SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Overall, it's a hard problem.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trump...
On the internet you need to know the receiver and sender of a message, otherwise you have no idea where it's going and the best method to from there is to use very inefficient methods.
HTTPS and IMAP over TLS already achieve MITM-resistance, as long as you verify the certificate.
With TLS (and SSL to some extend) you can't snoop on and censor data, not without compromising the sender (assuming you trust their certificate explicitly).
I’ve had this occur quite a few times now that 8.8.8.8 (yes, verified with DNSSEC to be the real one) and DNS servers of US ISPs returned different IPs than the authoritative nameservers, and the returned IPs always showing a neat "The FBI has seized this property due to piracy" link.
That's a pretty serious statement, the government threatens infrastructure providers all the time but I haven't heard of the FBI requiring ISP level censorship of DNS.
> I’ve had this occur quite a few times now that 8.8.8.8 (yes, verified with DNSSEC to be the real one) and DNS servers of US ISPs returned different IPs than the authoritative nameservers
Can you give some examples?
It’s not unheard of the FBI just storming into data centers, seizing entire racks, just because some of the systems in them might be connected to piracy sites.
> Can you give some examples?
I’m sorry, I know this will undermine the credibility of the statement, but I won’t link to content where linking to it can potentially be a crime on here. Sorry.
Indeed, they regularly force cooperation by telling the accused that they will seize their hardware for forensic analysis and then drop them to the bottom of the priority queue.
> I’m sorry, I know this will undermine the credibility of the statement, but I won’t link to content where linking to it can potentially be a crime on here. Sorry.
I think you misunderstand how the law works (at least in the US). I suggest you read this guide put out by the ACLU[0].
[0] https://www.eff.org/wp/iaal-what-peer-peer-developers-need-k...
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/washingtondc/press-release...
See http://domainincite.com/2766-icann-had-no-role-in-seizing-to... for an example
The authoritative nameservers still return the original IP, I can still access the site from anywhere in the world except the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En...
Definitely an interesting idea. Since SpaceX will control the pipe and terminal they could use some of the bandwidth to prime a cache in the terminal with content they know will be commonly accessed.
HTTPS makes doing this transparently difficult, though.
> Home Internet customers would receive a "low-profile user terminal that is easy to mount and operate on walls or roofs."
You can place your firewall between your LAN and the antenna.
However there could be devices with their own antenna, much like iridium phones. I googled for them and they are not cheap. Mass production could shave off a zero and bring them under $50. Maybe.
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.
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.
Er... yes, I basically deeply disagree with all of your points :-)
I didn't vote for Trump, so it's not like I was supporting him, but damn Hillary voters were so ignorant of her history. They were so mad that Trump didn't want to welcome more Syrian refugees. How many of them knew Hillary literally created the Syrian refugee crisis in a failed attempt at a coup? Not a single one I talked to.
There is no evidence that Clinton backed or supported a coup in Syria. The US did support elements of a popular uprising in Syria during the Arab spring, and then provided and continues to provide military support to Anti-Assad factions after Assad viciously cracked down on the uprising. A coup d'etat is a very different beast.
The refugee crisis is a result of Assad and Anti-Assad factions acting to change the demographics of Syria via ethnic cleansing. It is unclear, but seems unlikely to me, that the refugee crisis would be lower if the Anti-Assad factions had gotten less support from the US. The refugee crisis would have just happened over a shorter period of time. To avoid increased US involvement Assad regulated his behavior somewhat (see Chemical Weapons controversy). It seems likely to me that the US by providing limited support to Anti-Assad factions acted to limit/control military support given by gulf nations to the more extreme Anti-Assad elements. Such support would likely have made the more radical elements of the civil war much more powerful and likely increased the flow of refugees.
US involvement in the Syrian Civil War did in certain circumstances limit the refugee crisis and has allowed refugees to return home. For example the US/YPG defense of Sinjar Mountain in N. Iraq allowed refugees to escape genocide, then with the recapture of Sinjar, allowed refugees to return home. Another example would be halting of the Islamic State's campaign in N. Syria, which if continued would have generated hundreds of thousands of refugees. Not only was the Islamic State's advance halted, but it has been rolled back significantly with large numbers of refugees returning home. This would not have been possible without US support to the factions (YPG/SDF) fighting the Islamic State.
We can debate the exact nature of US responsibility for the refugee crisis, but (1). any direct responsibility for foreign policy at this level is with the President not the Secretary of State, (2). there was no coup d'etat attempted or otherwise in Syria.
http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-i...
>Srian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war.
2. As another poster noted, ISIS started in Iraq not Syria.
3. The Syrian factions which the US supported are opposed to ISIS and fought several early battles against them. Some US allies in the region sent aid to ISIS, but the US worked to limit and stop that aid.
4. The Pentagon is not backing Assad and still provides aid to anti-Assad groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Syria#Parami...
Wikileaks has reported that the US government has been covertly funding the Syrian opposition since 2006.[40]
2. Yes, ISIS started in Iraq, by not primarily by Iraqis. As I said, the Syrians who had been trained, armed, and radicalized by the CIA fled to Iraq when the coup failed and started ISIS.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isi... A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.
