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FCC Authorizes SpaceX's Ambitious Satellite Internet Plans

Posted by BeauHD on from the always-connected dept.

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved an application by Elon Musk's SpaceX, allowing the aerospace company to provide broadband services using satellites in the U.S. and worldwide. "With this action, the Commission takes another step to increase high-speed broadband availability and competition in the United States," the FCC said in a statement. CNBC reports: This marks the first time the FCC has allowed a U.S.-licensed satellite constellation to provide broadband services through low-Earth orbit satellites. "We appreciate the FCC's thorough review and approval of SpaceX's constellation license. Although we still have much to do with this complex undertaking, this is an important step toward SpaceX building a next-generation satellite network that can link the globe with reliable and affordable broadband service, especially reaching those who are not yet connected," Gwynne Shotwell, President and Chief Operating Officer at SpaceX said in a statement.

SpaceX will begin launching the constellation it dubbed "Starlink" in 2019. The system will be operational once at least 800 satellites are deployed. Starlink will offer broadband speeds comparable to fiber optic networks.The satellites would offer new direct to consumer wireless connections, rather the present system's redistribution of signals, transforming a traditionally high-cost, low reliability service.

102 comments

  1. Get ready newbs. by ckatko · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    'Cuz I'm gonna pwn you with my 5000 ms ping!

    Starsiege: Tribes anyone???

    1. Re:Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even if those access points were put on the moon, the ping would be about 2000ms. I think though, they're going to be way closer.

    2. Re: Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're talking ping from the ground to the satellite. But the satellite will still need to relay to another satellite at least once before it gets to the ground and back. It won't be 5000ms, but I'd be surprised if it was 50.

    3. Re:Get ready newbs. by vtcodger · · Score: 1

      Latency was my first question. The almighty internet sayeth -- altitude 1200 km, latency 25-35ms. Higher than I'd like and probably doesn't include delays on the ground at the other end of the link. But, very likely workable for most stuff.

      My second question -- not so easily answered -- is how they manage contention since CDMA probably won't work.

      Cost? Who the hell knows?

      Overall, this could be a winner if they can solve about 7000 problems.

      --
      You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
    4. Re:Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      altitude 1200km, 2400km round trip

      average distance from east coast to uplinks which are typically in denver, 2800km, 5600km round trip

      a typical distance from denver to data center hosting whatever is being accessed, 2500km, 5000km round trip

      total distance the bits travel: 13000km.

      approximately the same as chicago to amsterdam and back.

      tl;dr: you won't get 25-35ms ping. try triple that, at least.

    5. Re:Get ready newbs. by xonen · · Score: 2

      Signals in copper and fiber do not travel at light speed (in a vacuum). Radio signals in space do.

      So eventually, a mesh network of satellites might actually have lower ping times than fiber connections.

      As side note, for the average (consumer) internet connection, most latency is in buffer bloat, not in signal traveling time. As anecdotal evidence, I frequently have faster connections to servers at the other side of the Atlantic than to servers in my own country.

      --
      A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
    6. Re: Get ready newbs. by jcr · · Score: 2

      the satellite will still need to relay to another satellite at least once before it gets to the ground and back

      Why? Seems to me that there should be plenty of instances where your signal path is just you -> satellite -> ground station.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    7. Re: Get ready newbs. by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      The almighty internet sayeth -- altitude 1200 km, latency 25-35ms

      If you do the math properly, the minimum round trip latency is actually more like 8 ms.

    8. Re:Get ready newbs. by Goragoth · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Even if it is around 100ms ping, that's good enough for most Internet usage (especially if the jitter is low). Outside of FPS/MOBA players, who really cares about sub 100ms pings anyway?

      If it is cheap and bandwidth is high this could be a game changer for a lot of places. If you are currently on fibre of course you don't care, this (probably) won't beat that, but if you are living in the outback with shitty 1mbit DSL, then this could be huge. And that's a huge potential customer base that right now doesn't have a lot of great options, plus depending on just how good this is, there are also a lot of folks living in cities with poor connections due to contention that might be interested.

