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Comment by JankySolutions | Hacker News Reader

So what kind of latency should we expect from a satellite at that altitude?

It's in the article, but 25-35ms total. For the highest orbit they plan, one way latency is under 5ms, so these goals seem easily within the realm of possibility.

With multiple base stations that's the minimum latency to get across the street.

However, the added latency is not necessarily that bad vs landlines. Picture a triangle with the satellite at the apex and the goal at the other side. On the other hand if their base station was further from the network than your house then things get significantly worse.

I also failed to account for slant angle for the distance, which could add a few more milliseconds to each leg in the worst case.

With so many satellites in the sky, I think those effects will be exactly as you said, a few (<10 ms) milliseconds in the worst case, depending on how aggressive the hopping from sat to sat is.

Also not taken into account is that light travels about 30% slower in a fibre optic cable than in space.

From the article:

> SpaceX has said it will offer speeds of up to a gigabit per second, with latencies between 25ms and 35ms.

I really hope that this works well.

Being able to break the comcast/att/verizon effective monopolies across the USA would (hopefully) have great positive effects. At least competition would bring prices down for low-latency land-based connections.

Of course, you're swapping control of your internet connection from a "mostly evil" to a "not yet known if evil" corporation.

> not yet known if evil

A decent heuristic would be whether said corporation manufactures flamethrowers. Wait...

They are specifically not flamethrowers.

That a different company. Just the same Bond villain in control.

There are the good looking Bond villains and the bad looking ones.

Obama and Musk are good looking Bond villains. (The former had assassination sky robots, ICBMs, and a military. The latter has rockets, oceangoing spaceship landing pads, and huge enigmatic installations in the middle of the desert.) Putin and Trump are bad looking Bond villains.

I know which ones I'd rather be a henchman for.

* different company

* not flamethrowers

* manufactured by a third party

sorry, I know you are joking, but I couldn't help myself.

Competition is not just about price. The capacity of a corporation to be evil depends on alternatives people have.

The closer the competition the smaller the 'evilness' that would make people switch.

The same company can be perfect in one country and a 'evil' in another depending on the situation.

Companies aren't "evil" as such, but they can get complacent when not exposed to sufficient competition. Once SpaceX is a viable competitor, Comcast will probably fairly quickly "forget" that they are evil.

I seem to recall people reporting that Comcast is actually just fine in many areas with a second viable provider. With SpaceX, that would be all of them.

Companies aren't "evil" as such, but they can get complacent when not exposed to sufficient competition.

Power corrupts. Therefore, power in the market also corrupts.

They'll just turn around, provide better service at lower prices, drive spacex out of the market, and raise them again. They have a lot more money to play with (and their infrastructure is much cheaper to maintain).

"They" meaning... every ISP on the planet? At the same time? Starlink will have the ability to offer coverage globally, even in places where existing ISPs have no infrastructure.

Not to mention that that kind of predatory pricing is illegal in many countries.

But their potential market is like 1/40 the size.

Anyone know what the downlink bandwidth might be for this system (i.e. not to the user, but to the Internet backbone?)

Seems like only a few customers at 1 Gb/s could saturate the network pretty quickly. Especially if the coverage area is a few hundred square miles.

"Each satellite will provide aggregate downlink capacity of 17 to 23Gbps"

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/space...

That's just the initial system. And there will be, say, 30 satellites in view at any one time, giving an aggregate of 600 Gbps. At a typical 100:1 over-subscription ratio, they should be capable of serving almost a million customers per region (~500km diameter) at that speed. At more reasonable 10 or 100Mbps, it's on the order of tens of millions of customers in a region.

But that's just the initial constellation. SpaceX plans to put 12,000 total satellites up, with the VLEO ones having much higher throughput. Idea is to replace them every 4-6 years with faster throughput.

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