3. See #2 above, we clearly funded and armed what became ISIS.
4. You're right on this one. The reports of the two parties backed by the CIA and Pentagon fighting each other had me mixed up. That doesn't change the rest of the stuff above for which I've provided citations.
2. What happened in Syria is a civil war not a Coup d'etat.
>"the Syrians who had been trained, armed, and radicalized by the CIA fled to Iraq when the coup failed and started ISIS."
The civil war was going well for the rebels all throughout the rise of ISIS, so I'm curious when you thought this was happening? All sources agree that ISIS was formed in Iraq and then infiltrated into Syria.
"the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups - they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state”"
Lets parse that carefully as it is deceptively written:
* "the US and its allies" that is, the US had one policy and its allies had another, but the author chooses to group them together to blame the US for activities undertaken by US allies which the US actively opposed and ran counter to US interests.
* "supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups" while true the US was going out of its way to arm the less extreme elements (unlike some US allies).
* "they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state”", that is, a DIA intelligence assessment considered the possibility that the Sunni population of Iraq might break away from Iraq. They didn't support this possibility, just said it could happen (and it did). This state need not be "The Islamic State", but author choose the name "Islamic State" to make it sound like the US supported the Islamic State.
The author of that piece is being willfully misleading. Note that it was published in the Opinion section of the guardian. Even with all that the author supports my claim that ISIS started in Iraq.
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.
the person you're replying to didn't make such a strong claim.
"If the internet stopped people from falling for bullshit, "post-truth" would not have been 'word of the year' for 2016."
which is making a general claim. Whereas now you're implying that you weren't making a general claim about "stopped".
If you 'stop' corruption, it doesn't mean you 100% eliminate corruption. A journalist can 'stop people in the street' to talk to them, but that doesn't mean that they stand still rather that walk-and-talk. If a parent is able to 'stop' a kid sleeping badly, it doesn't mean their kid never again sleeps badly, just that the incidence is considerably reduced. Even a traffic 'stop' sign doesn't completely stop people all the time. 'Stop', when applied to human behaviour, is not the fucking same as corking a bloody wine bottle.
Let me put it another way: in your subsequent replies you are implying that what your original claim meant was "If the internet stopped even just a few people from falling for bullshit, "post-truth" would not have been 'word of the year' for 2016." which is clearly not what you meant (and, BTW, would clearly be a false statement) - hence the equivocation.
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.
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.
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).
Maybe, but if so it's not like a phase of the moon, which changes on its own. This phase will only pass if we do something to make that happen.
... this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists [and everyone else] set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.
I think you will find the opposite is true. You have completely out-of-touch elitists who think everything is great, and then you have people who voted for Trump who are extremely aware of the reality of the situation.
The people who voted for Trump had to actually seek out the truth because they realised that would they were being fed by the mainstream media and social media didn't match their reality.
The people who voted for Hillary just continued to be fed information. The end result is the Trump voters became extremely knowledgeable about all of the various issues, and Hillary voters look like products of brainwashing.
For example, Hillary voters would see the cnn article about how citibank predicted the sharemarket would drop 3% if Trump was elected and just take it at face value. Trump supporters know that citibank has strong ties to the democrats to the point that they selected the Obama team and can see that CNN is merely a propaganda arm of the clinton foundation.
Hillary was under investigation from the FBI at the time that article was written and their logic for suggesting the 3% decrease was supposedly that at some point Trump wasn't the favourite and so it would be an unexpected result. So being an unexpected result will cause a 3% drop, but not your president being under investigation by the FBI.
That is just one example of literally hundreds of examples. Hillary voters never bothered to seek the truth.
This doesn't harm anyone. People follow and believe in all kinds of unreal things - The Pope tweets, Dalai Lama has a website... at least there's not going to be Flat Earth terrorism.
Consider that for many people on Earth, getting access to the internet takes them from the knowledge shared amongst the members of their community to the collective knowledge of world. That's quite a leap, and I'd argue that having to read flat-earther nonsense once in a while is a price well worth the benefit
Some believe that fringe information was a major factor in the U.S. Presidential election. A leader of a fringe community is the chief political advisor to the most powerful person in the world-elect.
Something should be both extreme ideologically, and a relatively small minority to be "fringe".
Mostly, interestingly enough, the premise of these contrasting groups and opinions are actually based on the idea that some third party external group is imposing on their freedoms and well-beings. Romans laid continents under their taxing rule by fear mongering, nothing new and you hardly need a free and open digital global communication network for that.
My personal belief here is that these developments will self adjust. Unfortunately through great friction and pain. Any open society that eventually submerges into the rule of a "Trump/Bannon" group, will eventually self destruct slowly. If the core premise of a society is fear mongering of a third party external group (Jews, Muslims, Republicans, West-, East-, Capitalist-, Communist.. ) the core problem is that you're trying to fix your head ache by shooting yourself in the foot. And then the next foot from that..
