This is monumental - I claim every major advance in communication technology immediately precedes a major progress for society.
This will make the 'Internet' truly global and ubiquitous.
So excited for the developing world.
This will make the 'Internet' truly global and ubiquitous.
So excited for the developing world.
These developing countries are going all-in on mobile and it’s a good thing. They really don’t need these sattelites, but for Americans apparently it’s good for leveling the ISP playing field.
People often use when they want to say "backwards" countries.
The correct term is developing world, which just means rapidly improving and doesn't cloudy the convo with connotations about the cold war.
The primary definition is now "underdeveloped countries" - because language changes over time.
Sri Lanka coverage: http://www.airtel.lk/coverage-map.html Bamako (capital of Mali) coverage: https://www.orange.com/en/Group/Orange-in-the-world/countrie...
The uncovered area of Mali is probably 5-8 times the size of Sri Lanka.
Sorry, needed to get that out. I'm a little frustrated here, because I have been in several poor countries (Africa, Thailand, Moldowa) and they've all had a way better internet coverage than Germany.
I lived in Germany for about 5 years. Half of that the last 300m of connection to my house were over the thinnest legally allowable copper wire. 3.2mbps max speed down on a very very good day (usually sub 2mbps), about a tenth or slightly more up.
My in-laws previous house was semi-detached and the neighbours house have fiber, but theirs didn't. Same actual building but KabelDeutschland wouldn't run an extension just 2 meters to the wall on my in-laws actual house.
And I mean 'won't' not "couldn't". They scoped the cost and agreed to pay for it to be done, even at the overinflated price, and KD actually said they didn't want to do it.
LTE is everywhere and in my home town I get 20Mbs/5Mbs rates over Vodafone. There is only one place, literally in the middle of a dense forest ( part of a Wandertour ) where there is no signal at all. The highways are well covered, I normally skype and other VoIP apps work flawless.
So while we are talking about Germany, let's not forget this is a federal state and each state can individually influence the development. Not sure if USA is the same.
I was under the impression that "third world" was supposed to be defined as "a country that was not on the axis or allied side during all of World War 2." Your use of the term directly contradicts this definition.
Also it was the Cold War, not WWII. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
>The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Communist Bloc.
I know exactly the meaning that you intend here, but at first I thought "how exactly is this going to be beneficial for polyamorous triads of hemp farmers who attend burning man every year?"
LEO is a range between 300km - 2000km. I suspect the satellites will be on the higher range to reduce atmospheric drag. The IIS has a 400km (250 miles) orbit and it's orbit decays at 2km/month without correction maneuvers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit
[http://www.vsat-systems.com/satellite-internet-explained/lat...]
Edit: Please note that the data packets make a two way trip from the satellite. Many network communications assume a lot of two way communication from client and server, so this decrease in distance should have a big impact.
So it possibly won't be a killer for video conferencing, but keep in mind that the USAF's current system for drone video has 2 seconds of one-way lag. There's three orders of magnitude between what we're currently doing and the physical limit.
SpaceX's system will undoubtedly be better than what is in use today, but even with two orders of magnitude improvement (a HUGE improvement) you're looking at adding 20 ms of lag on top of what you'd already have.
What the RVers are too cheap to do is pay for the product they want. Go to unlimitedville.com, pay $200 a month, and you have unlimited LTE in every city you travel to. If you want the best mobile internet you have to pay for it.
Unlimited mobile data went away or got expensive in most places right around the time that smartphones gained the ability to act as wifi access points.
Also, for completeness, it's probably worth mentioning the conditions of your unlimited data roaming were bandwidth limits, and a maximum trip duration of thirty days. Though I know people who considerably exceeded that duration in Europe and weren't noticeably restricted or penalised. Of course it's moot now (yay!- I write this message from Madrid airport..).
> Data abusers are those who purposefully push limits or conduct known illegal activity like torrenting etc. If you consistently burn through a half terabyte or more a month (that’s over 500 GBs!), that is not normal internet usage and you could be asked to split your usage between two accounts or the service could be terminated by certain carriers.
Why would you pay this much just to get what's basically a high FUP plan?
But then why not just sell 500 GB packages? So everyone knows what they will get.
My Cox internet also had a 500 GB warning.
Plus, Netflix HD streaming is about 3GB per hour. You can stream a two hour movie every night and only use 180 GB per month. I've never gotten to 500 GB, so it's effectively unlimited.
It doesn't take abusive behavior to hit a limit like that on a home connection. If you took a 2007-era 250GB cap, and kept it price-constant, you'd be looking at something like 20TB caps these days.
Every single country has 3G, a few have 4G. Often the speeds were faster than what I get in Canada.
A pre-paid SIM costs $1, data is anything from $1-$10/GB in a pre-paid bundle. So I think the biggest difference the SpaceX Constellation can make is price.
A huge percentage of the population in virtually every dirt street town has a smartphone with facebook and whatsapp.
[1] theroadchoseme.com
That's a lot of capacity. Now a big part of the problem is outdated regulatory regimes and government-controlled telecoms that are keeping prices artificially high, and keeping out competition in the 4G/LTE market and ISP market.
