
SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed - phenylene
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/spacex-plans-worldwide-satellite-internet-with-low-latency-gigabit-speed/
======
katzgrau
Free, global internet access is the next step toward a smarter, more
progressive planet. I don't even care about the speed - if the only thing
users could access was wikipedia, I'd still personally donate to the project.
I cannot emphasize how important democratizing knowledge is to me (and many
others).

~~~
manachar
Spreading true (well, at least less wrong) information is a noble goal.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure we're not seeing such information availability
providing avenues towards a smarter, more progressive planet.

Instead, the internet seems to be helping people create cocoons of ignorance
and "evidence" to support even the most specious claims - such as the world
being flat.

Knowledge does not seem to be enough. Wisdom and the ability to sift through
knowledge with some degree of appropriate skepticism need to spread at least
as fast as the knowledge if we are to get a smarter planet.

~~~
geuis
I suspect this is just a phase. I don't have any hard stats at the moment to
back it up, so it's just a feeling.

Internet culture is still very young. At least in the US based on the election
last week, the majority of people 18-25 voted progressive in most states.
These are people who have never known the world without internet access.

I guess that the people who voted the other way are folks who have
transitioned into internet-required lifestyles later in life and had their
young adult lifestyles set in the 80's and early 90s and earlier. This makes
them less digital natives and more like immigrants (ironically).

Again, none of these are universally true of course and this is all just
personal opinion.

I believe that in general, younger people have become better at filtering out
bullshit because they've had access to much more information than older folks
did growing up.

I was born in 1980 and while I'm technically outside the millennial cutoff, I
still identify with that group more than any other. While we didn't have a
computer in the house until the early 90's, I was always exposed to computers
and the internet from a super early age. Most of my viewing habits are gaming
and making on YouTube, some streaming, etc. Still haven't really gotten the
value from Snapchat personally, but I think that's more of a function of not
having much need to use it.

Overall I am hopeful things are getting better as boomers age out and die off
and the younger folks are coming into their own.

~~~
vacri
> _the majority of people 18-25 voted progressive in most states_

This is entirely normal - the young like things to change, the old do not.
This voting pattern well predates the internet.

> _I believe that in general, younger people have become better at filtering
> out bullshit because they 've had access to much more information_

I disagree. It's about the same as it always has been. Yellow journalism
exists now, just as it existed in the 19th century, and people still fall for
it now.

If the internet stopped people from falling for bullshit, "post-truth" would
not have been 'word of the year' for 2016.

~~~
dcposch
> This is entirely normal - the young like things to change, the old do not.
> This voting pattern well predates the internet.

Makes no sense given the context. Clinton was absolutely not the change
candidate in this election.

Old people predominantly voted for a shakeup, a radical change in the way
American govt operates.

~~~
vacri
That "shakeup" was a vote to regress things to how they were in the past. It
was a vote to rollback changes, not go in a new direction. It was a
fundamental part of the campaign slogan: "again".

I'm not sure if you noticed, but both houses went Republican, and the
Republicans who have been controlling congress for the past 6 years have been
stonewalling and blocking everything. The people who were voted in? They
actually aren't up for change.

edit: The Republicans in particular are not going to change the current
system, and Trump, even if he wanted to, can't do it without a 2/3rds majority
for the constitutional change. The Republicans don't want to change the
current system, because it's their force multiplier - they are overrepresented
because they've been able to more successfully bend the current system via
gerrymandering and similar. They also will have _serious_ trouble fiddling
with the constitution, because in order to get where they are, they've made a
lot of shouty people _very_ religiose about the original document - changing
their 'holy bible of politics' will be a very difficult sell.

Trump will change the rhetoric coming out of the oval office, sure, but he's
not going to substantially change how government functions.

~~~
paulmd
> The Republicans in particular are not going to change the current system,
> and Trump, even if he wanted to, can't do it without a 2/3rds majority for
> the constitutional change.

There are actually two ways to pass a constitutional amendment. 2/3 of both
Federal legislative houses is one, but they can also do it with 2/3 of all
state legislatures.

Republicans do very well in the state legislatures, they're only about five
states short of the latter threshold.

2018 is likely to be a bad year for Democrats, there's a huge number of seats
to defend and only a handful of Republican seats that must be defended, with
only like 2-3 competitive seats. A very real possibility is that this turns
into the usual midterm bloodbath and they pick up a few more
seats/legislatures and start pushing constitutional amendments on wedge/social
issues to lock in their wins.

People's adherence to this as a "religious document" is oversold - the
document includes a method to change itself, and this is "playing by the
rules". But frankly they wouldn't even think twice before rationalizing, when
presented with the opportunity to lock in their wins for multiple decades.