Power is profoundly addictive and corrupting. If you've been a failure up to now, and suddenly you're in power for blaming some low influence group, that blame will only grow stronger and stronger with the failures of making a positive impact for the desperate people that put you in power.
I would argue that a small taste of power corrupted the left.
When they started censoring conservative views, banning conservative speakers on campuses, "no platforming", they were not defending freedom.
The comment I responded to, however, was partisan and I was simply adding balance.
* Subscribe to The Economist and read it weekly. It's designed for busy people but has real, sophisticated information and exceptional breath of coverage. It's a bit right of center, but not ideological (except their obsession with the free market solving every problem), and very credible.
* Read this news summary daily. It's a bit left-of-center, but again non-ideological and the coverage is exceptional.
https://www.justsecurity.org/category/news/
* Check the headlines at the NY Times. They are criticized by all sides for being biased against them, an excellent sign of good journalism. Their editorials are left-of-center, but ignore them and read the news:
In about 20 min a day, you'll be better informed than almost everyone you know. Final tip: Skip all editorials, columns, talk radio - 99% is either uninformed, intended to twist things and manipulate you, or both.
Perhaps corporate media has defined the Overton window for so long that we've come to believe that they speak for the mainstream, even when millions of people send a clear message that that is not true.
> Perhaps corporate media ...
There is so much confusion packed into that statement, it's hard to respond. All I'll say is that the election was in no way a mandate for racism. And why would anyone want to argue that it was?
Bannon was Trump's adviser during his campaign and even before that, Trump's statements were consistent with Bannon's and Breitbart's. Whether those statements were racist is a debate that's been held a thousand times and is not worth rehashing.
> Whether those statements were racist is a debate that's been held a thousand times
I disagree; it is not a matter of debate. In fact, I've never heard anyone but the most dedicated apologists say otherwise. The racists generally have said that they don't care, which I believe.
> Those members of a group or political party holding extreme views
Then that's simply a subjective term, as is "extreme". By that definition "fringe" expresses nothing more than your opinion.
Thus, when you say Trump and Lenin were fringe, all you've done is clarify where you stand politically.
Yes, the internet allows people to be mis-informed if they don't care for being informed. Still, not being connected at all is basically equivalent to not being able to connect meaningfully with modern civilization. I literally don't know anyone who isn't connected to the internet. It's simply a prerequisite for modernity.
(Does anyone have a map?)
Very true, but not relevant: as a rebutal to the statement that "you're overstating the effect of fringe communities", they do have a point.
Yes, but Trump won despite the fringe information against him.
See why these political posts are vapid garbage that do nothing to add to the conversation?
But that is not the only factor. There are probably a dozen stewing issues and Trump managed to ride the coat tails of quite a few of them, not least of which is some people who didn't want Trump president couldn't be bothered to show up and vote. There's a roughly 8 million voter gap between 2012 and 2016.
Edit: And there were (are?) "code words" for getting referrals. Some have even become everyday slang. But I've forgotten the specifics.
Anyway, the Trump team has now somehow made European-Americans more racist and xenophobic. They just did an outstanding job with the Wallace strategy. Wallace was appealing to blue-collar union members in the North. But now unions are largely gone, and that demographic is either unemployed, or earning minimum wage. And arguably, that has exacerbated racism and xenophobia. Pushback against globalization and the concentration of wealth.
Most likely if we had compulsory voting in this country, most of the plurality, who did not show up to vote, would not have voted for Trump. It may have been a scant amount, but very clearly the more eligible voters vote, it favors Democrat candidates.
I'd absolutely call it fringe. It has a very tiny base of support. It is also on the political extreme - far to the right of the mainstream.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/18/10...
Outside the racism, I agree that he is very conservative, in a way that used to be fringe, which has little support now, but is widely accepted as normalized. That, I strongly feel, is a serious error by us, the public.
Now that everyone can communicate on the same system, the next issue to figure out is how to pick up the good bits and filter out the bad bits. But consolidating all that information (onto the internet) is a great way to start doing that.
The long-term view, spanning decades or hundreds of years, overwhelmingly argues in favor of information availability leading to progress. That progress doesn't happen all at once, gains are not always evenly distributed, it's gradual and eventual. All great leaps of human progress have directly coincided with immense increases in information availability. I'd be very skeptical that that is a coincidence. Ignorance is gradually boxed into smaller and smaller enclaves when confronted with unfettered access to information. The only way to truly retard that progression is through violence and that is always temporary.
What other explanation is there for seven billion people having such a drastically higher median when it comes to knowledge, versus what the median was 500 or 5,000 years ago? 500 years ago, the median on the planet was extraordinarily ignorant compared to today.
You can see ignorance collapse rapidly when confronted with information. Countries as varied as China, Vietnam, Romania, Colombia, Brazil, etc. have been or actively are incredible demonstrations of it in action the past few decades. Cuba will demonstrate it once again over the next ~20 years. China's last 30 years may be the single largest / greatest leap in history, going from a median that was hyper ignorant and impoverished agrarian to quickly closing the gap with the global median. That China leap directly coincided with a vast increase in knowledge availability for the median (even if state censorship is still present, the education level available to their median has skyrocketed).