Decentralized alternatives, like Freifunk, are the best option in my opinion.
So a better comparison as others have said is comcast and mobile broadband providers. The more competition the better as far as I'm concerned.
ubiquitous internet will make remote weather stations, drones and a multitude of other things far more cost effective or possible. (especially here in Alaska)
https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2017/03/19/with-federal...
https://www.adn.com/features/business-economy/2017/03/18/for...
The goal for these is to build network bridges to alaskan terrestrial fiber, getting to Fairbanks and/or Anchorage, from where connections are possible into Alaska's subsea fiber cables to WA state and the Seattle area.
Implemented properly this can be significantly faster than satellite, bringing a 1 to 2 Gbps full duplex connection to each town with licensed microwave bands. From the perspective of ACS and GCI and similar operators, it can pay for itself pretty quickly because they can stop paying monthly-recurring geostationary satellite transponder kHz leases.
However, I suspect SpaceX will however allow China to monitor/limit connections. Further, China has a lot more power to crack down on purely internal operations would deter many.
a) the rooftop CPE needs to be reasonably large and have high gain to be used effectively, and needs clear unobstructed line of sight to as much of the sky and horizon as possible.
and
b) It needs to transmit, it will transmit in very known frequency ranges, and the chinese authorities have plenty of budget to buy portable spectrum analyzers, horn antennas and to reach people how to use them. It only takes a couple of hours maximum to reach somebody how to use a portable spectrum analyzer to physically locate and identify transmitters in almost any band.
B) These things need to transmit up, so you can reasonably block most signals in other directions. Aircraft would work, but again not cheap.
The real issue is more on the human side and network monitoring. Lots of encrypted network traffic to a ransom location would be suspect.
PS: For once tinfoil might actually be useful vs government spying :)
B) not just up but to the sides and toward the horizon as well. This will be a non moving phased array antenna that can talk to two LEO satellites moving across the sky at the same time. I predict that any reasonable amount of blockage to the sides will not be a good idea for their network architecture.
C) all Tx have some sort of sidelobes and nothing has a perfect f/b ratio. Will still be detectable by spectrum analyzers from the side.
B) Depends on how many satellites are in the constellation. Ideally you want a lot of them as there is vastly more atmosphere the lower your angle to the horizon.
C) detectable at say 50 feet sure, but a signal you can detect from 10+ miles in a van doing 60mph without a lot of false positives is another story.
With the resources of China, spending $15,000 per spectrum analyzer kit x 8 kits, plus training, is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money and effort they are currently spending on IP cameras that feed into facial recognition systems, etc.
However, if you want to catch individual usage in urban areas, with guys on for that's going to easily be into the 10's of of billions as users don't need to keep them on 24/7. AKA within the capability of nation states, but not without significant effort.
s/Aircraft/Drone/. Now it's cheap.
Bring in a few from where? Where do you think these devices will be manufactured anyway? ;)
Also, even if they were manufactured in the US, China is literally the best country to reverse-engineer electronics and produce knockoffs ;).
That said, AFAIK those satellites aren't meant to be dumb routers/repeaters - so China might just politically/economically pressure US to tell SpaceX to pretty-please don't service connections to/from China.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-internet-satellite-con...
Do you have more info on this? Or anyone?
That's so crass. It's plain indefensible. I really want to know more.
edit: Thanks for the links.
I’m sure lots of North Americans wouldn’t want Chinese satellites overhead for concern of privacy.
I mean, generating tons of space junk is not cool. But what else are you going to do if others are lurking on your airspace?
It is going to be shift is policy though. We are going to need to update space law.
If there is a willingness to do it once, it tests the barrier of what's acceptable.
It's bad for everyone—present, and future.
Umm, there are of course Chinese satellites overhead and they have excellent imagery of all of our military bases. As we do for theirs (and every other country!). Orbits aren't very friendly to avoiding airspace.
accidental example:
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=iri...
no nation-state wants to start the game of shooting down another's satellite, either military or commercial, because everything up there is so vulnerable. it would open china to retaliatory strikes taking down their own polar orbit LEO, inclined LEO (35-45 degree) molnia, MEO and GEO satellites. satellites are fragile things and can be killed with one 200g chunk of tungsten at a closing velocity of 18,000 km/h.
Your defining 'space' as airspace is odd also
These are not government satellites and china owns the airwaves over their nation. I highly doubt the US government would retaliate whatsoever against China if they shot down a satellite that illegally interacted with their airspace.
> China wouldn’t risk it. This is a great opportunity to break the great firewall and finally give the Chinese people access to unfiltered information.
Take this with a grain of salt since this is mostly based on what I have heard hearsay, but they can jam the signals and/or monitor who transmits back and go after the citizens using said signal (and china is not a country where you want to poke the government). I doubt this will have any effect on the great firewall.
It's less expensive than launching satellites, and the Chinese goverment has enough money to do it if they want.
Are you sure? If China knocks out one of ours, we’ll knock out at least one of theirs. We’ll also likely implement a suite of sanctions. Shooting down a satellite is an act of war.
