
SpaceX faces daunting challenges if it’s going to win the internet space race - pseudolus
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-spacex-starlink-constellation-20190628-story.html
======
topspin
It appears the potential market in the US is based on Federal broadband
coverage figures. From the story:

    
    
        "In 2017, more than 26% of people who lived in rural
         areas in the U.S. were not covered by terrestrial
         broadband internet service, according to a May report
         from the Federal Communications Commission."
    

FCC numbers are pure fiction. It is well known that providers are GREATLY
exaggerating their coverage and available capacity to rural and semi rural
areas. Much of the coverage that actually exists is also garbage; fixed
wireless suffering absurd contention and unreliable, low performance cable
system or DSL systems.

There are well-heeled communities adjacent to large urban areas that can get
nothing worthwhile; they're inflicting substantial new property taxes on
themselves to fund FTTH build-outs. I suspect the actual market for rural
broadband is many times larger than whatever is assumed in this story. I also
know for fact that there is a cohort of people that will go further out into
the hinterlands the instant they can solve the bandwidth problem at a
reasonable cost. I'm one of them.

~~~
phil21
> FCC numbers are pure fiction. It is well known that providers are GREATLY
> exaggerating their coverage and available capacity to rural and semi rural
> areas.

Thank you.

At risk of piling on a "+1" comment, I will add a little bit of context.

My parents live about 35 miles from a "midwest urban core", they are served by
Frontier. Supposedly they can get "1.5Mbps DSL" which qualifies as broadband.
On a good day they can get 64k. This has degraded from about 768k ~10 years
ago, to ~64k today. Absolute _no_ maintenance other than "electrons kinda
flowish" has been done on these lines.

But, my parents and their neighbors of ~150 households totally count for
"broadband" stats.

The fraud going on here is absolutely mind boggingly in scope. The "lie big if
you're going to lie" thing comes into mind here. Billions evaporated due to
nothing other than absolutely in-your-face fraud.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
That's slower than ISDN :( To stream Netflix at 10 frames per second, they'd
have to watch a show in something like 28 px by 21 px. That'd be like playing
Minecraft on a 1970s LED calculator.

~~~
phil21
Indeed. They have since canceled as of about 4-5 months ago. Now they use a
T-Mobile re-seller (via walmart, iirc) that gives them 25GB/mo for less than
their "broadband DSL" cost. So far they have been happy - watching shows at
480p.

------
travisoneill1
If the constellation costs $10 billion to launch as estimated and has a
operating cost of $1 billion/year and a lifetime of 5 years, Spacex will need
only $3 billion/year to break even. If they sell subscriptions at $50/month
they will only need 5 million subscribers to break even. They only have to be
better than current offerings in poorly served markets to get that. I think it
will be a cash cow.

~~~
H8crilA
Did you see the part about competition? It can end up like airlines - never
ending price war. Surely good for consumers, but a measly, possibly negative,
total return on investment for the whole sector.

~~~
toasterlovin
SpaceX has a gargantuan advantage when it comes to the cost to get stuff to
space, though. And it doesn't seem like anybody will catch up with them any
time soon.

~~~
loceng
And then you'll vote (purchase) based on which government you trust the most
for whom the company will be under the umbrella of - US, China, India, etc.

------
csb6
I think a lot of discussion I have seen online has overlooked the importance
of the phased array antennas, which are too large to make Starlink practical
for someone using a phone or laptop on the go. However, it would be very
convenient for people needing Internet service at home.

I have also heard people (not in this thread) talk about Starlink as a way to
bypass censorship in places like China, but this is almost certainly not
possible. What authoritarian regime would allow the sale of the Starlink
antennas in their country and the local downlinks needed to have good latency?

This is a fascinating project, but I hope we don't end up treating it as a
panacea to all issues of information freedom.

~~~
anovikov
There are no technical means needed to bypass internet censorship in China.
People are using the free internet there perfectly, using obfs4. Problem is
that there is no way to express their opinion freely on the internet because:

\- Expression of opinion almost always lets you being identified even if your
IP address can't be seen.