You're right about it being in their best interest not to mess with the
election system right now. The multi-level (state/federal) and district-by-
district/state-by-state nature of the system favors them _heavily_ compared to
the popular vote. Republicans have near total dominance of all levels of
government, with what amounts to a popular loss. One thing they may change is
to have more blue states start splitting their electoral votes, like Nebraska
and Maine do. States get to determine how their electoral votes are allocated,
and Republicans control many of the "blue" states' governments (eg Michigan,
Wisconsin, etc). Republicans can essentially make those states not count for
Democrats electorally, since they will go half-and-half for both Republicans
and Democrats (+/\- a few seats).

~~~
mcguire
There are 2 ways to _propose_ constitutional amendments. And a constitutional
convention is is unlikely.

------
mrep
napkin math (chemistry style): (4425 satellites * 23Gbps) / ((60,000PB of
fixed internet traffic / 1 month [1]) * (12 months / 365 days) * (1 day / 24
hours ) * (1 hour / 60 minutes) * (1 minute / 60 seconds) * (8 bits / 1 byte)
* (1024 Tera / 1 Peta) * (1024 Tera / 1 Giga)) =

An astounding O(54% of global internet traffic) [2]! Obviously there are many
many more variables in this [3]. Nonetheless this will be super interesting to
follow.

[1]: my estimated current data usage from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Intern...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Internet_traffic)

[2]:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(4425+*+23)+%2F+((60,00...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=\(4425+*+23\)+%2F+\(\(60,000+%2F+1\)+*+\(12+%2F+365\)+*+\(1+%2F+24+\)+*+\(1+%2F+60\)+*+\(1+%2F+60\)+*+\(8+%2F+1\)+*++)
(1024+%2F+1)+*+(1024+%2F+1))

[3]: Side note, someone should create a multi user algorithm website (it might
be able to be done over google spreadsheets) but adding in extra factors like
revenue streams and what not sounds like it would be fun to play around with.

~~~
phkahler
But if everyone gets 1Gbps then each satellite can only service 23 people. Of
course people who have that kind of bandwidth don't use it continuously. But
what if we all try to watch some 4k video at say 20mbps? That's 50x23 = 1150
users per satellite or around 5 million users to saturate the whole
constellation. It's still cool, but certain things will not be possible.

~~~
subway
Oversubscription isn't exactly a rare thing in the ISP world.

~~~
flukus
No, but cables can be duplicated, wireless bandwidth can't.

~~~
the8472
lasers are wireless and don't compete for spectrum. beam-forming with phased
arrays is not quite as good, but still gives you more capacity than naively
shared spectrum would.

~~~
flukus
This is laser based? Are the building ground stations everywhere too?

~~~
the8472
The links to end-users use beam-steered microwaves, sat-sat links use laser.

I was more making a more general statement: that wireless is not necessarily
synonymous with shared medium.

------
icehawk219
Something I find interesting about this: what does it mean for countries who
monitor and filter/block content (think China)? Presumably since this isn't
using their national infrastructure they would lose all control of it, no? I
wonder how those countries would respond to SpaceX wanting to let their
citizens use the service. Unless I'm missing something it seems to me like
they wouldn't really be able to stop it.

~~~
talamown
A government still can get control practically. They cannot stop the service
itself but can regulate payments from their citizens to the service. It is
like online casino.

Of course, there may be some loopholes for payment and some citizens who
access the service as well as online casino.

~~~
rezashirazian
What if SpaceX offers a free tier version. They can possibly double internet
traffic with a flip of a switch.

~~~
taneq
Put three generations of your family in jail if they catch you?

------
whiddershins
I don't understand the math. 800 satellites at 23 gbps seems to be able to
provide 1 gbps to 18,400 connections at any given time. This seems to be many
magnitudes off from what would be needed to have any impact. What am I
missing?

~~~
gibybo
People aren't generally using a 1 gbps connection at 100% capacity 100% of the
time. If we assume customers use an average of 1 TB of data per month and the
time they use it is pretty spread out (seems reasonable since they are going
to be spread out accross timezones eventually), you can serve about 6 million
customers with 800 satelites @ 23 GBPS, and with 4400 @ 23 GBPS you could do
~33 million.

Admittedly these numbers are all best case scenarios (except maybe the 1 TB
average, that's probably generous), but even if you divide by 2 it's a decent
number of people.

~~~
andrepd
Still. What's the cost of deploying 800 sattelites vs cost of fiber
infrastructure for 6 million people?

~~~
Tuna-Fish
In cities, the fiber, or even some form of local wireless, is much cheaper.
However, in more rural areas the satellite system can well end up the cheaper
choice.

The interesting part is what building 4425 satellites does to the economics of
making satellites. Right now, most satellites are one-offs, or at most made in
a series of 10 or so, handmade to exact specifications for maximum reliability
and built for 25+ year lifetimes. This fleet is meant to be mass-produced and
built to last a much shorter time, 5-10 years at most. I am very interested in
just how low can they drive the cost of making a single satellite.

~~~
nickpsecurity
"This fleet is meant to be mass-produced and built to last a much shorter
time, 5-10 years at most. I am very interested in just how low can they drive
the cost of making a single satellite."

