to get yourself a sweetheart deal. There's a big difference between speculating on radio spectrum and speculating on, say, silver: if you buy some silver and don't use it, a few years later you've still got some silver. If you buy spectrum and don't use it, a few years later the FCC takes it back and you've got nothing. Spectrum is a perishable resource, so nobody's going to bid on spectrum unless they really are going to make a communications network, or they plan to "flip" it and resell it to a viable user like SpaceX.

And short-term speculative bidding is *good* for the American public. Remember, this radio spectrum is our public property, and it's worth serious money. If SpaceX convinces the FCC not to allow "paper satellites", and demonstrates that it's the only bidder that's for real, then it can bid $0.01, win the auction, deploy its constellation, and keep all the profit. Allowing speculative competitive bids forces SpaceX to raise its bid, meaning the FCC, and thus the American public, gets to take a share of SpaceX's profits.

Analogy: Suppose your town decides to auction off some public park land to local developers. The biggest developer says, "only developers that can actually build a condo at least 20 stories tall should be allowed to bid." They are the only such developer, they bid $0.01, build a gigantic condo, make a fortune, and you and your town is left with no cash and no park.

Re:4000 satellites? Quit now.

[khallow]

Iridium launched and is currently in use. That's a pretty concrete fantasy.

and the only reason why he's irked is that 'competition' means he'll have to justify his numbers better.

I don't see that at all.