No, we won’t. We’ll impose several decades of meaningless tariffs and embargoes with tons of loopholes so it looks like we’re doing something until everyone forgets what everyone was mad about in the first place.
Wars kill lots of people. You knew that, right?
I doubt it, since a single Falcon Heavy launch would carry dozens of Starlink satellites but the existing anti-satellite technology can only hit one at a time. Keep in mind they have said the final constellation will be 12,000 satellites!
edit: and BFR could theoretically carry 300 when it is operational. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/25525/how-many-spa...
Moving something to the same altitude as Leo requires much less energy than moving something to Leo. Rockets don't fire straight up because the need their momentum to be at an angle. In addition, the payload of a communication satellite is more expensive than the payload required to throw it either disable the satellite or put it into a declining orbit.
Maybe Elon's rockets are just so cheap he can make it up in margin, but we are really talking about we aren't talking about marginal amount of difficulty difference, but an entire order of magnitude.
I'm not sure how efficient China's military industrial complex is, but I wouldn't trust the US's military to be able to build a weapon system that could destroy SpaceX satellite's more efficiently than SpaceX can launch them, haha.
Really, the audience for this are ships and other remote regions, not anyplace that has a road going to it.
It will be much slower than LTE, since the satellites are going to be about 100 miles away. LTE towers are only a few miles away. How do you expect it to have higher bandwidth than LTE with communications a hundred miles away? It doesn't matter that they're putting in 4000 satellites, since those satellites are still 100 miles away from the terminal.
Again, I want everyone to be clear: This is going to be MUCH slower and more expensive than LTE.
Like Iridium, this project is only useful for remote areas that can't be reached by roads. Very few people will benefit from this project. It won't change society.
This is another one of Elon Musk's garbage projects that doesn't really advance the state-of-the-art.
There’s valid skepticism of SpaceX’s plan, but none of your points are among it.
SpaceX's particularly large constellation (allowing streaming from multiple satellites at a time and with large phased array antennae on both ends) will allow much higher bandwidth than existing satellite internet systems, but the biggest deal about these LEO satellite constellations over GSO satellites is the far lower latency.
“Another one of Elon Musk’s garbage projects that doesn’t really advance the state-of-the-art.”
Okay, so you’re just trolling, then. Never mind.
And if they're targeting this for cellular base-stations, they're now on the hook to provide an even larger aggregate bandwidth to share among hundreds or thousands of local users per tower.
Major advances in communication technology also precede major military upsets. Only the victors labelled those as progress.
Roman roads, pigeons, semaphore, radio, all used to project military power in profound and overwhelming ways. Radar, sonar (if you’re willing to stretch the definition a little). CDMA (invented by Hedy Lamarr during WWII for torpedos, but not used until the Cuban missile crisis). Cryptanalysis to defeat the Germans. ARPAnet was built to be literally bomb proof.
Could you clarify this and help me understand your viewpoint a bit better?
I’ve been watching tech for a long time and we tell ourselves a lot of half truths. My good friend showed me a private demo of the first web browser that supported images. I was around people who wanted to change the world and it was all thrilling. But I can still recall conversations about how we were all going to slay Big Brother, but instead we made him stronger than ever. It’s really painful to look at your role in that. I’d bet money that half of them still don’t. And that was why I started my post with “careful”. War is just a conterexample. Especially if you have sympathy for the losing side.
Tech will only be good if you exert yourself toward making it so. Here we are with three threads a day talking about how Facebook used their technology for negligence or evil depending on your point of view.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/6-milestones-history-telecomm...
You're leaving out the vast cost to build & maintain the wired infrastructure. Tax payers & consumers in those developing nations have to pay for that. That cost has to be included with the monthly fees to do a serious comparison.
The Manhattan and Tokyo speed tests are more important to me personally than The Grand Canyon and Indian Ocean speed test.
So does it makes the exploitation that comes with it...
Providing internet to the unmotivated masses only results in their exploitation..not in their empowerment.
So as I said again, it ll result in the exploitation of 99.5 percentage and may be empower the rest to attempt something that was impossible before...
I would bet that as soon as government begins infringing on the rights to work which affect HN usere, suddenly everyone here would be a civil libertarian.
1-https://www.theroot.com/tennessee-has-fined-residents-almost...
You're against the government deciding on "removing your right to work", but the alternative is your neighbor or your competitor making that decision for you and overloading "your" spectrum. And you have no recourse to complain, all you can do is push more power, which impacts more people. And your competitor pushes more power, so you push more power and now no one gets to use it.
Libertarian ideas always seem to end in a corporate power struggle while everyone else gets locked out. That doesn't sound like a good outcome to me.
I think the point I was trying to make is missed. Should someone, the OP, criticizing the FCC's role for doing this be downvoted/ridiculed? No, I think it's an important job, because we should always question when rights are taken away from the people and handed over to government.
Maybe it's all too far gone and this is a better discussion to have for a Mars colony, but I still have faith.
Lots of that communication moves through electromagnetic radiation which practically anyone anywhere can use/interfere with. This is a textbook case of a common good which if unmanaged would be effectively destroyed due to the tragedy of the commons [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commiss...