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Samsung Researchers Propose 4,600 Micro-Satellite Space Network
Bismillah writes: Samsung Electronics has proposed a network consisting of 4,600 micro-satellites that could act as backhaul for terrestrial cellular networks and take low-cost internet access worldwide. They project that by 2028, cellular and Wi-Fi traffic will exceed 1 zettabyte/month, and their goal is to design a system with equivalent capacity (PDF). "With the satellite-based backhaul, cellular and wi-fi deployments become practical in remote regions of the earth where there is no wired Internet infrastructure." The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum, as well as satellites capable of 1 Tb/s or higher.
Who would be the ISP? You won't be able to make such a worldwide network with a single ISP, that's for sure. And I highly doubt that the ISP would truly keep costs "low".
You are all tiny space cows. In space, nobody can hear you moo. ""! ""! "" tiny space cows ""! "" say the tiny space cows. YOU TINY SPACE COWS!!
"...They project that by 2028,cellular and Wi-Fi traffic will exceed 1 zettabyte/month..."
Well of course it will. After all, how can anyone expect humanity to even survive on anything less than 32K Netflix video streams pushing to a 5" screen on a cellphone.
Why not up that number over 9000?
I watched the Horizon programme about space junk the other week - it was good - and one of the points raised in it was concern about cubesats not having any movement capability and being cheap and considered "disposable" and thus much more likely to become part of the junk problem that other, expensive, satellites.
4600 micro sats sounds to me like even more junk waiting to happen. Keep it up and we'll not be able to have any nice things in orbit soon.
It could, but it won't.
There's far too much corporate interest in making sure we pay through the nose for cellular and internet access.
They're not going to allow low-cost anything. They might lower their costs, and increase their profits. But they will actively resist ever lowering our costs.
Low cost? Affordable? That sounds like communism right there, there's shareholder value and executive bonuses to maintain.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
pilot: ladies and gentlemen we've turned on the fasten seatbelt sign in preparation for entry into earths orbit and the inevitable turbulence from the legendary orbital garbage layer that surrounds the planet.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Can you say Kessler Syndrome, children? I knew you could.
(4,600! Are they out of their frickin' gourds?)
Will there also be an array of cleaner upper robots to collect these things things into bundles when they break down so they can be ejected from orbit and burned up in the atmosphere (or disposed of in some other way) or do we just keep rocketing micro satellites up there by the pallet as the old ones break down and try not to think about the space junk problem?
.. and yet in some nations like Canada, the providers will still somehow justify ungodly monthly fees and data caps.
"I recommend a full planetary frontal assault with 4,600 assault laser micro-satellites!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Sounds like something for the Debris Section
can anyone indicate that we're dealing with this shit, yet?
it's as important as the environment and climate, files under both, really...
aside from the obvious solution of turning them all into confetti deliberately, to make an umbrella, should we fail to fix the warming problem sensibly...
is there anything practical being done, to limit the amount of crap we send up?
until more than one base are up to us.
you know wat you doink!
up base!
for Beowulf nodes!
How does a satellite stay up if the Earth is really flat?
http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/za/za00.htm
The above was written in the late 1800s so does not perform any experiments regarding satellites. It is well worth looking into though; one can see things across the water that should be "below the horizon" -- it is important to note that this observation disproves the current globe theory! (It might be a much larger globe, perhaps, but it is not a 25,000 mile around globe.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
The major problem is clearly stated in the article:
The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum, as well as satellites capable of 1 Tb/s or higher.
Where we could build the satellites, what doesn't exist is the wireless spectrum. This is basically going to suffer the same fate as Light Squared did when they attempted to get some spectrum reassigned for high power terrestrial use. All of this about spectrum space.. Well, most of it is.
