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FCC Authorizes SpaceX's Ambitious Satellite Internet Plans
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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!
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."
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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
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
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
An impartial observer would conclude, that he was not. Do we have any such observers here, though?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
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
Will Amazon have to collect sales tax if it is operating in space?
They picked "Starlink"? I mean, this is literally a "Skynet". Hope it wasn't licensing that stopped them.
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
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.
Oort Compute Cloud (OC2) and Oort Cloud Storage (OCS).
"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.
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
Latency has been the biggest issue with previous satellite internet services. What's it like with this system?
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
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.
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.
...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.
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.
I can see steerable antennas with narrow outputs becoming the norm rather than the exception.
..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".
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.
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.
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.
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?!
Part of the latency is probably due to interleaving for the error correcting codes so it can fix up burst errors.
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.
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
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
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..."
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.
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.
They didn't have their own rockets.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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