    9. Re: Get ready newbs. by Rei · · Score: 2

      Indeed. Satellite-satellite relays are a minority of traffic, not the majority. Where possible, the communication is a single hop - between the user and a base station located on an internet backbone. Now, this station may be a significant distance from the user, but it's all still line-of-sight.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    10. Re:Get ready newbs. by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Signals in copper and fiber do not travel at light speed (in a vacuum). Radio signals in space do.
      However the differencce is neglectible.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    11. Re:Get ready newbs. by Rei · · Score: 0

      That's some weird math. So apparently, in your calculations, all SpaceX communications go from "wherever you are", to the US East Coast, to Denver, to the destination? And beyond that, 13000km at speed c is about 43 milliseconds, hardly triple 25-35 - although of course the calculation isn't that simple.

      Regardless, here's how it actually works, for the vast majority of communications. There's one hop from you to the nearest satellite. There's then a hop down not to some random location, but rather a base station located on an internet background, with the choice being "whatever's most on the direct route to your traffic's destination", as well as being physically as close to the destination. The same applies for return traffic in reverse - routed to whatever ground station that is in range of a satellite in range of you has the lowest ping time.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    12. Re:Get ready newbs. by Rei · · Score: 1

      The big thing is that it eliminates all of your local hops and dumps your traffic straight onto a backbone - at a ground station that's up to a couple thousand kilometers closer to your traffic's destination.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    13. Re:Get ready newbs. by idji · · Score: 2

      5000 ms is to the Moon and Back TWICE. Where do you think the Starlink satellites are going to be? You are orders of magnitude wrong with these ping times.

    14. Re: Get ready newbs. by vtcodger · · Score: 1

      You're right. I didn't do the math at 0400 local with no coffee. And yes 8ms is about right for minimum round trip delay. However, if you think about it for a while, you'll find that the majority of contacts will be made at slant ranges quite a bit longer than 1200km. The geometry is messy. And computing the average/typical range turns out to be even messier. I COULD do it (I think) and so could you most likely. But it'll take a bit of effort. My best guess would be 12-15ms round trip typical. But we're probably overlooking something.

      Then there's the issue of which satellite gets used when multiple satellites are visible. I have no idea how that is going to be handled unless the "ground station" antennae are directional and pick their bird dynamically

      --
      You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
    15. Re:Get ready newbs. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      average distance from east coast to uplinks which are typically in denver

      This is supposed to be a global system, so why the hell is Denver, of all places, of special importance here? :-p

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    16. Re: Get ready newbs. by high_bandwidth_user · · Score: 1

      The ground stations will use phased-array antennas to track the satellite(s) as they pass overhead.

      Presumably the system will be smart enough to load balance users across the satellites visible to them to keep the load on any particular satellite as low as possible, though this only speculation.

    17. Re:Get ready newbs. by bobbied · · Score: 1

      average distance from east coast to uplinks which are typically in denver

      This is supposed to be a global system, so why the hell is Denver, of all places, of special importance here? :-p

      Middle of the country, the weather is generally not that bad, already a mile high and the network connectivity isn't bad in Denver. Plus a lot of uplink sites already exist there.

      However, that's not to say any other central location with good network connectivity wouldn't be workable.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    18. Re:Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Signals in copper and fiber do not travel at light speed (in a vacuum). Radio signals in space do.

      So eventually, a mesh network of satellites might actually have lower ping times than fiber connections.

      Not even close. Wireless is a common carrier. If adopted broadly, the airwaves will be congested to the point of saturation. Fiber will always be faster for direct connectivity and backbone trucking, because you can always pull more strands. You can’t magically create more RF spectrum.

    19. Re:Get ready newbs. by nospam007 · · Score: 1

      "tl;dr: you won't get 25-35ms ping. try triple that, at least."

      Bummer, so this won't be for real-time traders and gamers.
      So only 7 billion potential customers, that sucks.

    20. Re: Get ready newbs. by vtcodger · · Score: 1

      I actually do know what a phased array antenna is. I reckon it'll be fine for a fixed ground station. Trying to use a phased array in a moving vehicle or a cell phone-ish device seems to me likely to be conceptually possible but pragmatically unworkable with current technology.

      But what the hell do I know?

      --
      You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
    21. Re:Get ready newbs. by Lodragandraoidh · · Score: 1

      Outside of FPS/MOBA players, who really cares about sub 100ms pings anyway?

      Anyone requiring near real-time interactions, not only for FPS/MMORPG style games, also VR/AR, and anything else such as video conferencing, voice communications, where interactions between people or between people and machines require low latency. The more of these applications are developed and become useful to people, the more demand there will be for low latency networking.

