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 Instead, outdated international and domestic regulations on satellite communications could stand in the way, according to a new Federal Communications Commission filing by the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]

What do you think is a reasonable amount of time to wait for a company or individual to exploit a frequency? A year? Two years?

And then of course there is losing the rights if you don't broadcast there. The warm up and cool down time should be similar.

I think two years of warm up time is the most I would give anyone. If you can't go live within 2 years then I don't want to give you rights to spectrum. I might be willing to make exceptions for really extraordinary projects like Musk's. But what am I offering then? Three years? Four? Four seems right on the edge of excessive even under extraordinary circumstances. If you can't go live in four years then I'm not giving you a lease.

And what is more with stuff like that, if you need four years because you're not going to go live until then... then I see no reason why people can't use that spectrum until then. So when you're project finally goes live they might have to get out of the way. But until then... who cares what they're doing because you're not using it.

  Most of my stipulations refer to terrestrial use however. In rural communities especially they could have broadband internet served rather cheaply using unused radio frequencies. No need to run fiber. Just put up a broadcast tower and there is plenty of spectrum to serve the 500 people in the area with high speed internet.

You could even stretch that radically by using high directional broadcasts.

I saw something from a company called "air fiber" which boasted something like 3 gigabits at 10 miles. I could be getting the numbers wrong. The point is that it was a lot of bandwidth that could be pushed over a long distance without hurting anyone.

The FCC should make a point of getting out of the way of that stuff and not treating every part of the country like it is a major city with locally congested airwaves.

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

[Karmashock]

Its sensible. It encourages maximum exploitation. That is the point of regulations like that.

That was the point of the homestead act. They wanted to settle vast stretches of land IMMEDIATELY. That meant offering it basically for free. Anyone that went out there willing to work could within 5 years own a big stretch of land. The big finance interests couldn't just buy it all because they were required to actually develop it. Such interests are rarely capable of actually doing that enmass. They can develop something. But if given a chance they'll try to buy it all and then develop it slowly.

That is one of the problems with the way cellphone spectrum is sold. It shouldn't just be sold to three companies. It should be closer to wifi in that anyone can set it up. HOWEVER, you do require them to interlink their systems, allow rival users to roam on their network, etc. There is more than enough spectrum for everyone.

We don't need 3 companies owning all the spectrum It is absurd. The leases on spectrum should be specific to the region like conventional radio stations. If I lease a bit of spectrum in Florida for a radio station, I don't own that same frequency in California. I don't even own it in all of Florida.

Force the FCC to sell the cellphone spectrum piecemeal. In little 5 or 10 square mile zones. And require that they actually use it to maintain the lease.

What is more, if cell phone coverage in my area is shit, I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to put a cell tower literally at my house that operates as a completely normal cell phone tower. Not only would I get great coverage there but all my neighbors would suddenly get good coverage as well.

Yes require me to get a license and a lease from the FCC etc. that's fine. Just make it something that a person can actually do... legally. The technology will take care of itself.

I've seen some DIY cell tower kits that cost no more than a couple thousand dollars. That's chump change. Link it into a respectable internet connection and you've got a cell tower.

Re:Not a problem

[AikonMGB]

That's why SpaceX is planning to put these satellites into a lower orbit at around 1200 km.

Re:Not a problem

[cheesybagel]

Did you read the summary? It said 4000 satellites. To need that many satellites to ensure global coverage it must be a LEO satellite constellation. So the latency won't be worse than a transatlantic trip via fiber optic. The article says a 750 mile orbit so the round trip is 1500 miles. According to Google 1500 miles/speed of light is 8.05 ms. If they include caches on the satellites for web traffic the latency can be even less.

Re:Not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

With satellite-satellite routing (as they are planning) it can actually be faster than fibre.
Light in fibre goes at around 2/3 the speed of light in free space.

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?

Double Head-Fake

[mbone]

SpaceX is using fake fake competitors to disrupt opposition to its Space Internet Plan. Musk must be a big Animal House fan.

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.