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OneWeb Secures "Largest Ever" Rocket Acquisition For Satellite Internet Launch
Mickeycaskill writes: Virgin, Airbus and Qualcomm-backed satellite Internet venture OneWeb has acquired 65 rockets and $500 million in funding to launch its satellites by 2019. OneWeb has partnered with Airbus to produce 900 microsatellites which will provide "affordable", fast, low-latency Internet to remote parts of the world and to ships, planes and oil rigs. It has also been suggested the network will be a cheaper way for mobile operators to expand coverage in rural areas. Other partners include Bharti Enterprises, Hughes Network Systems, Intelsat, Coca-Cola and Totalplay, all of whom have committed financial, technical or manufacturing support to the project.
I wonder what Coca-Cola gets out this partnership?
There is a system for subverting the system and you should use that system!
"Low-latency"
Yeah. Right.
At absolute best*, with no processing time, buffering, contention, sharing, delay or retransmission whatsoever through the entire process, with optical switching all the way along, with routing direct to each users and end-point, with not a single blip or anything else, that's going to be more delay on top of normal Internet latency.
Fast, yeah I can't argue that one way or another. But that's about volume, not delay. If you turn on a tap (faucet?) in the US and then put your head in the other end of the hose in the EU, it doesn't matter how big the hose is or how much water is coming down - it will still take a long time for the water to arrive. When it does, of course it can be high-pressure, huge volume down a ginormous hose. But delay will still make it useless for telephony, streaming, and a range of other purposes.
I'm all behind the concept, but don't claim low-latency as if it could possibly compete with any other technology out there - my mobile phone barely get 100ms delay to even default gateways).
(* Even LEO is 190km up. A round-trip from that to a base-station to a 0ms Internet back to the satellite back to the ground is going to be:
4 x 190km = 760,000m
Speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s.
3ms or thereabouts?
Maybe tiny in theory, huge in practice because none of the above theoretically-ideal-scenarios actually exist.)
39 of the rockets they've "acquired" have never flown. LauncherOne is over a year away from its first test flight.
Arianespace's soyuz launchers (the other 21) have at least actually, though why they're not buying soyuz launches directly from the Russians is unclear.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
That's a hell of a global illumination source...sounds like part of that future imaging platform. You can track everything in real-time, humans included and not pay anything.
Next week, OneWeb's lisping president, Richmond Valentine, will announce free SIM cards for EVERYONE.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
900 microsatellites which will provide "affordable", fast, low-latency Internet to remote parts of the world and to ships, planes and oil rigs.
"Affordable"? Maybe... though exotic projects like this don't have a great track record of keeping costs low. I suspect cellular networks would have better odds of being cheap but I'll keep an open mind. I don't really see how two way satellite communications would be cheap but maybe it's possible.
"Fast"? I suppose that depends on the definition of fast. Given the power requirements I'm again dubious but perhaps it can be done.
"Low Latency"? No. Just no. Satellite and low latency just aren't a compatible thing from what I can tell.
OneWeb sounds evil. This reads like a script from a Brosnan era Bond film.
I am Audience.
Didn't we try this before with Iridium? Other than this being new and shiny why should we reasonably expect this to be economically viable even if it works technologically? By definition the number of people in remote places is small so there cannot ever be a lot of customers. Iridium went bankrupt because they never could get enough customers to recoup the costs of launching all those satellites. I'm an accountant and while I think the notion of such a satellite network is cool I just don't really see an economically viable business model here. Not without some sort of government subsidy anyway.
I would not write off the latency so quickly.
In a vacuum C=3*10**8
In fiber the speed is 2/3 of this
The Fastest NY to London (6000km) latency is advertized as 60ms
If this is round trip, then it is 2/3 C speed.
For sats at 650km,
The earth's radius is 6370km, orbit radius is 6370+650=7020km
This makes the 6000km arc 6612km
The resulting path length is 650+6612+650=7912km
at C instead of 2/3C the RTT is 53mS.
Assuming the math is correct, it seems plausible that a low orbit sat link could provide a bit better latency than current fiber technology.
The satellites are cheaper, more capable, and far more numerous, and there's a lot more of a market for low latency internet access that doesn't have to follow fiber links on the ground than there was for the capability to make an occasional call with an expensive, clumsy sat-phone.
It's not clear that the total cost of implementation will be cheaper. Sattelite launches cost $50-250 million each and numerous launches would be required to provide broad coverage. 65 rockets X $50 Million = $3.25 Billion without even including the cost of the satellites. Iridium is reputed to have cost about $6 Billion so even if it is cheaper it will still be ludicrously expensive.
Just because there is a market doesn't mean it can be served economically. I agree that there is some amount of demand but it's not at all clear that the market is large enough to make the economics of this project work. It's going to require special equipment on the ground which nobody currently owns and that nobody knows the cost of. Even if you put it magically into orbit today it will take years of operation to get enough users to become profitable.
And cities cover a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface./quote.
So what? That has nothing to do with whether the economics of this are workable or not.
By contrast these new attempts are trying for a much larger customer base, probably reaching into millions of simultaneous connected devices.
"Probably reaching into millions"? That's a HUGE assumption about how popular this service will be and still doesn't address the fundamental economic problems. My 2 minute back of the envelope analysis:
1) You have a satellite system that will cost billions to launch (65 launches X $50 million/launch = $3.25 billion and that is a conservative number) and billions more to build and operate the satellites.