      --

      Lodragan Draoidh
      The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
    22. Re:Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      However the differencce is neglectible.

      Only if you call 5% (unshielded copper) to 10% (shielded copper) or 35% (fiber) negligible.

      http://www.m2optics.com/blog/b...

    23. Re: Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That is indeed the way that most current communications satellites work (single hop), but with these kinds of mass networks I'm guessing that is going to change. Most current communications satellites are pretty high up, making single hop much easier. But these new satellite networks are in pretty low, limiting how many ground stations they can communicate with if any. More likely what we'll see is a daisy chain of satellites, each relaying their data up/down the satellites in their orbit until they get to one with a good connection to a ground station. At worse that would result in a connection length of ~24k miles (up, to a GS on the other side of earth and back along land connections to the area of the user), about half of the connection length to a geostationary communications satellite (~45k miles up and back). More likely you're looking at connection lengths of a few thousand miles. Not great if you want to competition play a FPS but not bad for video streaming, research, social media, etc.

    24. Re:Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And what about the radio signals traveling to and from your rooftop from those satellites? Now double that for the round trip required for communication to take place.

      LEO satellites are another marginal advancement that might help a small percentage of people. They won't revolutionize anything.

    25. Re:Get ready newbs. by Memnos · · Score: 2

      Er.. the velocity factor in CAT-7 equates to about 3/4 of c in a vacuum.That's close to the best copper can do. Fiber has a refractive index which results in about 2/3 light speed for signal propagation.

      --
      I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
    26. Re:Get ready newbs. by cjameshuff · · Score: 1

      ...the whole point of the system is to provide distributed access, with terminals in offices, schools, residential areas, ships and aircraft, etc. Your data is not going through Denver.

    27. Re:Get ready newbs. by Charcharodon · · Score: 1
      The satellites wont be that high up. They are scheduled to be around 300 miles.

      Speed of light in a vacuum 186,000 miles per second
      Speed of light in a fiber optic cable. 128,000 miles per second
      Speed of electricity is much slower

      Really what is slowing things down is how many network devices are between you and what you want to be connected two. Yeah this wont beat a local network in your house, but if you are trying to connect to something on the other side of the world it'll beat the pants off terrestrial networks for ping. Seeing as most places outside of major cities data connections are overly expensive and suck ass, even a high ping connection would be awesome.

      At that low of an orbit they seem to be going for the equivalent of "el cheepo" Wi-Fi routers since they don't need to reach very far and in that low the orbit will decay pretty quickly once fuel runs out (if they even bother with thrusters to keep down the costs). Seeing as they are launching all the time, they'll just be kicking out a large number of throw away satellites each time with the latest, best bang for the buck hardware on board.

      The real plus for this is also being able to tell your State approved monopoly local internet/phone/cable providers to go eat a giant bag of shit covered dicks and then switch to SpaceX service.

    28. Re:Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      'huge potential customer base" and "game changing wireless" are mutually exclusive. Wireless can work great at small scales. Dump your huge customer base onto it and it won't perform any better than that shitty DSL.

    29. Re:Get ready newbs. by Charcharodon · · Score: 1
      Actually they are doing just that. Right now large swaths of the RF spectrum are filled up with legacy applications. Very little is actually devoted to data connections. Eventually they'll get to the point were everything will be required to be digital and forced to play nice with one another. No more high powered Omni-directional RF spam for you!

      I can see steerable antennas with narrow outputs becoming the norm rather than the exception.

    30. Re: Get ready newbs. by Charcharodon · · Score: 1
      They are not running the satellites that high up. Try around 300 miles or 480km. Ping time would be closer to 0.2ms + the hardware latency for a direct satellite ping..

      You still wont be able to play twitch games in real time globally, but even with say within 2-5 hops it will definitely expand the player base, not to mention anywhere internet would be revolutionary on so many levels.

      They are well aware that a 300 mile orbit is horrible on gas millage and that the satellites will either use a lot of fuel. I think their strategy is to put up as cheap as possible units that just deorbit eventually. They don't have to sink a lot of cash in the satellite and just constantly upgrade the network with the latest best bang for the buck units. The fun part of this conversation is they are talking about deploying the same system around the Moon and Mars.

    31. Re: Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Leeloo multipath. Aim that beam wherever you want, unless you are pointing it at a satellite in the sky, it's going to scatter all over the damn place.