Yes, it's true that underground utilities and services can be produced that skirt legal responsibility for a good while, but without the legal ability to come into the sunlight and flourish, such things will always remain incomplete, spotty, and hard to come by, always denied a full resource allocation and full publicity profile.
We need to update copyright to something that's sane for the digital age, something that doesn't pretend like a RAM representation that exists for microseconds represents millions of dollars in damages. We need to update patent law to something that protects small innovators without becoming a club that can bludgeon competitors who are playing fair. We need to repeal and replace the Soviet-era CFAA and its copycats, which still govern most network access and allow tech monopolists to take your data, and thus your life (calendars, emails, photos, phone numbers...), hostage.
The true potential of a free internet remains unseen, stifled by greedy monopolists hiding behind their hypocritical rhetoric about freedom and openness while they prosecute and harass anyone that tries to ensure you can keep control of your most personal records.
With Steve Bannon he has the best man on board to do exactly that /without even alienating his followers/, at least the loyal ones. We might see a propaganda alliance between the White House and far-right media, so it's not at all clear to me that Trump will be destroyed by fake news.
I've yet to see any evidence that it overall makes the world a worse place.
People give examples like immigration but leave out things like gay marriage acceptance which would have been unheard of pre-internet. Drug reform seems to be improving.
> Knowledge does not seem to be enough.
Correct, access to knowledge is useless, but the internet is more.
It's access to incredible AI machines and software, like Googles search engine. The ability for Uber to work. For free phone calls.
So I do think we'll have issues controlling that false information doesn't spread faster and wider on the Internet then true info.
> I've yet to see any evidence that it overall makes the world a worse place.
Donald Trump, potentially. We'll see.
> People give examples like immigration
They don't know what they're talking about. Migration isn't even a particularly modern phenomenon.
I'm not sure discussions of a free and equal internet approach something that will be a net good.
I think there's ample evidence that the internet is really most similar to TV.
Come on... It was very fine to say this 15 to 20 years ago, but now we have had the ability to see what Internet evolved into during the last 5 or 10 years, and it has definitely not gone towards the achievement of this dream, but in a completely different direction.
>The Internet is a perfect reflection of the world at large. It has everything in it except homeless people and that's only because they can't afford the monthly hookup charge. The Internet is scary to people because it TRULY makes everyone equal. All the people who are invisible in the normal world (the world run by the rich and powerful), all those people you can dismiss on the street as powerless and harmless -- ALL THOSE PEOPLE are now in your face. You can feel their hot breath on the Internet.
>It's called "humanity."
---
Maybe you feel like comments have gotten too stupid or that too many people have backwards beliefs. Maybe you feel like that goes against the notion of a "progressive planet". But the way I see it you're absolutely wrong.
Also, the word "equal" deserves some attention. There's "equally powerful" and "equally wise". The two are not necessarily related and today's internet does not guarantee either. While the internet levelled the playing field for a while (at least for those who had access to the field), things are getting back to their "natural" state of "whoever has the gold (or power) makes the rules". Venting one's beliefs on the internet (whether wise or moronic) is possible for everyone but the amount of impact it will make will usually depend on the amount of resources one has.
This is so false I don't understand why you would write it. I listen to political commentary from this guy on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/Styxhexenhammer666/videos and he's just some guy with a camera and a microphone and he reaches thousands of people. More than ever are people able to share their beliefs and reach a huge number of people with little to no cost.
This is what scares the powerful and rich, and this is what makes everyone equal.
As to the YouTube example you gave: I'm not saying the Internet didn't open more possibilities to the individual, but reaching thousands of people is still a long way from being able to make a difference and is not a threat to anyone. By the way, that channel is not available in my country so if he wants more listeners perhaps he should let his information be more free...
I'd much prefer if local people become the experts through knowledge sharing / gathering than bringing in expensive consultants to train them and tell them how to do it. The most vulnerable places often slip through the cracks.
Smart phones are dominating these communities, not the latest and greatest but they are definitely starting to come online. By the way, there are plenty of videos to understand the different solutions on offer for clean drinking water. Email and VOIP allows community leaders get expert advice without leaving their shelters.
By empowering the community to chose and implement a solution most appropriate for them they will be able to achieve much more in the future. Teach a man or woman to fish and all that jazz...
And, increasingly, I'm not so sure the internet has been a good thing all told.
If I had Wikipedia and Khan Academy back then, it would have been life changing. I would have probably made very different decisions than I made
Access to information does not mean consumption. If you give access to internet to 100 people, 99 of them will use it for Facebook or Porn.
1. If you have enough motivation, learning about anything was already possible even before Internet (local libraries and resources)
2. If you don't have enough motivation, then providing access to Internet, is not going to make a difference.
So the key to a smarter planet does not lie in providing internet. But in installing enough motivation, imagination and a quest for knowledge and free thought in younger generations.