One of the best points in the discussion. This has potential to produce side-
effects more valuable than whatever they were attempting to do. As in, they
can fail in their overall goal but a ton of great things would come from
success in this part.

------
pmontra
Is this going to scale? "Each satellite will provide aggregate downlink
capacity of 17 to 23Gbps". Some 20 Gb/s per satellite times 4425 satellites
spread around the globe is not that much bandwidth for any given densely
populated area. We're going to keep having our local ISP in cities (they're
giving between 0.1 and 1 Gb/s on fiber right now) but it will be great to get
connectivity in the countryside and the mountains. And when traveling abroad,
if they'll sell a small antenna that can be operated on a battery or connected
to a laptop over usb. I wonder if there are chances that those antennas can be
made so small to fit into a phone and tablet. Iridium's ones are still pretty
big, like the ones of wifi routers.

~~~
schiffern
>Is this going to scale? ...not that much bandwidth for any given densely
populated area. We're going to keep having our local ISP in cities (they're
giving between 0.1 and 1 Gb/s on fiber right now)

Except the goal _isn 't_ to replace fiber in densely populated areas. Musk
said this during the initial announcement:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=2m57s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=2m57s)

> _The goal will be to have the majority of long distance internet traffic go
> over this network, and about 10% of local and business traffic. Probably 90%
> of people 's local access will still come from fiber, but we'll do about 10%
> of business and consumer direct, and more than half I think of the long
> distance traffic._

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=4m39s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=4m39s)

> _And then space is also really good for sparse connectivity. So if you 've
> got large swaths of land where there's relatively low density of users,
> space is actually ideal for that._

> _It would also be able to service, like I say, probably 10% of people in
> relatively dense urban and suburban environments. And so in cases where
> people have, you know, are sort of stuck with Time Warner or Comcast or
> something, this would provide an opportunity to..._ [unintelligible due to
> cheering]

>I wonder if there are chances that those antennas can be made so small to fit
into a phone and tablet.

As revealed in the above video, it's a rooftop antenna about the size of a
pizza box. No wall/roof penetrating spectrum.

Of course it automatically aims itself, so as a mobile AP it should be "plug
and play" unlike current GEO internet user terminals which need finicky
pointing.

------
grapevines
Such a genius move, surprising nobody saw it coming. Just think: he will
already have access to a large base of customer's roofs (which SolarCity
effectively owns) --- 1 million by 2018.

Then, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to an on-demand, fully-cached, mesh
network. They're probably not far from being able to provide internet service
to all SolarCity customers, just a bit of a modification to the contract.

~~~
andrewtbham
no one saw it coming? they anounced this in 2015.

Here is a video where elon explains the system very well in 2015.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4)

~~~
dshields1
People also speculated that this was the reason Alphabet invested in SpaceX.
(Which was around the same time as that announcement)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/technology/google-
makes-1-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/technology/google-
makes-1-billion-investment-in-spacex.html)

------
baldfat
Latency Math (Almost 100ms faster then current technology)

EDIT: This is only one way

ALSO Grace Hopper telling David Letterman what a nano second is!
[https://youtu.be/1-vcErOPofQ?t=4m26s](https://youtu.be/1-vcErOPofQ?t=4m26s)

1 Nanosecond = distance light travels one foot

1 mile = 5260 nanoseconds (In a vacuum)

Current Satellite Internet = 22,000 miles or 115720000 Nano Seconds = 115.72
ms

SpaceX Low Orbit = 715 to 823 Miles

823 miles = 4328980 nano seconds = 4.3 ms

------
dark_star
Here's the thread on r/spacex that has a bunch of analysis:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/5d9724/spacex_has_f...](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/5d9724/spacex_has_filed_for_their_massive_constellation/)

------
abc_lisper
Man, you have to tip your hat to Elon Musk and his teams. They manage to
consistently up the scales - its almost like accelerating towards future!

~~~
ygaels_armpit
The guys a freak. He's about the only optimistic thing going on at the moment,
it seems.

~~~
eknight15
No kidding, South Park's episode this week kind of pointed that out.

------
tonydiv
I worked for a company called Lightsquared that tried to do this. Big problems
were faced from lobbyists, maybe SpaceX has more money to protect themselves
though:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligado_Networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligado_Networks)

~~~
upofadown
The big problems came from an attempt to use satellite downlink spectrum in an
inappropriate way that would cause problems for adjacent users (GPS in
particular). Lightsquared wanted to run high power terrestrial transmitters in
that band. They promised the FCC that they could make things work, but the
physics of the situation prevented that.

Lobbyists were not the issue, a bonehead technical decision was.

Presumably SpaceX will be able to avoid any errors that obvious in their use
of spectrum for their system.

------
lettergram
Does anyone know:

(A) the potential lifespan of these satellites are?

(B) Why has this not been done to date? I assume SpaceX expects that it'll be
relatively affordable since they can reuse rockets.