    32. Re: Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Works much better with no atmosphere. Of course by the time we need wide area networks on other plants weâ(TM)ll already have Dyson sphere tech and wonâ(TM)t need birds.

    33. Re: Get ready newbs. by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      However, if you think about it for a while, you'll find that the majority of contacts will be made at slant ranges quite a bit longer than 1200km. The geometry is messy. And computing the average/typical range turns out to be even messier. I COULD do it (I think) and so could you most likely. But it'll take a bit of effort. My best guess would be 12-15ms round trip typical.

      That's not bad for a back of the envelope guesstimate. Assuming a 40 degree angle (excessive but ok) the maximum length would be about 1600 km, which bumps an 8 ms roundtrip time up to around 10-11 ms.

      Those are of, course, minimum times. Any useful system is going to introduce more delay. But the interesting thing to note is that, at least in theory, communicating with a partner on the other side of the world could actually be faster than using land-based infrastructure.

      It'll be interesting to see how it actually performs.

    34. Re: Get ready newbs. by cjameshuff · · Score: 1

      That's completely backwards. Being able to electronically form and steer the beam without any physically moving components makes phased arrays particularly well suited to applications where the array is mobile, which is why they're used so widely on aircraft and ships, and they are already being incorporated into cell phones.

    35. Re:Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are orders of magnitude wrong with these ping times.

      Or, maybe se's assuming a really bad network design. I was once brought in to troubleshoot a military network: "why do downloads from our new Windows server take several times longer than from our old Solaris server?" The round trip ping time to both servers was close to 5 seconds as the route went through multiple satellite hops. (I was able to get bulk file transfers from the Windows server within 10% of the speed of the Solaris server by manually tuning the TCP stack settings.)

    36. Re:Get ready newbs. by zmooc · · Score: 1

      These satellites will orbit relatively close to earth at 1000-1300km. That's 4ms for a photon, or a 8ms round tripe time. The latency is reported to be about 25ms, but it has the potential to be much lower than that. Furthermore, since these satellites are expected to communicate with each other, this is not just a last-mile solution, but a fully fledged alternative Internet that could even be faster than traditional cables that need to twist and turn and therefore never follow the shortest path. This will be a game changer no matter what.

      --
      0x or or snor perron?!
    37. Re: Get ready newbs. by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Part of the latency is probably due to interleaving for the error correcting codes so it can fix up burst errors.

    38. Re:Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > The latency is reported to be about 25ms

      Read the wikipedia page on Starlink. It will be more like 7ms. Quite comparable to what you'd get with fiber.

    39. Re: Get ready newbs. by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 1

      Indeed. Satellite-satellite relays are a minority of traffic, not the majority. Where possible, the communication is a single hop - between the user and a base station located on an internet backbone.

      Starlink may or may not fall into that category. The lower tier of satellites is designed to beam-form down to just 1.5 degrees, an approximate 4 km radius at the 340 km altitude. Maximum ground footprint at that altitude has a radius of ~440km, but according to their FCC filing, it will never use a beam size that large. There's text in there that implies using multiple simultaneous beams, but I'm not finding anything explicit. No time to read it all, and it's dense technical reading.

    40. Re:Get ready newbs. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Why are "uplinks in Denver" so important when every single terminal of SpaceX's system is its own uplink? There is NOT going to be any "central location", that would make absolutely no logical sense!

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    41. Re: Get ready newbs. by Rei · · Score: 1

      It is many simultaneous beams. They can be along any angle up to an arc of, if I remember right, something like 30 degrees.

      Concurrent with the launch of the constellations, SpaceX will be building a global network of ground stations, which functionally act like ISPs.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    42. Re:Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even if it is around 100ms ping, that's good enough for most Internet usage (especially if the jitter is low). Outside of FPS/MOBA players, who really cares about sub 100ms pings anyway?

      The problem with 100ms, is once you download a basic web page that may download a bunch of other stuff that downloads a bunch of other stuff, that loads some complex javascript that downloads still more. Basically it is more complex than a single relatively short download.

      For geostationary satellites you are around 240ms minimum with the round trip, but in low earth orbit, which is apparently much closer, your at a negligible distance. I could see ping times being quicker there, if you can manage to not fill any buffers...

      Now if your at capacity and all the buffers in the system are pending, well there goes your ping time. Unfortunately to maximize what profit you can get out of such a system your going to want it running at essentially full tilt, which will probably increase delay. Clever shaping and such can push that further, but there are limits.