But sadly, the Internet of today seem to work against this by providing perpetual distraction and addictive/useless chitchat across the world......
You misspelled 100.
Still, I wouldn't want to go back to pre-internet era. With all the crap, it seems the bottom line is still a gain to humanity and hopefully that gain will increase with time.
And that's how technology works. While they are a lot of naive people around, it has been that way ever since, and humans would use what they got at their disposal to do what humans do.
Views like this created the internet and wikipedia and we need more of them. Wikipedia is still going strong thanks to them:
[1] Assuming good faith (AGF) is a fundamental principle on Wikipedia. It is the assumption that editors' edits and comments are made in good faith. Most people try to help the project, not hurt it. If this were untrue, a project like Wikipedia would be doomed from the beginning.
As an example, the story with the teens from FYROM creating false news sites for the americans[2] could be avoided with better education from both sides, not by "stopping the internet" or putting them to prison.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith
2. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
> If you don't have enough motivation, then providing access to Internet, is not going to make a difference.
I'd argue that because the barrier to entry is smaller, you need less motivation to learn about things. Going to libraries, scanning huge books for the few pieces of information you want is much more effort than looking it up online.
I'm not doubting that the internet might only make a small percentage change in the people willing to do it though.
This isn't a zero sum game, last night I used my internet access for porn, today I'm using my internet access to learn about a new 4,000 satellite constellation being built by SpaceX, later on today I'll use it to create a pull request on Bitbucket.
Providing access to the Internet will make a difference, because right now its gated and walled by every country on this planet...give me and the rest of the world direct satellite uplink sooner than later.
That's been part of our culture for a huge amount of time, widespread gossip and idle speculation didn't start in the era of modern technology.
The problem was that they picked popular low-bandwidth public-good informational websites (like Wikipedia, mostly text), and Facebook which isn't either. All US websites.
The website selection was almost comical. No Google Translate, but ESPN, which is only relevant culturally in America...
And there's also a problem related to having large companies harm local ISP markets, which only providing just the non-profit Wikipedia would have mostly avoided.
Not free according to Musk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=12m37s
>Well it can't be free. Because then we'll, like, we'll go out of business. [laugh]
>No, no, it can't be free to the user. I don't think so.
>This would be... this would cost a lot to build. Ultimately over time to build the full version of the system, we're talking about something that would be 10 or 15 billion dollars to create. Maybe more. And the user terminals would be at least 100, to maybe 300 dollars, depending on which type of terminal.
>And this is intended to generate a significant amount of revenue, and help fund a city on Mars. So looking into the long term, and saying, "what's needed to create a city on Mars?" Well one thing's for sure... a lot of money. [laugh] So we need things that will generate a lot of money.
small sattelites: http://news.mit.edu/2016/better-views-smaller-satellites-071... http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/the-next-big-thing-in...
You gotta appreciate the honesty. It is so unusual that we still look at this trying to see the angles.
There's nothing wrong with this. In fact many pure tech projects fail completely because they don't understand how to make money, ultimately helping no one.
My point is that there's nothing wrong with trying to make more money as the goal. It's not some morally lesser option.
An extreme example is dumping industrial waste illegally to save on costs of safe disposal.
Or you know, he's already rich.
If Facebook's "Open Internet" (Read: "Walled Garden") denied by India is any indication, you're unfortunately paying more for the service with your personal data than you are with any money.
GPS requires maintaining an array of satellites, but governments have decided that footing the bill for maintenance is worth it to give the whole planet access to GPS.
Where exactly do "progressives" think we are progressing? Why don't other animals need to progress? What is having access to wikipedia even going to do? "Education" is basically just another term for brainwashing and the internet is largely about administering that brainwashing.
Silicon Valley has literally no idea what it is doing. The leaders don't realise they are not as smart as they think they are and are not actually right in the direction they are attempting to steer the world.
If I look at all of the areas where the internet has improved my knowledge and helped me in some way, it has only been to solve problems caused by "progress" in the first place.
For example, sitting down all day as part of my job led to a terrible posture. I used the internet to figure out how the muscles work and what needed to be changed to fix the problem.
Originally, the answer to that would be Communism. It was looming, remember? Just a matter of time and it could be accelerated through different kind of policies... Except it never happened.
But these days that's a bad word and some of them abandoned it, and others just don't say it anymore.
I don't think its seen as bad of a word amongst young progressives, however, those same progressives who are students of history know that some individuals in a Communist society are "more equal" than others.
If you're not catching my drift, Communism, historically, has been rife with hypocrisy WRT the "ruling classes" who instill it on the proletariat.
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...
[2]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(4425+*+23)+%2F+((60,00... (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.
- Satellite with LEO orbit covers 1-2 percent of earth surface with 10 degree elevation.
- Land occupies less than 30% of earth's surface area. Urban areas occupy less than 3 percent of the Earth's land surface. That's where the customers are.
You have to divide at least by 100.
The traffic between europe and the US is not solely dominated by the amount of data sent and received by visitors of a particular web site. It includes a lot of other background data such as backups between regions.