(C) Will this impact the launch capabilities of future rockets (4500
satellites are a lot)? My assumption is that the low earth orbit will likely
aid in destroying those satellites as opposed to leaving them up there at end-
of-life

~~~
nickparker
A) The technical attachment lists the lifespan as 5 to 7 years

B) It's a triple play of radically reduced launch costs, rapidly dropping
space hardware costs thanks to growth in the market, and improving RF tech to
greatly increase the bandwidth such a constellation can provide. Ubiquitous
connectivity is a great example of a technology that's _going to happen_
because of the high level industry trends. The interesting question is whether
it will be a SpaceX constellation, OneWeb constellation, or an atmospheric
solution like Google's Loon or Facebook's Aquila.

C) 4500 satellites is more than we currently have in LEO total. However, LEO
is low enough that atmospheric drag deorbits idle satellites relatively
quickly. SpaceX's constellation is designed to deorbit on its own after their
7 year life.

~~~
creshal
> It's a triple play of radically reduced launch costs

Which is a very recent phenomenon, and still not fully materializing – SpaceX'
Falcon 9 already cut costs in half in its class _without_ reusing anything.
Actually reusable Falcon 9s and the planned competitor products will drive
down costs further still.

------
mpg33
Am I the only one that thinks Elon Musk is scattered and overextended?
Literally a new grand idea every few months..

~~~
clydethefrog
He is a snake oil salesman for geek millionaires.

~~~
chronolitus
the snake oil that does 300 miles on a single charge,

or the snake oil that lands on a barge from orbit?

------
elihu
> “Optical inter-satellite links permit flexible routing of traffic on-orbit.
> Further, the constellation ensures that frequencies can be reused
> effectively across different satellites to enhance the flexibility and
> capacity and robustness of the overall system.”

Is optical communication between satellites an existing technology that's
already known to work, or is this new? Also, is this sort of thing done (or
expected to be done) by aiming laser exactly at the destination satellite, or
is it more of a non-directional blink-a-really-bright-LED sort of thing?

~~~
ramidarigaz
This[1] article does a nice job of covering the subject, but in essence,
laser-based communication between satellites has been done and it works pretty
well.

[1] [http://www.osa-
opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/may_2016/feat...](http://www.osa-
opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/may_2016/features/space-
based_laser_communications_break_threshold/)

~~~
elihu
Ok, thanks. From that article it sounds like it's already been done in a
number of contexts, but it's still in the "early adopter" stage and isn't
really widely used yet.

------
flukus
Now might be a good time to familiarize everyone with Kessler Syndrome:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)

------
deegles
My dream of an off-grid cabin with internet access inches closer!

~~~
matheweis
You can do that today. I work with a guy who lives in an off-the-grid place in
what most of us would consider to be the middle of nowhere with satellite for
his internet access.

------
disordinary
Some countries are not going to like this, network infrastructure are
important national assets and are often done with high levels of regulation to
ensure availability and pricing, so a lot of nations will not think it's in
their competitive advantage to have this provided by a foreign entity.

~~~
lucaspiller
Even within the US I'd be very surprised if the cable companies don't try and
somehow block it.

------
hyperpallium
yesterday's comments:

SpaceX FCC Application for over 4000 Internet Satellites
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973223)

------
er0l
Everyone has their worldwide internet solutions, Google balloons and Facebook
gliders, but this is easily the most plausible. Musk tends to see his ideas
through.

------
operon
Now I want to buy an island and build a new kind of community.

~~~
charlesdm
I wonder how much it would cost to purchase an island with 10-20 people and
build houses on it. Could you live there in a sustainable way? Possibly seems
like an interesting way to live.

~~~
operon
You can buy a small (~2 ha) undeveloped island for as low as 100,000 USD.
Bigger ones cost more depending where they are located. However I saw really
big islands (~2,200 ha) for about 2M USD in Chile (I think that is cheap
considering that a luxury apartment in my city, Florianópolis, can cost way
more than that). Current solar energy solutions and biogas production from
waste can form a solid base for a sustainable community.

~~~
charlesdm
2,200 hectares? Do you have a link for that? That can't be right / seems
amazingly cheap (also if compared to that small island, too good to be true).
If you split $2m between 20 people you get 110ha for $100k. 110ha is massive.

~~~
operon
Sure, this one in Chile is a good example:
[http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/isla-
verdugo](http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/isla-verdugo)

Has lakes, a small marina, but is far way from any big city.

However, with gigabit internet and a bunch of interesting people it can become
a very good place.

If I had 2M on hand I would start a community there right now.

~~~
charlesdm
I have a property developer friend who had the idea to create a sort of luxury
village in Southern France where successful people from the arts /
entrepreneurs etc could meet. People that had achieved financial independence
and weren't "part of the system". Sort of like a safe enclave to exchange
ideas. He did well + things were progressing, but during the financial crisis
in 2007 banks pulled out (€50m in loans) of the deal and wiped him out.

I honestly wonder how many people would be interested in living like this.