      I think this is likely to be an interesting addition to cell service, but I'm not yet convinced it is a better investment for the bandwidth.

    43. Re:Get ready newbs. by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Funny that copper is actually faster than fiber ...
      Anyway, as I that for most practical purpose that is irrelevant.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    44. Re: Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ààà¥

    45. Re:Get ready newbs. by Memnos · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I only really had to pay attention to it recently when designing a high-throughput application, where some of the unavoidable round-trips in our ingestion pipelines need to finish inside of 10-15 microsecs. For most use cases it doesn't matter.

      --
      I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
    46. Re:Get ready newbs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No. The long ping time is to geosynchronous altitude. These will be in LEO, less than a tenth of the distance.

    47. Re:Get ready newbs. by bobbied · · Score: 1

      There are three reasons for Denver...

      1. The weather, it's usually dry and clear and that is important because H2O is the nemesis of satellite band RF. So uplinks in Florida, where they exist, are a bit more subject to rain fade issues than the ones in Denver.

      2. It's almost in the middle of the country. This means that you can uplink to a satellites over the majority of the country directly (in one hop). When you are looking for the least delay and maximum bandwidth, single hops are better than multiple ones.

      3. It's where the engineers are that know about this stuff. Historically, because a lot of uplinking has happened in and around Denver, there is a pool of experience already living there to draw on that know what they are doing. Never underestimate the cost of relocation...

      This isn't to say that Space-X won't have multiple uplink locations for an LEO constellation. I would assume they would need a lot of small uplink sites all over the earth to make this idea work efficiency. But I do figure that they will be located in the traditional locations as much as possible for similar reasons.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  2. What is this, really? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's a lot yet to be revealed. If this system really requires a pizza-box-sized antenna, it's good for home use and some automotive use (that would fit fine on an RV, etc.) and a lot of uses that currently use a cellular modem. But consider that Elon might be attempting to do an end-run around all of the world's cellular telephony companies. If there's enough system gain to use a cell-phone-sized antenna, it's a real game changer.

    If you believe Elon (and we know not to always believe him), this is going to pay for Mars. If it works with a handheld terminal, maybe it could.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re: What is this, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh come on California wouldn't ever allow it's civillians to hold that kind of transmitter to their head.

    2. Re: What is this, really? by vtcodger · · Score: 2

      Not a problem. You put the antenna on top of your mandatory, surgically implanted, tinfoil hat and don't use the internet during thunderstorms.

      --
      You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
    3. Re:What is this, really? by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 1

      If you believe Elon (and we know not to always believe him), this is going to pay for Mars.

      Musk seems to have more ambitious projects that one single human being could handle alone.

      Has anyone really taken a good look at Musk . . . ? I am starting to think that he is really a Beowulf Cluster of Musks . . .

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    4. Re:What is this, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If they are smart about it they could just put omni wifi antennaes in all the pizza box sized antennaes which could then act as a giant mesh; with enough of them scattered around cellphones could just tie into the wifi mesh.

    5. Re:What is this, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thankfully he doesn't handle any of them alone, he has employees who do that.

    6. Re:What is this, really? by mentil · · Score: 1

      He can spin off instances of himself, Dr. Manhattan-style.

      --
      Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
    7. Re:What is this, really? by SEE · · Score: 1

      Serious satellite broadband with a handheld antenna?

      I mean, I guess it's possible that they have a radical breakthrough up their sleeves, but the launching-right-now Iridium NEXT is looking at only 128 kbit/s to phones, the 1.5 Mbit service to moving ships using 22-inch diameter device and the 8 Mbit service limited to fixed stations.

    8. Re:What is this, really? by cjameshuff · · Score: 2

      Another thing to consider is that not all of SpaceX's customers have to be on the ground, accessing the network through those terminals. Starlink could provide broadband internet connectivity to any satellite in LEO with a compatible optical link. For example, Iridium could launch a few of their own satellites with Starlink transceivers and get a massively redundant internet connection without any additional groundside hardware of their own.

      And with multiple transceivers per Starlink satellite and a guaranteed stream of production for replacement satellites, the cost of those transceivers will be relatively low. Many small satellites might use a single optical transceiver as their only communications link, no ground infrastructure required.

