SpaceX Hits Two Milestones In Plan For Low-Latency Satellite Broadband (arstechnica.com)

SpaceX is about to launch two demonstration satellites, and it is on track to get the Federal Communications Commission's permission to offer satellite internet service in the U.S. "Neither development is surprising, but they're both necessary steps for SpaceX to enter the satellite broadband market," reports Ars Technica. "SpaceX is one of several companies planning low-Earth orbit satellite broadband networks that could offer much higher speeds and much lower latency than existing satellite internet services." From the report: Today, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai proposed approving SpaceX's application "to provide broadband services using satellite technologies in the United States and on a global basis," a commission announcement said. SpaceX would be the fourth company to receive such an approval from the FCC, after OneWeb, Space Norway, and Telesat. "These approvals are the first of their kind for a new generation of large, non-geostationary satellite orbit, fixed-satellite service systems, and the Commission continues to process other, similar requests," the FCC said today. SpaceX's application has undergone "careful review" by the FCC's satellite engineering experts, according to Pai. "If adopted, it would be the first approval given to an American-based company to provide broadband services using a new generation of low-Earth orbit satellite technologies," Pai said.

Separately, CNET reported yesterday that SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch on Saturday will include "[t]he first pair of demonstration satellites for the company's 'Starlink' service." The demonstration launch is confirmed in SpaceX's FCC filings. One SpaceX filing this month mentions that a secondary payload on Saturday's Falcon 9 launch will include "two experimental non-geostationary orbit satellites, Microsat-2a and -2b." Those are the two satellites that SpaceX previously said would be used in its first phase of broadband testing.

Comments

Re:Latency

[Rei]

1) Satellite networks already have inter-satellite communications. It's not new.

2) It's much easier than mesh networks on Earth. It's not an improvised network; you know exactly where every craft should be, down to incredibly fine accuracy, and they're all built specifically to operate with each other. And there's no random physical obstructions.

My understanding is that it's a "last mile" solution where the last mile can actually be several hundred. The signal goes up to the satellite and straight back down to the nearest ground station.

The last part is your error. It does not go to the "nearest ground station" to the user. It goes to the latency-weighted nearest ground station to the server which the satellite can reach. Furthermore, it's hopped directly into backbone traffic instead of filtering up through a progressive series of IPs. For example, if I traceroute anywhere out of Iceland, there's six hops within Iceland, then the traffic goes to London, then there's two hops, and then it hops onto a series of backbone routes to wherever it needs to go in the world, whether that's China, the US, elsewhere in Europe, etc. With the SpaceX constellation, the first 8 hops would disappear and be replaced by one hop through the satellite and one from the ground station to the most appropriate backbone; a single satellite could reach to North America, Europe, or North Asia from here.

For all the cases where the signal has to go via more than one satellite, you're fucked

You for some reason are assuming that the satellites have slow packet processing, or abnormal processing delays. Or perhaps you're mistakenly thinking that the physical distance traveled is longer? These are LEO satellites; for most traffic, it's shorter, as it doesn't involve snaking around the world wherever backbone lines happen to be laid.

more so when everyone is trying to do the same thing

Only a very small minority of traffic is routed satellite-to-satellite.

The reason I'm being so definite in my criticism is that we know that mesh networks don't work well (plenty of literature on the topic)

Wow, that totally makes you an expert on satellite communications, and makes you know more than SpaceX, Qualcomm, Samsung and Lockheed.