SpaceX Wants Permission To Test Satellite Internet

An anonymous reader writes: SpaceX has filed documents with the FCC asking for permission to begin testing a project to serve internet access from space. "The plan calls for launching a constellation of 4,000 small and cheap satellites that would beam high-speed Internet signals to all parts of the globe, including its most remote regions." This follows news that Facebook and Google had stepped back their efforts in that arena. SpaceX could prove to be a better fit for the project, given that they need only rely on themselves for launching satellites into orbit. "The satellites would be deployed from one of SpaceX's rockets, the Falcon 9. Once in orbit, the satellites would connect to ground stations at three West Coast facilities. The purpose of the tests is to see whether the antenna technology used on the satellites will be able to deliver high-speed Internet to the ground without hiccups."

Comments

Re:4000

[nospam007]

"It will have to be Low orbit ..."

SES has been offering internet service via geostationary satellites in Europe for over a decade.

http://www.ses-broadband.com/1...

Re:4000

[Isca]

Radio waves travel (in a vacuum) around 1 kilometer in about 3 microseconds. With Geosynch satellites that adds up to roughly 45 milliseconds at a minimum for the signal to get from the base station to the satellite and back down to you. However there is only a few base stations that transmit requests up to the satellite and it takes time for the signal to get to the station. If it's the morning on the east coast server and you are hitting an east coast server and transmitting from an east coast server to a satellite overlooking the continent US, the delay should be well under a second. However before you get to that point, you have to add the latency for the server you are accessing to the ground based transmitter and hope that it's not congested.

With spaceX's new proposal you are looking at 2.2 ms as the minimum earth to ground delay + presumably something up to 15-16,000 km (15-16 ms) if your packets had to travel to the exact opposite side of the globe. Add in a 1-2 ms delay for each hop between satellites due to the actual switching and he could be much much much faster for intercontinental packets.

Plus I'm assuming under this scenario that there will be hundreds of terrestrial transmittal points to use versus just a few base stations to make the terrestrial hops even less.

I'd wager that financial market trading traffic alone could pay for a significant portion of this bill at super premium rates, especially overseas traders. Not to mention traffic from ships, planes, rural 1st world locations all paying a premium. They can implement zone pricing pretty easily because they will always be able to able to triangulate a transmission down to the inch. With a network that dense it would greatly surpass the accuracy of the existing GPS constellation.

Re:4000

[Teancum]

I'd wager that financial market trading traffic alone could pay for a significant portion of this bill at super premium rates, especially overseas traders. Not to mention traffic from ships, planes, rural 1st world locations all paying a premium. They can implement zone pricing pretty easily because they will always be able to able to triangulate a transmission down to the inch. With a network that dense it would greatly surpass the accuracy of the existing GPS constellation.

I had not thought of that idea before in terms of a potential customer for this set-up. That is an excellent point. Iridium could have been used for something like this (which also has a digital data component), but given the technology capabilities available at the time Iridium was being built, they could only get about 4800 baud for individual customers... something that makes the bandwidth latency sort of irrelevant. High bandwidth and low latency combined with global coverage would indeed be a good customer.

The major competitor to this concept in that regard is an even older technology though, mainly the 19th Century concept (updated to using 21st Century materials) of the cable laying ship. An awful lot of fiber cable has been laid down across all of the oceans of the world between major cities. It is only when you can't access that fixed terrestrial network that something of this nature really becomes useful (as you've mentioned).

As a means to deliver that last mile architecture, it really opens up possibilities.

Re:4000

[cbhacking]

Space is really, *really* fucking big. Even low earth orbit at any given altitude is vast; it's literally larger than the surface of the planet. Add altitude shells to that - go up a few KM and you're now a few KM away from anything in the lower shell, even at closest point of approach - and there's an astonishing amount of room in space.

You wouldn't ask if there's room for 4000 more ships on the ocean, despite the fact that there's a lot less ocean and a lot more things crossing it vs. what we have in LEO. You wouldn't even ask if there's room for 4000 more cars on the road in the continental US, despite there being many orders of magnitude less space on US roads than there is in any given LEO altitude. Satellites, functional or not (including debris), move in predictable patterns, and functional satellites have thrusters that allow them to alter or maintain their course.

Agreed, of course, that the satellites should be capable of de-orbiting. But seriously, this "is there enough space in LEO?!?" meme is kind of dumb, at least right now. Let's assume you put each satellite in the middle of 20x20 KM non-overlapping exclusionary zone (omitting the third dimension for now). 400 KM^2 per bird. 1,600,000 KM^2 total. Sounds big, right? You could fit that entire collection, with a hundred thousand square KM left over, into Alaska. Don't get me wrong, Alaska is a big place, but it's not *that* big on the world scale. That's all in one orbital shell.