    9. Re:What is this, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unless he magically creates more wireless spectrum the game will remain unchanged. There is a reason wireless companies are paying billions for the spectrum they use, and there still isn't enough to make it work as well as it needs to work. And now you're talking about traveling a couple thousand miles round trip over wireless instead of a few miles across the terrain, so you just added a whole new set of constraints to work around.

    10. Re:What is this, really? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 1

      The 22 inch diameter device is a steered patch antenna. Consider that it adds 20 dB to the link budget. Add that much power and gain to the downlink. It's partially antenna gain, because the footprint of the SpaceX satellite is much smaller than Iridium, and partially transmitter power.

      The uplink bandwidth doesn't have to be as high, so you can get by with a lower uplink budget.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    11. Re:What is this, really? by MrLogic17 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      >If you believe Elon (and we know not to always believe him)...

      I used to think that... but find me a tweet (even the joke ones) that hasn't turned into reality.
      Car in orbit past Mars? check
      Flamethrower? check
      Boring company? check

      He's rich enough to turn his jokes & whims into reality. I now take all of his tweets seriously - especially the jokes.

    12. Re: What is this, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well that is the real trick of it.
      They are using beam forming that can apparently target areas as low small as a few miles diameter from LEO. So across the globe the same frequency can be in use at thousands of points.

    13. Re: What is this, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your list:

      A car in orbit, wowwwww big fucking whoop.

      A flamethrower? Wowwwww how revolutionary. Game changer indeed /s

      His boring company? Who hasn't broken ground anywhere. Will be stuck tied up with red tape and regulation. Again, he hasn't broken ground anywhere and hasn't solved any of the problems.

      So again, your list isn't very good. Musk is a shit talker.

    14. Re:What is this, really? by WrongMonkey · · Score: 1

      but find me a tweet (even the joke ones) that hasn't turned into reality

      Any of the Model 3 production estimates

  3. low cost, low orbit! high speed, high latency! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    sounds great

  4. What does this mean by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What does this mean in real terms? Could someone in a obscure country sign up online, get the wireless modem/whatever and get internet without going through their own country's hoops and obstacles?

  5. Huh? by Freischutz · · Score: 3, Funny

    "With this action, the Commission takes another step to increase high-speed broadband availability and competition in the United States," the FCC said in a statement

    Increase competition!?!?! Wasn't Ajit Pai was put in charge of the FCC precisely to prevent such a catastrophe from befalling the existing well established structures of localised telecommunications monopolies? Competition on a nationwide level would seriously impair their ability to shaft the consumer!

    1. Re: Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They don't think he can do it. He will, and they will all go out of business :D

  6. neutral? unsold? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    have they said if they will filter the connection? if they will sell metadata on?

  7. Not the whole world by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... Elon might be attempting to do an end-run around all of the world's cellular telephony companies ...

    India and China keep their respective cellular markets pretty close to their respective chests

    So no, all Elon might end up getting is the world, minus India and China

  8. Shape Shifter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... Has anyone really taken a good look at Musk . . . ? I am starting to think that he is really a Beowulf Cluster of Musks . . .

    I honestly believe Elon Musk might be a Shape Shifter

    Sometimes he looks like a Caucasian

    Other times he looks like an Oriental

    Sometimes he acts as if he is a rocket scientist

    Other times he goes underneath a Tesla trying to fix something ...

  9. Smarter than you think by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Cell" will eventually just be "voice over data link", so in effect he's putting up a world wide cell phone network without having to deal with all the shit (Like governments auctioning bandwidth, the big players locking out newcomers etc). There's serious money there if he pulls this one off.

  10. Nobody works alone by sjbe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Musk seems to have more ambitious projects that one single human being could handle alone.

    That's why he hires people. Very little of consequence in this world is ever done by a single person. We Americans tend to like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists but the reality is that we depend heavily on each other for even the most basic of necessities.

    Elon's job is not to do these projects but rather to hire the people who can do them. Think of his job like that of Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs. He allocates capital, set a direction for the company, and hire the right people to make it happen, and sells the vision of the company. He likes to get involved with the engineering because that helps him understand how well his employees are doing their job (and because its fun) - similar to Steve Jobs in that respect but that isn't his real job. Elon's real job is to provide capital where it is needed, hire the right people, and to act as chief sales person. And he seems to be rather good at that.

