
Astranis emerges from stealth with new satellite tech for connecting the world - sethbannon
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/01/astranis-emerges-from-stealth-with-a-new-satellite-technology-for-connecting-the-world/
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nkoren
Meta-comment: I haven't seen this noted elsewhere, but there's been a very
sudden and significant acceleration in the pace of space launch. So far there
have been 22 launches this year, which is about double the pace of last year.
And there are more than 180 launches planned -- again, double the pace of last
year. The most launches ever to occur in a single year was 139 -- during the
height of the space race in 1967. Although many of this year's planned
launches will undoubtedly slip into next year, we're quite likely to set an
all-time record:

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

Also notable is the fact that of the 22 launches this year, three have been
the debuts of entirely new vehicles, two of which were entirely privately
funded. There are likely to be several more private launch vehicle debuts this
year.

This is a really significant shift for what had long been a moribund industry,
and a lot of complementary innovations will be able to piggyback onto this
momentum.

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wastedhours
Really exciting, but have the regulations of what "stuff" we're putting
up/leaving up there moved as fast?

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nkoren
For the most part, yes. Changes in the regulatory system have been one of the
critical enablers for this during the last decade. The key area where the
regulations _haven 't_ particularly kept pace is in extra-terrestrial property
rights.

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gedmark
Hi everyone, I’m one of the cofounders of Astranis (YC W16). Thanks for taking
the time to read about what we’re doing and happy answer any questions.

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walrus01
Satellite earth station engineer view:

I'm interested in what the total system gain, EIRP and power looks like in an
Astranis spot beam from geostationary, as compared to a current-generation
4000 to 6500 kilogram geostationary satellite with Ku and Ka band spot beams.

I am optimistic but also skeptical. The size and power of the satellite will
influence what the size of VSAT terminals needs to be, and also the earth
stations/major teleports. The example size of the satellite shown in the URL
is so much smaller than current geostationary satellites that I don't see how
the Tx power from each transponder will be anywhere near the power on a much
bigger, costlier satellite.

Let's say for example I have put together from industry standard components, a
3.0 meter compact cassegrain Ku-band antenna in a remote part of Nepal, with a
40W BUC and a relatively recent Comtech EF Data modem. Are you planning on
selling 1:1 dedicated capacity SCPC (and MCPC) type transponder kHz on a
monthly basis? Or are you planning on standardizing on your own type of VSAT
hardware terminal in bulk and selling contended access only?

Where do you see your value proposition for high capacity IP trunk links as
compared to an ISP buying a 2 x 1.8m dish o3b terminal, and dedicated capacity
through o3b? What will your $/Mbps rate look like compared to o3b with a
monthly spend of 2500 or 3500 dollars?

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gedmark
Hey there, I think you got the gist of it in a different part of this thread
(each of our spacecraft has a fraction of the number of transponders as a
typical large GEO). But if you'd like to discuss further I'd be happy to chat
offline. Do you have an email address or other way that I could contact you?

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walrus01
I understand you are probably at a very early stage of product design for the
satellite capabilities, so you are cagey and don't want to make any definitive
statements of technical specs... But I'd rather not move the discussion off
forum into private email when the other people reading this thread could
possibly benefit from answers to my specific questions.

I am kind of concerned that your answers to others' questions in this thread
are vague and noncommittal.

One more question. Do you intend to:

(A) lease raw transponder kHz capacity to third party end users and ISPs (eg:
the ku spot beams I can get on Russian satellites covering Afghanistan and a
check for $4500 USD a month,

or (b) is your business plan to operate both the satellites and the earth
stations, and resell fully packaged VSAT services directly to end users?

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nikanj
(C) Trust investors don't know enough physics to question the business plan.

See also: Theranos, uBeam, etc.

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walrus01
I just took a look at the currently frontpaged "Who's hiring" thread. Lots of
software development, of course.

Hardware startups are costly and _hard_.

Now do it on super hard mode and build a thing that has to go 36,000+ km away,
never to be seen or touched by a human, and make it super reliable.

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guhcampos
I don't see the novelty on this at all. Geostationary satellites are pretty
much the standard for satellite internet for years. I had a broadband
connection like that on my first job, 15 years ago.

It's off course very welcome if they can get higher transfer speeds, cleaner
and lighter satellites and newer technologies to the mix, but that's it. The
biggest problem with satellite internet: the latency, is not going to be
solved.

