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

[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.