    1. Re: Nobody works alone by danperc7 · · Score: -1, Offtopic

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    2. Re: Nobody works alone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Musk often makes decisions alone. That is probably what the original text meant. Part of being an American "rugged individual" is making decisions without leaning on a board of directors or the typical fawning corporate staff. Or worse, government consultants or regulators.

      Why, he probably didn't even ask an HR staffer how it would impact his employees!

    3. Re:Nobody works alone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah but way back when wasn't he the lead rocket engineer for the first rocket because they could not find anyone else?

  11. Only PayPal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    One will only be able to pay for this Satellite Internet Service using PayPal.

  12. Great... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    more light pollution amateur astronomers will have to deal with. I hope they at least try to minimize reflective surfaces.

    Think I'm joking? This is a real issue and will get worse over time.

    Enjoy a nice dark sky while you can. Every year it gets harder to get away from man made lights here on earth. There is no escaping man made lights up in orbit. The moon ruins half the month as it is (at least the moon is fun to look at).

    1. Re:Great... by jimtheowl · · Score: 1

      Yes I think you are joking, or trolling, but it would be nice to hear from more credible sources than AC on the topic.

      Light pollution from artificial satellites are nothing in comparison to the masses of man made lights on the surface hitting every dust particle and clouds going upwards.

    2. Re:Great... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Pollution from LEO? Highly unlikely. The satellites in LEO are at night as dark as the surface because they're in the same shadow cone.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Great... by AsmCoder8088 · · Score: 1

      That's odd, because I thought the ISS was in LEO and yet I'm able to see it pass overhead with the naked eye. Sure, it is a bigger object, but even the smaller ones can be easily observed with a consumer telescope. And to be honest, it is a real problem when doing astrophotography. You do a 15 or 20 minute exposure (with a good mount) and have to throw it away because a satellite passed within the field of view causing a noticeable streak in the image.

    4. Re:Great... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's odd, because I thought the ISS was in LEO and yet I'm able to see it pass overhead with the naked eye.

      Not at night. You can see it at dusk and dawn.

    5. Re:Great... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      and yet I'm able to see it pass overhead with the naked eye

      Only when it's lit. It's not lit most of the night, because of simple geometry.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  13. Top management works as a team by sjbe · · Score: 1

    Musk often makes decisions alone.

    No he doesn't. He makes the final decision but NOBODY who is a CEO of a company that size makes decisions alone or without help on a regular basis. There are lots of people providing him data, opinions, and context to every decision he makes. If you think otherwise then you have never seen top management of large companies in action up close. They spend a huge percent of their day in meetings gathering information and opinions. Even legendarily domineering CEOs like Steve Jobs listen more than they order and certainly do not get their way all the time. Business is a team sport and those who fail to recognize that don't thrive.

    Part of being an American "rugged individual" is making decisions without leaning on a board of directors or the typical fawning corporate staff.

    No it is not. The "rugged individual" concept is largely a mythology that we tell ourselves when the reality is that we are highly interdependent. It certainly doesn't come from having a domineering CEO who foolishly ignores his board of directors.

    Individuals that make decisions without consulting the smart people around them tend to fail rather rapidly. I assure you that Elon Musk spends a LOT of his time soliciting information from the people that work for him. Far more than you might imagine given his prominence in the company.

  14. More of the same by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Satellite Internet companies try and try and fail and fail. I hope this is better. The latency should be better but the very low data caps will render the whole thing a moving joke. It seems like it will have to be very expensive. 800 satellites will be an immense initial start up cost. It might work as a cell phone competitor but for fixed Internet access it seems dead even before it arrives.

    1. Re:More of the same by green1 · · Score: 1

      My suspicion is that the 800 satellites is to deal with the low data caps, you don't need that many satellites to cover the Earth as we've seen with the Iridium system. So it must be that they need this many to be able to handle the usage they're expecting. So I'm not sure the data caps are likely to be a problem. That's said, cost seems highly likely to be an issue because I can't imagine this endeavor being cheap. my best guess is that this will compete with the current satellite internet providers who are fairly expensive for slow speed high latency connections with low data caps. Those providers do however still get business from many people who simply have no other option. If they manage to keep the cost not much higher than the existing satellite providers they will probably see a lot of business due to the significantly lower latency, higher speeds, and more bandwidth.

      That said I am really suspecting that musk wants to put these in his cars to give them a permanent internet connection I don't think he's happy with the current LTE solution.