The analogy to economics would be the calculation of GDP in that you generally don't factor in B2B products/services when the end product/service is the consumer.
Obviously, this won't replace my "laptop -> router" communication nor "server -> server" communication but it's the consumer that matters.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Intern...
I was more making a more general statement: that wireless is not necessarily synonymous with shared medium.
Thanks for working this out. This matches with Musk's stated goals for the project from January 2015 ("the majority" of internet traffic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=2m40s
>The focus is going to be on creating a global communications system. This is quite an ambitious effort. We're really talking about something which is... in the long term it will be like rebuilding the internet in space. 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.
>As you guys may know, the speed of light in a vacuum is somewhere between 40-50% faster than in fiber. So you can actually do long distance communication faster if you route it through vacuum than you can if you route it through fiber.
>And you can also go through far fewer hops. Let's say if you want to communicate from Seattle to South Africa. If you look at the actual path that it takes it's extremely convoluted[1]. It will follow the outline of the continents. It will go through 200 routers and repeaters, and the latency is extremely bad. Whereas if you did it with a satellite network you could actually do it in two or three hops. Well maybe four hops; it depends on what the altitude of the satellites are, and what the cross-links are.
>Let's say at least an order of magnitude fewer repeaters or routers, and going through space at 50% faster speed of light. So from a physics standpoint it's inherently better to do the long distance internet traffic through space.
[1] https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cyberge...
On the bright side, this completely solves the bandwidth for adventurers. The farther you are from civilization, the less contention for the links.
Of course, there may be some loopholes for payment and some citizens who access the service as well as online casino.
It can still be made illegal, of course.
I guess the numbers depend on what "final deployment" means. Presumably more satellites with higher bandwidth.
Even if that's true they've effectively subsidized their rocket business and gained more experience through a greater number of launches. Often Elon is trying to kill more than one bird with every stone he throws - maybe he knows he'll need a solar network to support a Mars colony. This is how he gains the tools, people and experience to eventually roll it out.
Why do you think he wouldn't do the same here? He knows everyone hates existing telecoms. He's trying to create a better alternative.
Not true everywhere. I'm paying < $40/month for a 100 MBit connection and I don't hate my telecom.
It is directed towards middle of nowhere areas where nobody provides fiber.
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.
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.
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.
You mean a satellite system can well end up your ONLY choice. If you're rural there are no choices besides dial up and satellite. Satellite is a reseller selling hughesnet.
It's really hard to estimate since we don't know their satellite costs, but $100 million per satellite (launched) is probably a good starting point. That ends up being $13k capital cost per customer. If they can borrow capital at 5% or less, that works out to ~$55/month.
But if they succeed with reusable rockets (and it sure looks like they will), they can probably drop the launch cost from $60m to $10m in the near term. If we assume the satellite still costs $40m, that still cuts the total cost in half to ~$27/month @ 5%. Maybe they can mass produce these satellites and get them to $10-20m each, which would reduce it to more like $15/month.
Again all these numbers are pretty rough/best case scenarios, but even if we multiply them by 10 we could be looking at 1 gbps connections for $150-500/month. That could be cheaper than fiber infrastructure in a lot of places and still immensely useful in applications where fiber isn't possible (in a car, plane, or boat). That's also assuming 1 TB/customer. In many cases you may just buy the bandwidth in smaller increments at $1-10/gigabyte which is a few orders of magnitude cheaper than current satellite internet and comparable with LTE cell coverage.
Edit: Maybe this has some answers: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/11884/how-man...
For example, 23*4400 = 101Tbps, but I guess many of the satellites will end up above water, so maybe around 60Tbps. One cable by google did that for 300mil$ [1]
Maybe it is good for last mile connectivity, which is probably a good target, but only for less populated areas where LTE isn't available.
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/internet/231074-googles-faster-u...
Since the line of sight would often have things in the way. I'm assuming trees, bridges, and being in a garage would interfere with it.
https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...
http://www.alternativephysics.org/book/GPSmythology.htm
"The presence of Special and General Relativity effects has no bearing on the accuracy of GPS operation. In summary, it wouldn’t matter whether clocks aboard GPS satellites ran faster or slower than Earth’s clocks or even changed their speed each day. Just so long as the satellites’ clocks remained synchronised with each other and the time-difference relative Earth’s clocks didn’t become too large, GPS receivers would continue to calculate their correct position."
The reason that GR and SR have "no bearing" is because they've already been designed into the system...
From "Understanding the NAVSTAR" 2nd Edition, by Tom Logsdon ( one of the designers of the system ) the time-dilation is compensated through:
1. Off-setting the clock ticking-rate during manufacture of each satellite.
2. Applying a unique onboard corrective factor according to the eccentricity ( egg-shapedness ) of each satellite's current orbit. The latter is correction is constantly recalculated for each satellite.
Without these corrections against relativistic effects the accuracy would suffer by 14 nm after 24 hours ( without tick-offsetting ) and 100 feet or so per day due to orbital eccentricity.