~~~
operon
I think that there are a good number of people that would be interested, plus
some companies.

I can imagine a safe place for innovation and experimentation away from dumb
regulations and government interference.

Maybe a good model is trough private capital much like a startup.

How many companies and wealthy individuals would not like to have a safe
heaven for work and living where you have plenty of space and intact nature?

If Silicon Valley is at peril with Trump (according to some opinions), why not
build a Silicon Island.

~~~
kilroy123
I would be interested.

------
mkj
Wonder if we'll see CDNs in space too. Would solve one side of the
transmission problem.

~~~
ooqr
Lagrange CDN

------
paulsutter
How much will the base stations weigh? Light enough to be carried on a drone?

High speed / low latency internet will be important in self-driven cars.
Especially with phased array ground stations which can respond faster than the
motion of a car. So now a crossover between SpaceX and Tesla?

How much cellular cost the Tesla fleet, especially as the model 3 come out?

~~~
elihu
That's an interesting point. There are many companies excited to use low-
bandwith 5G connection to link up all their IoT devices. A satellite network
provides a means to route around the cell phone network, which could be
valuable to Tesla if they think it's cheaper than buying data plans for their
cars. It could also be an effective backup system in case cell networks are
out of range or unavailable.

I suppose the interesting questions are: how many individual ground stations
will a single satellite be able to support simultaneously? And what are the
physical characteristics of the ground station? (Iirc, in the early 2000's,
Teledesic was going to use multiple motorized parabolic antennas enclosed in
beach-ball sized plastic bubbles to track satellites as they went over. We can
do that now without moving parts with beam steering, but the antennas might
still be kind of bulky/awkward.)

~~~
visarga
Why provide ubiquitous internet coverage for a car that depends on electric
charging stations to go anywhere? Remote areas have few charging stations for
Tesla.

------
noahdesu
Perhaps the next step will be selling cloud services from in-orbit data
centers that have no cooling bill.

~~~
Something1234
Although the temperature in space is very low, the ability to dissipate heat
is reduced. So you wouldn't be saving that much, unless my understanding is
wrong.

~~~
metafunctor
I think the heat would be just radiated out passively. Most space hardware,
I'm told, needs to operate at -10°C – 50°C, and withstand continuous
temperature fluctuations between those extremes caused by solar heat.

~~~
Something1234
I thought that space would have a low thermal conductivity, meaning that
things with a high tdp (big iron) would just hold the heat, and not much would
transfer. As I remember from high school physics, radiation is the least
efficient form of heat transfer.

~~~
metafunctor
Correct. That's why I said the way to lose heat in a satellite is by
radiation.

~~~
mnw21cam
Ever heard of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law? This dictates the maximum amount of
energy that can be radiated from an object per unit area for a specific
temperature. The power is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature.

[http://hyperphysics.phy-
astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/stefan.htm...](http://hyperphysics.phy-
astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/stefan.html)

So for example if you have 300W worth of TDP, and a perfect black body
radiator of half a square metre, then the radiator temperature is already
going to hit your maximum CPU temperature of 50C, assuming it is perfectly
shadowed from both the sun and the earth.

~~~
metafunctor
Sure, I have studied these things a couple of decades ago. Now that I read my
comment above I realize it was badly worded. I didn't mean to say all heat
would simply be radiated without posing a problem. I meant that the only way
for a body to lose energy in space is by radiation (without ejecting matter, I
suppose).

------
nthdesign
Will this high number of low-altitude satellites cause a tracking and
collision nightmare for the world's space agencies? Sorry, I recently finished
"Seveneves" and I have space debris anxiety right now.

~~~
duskwuff
Dead satellites and debris in low altitude orbits will experience orbital
decay and burn up in the atmosphere within a few years. High-altitude objects
(e.g, at GEO) are more of a concern.

~~~
flukus
Unless some debris from that gets pushed into higher orbits, then collides
with something else and the process repeats.

------
djloche
Here is the FCC filing: [http://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-
bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/report...](http://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-
bin/ws.exe/prod/ib/forms/reports/swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number/%3D/SATLOA2016111500118&prepare=&column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC/File+Number&utm_content=bufferda647&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer)

------
leonroy
Seems a logical step for SpaceX. One of the biggest challenges facing Mars
colonization would be internet connectivity over such tremendous distances.

A super cheap (relatively) satellite mesh network would be just the thing to
handle Earth to Mars communications.