  15. When facts contradict theory by mi · · Score: 1

    Increase competition!?!?! Wasn't Ajit Pai was put in charge of the FCC precisely to prevent such [...] ?

    An impartial observer would conclude, that he was not. Do we have any such observers here, though?

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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  17. Get straight to the important part by biggaijin · · Score: 1

    Will Amazon have to collect sales tax if it is operating in space?

  18. Don't like the name by qzzpjs · · Score: 2

    They picked "Starlink"? I mean, this is literally a "Skynet". Hope it wasn't licensing that stopped them.

    1. Re:Don't like the name by Xarius · · Score: 1

      It was already taken for an existing constellation

      --
      C17H21NO4
  19. Re:HIGH cost, low orbit! high speed, high latency! by bobbied · · Score: 1

    FIFY... This will be a costly way to provide internet service. It may be cheaper in rural areas or for mobile customers who depend on cellular or geosynchronous based providers now, but the customer base will be limited in this cost range.

    --
    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  20. Next up... by Raistlin77 · · Score: 1

    Oort Compute Cloud (OC2) and Oort Cloud Storage (OCS).

  21. What's the latency? by RogueWarrior65 · · Score: 1

    Latency has been the biggest issue with previous satellite internet services. What's it like with this system?

    1. Re:What's the latency? by green1 · · Score: 1

      Because this is low earth orbit instead of the current geostationary system for satellites latency shouldn't be much of an issue, calculations done for this up thread put the latency for a round trip ping at about 8-12 milliseconds which is effectively nothing when you look at the grand scheme of things. In fact, depending on how they want to route packets, you could actually get decreased ping times when reaching servers on the other side of the planet, has signals actually travel faster through empty space than they do through copper wires are fiber optic cables. (Though my suspicion is that they'll try to get your signal out of space and onto fiber and copper as quickly as possible likely negating that particular benefit)

  22. I'm surprised.. by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

    ..no, shocked, shocked I tell you, that Ajit Pai didn't specifically and categorically deny SpaceX from doing this, then turn around and announce that Verizon, or AT&T, or Comcast is going to do precisely the same thing, and how it'll "increase competition and innovation".

    1. Re:I'm surprised.. by painandgreed · · Score: 1

      ..no, shocked, shocked I tell you, that Ajit Pai didn't specifically and categorically deny SpaceX from doing this, then turn around and announce that Verizon, or AT&T, or Comcast is going to do precisely the same thing, and how it'll "increase competition and innovation".

      That probably wouldn't work well as those other players will have to use SpaceX rockets. Better to let SpaceX start, then use anti-trust issues to get the rocket cost down for others.

  23. You'd be wrong by gerald.edward.butler · · Score: 0

    Current geosynchronous satellites (which are much much higher than these will be) have a round-trip ping time (end-to-end) of no more than 200ms. FACT. I know for sure as I've used them extensively. Over 9600 Baud short-haul modems from the computer over 1000 ft to the Sateliite uplink and back.

  24. Starlink.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... because "Skynet" was already taken.

  25. Musk's portfolio will go bankrupt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just look at the numbers. Lots of Muskbots around here believe Silicon Valley spin but they don't j is how to read a financial statement. Look at the profit & loss and cash flow statements for Musk's companies. These crazy projections are not sustainable. Elon isn't delivering any space wifi. Elon is delivering a big steamy plate of capital losses to his deluded shareholders.

  26. Musk better watch out by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Iridium went belly-up because it had to launch about 70 satellites before it could be operational. Musk needs 800? Are there that many sucker investors?

    1. Re:Musk better watch out by Megane · · Score: 1

      They didn't have their own rockets.

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
  27. Impossible, it cannot be true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have read all sorts of Slashdot pieces about how the evil FCC cahir Ajit Pai hates the internet and wants everybody to be prisoners of AT&T and ComCast who will jack-up everybody's internet access fees while providing slower and slower leass-reliable internet service. I have also been assured that Trump and Musk hate eachother and that Trump is a corrupt evil bozo who punishes everybody whith whom he has disagreements. I have also been assured that somewhere in the mix, Trump and/or Pai is probably getting cash from lobbyists for the big Telcos and they will do the bidding of all those suplliers of corrupt cash. Political cash overrules all other concers obviously.....citizens united....citizens united....citizens united....

    Now Trump's FCC guy is approving Musk's plan to provide people improved affordable internet access? These things cannot all be true.