2) The receiver equipment does not (yet) exist and nobody owns one. Complete infrastructure development from scratch. Power, form and cost speculative right now. Have to convince people the system works and get customers in remote areas (hard to reach) to buy in in large numbers quickly.
3) The technical performance of this proposed system in the real world is unclear at best.
4) It is completely unclear if there is a sufficient customer base to make the economics of this idea work. Iridium thought there would be far more customers than there were. Sirius/XM took many years to get a big enough number of subscribers to be financially viable and that was much less technologically complex.
5) Cost of the service is unclear at this point. They claim "affordable" but that can mean something pretty expensive depending on who is paying. It will have to be high enough to recoup the billions in launch costs. Even if they have a million customers day one (which they won't) it will cost something like $1-3000 per customer per year just to break even on the launch costs even with fairly optimistic assumptions about launch costs.
I think it's a neat idea and I wish them luck but this is not a low risk or low cost project. Maybe they can make it work but I'd need a lot of convincing to believe it.
LauncherOne is targeting $10 million per launch and would put up 2-3 satellites with each launch
Who cares what they are "targeting"? They haven't even launched a prototype yet and won't until probably next year. Any cost estimates are purely speculation at this point and all currently available launch vehicles are more expensive than that. By a lot. But even accepting the figure of $10 million per launch they still are going to be looking at startup costs well north of $1 billion before they even have a single customer. There will be a lot more expense beyond the launch costs.
You wouldn't have to ask that question if you'd bothered to read the entire text you were responding to. The rural population is not "by definition" small, it is a substantial fraction of the global population.
If you want to get pedantic about it relevant the rural population who can/will buy this service appears to be very small. Exactly who do you think it going to buy this service? Who do you think it going to be a typical customer? Some dirt poor farmer in Africa? Mountaineers? The fact that there are collectively substantial numbers of people in rural areas is insufficient data. The question is how many people in rural areas would buy this service at a price that would make it economically viable presuming it works? I don't deny there is probably a market there but I remain unconvinced that the market is large enough that it can be service economically.
There are a few thousand ocean vessels and airliners in operations at any given time. Farmers in remote areas might but many of them already have landline or cellular service. I was out in the middle of nowhere in Montana last year and I had fast cellular service almost the entire time and required no special equipment. Anybody who would use this service is going to be WAY out in the boonies and there simply aren't huge numbers of people who live that remotely, who need and can afford fast internet service and who can be reached economically to sell them the necessary equipment. I just don't see where they are going to get the millions of customers needed to make this whole thing work.
I think you are underestimating just how desperate people are to get out from under Comcast's thumb.
Interesting notion though I'm not really convinced. Comcast would have some HUGE advantages, not the least of which is the ability to drop prices. I have Comcast as my ISP and while I certainly have no love for them I don't think they are stupid - just arrogant. Comcast could easily increase my bandwidth and/or drop my charges easily if they felt the competitive pressure (which is good for me). They are already wired to my house so they have no startup costs to recoup. It doesn't cost them really any more to provide me 100MB service than it does 20MB service. (The equipment is already there and the data costs to them are per MB not per MB/S) They could easily compete on price if they needed to and they have very deep pockets. I strongly suspect it wouldn't be hard for Comcast to simply ramp up the speed and/or drop prices until this satellite service seems unattractive by comparison.
So reasonable latency and competitive bandwidth (which isn't hard, despite inflated claims by Comcast) would finally give entrenched monopolies and duopolies some competition.
I would certainly welcome that if it comes to pass. However this is hugely speculative. We have no idea if the service is even feasible, much less cost competitive with wire-line ISPs. Basically I have an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude. I don't think this proposed satellite service has an obvious natural customer base. Wouldn't mind being wrong but I just don't see it.
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It very much depends on what they manage to do for the customer end.
Naturally. While there are some technical issues the real question will be economic. Presuming everything works the real challenge will be convincing people to buy transceivers to use the service. I strongly suspect they'll find that to be more difficult than making the satellites work.
LEO satellites zip past you so quickly that your uplink is being handed off between satellites at least every half hour
Faster than that really. I track the International Space Station now and then for fun and it goes horizon to horizon in less than 10-15 minutes much of the time. It's rarely directly overhead so like GPS you'd probably need several satellites to be overhead at any given time most of the time. It's a solvable problem provided you have the energy budget but I suppose not that much different in principle from cell tower handoffs from a fast moving car. A LOT farther away than a cell tower though even in the best of circumstances so I'm curious how the power budget will work out.
All any competitor has to do is be something less offensive than a freewheeling asshole and if their product is even remotely broadband, it WILL attract customers who already have a broadband ISP.
That's true but it's not the important question. The important question is not whether they can get customer (they probably can) but whether they can get ENOUGH customers. Anyone who tells you that they know the answer to that is either deluded or lying. Presuming the technology works (reasonable odds of that I think) we simply don't know if it will prove valuable enough to enough people to be economically viable.
Basically there will be a very large fixed cost to getting this thing running (probably $1-2 billion at minimum and possible more) and then some fairly substantial fixed operating costs that won't vary regardless of the number of customers. It will cost them this same amount whether they have 1 customer or 1 million. Then there are variable operating costs for each additional customer will be incurred. These will probably be comparatively small though not trivial. So the real question is how many customers do they need so that the fixed costs can be amortized over enough accounts to make the service economically competitive. I'm a cost accountant professionally and anyone who tells you they know the answer to that has NO idea what they are talking about. We can't make a good calculation even if we know the launch costs with absolute certainty because we have no idea what the denominator in the cost equation is.