With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

Initially, the SpaceX system will consist of 4,425 satellites operating in 83 orbital planes (at altitudes ranging from 1,110 km to 1,325 km). SpaceX has proposed an additional constellation of 7,500 satellites operating even closer to Earth.

For the end consumer, SpaceX user terminals—essentially, a relatively small flat panel, roughly the size of a laptop—will use phased array technologies to allow for highly directive, steered antenna beams that track the system’s low-Earth orbit satellites. In space, the satellites will communicate with each other using optical inter-satellite links, in effect creating a “mesh network” flying overhead that will enable seamless network management and continuity of service.

Later this year, SpaceX will begin the process of testing the satellites themselves, launching one prototype before the end of the year and another during the early months of 2018. Following successful demonstration of the technology, SpaceX intends to begin the operational satellite launch campaign in 2019. The remaining satellites in the constellation will be launched in phases through 2024, when the system will reach full capacity.

SpaceX can plan to launch be 30% more launches than their actual customers need. All those extra rockets are used for internet satellites. If there's an accident (boom) or a sudden need for more rockets, the internet satellites get delayed, and the paying customer gets a rocket.

If customers are finicky about using re-flown rockets, that's fine, the internal customer doesn't care. If a customer backs out for any reason, the internal customer takes their place.

Rocket production gets a smooth flow going, which improves production efficiency.

Such receivers can also act as backhaul for mesh networks, providing access to un-censored information in times of turmoil and peace alike.

This should be interesting, depending on how this is regulated on the legal side it could result in the major ISP's updating our infrastructure, of course nothing has stopped them from agreeing to update infrastructure then running off with our tax money in the past. Not to mention they will probably use legal means to hamstring this if possible. Hopefully this spurs competition in areas with stagnating ISP's and increases availability of low latency connections in sparsely populated areas.

This could make a major difference for that type of rural town.

Even at 4425 satellites that means, let's see. The earth is 500 million km2, and they don't need the same density everywhere, so some optimizations may be possible, so let's say 5000 satellites. That means 100,000 km2 per satellite. That means one satellite per decent sized country, only about 100 for the entire US. This is not geostationary orbit, so they'll have to aim for evenly spaced satellites.

Let's say they fix their satellites and do 10x what is currently possible, so that means 100Gbit/satellite. Current internet traffic into and out of the Netherlands is 50 times that (granted, more and denser cities than portugal, but the Netherlands would have to share one SpaceX satellite with Belgium and parts of the UK).

They would only be able to provide about 1/10,000,000th of a Satellite to a cellphone in the US, and if they have 100 Gbit/satellite, that's not even 1kbit on average. Even 10x or 100x that capacity wouldn't change much. Doubling or tripling the number of satellites won't fix this, we'd need between hundreds of thousands and to millions of satellites.

This will either need to be rather expensive (certainly as much as your cellphone, probably more, as this seems to indicate the system can only support 100x less users than the mobile network in the US, and even less in smaller dense countries or cities like the Netherlands or New York). Even at state of the art technologies, bandwidth limits are going to be tight. Like any satellite service, I can't see this work at city densities, or for mobiles.

According to (https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-set-up-and-la...) it costs ~$80-$100 million per satellite to build, launch, and run. So that's ~$354-$443 billion for all the satellites. Let's call it $443.

Now, I pay ~$60/m for internet. That's $720/yr. If they want to recoup costs after 10 years, it'll take ~61.5 million subscribers.

For the U.S. alone, that'll probably never happen. But worldwide? Maybe. Though worldwide the price per subscribe will be less, often times substantially less.

On the other hand, SpaceX will have lots of operational discounts because its their own rockets, and they already have all the supply channels for building space tech. And maybe they aren't looking to payback in 10 years for this initial run; maybe they only want to break even so payback in 15 is good enough.

Just some numbers for thought.

P.S. Businesses unlucky enough to be in "rural" areas, aka most commercial business parks outside of tech cities, are in the unfortunate position of paying the local telephone company/AT&T/TimeWarner thousands per month for roughly dial-up speeds. SpaceX could charge the same but offer broadband speeds and get a nice chunk of business, methinks.

For comparison my CableCo connection in the left-middle of America achieves a loop RTT of about 10ms (5ms Latency), and an RTT to 8.8.8.8 of 25ms (12.5ms Latency).

With a fast turn around re-usable F9 booster (so its relaunch costs are significantly less than launching a new one) Musk would have control over his destiny in this case. When Iridium was being built the whole ground station thing (up/down links into the switched telephone network) was nearly a decade slog of permission, licenses, and regulations.

That said, if he is successful he will suck a lot of money out of wallets that belong to some pretty big fat cats companies. And if he made every ground station a Tor exit node it would really mess with the powers that be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic

And yeah, I know latency would be between 6 and ~45 minutes.