\- Most people won't support your opinion - because they are paid trolls (a
large fraction of app posts, because a comparatively small - 'only' hundreds
of thousands - trolls post in insane quantities) and because many online
spaces are shaped by trolls and by people who are too afraid of expressing
their opinion freely. Internet is simply not seen as a place appropriate for
sensitive discussions in China and this will not change if people will be able
to access all blocked resources, or reliably hide their locations.

~~~
Analemma_
> There are no technical means needed to bypass internet censorship in China.

Individuals bypassing technical restrictions is very different from having a
commercial operation. Without the mandated censorship and monitoring,
Starlink's entire business is completely illegal in China, so the entire thing
(from setup to service to support) would have to be run underground, they'd
have to accept payment in Bitcoin, no SpaceX executive could ever travel to
China, and Tesla would probably have to get out too.

It's not gonna happen. There is no chance, none whatsoever, that Starlink ever
does business in China unless it goes through the same filters as everyone
else, even though from a purely technical perspective it theoretically could.

------
true_tuna
Perhaps a viable business model could be hybrid solution where mobile carriers
partner to create LTE and 5G towers with Starlink uplinks. This would make it
easier for carriers to deploy towers in remote locations. It’s my
understanding that the primary challenge for deploying towers in underserved
areas is lack of existing infrastructure for uplink. Call me crazy, but if you
could solar power the ground station you could plop them anywhere on earth.

~~~
reneherse
Perhaps if you know a guy who does solar and batteries, you could avoid the
carrier partnership altogether... ;)

~~~
stcredzero
Put the transceivers on the roofs of cars. Then make the cars rolling
supercomputers -- oh, already done! Then start selling a part of the compute
power of the cars as a cloud with no search warrantable address. All of the
virtual servers will be ephemeral and will migrate such that they're only ever
running on moving cars.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Elon said the receivers are too big to put in the roof of a car. But that it
might be possible to engineer one small enough.

------
dredds
These articles ignore a vast number of global web users who are living in or
around major cities and towns just to have connectivity, who will likely be
early adopters seeking the freedom to live in more affordable rural locations.
The potential size of this group is hard to judge, so it seems there's some
reluctance to even speculate on a figure.

~~~
umvi
I mean... satellite internet exists. North America in particular has full
satellite internet coverage.

~~~
swsieber
Satellite internet with high latency exists. The stuff SpaceX is putting out
will have significantly lower latency, which is huge difference.

~~~
godelski
For reference GEO is something like 250ms and in LEO you can get sub 50ms.

I did the math a year ago and so numbers may be a little off due to memory,
but they should be in the ball park. Also these would be optimal numbers, so
realistic would be worse.

~~~
H8crilA
And, honestly, who needs less than 250ms? Gamers? How many websites open in
under a second anyhow?

~~~
aguchobena
The existing Internet satelite are incredible expensive and not only the
latency is really bad, but the bandwidth is also very limited, you can not
consider it as a broadband ISP. Starlink will be a true alternative to the
fiber optic ISPs, and for world-wide will be even faster thanks to the direct
lasser link among the constellation.

------
modeless
Worth noting here that SpaceX is currently raising another round: pi hundred
million dollars at a valuation of $35 billion. And it is possible to
participate as an individual accredited investor on
[https://fundnel.com](https://fundnel.com)

------
m463
I think people need to realize spacex has a primary goal of developng rockets.

I see all this as analogous to the problem of beginning pilots: the cost of
getting hours in a plane is expensive.

Offering <x> where x requires the pilot to fly a plane will get the pilot
discount hours in the air. x could be flight lessons, flying packages around,
aerial photo services, etc.

~~~
Robotbeat
Indeed. If Starlink merely breaks even, it'll massively increase the demand
for launch services which allows them to justify the development of large,
fully reusable rockets like Starship. From SpaceX's perspective, besides the
straight up revenue they provide, the main point of megaconstellations like
Starlink is fodder for reusable rockets.

...and having multiple megaconstellations competing thus isn't necessarily a
bad thing even from SpaceX's perspective. More mass to launch to orbit.

...that's one thing about reusable rockets that is key to understand. There's
no fundamental physics that says reusable rockets can't be done. Shuttle
proved upper stages can be reused and SpaceX showed first stages can be
reused. The main question is demand: reusable rockets make sense IFF there's
more than sufficient demand to pay back the R&D and the keep the factory busy.

To over-simplify things a bit: Rocket factories for even expendable rockets
seem to struggle to be affordable unless you're building at least 10 airframes
per year, so if you want to get 10-100 reuses out of your rocket, you'd best
be launching at least 100-1000 times per year...