Which is fine, I must say, since they are in the business of bringing Internet
to where there's none. But these new Internet users will arrive without access
to the Internet's most incredible features, such as real time voice and video
communication, interactive website experiences and online gamming.

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black_puppydog
Funny how you say those are the most incredible features. For me (and
obviously this is personal preference, so please don't take offence) these are
"nice to have" features. What I'm really after are (and have been, since I
kinda grew out of FPS games)

* google/$INFORMATION

* Wikipedia

* podcasts

* spotify/torrent/$MUSIC

* blogs/twitter

* youtube/netflix/torrent/$VIDEO

pretty much in that order. None of which would be a problem on satellite
(albeit less convenient) but would make a day/night difference for me.

As for the "interactive website experiences", that's usually the part I like
the least about a website, which is why I use uMatrix most of the time, making
pages more readable (or, depending on the JS affinity of the people making
them, completely unreadable)

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nappy
Isn't latency a major issue for connectivity with satellites in geosynchronous
orbit? I'm curious what their approach is here, either technically or what
customer use cases they are targeting.

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gedmark
The distance to GEO does add some latency due to the distance, that’s the main
trade off. What we found in studying this problem for a long time was that 95%
of internet traffic isn’t latency sensitive— CDN traffic, video streaming,
audio streaming, file downloads, social media posts, etc. The bandwidth crunch
is a huge problem to solve but we realized there is low hanging fruit here
that we can go after by putting satellites one at a time in GEO and putting a
dent in it immediately. vs LEO constellations where you have to put up hundred
of satellites (at a cost of billions of dollars) just to get started.

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PaulHoule
I am skeptical of that analysis.

I have worked over ssh over internet connections with satellite-class latency
and I can say it is painful. (Emacs shell mode can help)

You probably think that 'the web' is a high latency application. It probably
should be, and maybe it was in 2000. Since then, web developers have gotten
into the habit of using AJAX indiscriminately, plus they feel pressured to add
features such as customized fonts, advertising, third party tracking, etc. I
am not sure if CDN is really a net positive when a web site might need to do
30 DNS lookups because it uses 30 CDNs. It just takes one of those lookups to
be slow to obliterate the savings from the CDN. CDNs might help with the
median, even the average load time, but I am not sure they help the 95% load
time which is what causes customer pain.

Add up all those round trips and the overhead of access control (maybe those
patents on slotted ALOHA for satellite applications have expired by now) and
you are talking upwards of 0.5 sec and it doesn't take many round trips for
that 0.5 sec to turn into 5 to 10 seconds.

Worst thing is that people who are developing locally or from places with fast
connections to the data center will think these apps are really fast.

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shaklee3
SSH is not a typical use case. He said 90-95% of traffic isn't latency
sensitive, and yours isn't in the majority.

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mmmBacon
How is 10Gb/s achieved and how reliable is that BW in the presence weather?
What is the practical coverage area of the satellite and what would the
typical user BW be on a clear day? How would the BW change on a rainy day?

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consciouskernel
There's a reason that no other company tries to use geosynchronous orbit.

Stationary orbit is at a distance of 35800 km above sea level, which implies a
one way latency of 110 ms based off the speed of light. Since any request from
a user requires a total of 2 round way trips (one for request, one for
response), the minimum latency for a request is 440 ms.

Avg latency with fiber is something like 30-60 ms, so we can assume an average
request with Astranis will have ~500 latency.

Most modern webpages will not be able to support such latency. Astranis _will_
need to essentially cache webpages on demand and deliver them to the end user
as a fully rendered page, which will introduce security headaches.

I don't see why Astranis chose this vs a lower orbit.

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wmf
No other company... like HughesNet, ViaSat, Inmarsat, Intelsat, etc. Maybe you
were led astray by this terrible TechCrunch article.

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jmagoon
Seriously. Ever used internet on an airplane? You're using one of those
companies geostationary satellites. The article is ridiculous.

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blackguardx
Not necessarily. GoGo Inflight uses ground links for domestic US flights.

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bmcooley
And they're being dropped in favor of geosynchronous providers.

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blackguardx
I don't know much about their market. A friend of mine works there though, and
he said they are growing.

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shaklee3
They're not. They lost American, and they're losing market share quickly.

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tomrod
I'm excited for a (one day?) IPO!

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CamperBob2
Article is completely unreadable on a phone, due to a giant junk-quality ad
that elbows out the content. Anyone got a better link?

