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Comment by mattsfrey | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. While not as profound as bringing access to the developing world, this will also be a major win for people looking to live alternative lifestyles, i.e. perpetual traveling, van life etc, where keeping a consistent internet connection is the one thing holding many back.

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You can get decent 4G internet plans already in most parts of the world. While this will have better coverage of rural areas, mobile internet is very adequate for the van lifestyle.

That really depends on how much bandwidth you need. Several aspects of remote working like video conferencing large file transfers are too demanding for 4G in terms of bandwidth and transfer caps.

Wouldn't the latency of a sat connection interfere with something real-time like video conferencing?

These are very low orbit satellites, not geosynchronous ones. 200 miles, instead of 36,000. Should be much better latency

I think you have your distances wrong. Geosynchronous orbit is 36,000km not miles.

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

That's the crazy part, he didn't have his distances wrong. Part of the constellation is planned for an orbit of 340 km which is ~211 miles so close enough. The satellites are only intended to have an operational lifespan of 5 to 7 years. That's not a typo, that also means that given the massive size of the constellation that SpaceX will need to average one launch a month for StarLink with 105 satellites on it. If one of the lower orbit satellites goes dead, without actively maintaining the orbit it'll decay fast enough that it'll passively deorbit itself without risk of it just becoming a derelict satellite for centuries.

His Leo distance was correct, but his geo distance is in the wrong unit of measurement.

Current internet satellites with a geosynchronous orbit are about 35,000km above the surface. These Low Earth Orbit satellites will be less than 2,000km above ground, and as low as 300km above. This difference should have a big impact on the current latency number of satellite communication.

[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.

The best you can physically do is about 2 ms more lag than the fastest ground based system, and that's assuming you're only adding in the transit time from ground station -> satellite -> user.

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.

Satellite is worse, so if you can't get it done with 4G you won't be doing it with satellite.

This new tech is going to be better than 4G

It won't be as good as you think. This one is going right next to the Model 3 in Elon's book of things he'll technically deliver but will progressively dial back the claims before and after delivery.

Even if he delivers half of the bandwidth he promised for twice the cost that he quoted, it's still a far better option in many places. I have two ISPs where I live. One only goes up to 12Mbps/1Mbps. The other is a gigabit connection, but it's $200/mo and has a substantial amount of downtime.

Imagine living on a cruise ship though!

Imagine traveling on planes all the time!

You should read some RV forums for the hoops they need to jump through to get coverage, and deal with data caps

I'm doing it (mobile internet, not van life). The conversations on RV forums deal with stuff like unlimited data in the middle of Wyoming for less money, or how to get a SIM card and plan from a connected car device that AT&T discontinued because RVers were using for other than it's intended purpose.

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.

T-Mobile (or their wholly owned metroPCS MVNO which rides the same network) has plans which are "unlimited" up to about 50GB/month of usage, for a lot less than $200/mo... It's not a lot, but can be stretched pretty far if you're willing to refrain from watching a lot of youtube and netflix video. It used to have a 22GB soft-cap limit after which it rate limited to 128kbps x 128 kbps, they recently changed it to 50.

Seriously? 200$/month and you have unlimited data only in US? It seems like a really crap offer to me. I pay 17£/month and I have unlimited data in a lot of countries in the world, including US. Sadly my awesome plan got discontinued and now it’s not possible to buy it anymore.

17£/mo is sustainable when your users are just scrolling through Facebook and streaming Spotify. When they're all using it as their primary data connection and watching a few hours of HD Netflix a night, you need to charge more.

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.

That doesn't make any sense. An AP is just an AP, it has no internet connection. How does the smartphone get internet connection? With UMTS/LTE or similar. So you still need a data plan (or a combination with it).

The point is that without a way to tether your phone to a 'real computer', you have to be actively trying to use more than a couple of GB of data per month, so "unlimited" really means "up to maybe 5GB". While tethering was possible beforehand, it became much easier when wifi tethering was added to Android. This let anyone push a button and use their 3G / 4G data connection for torrenting, streaming and other such heavy duty usage, and suddenly "unlimited" phone plans were seeing hundreds of GB per month.

These days you can easily consume tons of HD video directly to your phone, even without tethering. So the situation has changed yet again.

"Incidentally", I suspect your plan was discontinued right about the time the number of competitors in the UK mobile market dropped from four to three. When 3 bought O2. And right about the peak of the 4g rollout. The same happened to my £13 plan. I'm not sure which of the above was the larger factor, or whether it was because usage patterns (tethering, Netflix) did in fact make these plans unsustainable. Interestingly, 3 also had their "one" plan (IIRC) which specifically allowed tethering, with unlimited data, for ~£20/mo.

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..).

From their site:

> 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?

I would call it normal internet usage (have about 500GB-1000GB traffic per month, with LTE)

But then why not just sell 500 GB packages? So everyone knows what they will get.

500 is effectively unlimited compared to the 22 GB that AT&T throttles you at on their native plans.

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.

If it's good enough for you, I'm glad. But imagine someone that replaces a TV on in the background with an internet stream. Now 2 hours is 6 or 10. Then multiply that by multiple people in a household.

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.

> live alternative lifestyles

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?"

Is that not covered under perpetual traveling and van life?

Well they'll have good internet, for starters.

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