But this is more like cellular access points. You have a private channel.
Like a radio tower can service an entire town, but you need many many cellular access points.
What I don't understand about this though is the number of frequencies available to connect to all these satellites and how it might extend to ~300 million people (let alone a billion potentially).
The issue is the antenna needs to be around 2 foot by 2 foot.
But, with autonomous cars people may want significant bandwidth in there cars. An hour or two of video a day seems reasonable especially if they can cache popular content.
Honestly, if they can get the price down this could be very profitable.
It depends on a country. Where I live, you can get unlimited 4G Internet for 15-30 eur/month (depending on a provider).
what if everyone withdraw their money from the bank at the same time?
what if everyone flushes their toilets at the same time?
This is some of the rationale behind data caps. While you can still exceed the available bandwidth if all your customers get on and use their connection to the max, a data cap forces your customers to meter their usage out over the month and reduce the impact of this concurrent usage pattern.
The way they can make this work is if they
1) are targeting traditional satellite internet customers (ships on the sea, commercial aviation, etc) and
2) integration with 5th generation mobile networks trough wireless network virtualization. Mobile network provider can sell a service where traveling customer pays extra for connection that works in the middle of nowhere. When the device is within normal cell network or WiFi, connection goes trough those networks, when they are sailing with their yacht, it can jump from the picocell in the boat or backpack to the satellite network. At any given time there may be millions of customers who pay little extra for coverage and just few tens of thousands who actually use it.
That made me stop and think for a bit...
(Gah - and don't you hate it when people stealth-edit their comments and make you look insane? For the record, the parent originally said "commercial aircraft carriers" instead of "commercial aviation". I may be insane, but there's a completely plausible explanation for this comment thread and it can't be used as evidence of my lack of sanity, ok?)
I've got a 5.8GHz "patch antenna" for FPV video from a quad copter which claims 12db gain - but I've got no idea what shape it is inside (it's small, maybe 70 or 80mm square, but it's a literal "black box" with an sma connector on it from my perspective).
Of course you generally need to provision for peak bandwidth rather than average so these numbers aren't even close to accurate but I think it's a rough explanation for why you don't need to fully provision every link.
Working for a CDN, we see our POPs gets about 4x traffic at peak compared to low times.
The exact orbit has to be arranged so that it precesses once a year, keeping it aligned with a particular local time of day. "Typical sun-synchronous orbits are about 600–800 km in altitude, with periods in the 96–100 minute range, and inclinations of around 98°"
Um, what? Of course you can.
We have weather satellites in this exact orbit right now.
I';; also counteract may own argument as to numbers with the idea that 16 million people could really mean 16 million households if they watch the movie together :-)
This could be a big deal for the huge under-served population in rural America and in developing countries. Incumbent telcos would have to have service at least as good/cheap as SpaceX's internet service to stay in business. I hope they introduce a low-cost, relatively low bandwidth plan that's accessible to the world's poor.
But the world's poor have internet connectivity, 3G/LTE is cheap and widely available. Don't go by US prices for data. Cellular plans here in India are cheap.
At some point as we developed world wide communications, laying down long distance fiber became cheaper than deploying communication satellites, and the existing satellites had enough capacity for the demand at the time.
We stopped shooting up sattelites, but we developed much better wireless technologies (e.g. MIMO) down on earth, and SpaceX now has the means to deploy those in space and undercut the competitions offerings that is still being used heavily for specific use cases (e.g. broadcasting, marine, etc applications)
It doesn't even have to be cheap, it just has to be cheaper than the competition. It's not quite world changing, but it's still a massive business (i guess) and would provide spaceX with some steady revenue stream. If it eventually becomes cheap enough for mass market that's just icing on the cake.
Also note that any competition also will have to pay SpaceX for deployment, so SpaceX wins no matter what.
Perhaps dollars are an overstatement, but your numbers are also for a best case scenario, when you have an application where you need to send data infrequently, in bulk, in an area with good coverage (not at sea) and no guarantees.
Source: am outdoor robot researcher.
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
>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
>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.
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.
In most places you can use significantly more efficient devices to turn heat differences into electricity.
I just had never heard you could harness this, it's cool.
Edit: Bit late to the party, 1821. Bit of catching up to do.
I just bought this house and put the fridge in the only position it can go. If I can harness quantum pugs and whatnot, its worth asking.
Well, before I muddied the water.
We can go from there.
But either one would be a pretty small amount.
It's fun as a toy, but not much more.
If you want to save power, buy a more efficient fridge. Maybe also get one where the hot part can go outside.
If you want free power, get solar panels.
Will those help efficiency? I mean, I imagine they will, but in practice, how do they work?
I want to move away from freezing so much meat ideally, but this might be a step. I was getting sick of the taste of Novell employees.
Here is a video where elon explains the system very well in 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/technology/google-makes-1-...
EDIT: This is only one way
ALSO Grace Hopper telling David Letterman what a nano second is! 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
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/5d9724/spacex_has_f...
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.