~~~
m463
chickens are the way eggs make more eggs

(where eggs = rockets and chickens = starlink)

:)

------
ravedave5
As far as a race goes there's only one other runner currently and they are
1/10th as far along (6 vs 60 satelites) and without a plan to launch as
cheaply as SpaceX. Spacex will be the first to have a system and unless it is
too expensive or has other operational issues they are going to be hard to
catch.

~~~
lukeify
Those "unless"'s are _kind_ of the point of the article.

~~~
breakyerself
SpaceX has a huge price advantage on launches so a competitor would have to be
able to significantly undercut them on the cost of the hardware just to become
competetive.

~~~
new_realist
Satellite costs, not launch costs, dominate. And then there is Vulcan and
other cheap launch competitors coming online.

~~~
Dylan16807
> Satellite costs, not launch costs, dominate.

Starlink is promising well under a million per satellite, and OneWeb is
reportedly already at a million. Satellite costs might end up lower than
launch costs, and even if they're higher that doesn't seem like they'll
dominate.

------
tectonic
They already raised over $1 billion this year. [https://spacenews.com/spacex-
raises-over-1-billion-through-t...](https://spacenews.com/spacex-raises-
over-1-billion-through-two-funding-rounds/)

------
sandworm101
No mention of the legal problems. SpaceX is pitching to become a worldwide
last-mile intenet provider. Each country, the US included, will have issue
with that. They will each set regulatory burdens, censorship limitations, that
will make SpaceX's life difficult.

I have yet to see any real plans for downlink locations, the places where the
satellite network will integrate with the fiber backbone that is 'the
internet'. The system cannot be funneled through a handful of locations in the
US. For the mega constellation concept to work you need hundreds of local
downlinks so that connections don't have to hop across too many sats before
exiting the network.

~~~
dzhiurgis
Possibly. Current hellholes put burden on to user - sat phones are required to
be registered in China, Russia, India, etc.

~~~
malandrew
Only sat-phones or any satellite communicator like my Garmin InReach
Explorer+?

------
ncmncm
My prediction:

The latency will be top-notch, but _only_ if they strictly limit total
traffic. So, streaming will probably cost way too much for normal people,
unless they can contrive to cache copies of the absolutely most popular stuff
on all the birds. Then, everything big but _not_ cached will be super
expensive, throttled, or actually forbidden.

Of course they will charge the publishers for caching, by spot auction, and
the publishers will use a good chunk of their allotment to cache ads.

~~~
HappyAlbatross
Honestly this could be true, however I dont think musk would risk most of his
wealth on non-viable tech. The dude does a lot of really dumb stuff with his
money, but in terms of investments and new products, his largest tech
investments have a remarkable track record.

~~~
ncmncm
The lowest-latency long-distance communication in the world, by several
milliseconds, will be worth far more, to just the right people, than any
number of streamed sitcoms and whodunits. I do not doubt Musk will make a
fortune on it. I just don't think it will be of much immediate use to you, me,
or Disney.

But first he has to launch it, and, before that, raise money to launch it.
Investors' tiny minds need to believe in massive disruption, just long enough.
They will get paid, just not the way they might guess.

------
tspike
If this goes according to plan, there will be more satellites in orbit than
visible stars in the night sky.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/spacex-
sa...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/spacex-satellites-
could-blight-the-night-sky-warn-astronomers)

~~~
mr_toad
But you won’t be able to see more than a few hundred satellites at the same
time because they’re so low. Whereas you can see at least 1000 stars in the
sky from any location.

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neonate
[http://archive.is/Ix3rO](http://archive.is/Ix3rO)

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throwaway062819
Here's a radical idea. Do you think SpaceX launching 1,000+ satellites for
internet is part of a larger experiment for creating an earth shield as a last
ditch effort to fend off climate change? How much surface area would these
satellites need to cover to have a discernible impact on the amount of
sunlight reaching earth?

~~~
wmf
Here's a good place to start on that topic:
[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0136648)

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new_realist
For most rural users I’m more bullish on AT&T’s AirGig technology than
satellite.

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
There's a lot of rural places that barely have 3G. The problem is if only 20
people benefit from a tower being stood up, they won't do it. This is the
advantage of satellite internet, connecting the sparsely populated. Towers are
the future of cities and outlying areas, low-orbit sat-internet is the future
of rural areas.

------
sunstone
Apparently SpaceX has some experience facing daunting challenges.

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AimForTheBushes
Have they discussed whether there will be firewalls in China or Russia?

------
oh_sigh
Wouldn't it be fair to say everyone entering the internet space race is going
to be facing daunting challenges?