This basically amounts to putting up 5K cell towers sans the towers using satellites. The Cellular spectrum is very crowded and expensive to obtain in the industrialized world. It's not going to happen, it's way too expensive and will be very difficult to internationally manage the legal aspects of such a system.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Every business plan based on making "remote regions" pay has failed. "Remote" regions that have the money have already installed infrastructure that will make this expensive and everyone else is too poor to make it worthwhile. Either a government steps in like the USG did for Iridium or this will disappear in short order.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Samsung is a world leader in the insane killer robot business ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AKZC-5dFWQ ) and now has robotic Howitzer, ammo and fire control platforms ( http://www.samsungtechwin.com/... ) ... having a network of satellites too. Now all you need is a malicious AI to troll up a war with North Korea and it's game over... or something like that.
--hongpong.com
I took the time to skim the paper for the LEO detains that the Australian ITNews article skimmed over. The ITNews article was (sadly) a good summary - discussion of LEO satellites was limited to the altitude (160 to 2000 kilometers) and why LEO is better for signal strength than synchronous orbits. No mention at all about the inclination of the orbits (or even if polar orbits were considered). No consideration was given in the paper to existing uses of LEO (such as the Hubble Telescope or the ISS - but they'd probably be out-of-commission by the time anything remotely like this proposal was attempted.) No thought was given to what it would take to replenish the satellites in orbit (i.e.: how many launches per. year) or how small satellites would de-orbit at the end of their useful life or any consideration at all about satellites that had failed and needed to de-orbit.
A particular point I'd like to consider is that the authors didn't seem to give any consideration of the coverage the satellites would offer based on the inclination of the orbits. It appears that the authors assumed equatorial orbits - which would certainly exclude coverage of polar regions (including coverage of trans-arctic flights.) I'd be curious if any consideration was given of coverage north (or south) of 45 degrees - such as Canada, all of Scandinavia, most of Russia, and so on.
Is no one seeing that this is exactly the beginning of the Plot to Time Crisis 2?
A lot of spectrum may be allocated, but most goes unused. Take the 2008 spectrum auction, going on 7 years afterwards and most of it still sits idle. I imagine this goes for most of the spectrum save for a few choice blocks, allocated nationally for a single use but only really used in a few local/regional areas. And spectrum for satellites isn't as much of an issue as most make it out to be, most satellites have used spot beams for decades to make better use of the spectrum by limiting transmissions to a regional area. Increase the number of satellites, decrease their orbit and narrow their spot beams and you can operate a large satellite network on a very narrow slice of the spectrum. The problems are of course international cooperation regarding which frequencies and preventing entrenched interest from lobbying/otherwise preventing a competitor from entering "their" market via "legal" means.
Pity that it comes from Samsung - probably, a few years down the line they would neglect it, and would attempt to force people to whatever is next.
Just chiming in on numbers. 1 zettabyte/month is:
440kbps unicast 24/7 for all humans
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Let them peasants fuck themselves. I've already got broadband.
"The plan would require significant amounts of wireless spectrum"
...which will go to some well funded organization to realize this dream, then when the inevitable happens and the project dies, they hang on to that valuable spectrum...
= "making sure third world shitholes get 'da internet' so they can jerk off over porn of white women, and then want to move to WHITE COUNTRIES and destroy them..."
Why can't these third world scum provide their OWN access to the internet?
We have all seen the "robustness" of samsung products. What I am worried about is, do any of these pioneering companies have a way to clean up the space junk that they will inevitably leave? Whose fault will it be if one of these objects collides and destroys manned or unmanned space launches? Will there be so many of these companies pursuing the same goal to compete in space that the low earth orbits become the equivalent of mine field? A solution to this maybe to have some way to make these satellites put themselves into degrading orbits so that they burn up.
With 4,600 here and Airbus sending up 900.
Wouldn't essentially slow ping times for everyone?
Google already proposed a project like this and Willy retracted it once they saw the cost. A cubesat with comms needed would be at minimum 100k per sat, and that isn't even the biggest hurdle, which is securing a huge swath of radio spectrum, that would be more difficult than building and launching satellites.