Getting out of left field here but could imagine the whole Solar System dotted
with these. Add a few sensors to each satellite and you could start detecting
and monitoring some pretty interesting metrics.

~~~
dfox
One of the big problems with solar-system wide internet is latency. Various
protocols assume that there is some upper bound on latency, IP itself assumes
that end-to-end latency is less than about 4 minutes (which is'n true for mars
at least half of the time), with typical TCP/IP stack implementations
requiring significantly less (5 seconds seems to be common requirement for TCP
to meaningfully work, 15 seconds is quoted in RFC 791), things like SSL/TLS
are latency sensitive enough that multi-hop terrestrial wireless connections
can be a problem.

Even when all these technical problems are solved (eg. by replacing the whole
IPv4/6 with something completely different) there still remains the problem of
the user experience completely changing.

------
consto
I love Musk's plans as much as the next Hacker, but he's proposing to
significantly more than double the number of satellites in orbit. I hope he
succeeds.

------
matt_wulfeck
[deleted]

~~~
candiodari
Specs for minimum ping of some internet technologies:

2G (100–400 Kbit/s) 300–1000 ms

3G (0.5–5 Mbit/s) 100–500 ms

4G (1–50 Mbit/s) < 100 ms

ADSL+PPP (0.1-200 Mbit/s) 40 ms

Cable (2 Mbit/s - 1 Gbit/s) 80 ms

Fibre (1 Gbit/s - 100 Gbit/s) 5 ms

Note that this latency is just the transmission delay, it does not send your
data more than a few hundred meters (technically up to 200km for fibre, but
usually the actual distance sent is still hundreds of meters).

After that, you should consider that your data is probably being sent at least
to the capital of your state, or some other large city, before there is any
routing (meaning a packet to your neighbor gets sent to this large city and
back). This distance tends to be more than the distance to LEO and back (but
of course, your wouldn't be sending it straight up to LEO but at an angle, so
the number of satellites makes a large difference. At 4000, it won't be a huge
angle).

So this can still beat every technology except perhaps FTTH, which is hugely
expensive and not widely spread at all. Furthermore, it can beat every mobile
last mile technology.

~~~
ricardobeat
Where are those numbers from? I get a consistent 12ms ping with my cable
internet (200Mbps) to local cloud servers, and have seen as low as 1-4ms on
fiber.

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're made up, and they lack context.

40ms for ADSL... From where to where are you pinging?

Gamers will regularly achieve ~20ms pings to other gamers on the same
continent. Where as pinging around the other side of world (under-sea cables)
is going to add approximately 150-200 ms.

Also FTTH vs. ADSL vs. Cable really shouldn't make much difference with
regards to ping (they're all fibre for the majority of the distance). The main
reason FTTH (or even FTTN) networks tend to have a quicker ping is because
they usually have newer/faster routing hardware running on them.

~~~
candiodari
You should try Australia. Undersea cables definitely adds more than 150-200ms
(but I guess you mean the Atlantic) to everything here.

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
I have tried Australia... it's where I live ;)

~150ms is how much time it takes for my packets to travel the ocean from
Australia to USA.

The UK in total is around 350ms (including lots of land routing). That's
mostly due to non-optimal routing, it shouldn't be quite that slow.

------
mtgx
> “Once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able
> to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low-latency broadband
> services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally,” SpaceX told
> the FCC.

Maybe this will finally provide the competition US ISPs need, while going
around their local monopolies. I hope 1Gbps is actually real, and you won't
get more like 50-100Mbps.

------
brendyn
Can the beams be intercepted, maybe if the signal scatters a bit, or isn't
100% targeted? Do they need to be encrypted between satellites?

------
setq
I don't know how they're going to get 25/35ms hops. If they're using low
orbits to reduce latency, the surface coverage is going to be lower so they're
going to have to mesh them in some way to span large areas. That means routers
and intelligence which means uplink, interlink, downlink hops in both
directions.

600ms here we come again.

~~~
tarikjn
Here is the part you missed: "Optical inter-satellite links permit flexible
routing of traffic on-orbit."

~~~
setq
It's still EM radiation. Takes the same amount of time to propagate between
two points in a vacuum. Line of sight optical in space is going to be very
difficult. Even relativistic effects need to be considered at very high
frequencies as they can cause phase shifts. Managing that on a mesh hurts my
head.

~~~
tarikjn
Thought you meant ground re-routing, I am the one who read you initial comment
too fast, and missed the mesh part. Anyway, what makes you think that routing
at such a low orbit should be significantly slower than ground-routing?

------
shams93
If they can pull this off it would be amazing because the technical challenges
to meet this goal are pretty considerable if you've ever tried satellite
internet in the past it was the worst thing ever. If he can pull this off just
the technical feat alone would be pretty amazing given the challenges
involved.

------
EGreg
OK that's it. This is why I need to build a large company and become rich. So
I can get all kinds of ideas that I have done, instead of listening to people
telling me how hard it would be. They would just get done.

[http://qbix.com/blog](http://qbix.com/blog)

~~~
bbcbasic
I outsource idea creation, execution and spending riches to Elon. Frees me up
for other more important stuff.

------
freyr
Google and Facebook are experimenting with drones, balloons, etc. to deliver
Internet to their next billion customers, who live in impoverished areas with
little network infrastructure. If it works, this seems like a much more
attractive solution.