(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
That would be, what, $9 billion? That sounds like a lot, until you realize they can spread that cost over 2-3 years and have millions (if not billions) of people paying for internet. This would replace cellphone plans too remember...
So that means SpaceX could probably charge a nice $100 - $300 a month and people would clamor for it. Seriously, this would probably make 10x return (easy) per satellite, if not more. Even 10 million people at $100 per month is $12 billion a year. Multiply that across a two to five year lifespan of a satellite and you'll have a very profitable business.
>millions (if not billions) of people paying for internet
You're vastly underestimating the challenge in attracting millions (let alone "billions", that's so ridiculous it's not even worth commenting on) of costumers.
>This would replace cellphone plans too remember...
You can't just hope to replace 4bil+ users in a snap of the fingers... Even if you had a hypothetical magical product that was cheap, available and revolutionary, flipping 4,500,000,000 clients would be a grueling task.
>could probably charge a nice $100 - $300 a month and people would clamor for it.
Why?? Who would be willing to pay 300$ a month for internet?? Maybe wealthy people in developed countries would pay that for the convenience of replacing home+mobile internet, but you wouldn't ever reach the amount of users you project with those kids of prices.
Right now people are paying Comcast $100/month for 25mbps, and Verizon $100/month for 5mbps at a cap of 10Gb...
I grant you you wouldn't hit a billion users at those prices, but you wouldn't need to at those prices. I guarantee internet like this will start at a premium, maybe $500/month. Then as more people adtop it'll quickly drop to something more inline with $50/month (or less).
You say I'm exaggerating getting millions of users. However, Id like to remind you Tesla preordered how many cars? Google Fiber had how many customers switch over? This is a game changer, and one that makes financial sense on both sides. Honestly, this is going to be like the Model T or iPhone, they'll easily have a million users their first year, ten million the next, and so on until they reach market saturation.
It's also a good bet Musk has done the math and thought about future math as well.
This won't just be profitable. It has the potential to be a political game changer.
After a while it's going to be possible to start running servers on satellites, to move them out of national jurisdictions.
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.
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.
For starters, since they will be in a low orbit (to reduce latency), each satellite will have a fairly low utilization. They will usually be flying over territory with no or very few humans within range.
or the snake oil that lands on a barge from orbit?
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?
[1] http://www.osa-opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/may_2016/feat...
SpaceX FCC Application for over 4000 Internet Satellites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973223
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.
I honestly wonder how many people would be interested in living like this.
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.
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?
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.)
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/stefan.htm...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
~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.
The altitude of the ISS is only ~250 miles above sea level, while the distance from SF to LA is ~400.
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.
600ms here we come again.
1. Uplink/downlink. This is the most primitive and I understand still the most common. You RX, strip the carrier off, mix it with a new carrier, amplify it and send. There is no intelligence other than the uplink and downlink frequencies. Bandwidth of both of these is pretty wide. Ergo, latency is minimal, power efficiency is high. The satellite doesn't have any idea what the signal means.
2. Decode/retransmit. This you need to RX it, strip the carrier out, demodulate it possibly thousands of channels individually spanning a massive bandwidth, intelligently decide what to do with it while buffering it, mix with one of many new carriers, amplify, retransmit. Latency high, power efficiency low.
The latter requires some serious routing power which isn't necessarily available either cost efficiently or reliably of the shelf. Getting something like that which is rad hardened isn't likey to succeed and you can't just launch three redundant core 2's to do it like Dragon.
Imagine launching a radiation hardened 4G base station. That's a good analogy.
The story from Musk is 20-30 ms latency anywhere on Earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=7m00s
Fiber has an order of magnitude greater number of hops/routers/repeaters, moves 50% slower, and has to travel more distance to route around continents. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12984991
In the linked video Musk says 4 hops to go from Seattle to South Africa, so they're skipping satellites. It works out that at 1100 km altitude they have vacuum line-of-sight for any satellite within 6000 km ground track in any direction.
>I don't know how they're going to ...
>Managing that ... hurts my head.
It is indeed a Hard Problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=5m18s
>So it's something that would both provide optionality for people living in advanced economies, as well as people in poor countries that don't even have electricity or fiber or anything like that. So it's a real enabler for people in poor regions of the world and it gives optionality for people in wealthier countries.
>So I think it's something that definitely needs to be done. And it's a really difficult technical problem to solve. So that's why we need the smartest engineering talent in the world to solve the problem.
>And, you know, at the same time to make sure that we don't create Skynet. So... [laugh] Ironically, the server room at Spacex (jokingly!) was called Skynet. [laugh] Though fate has a great sense of irony, so we really need to make sure that doesn't come true...
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/space...
Uplink bandwidth has been an issue in the past (phone/dsl is fairly slow speeds, at least in the places you'd want satellite internet)
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
Musk mentioned Teledesic the very first day it was announced (back in January 2015). 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.
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.
Or a privacy nightmare.
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.
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.
(Firmly tongue in cheek.)
This is how progress is done.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/a-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-j...
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.
EDIT: whew, I'm not going crazy yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973474
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.