
Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space - gwallens
http://www.wsj.com/articles/race-is-on-to-deliver-internet-from-space-1455670439
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ryandvm
Slow race. Motorola tried this once already and failed with the Iridium
Constellation in the 90s.

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

The venture went bankrupt and Motorola was actually on the verge of burning
them up in the atmosphere when the Pentagon stepped in:
[http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119255](http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119255)

Another interesting thing about the Iridium Constellation is that the
satellites have an unusual arrangement of large, flat antennae. This, along
with detailed data about their position and orientation means that they create
very predictable flares of reflected sunlight that are quite visible from
Earth. You can usually a fairly bright flare every couple days:

[http://heavens-above.com/IridiumFlares.aspx](http://heavens-
above.com/IridiumFlares.aspx)

~~~
cmsmith
The costs of building and launching small satellites has dropped significantly
since the 90s. People are also traveling more and demanding more connectivity,
so it seems that Iridium may have just been a bit to early to the game.

~~~
mikeash
Early, or late. One of Iridium's problems was that by the time they actually
became operational, a huge chunk of their potential customer base had been
eaten up by terrestrial cellular phones. The number of people who needed
something more than a cell phone was a lot smaller in 1998 than it was in
1987.

Iridium service was also unbelievably expensive and not all that useful. (For
that matter, still is.) If you had a choice between Iridium and a cell phone,
the cell phone won every time. Iridium was a product for those with no other
choice. If they had come in earlier, they might have had enough people with no
other choice to make it. Later, and they might have been able to offer
something that could actually compete with terrestrial services. As it was,
their timing ended up being really bad.

~~~
seanp2k2
Interestingly, they're still popular with some very adventurous groups, e.g.
Round-the-world sailors, motorcyclists going through remote locations,
climbers and hikers in remote places / foreign countries, etc.

Very useful if it's the only thing that will work.

~~~
mikeash
Exactly. For some cases it's an amazing service. It just wasn't enough to
sustain a company that had to spend $5 billion up front to get things started.
Once that got discharged in bankruptcy, it managed to do OK.

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oxalo
Has anyone figured out how to deal with the issue of latency for space-based
internet? Things like online games and video calls will just not work if the
traffic hits space. I could see an ISP offering a service where traffic that
needs low latency gets routed on land, while web pages and the like get routed
through space. At a cost, of course.

~~~
SEJeff
All of the past versions of "space internet" have been geostationary orbit,
which is around 25,000-26,000 miles above sea level. The new iterations, such
as SpaceX's idea, is to use many many more microsats and put them in LEO. Low
Earth Orbit is closer to 750 or so miles above sea level. Since the ping
latency of geostationary sat internet is around 500-700ms, it would be
massively less for low earth orbit.

The two technical issues I'm aware of are the sheer number of satellites
required for LEO internet, and the fact that you can't point your dish at a
single place. There would need to be some sort of actuator or omnidirectional
receiver for tracking to satellites at every client site. This makes the
installation a bit trickier, but the ping times should be entirely reasonable
provided someone gets the funding to put hundreds of satellites into an
internet constellation.

~~~
adamkaz
As someone who has worked in this industry and seen a lot of these ideas fail
first hand - another big challenge is going to be ground entry points. For GEO
satellites, each satellite serves many customers and may only need maybe 2-3
(for redundancy) groundstations.

For LEO constellations, each satellite can only see a small portion of
customers at any time and will quickly move out of coverage of a single point
on the earth, requiring many groundstations.

Alternatively, the satellites can crosslink and eventually hit a
groundstation, but these handoffs and trip lengths quickly get back to the
ping latencies of making a single trip to GEO.

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digler999
What I think they should do (not sure of what this is called ) is UDP-
broadcast "caches" of popular sites such as reddit, (hacker news :) ) wsj,
etc, continuously.

I'm willing to bet that a very large portion of people only access a
relatively small number of sites. If they streamed a cache this way, it could
probably cut their bandwidth substantially.

~~~
seiferteric
multicast

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bahmboo
ViaSat works great. Yes there is actual packet latency but practically
speaking voip/videochat just works. Download speeds are fast, absolutely no
problem watching streaming HD.

The biggest problem is that you get a fixed amount of traffic. They are
starting to come around to throttling once you go over, but so far not for
everyone.

Edit: need to amend \- As a technology it works great. \- I use it at a remote
cabin and it's fine for weekend use. \- Getting the Internet in middle of
nowhere, yes+++. \- If I had to live with it for day to day use I would not be
happy because of the traffic limits.

tl;dr geo sync internet without traffic limits would get the customer 99%
where they wanna be.

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andrewtbham
Any thoughts on how to get around the paywall?

The google search trick isn't working for me.

~~~
neeljpatel
[http://canmua.net/world/race-is-on-to-deliver-internet-
from-...](http://canmua.net/world/race-is-on-to-deliver-internet-from-
space-434318.html)

------
tarnquil
I wonder whether China would consider any internet-supplying geosynchronous
satellites over their borders as an affront to their sovereignty. Satellite
internet (without a land-based backhaul) is surely the most effective way of
subverting the Great Firewall.

~~~
mikeash
They will probably be able to convince the service providers not to offer
service within China. Flying the satellites over the country is fine, various
international treaties take care of that, but once you start actually doing
business in the country (even at a remove) then you'll run into trouble. It
would be interesting for an outside company with no ties to China to just say
"screw it" and ignore Chinese demands for restrictions or bans, but no company
large enough to provide this service would start a fight like that in the
first place.

You can see this at work already with existing services. Random example, check
out the satellite coverage map here:

[https://www.united.com/web/en-
US/content/travel/inflight/wif...](https://www.united.com/web/en-
US/content/travel/inflight/wifi/default.aspx)

Note the distinctly China-shaped hole in East Asia.

~~~
mschuster91
> Note the distinctly China-shaped hole in East Asia.

Quote: "Please note: Satellite coverage may experience outages for reasons
such as government regulations"

I guess this is intentional because China may retaliate against violators
(e.g. prohibit fly-overs).