------
ams6110
The mayor and city council where I live have a big hardon for municipal fiber.
I have this feeling that if and when they ever get it built they will have
spent a ton of money on something that is obsolete on day one.

~~~
Whitestrake
If it's truly gigabit, that will be pretty nice, but I doubt it'll obsolete
your fibre. For satellite internet, "low latency" is not a very difficult
threshold to meet.

------
DonnyV
With this many satellites being launched I hope he has a plan to clean them up
when they're ready to be decommissioned or worse if a couple hundred get
destroyed. aka natural disaster or state sponsored

~~~
Symmetry
The plans for decommissioning them are in the technical document.

[https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2016/11/space...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2016/11/spacex-Technical-Attachment.pdf)

------
cflynnus
How will countries like China that aggressively censor the internet respond?

~~~
pmontra
Outlawing the use of the service?

~~~
Symmetry
Outlawing it for consumers and putting censor-boxes between cell towers/ISPs
and satellite up links.

------
toufka
How do you get an uplink? I generally thought of satellites as providing
pretty good downlink, but high latency because the uplink was through some
alternative network - eg. phone/dsl lines.

~~~
viraptor
It depends on the satellite. The higher they are, the higher the latency /
lower power / lower effective speed. Spacex plans for very low orbit. They're
going for 1,110-1,325 km heights, which should give them the planned <20ms
latency.

Existing Iridium is at 781 km and offers rather slow and expensive, global
connections. But they provide phones, with reasonable-sized antennas:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications)

------
benatkin
There was a plan to do this back in the 90s:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic)

------
_pmf_
We once heard about a company providing cheap fiber connections to major
cities (and providing free WiFi to Africa via hot-air balloons). I think this
goes in the same direction.

------
destitude
Allowing "cell" phones to need only satellite link instead of cell tower would
be huge. Would also finally kill off the nasty cellular companies and their
plans in the.

~~~
anchpop
The receiving station needs to be 2 feet by 2 feet. This won't be going in
your phone

------
chx
Teledesic. SkyBridge. Probably more. Of course the timing is better with
SpaceX having its own rockets but it's curious noone mentions how this have
been attempted and failed.

~~~
schiffern
>it's curious noone mentions how this have been attempted and failed

Musk mentioned Teledesic _the very first day it was announced_ (back in
January 2015).
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=19m25s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=19m25s)

>Things to consider about success? Well, I think it's important to assume that
terrestrial networks will get much better over time.

>You know, one of the mistakes that, say, Teledesic made was not assuming that
terrestrial networks would get much better over time. So we need to make sure
that the system we design is good even taking into account significant
improvements in the terrestrial systems.

>But I do there there are some important differences between what we're doing
and, let's say, Teledesic. In the case of Teledesic they were trying to talk
to phones, and that gets back to that problem of a roof penetrating situation.
And particularly when stuff is coming from space, like if you're in a
skyscraper and it's got to go through 27 floors to reach you, that's not going
to happen. There's nothing that will... you know, short of like a neutrino
[laughter] ...a neutrino phone [laughter].

>In the case of Teledesic there were some fundamental issues there.

------
imw
This should not be privately owned. It should belong to the entire human race.
Otherwise it will be more of the same fallacious drivel that landed us in our
current predicament.

~~~
jnicholasp
If you have a viable model by which the entire human race can plausibly work
together to fund and implement this, the rest of us would love to hear it.

There's plenty that's flawed about capitalism, but the thing is that it works
better than anything else we've so far thought of for providing actual
incentives for people to push the envelope of what's possible and create new
things in economically viable ways. If there were some way to equally
effectively incentivize regulatory oversight - which we manifestly do not have
in existing governmental structures - we'd be in solid shape.

------
Animats
Will the inter-satellite links help? They may have to backhaul everything to a
surveillance monitoring station, as Iridium does. That could bottleneck the
whole system.

------
disordinary
That's a lot of satellites, I wonder if they'll have to outsource to other
companies like RocketLab who are going to do multiple launches per week from
next year.

------
mikeytown2
Thinking about this as a model for the Mars internet and I wonder if there
should also be powerful optics's on the satellite for live video streaming and
weather. Put a reflex lens on a small sensor and you could get something like
a 10,000mm equivalent in a fairly small package. With a lot of satellites you
would want a very narrow field of view in order to have a high ground
resolution. If you can have a utility satellite that does most of what you
need (com & pictures) that seems like a win for mars and earth. Live global
video stream sounds pretty awesome.

~~~
onion2k
_Live global video stream sounds pretty awesome._

Or a privacy nightmare.

~~~
mikeytown2
On mars awesome, earth you are correct

------
pascalxus
I'm excited by the prospect of more competition for Broadband. This could do
the world a lot of good. :)

------
dayaz36
I was disappointed to see Lightsquared go belly up. I'm glad to see another
(more formidable) disrupter in this area!

------
PaulHoule
Will this cause the Kessler syndrome?

~~~
Symmetry
No. First off, these satellites are all in the relatively underpopulated upper
section of low Earth orbit hugging the lower reaches of the inner Van Allen
belt at ~1,000km above the surface. Most satellites in LEO are closer to 300
km up. So there aren't really any non-ElonNet satellites to worry about except
for ones in highly eccentric polar orbits and those are few enough to be
avoidable. They also have fairly aggressive plans to de-orbit them at the end
of their lives which makes me happy.

The big danger for Kessler syndrome right now is all the satellites whizzing
around Earth in polar orbits that all cross over the Earth's poles.

------
seiferteric
How will this be affected by weather?

~~~
viraptor
It won't be affected much.
[http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/spacelink/radiospace.htm](http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/spacelink/radiospace.htm)

We're ok-ish with frequencies up to 20GHz or so. Standard satellite TV is
below that. Spacex filed for bands 10.7 – 12.7 GHz and 14.0 – 14.5 GHz for
user down/up link (Ku band) and higher frequencies (Ka band) for high powered
gateways.

------
trhway
and when Musk puts into orbit gigantic solar panels beaming down the energy i
wonder how the typical anti-solar-energy argument "Sun isn't always shining"
would sound then :)

~~~
zhaphod
You should Google for what Elon thinks about space-based solar energy.

------
elcct
How they are going to log data for NSA and similar agencies?

------
ygaels_armpit
Sometimes, when I get very drunk, I'll watch Warhammer distopian videos about
how it all goes wrong. Is it wrong that I think of Musk as The Emperor, come
to save us?

(Firmly tongue in cheek.)

------
xiaoxubeii
Greate project and benefit the whole world.

------
nithril
And the infosphere will become reality

------
zump
Do these positions also require ITAR?

------
flawedluck
Yes, yes, yes!

This is how progress is done.

------
colo12
what happen if this satellite is hacked?

------
davesque
And fair pricing?

------
thesimpsons1022
maybe they blew up facebook rocket because of competition

~~~
slackoverflower
LOL

------
edw
Try reading to the third paragraph before asking your "honest question":

> SpaceX wants to launch 4,425 satellites into low-Earth orbits, with
> altitudes ranging from 715 miles to 823 miles. By contrast, the existing
> HughesNet satellite network has an altitude of 22,000 miles.

That's about — basic arithmetic alert! — three percent the distance for the
SpaceX satellites compared to existing geosynchronous ones.

------
mordrax
Skynet

------
pmarreck
And hella pingtimes ;)

~~~
arcticfox
> SpaceX expects its own latencies to be between 25 and 35ms

Unless you're doubting their math, that's not a high ping at all. In fact,
that's a pretty amazing improvement given that existing satellite internet is
>500ms. I didn't realize the difference between LEO and geostationary was that
high.

~~~
gozur88
Geostationary birds are in a 42K+ km orbit. That's almost a quarter second
round trip just taking the speed of light into account and assuming the
satellite is directly overhead.

Back when international phone circuits were mostly satellite, you'd find
yourself continually starting a sentence at the same time as the other party
because that short delay messed up the flow of the conversation.

~~~
rconti
Shiii now that just happens on every conference call and WebEx on the planet!

It is amazing how quickly tech has changed. In about 1991, my father
telephoned us from the North Slope of Alaska, via satellite link. The RTT must
have been at least 2 seconds.

20 years later I rolled into Prudhoe Bay on a motorbike, looked down at my
iPhone, and saw I had 5 bars of 3G service, no satellite delay. And enough
free wifi bandwidth to stream Top Gear.

------
fluxic
Didn't SpaceX blow up the rocket carrying Facebook's Internet.org satellites
(which more or less were doing _exactly_ this)?

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/a-spacex-
falcon-9-rocket-j...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/a-spacex-
falcon-9-rocket-just-exploded-at-cape-canaveral/)

~~~
teraflop
"Doing exactly this" is kind of a misrepresentation.

SpaceX is launching a fleet of low-earth-orbit satellites. The rocket that
blew up was carrying a single satellite, owned/built by an Israeli company and
destined for geostationary orbit; Facebook had signed an agreement to lease
part of that satellite's capacity for several years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos-6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos-6)

~~~
ricardobeat
This is odd. I'm pretty sure I read this exact pair of comments in the other
thread earlier today... is HN moving things around with a fresh time stamp?

EDIT: whew, I'm not going crazy yet:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973474](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973474)

------
messel
_update_

23Gbps * 4425 satellites is

\- 100k simultaneous 1Gbps users

\- 1 million 100Mbps users

\- 10 million 10Mbps users

Doesn't seem like much of a subscriber base to recoup a fraction of the costs

(My) Estimated cost for satellites and ground stations: 50-100+ billion,
maintenance cost: few billion/year?

Might I propose instead genetically modifying insects to pass photosynthetic
light signals in massive swarms controlled by ground stations (just for cool
visuals) and spend the rest on ground microwave towers or anything else.

