Please tell me that this means Comcast will go out of business. Oh man. The excitement I would feel at watching them go down...
DOCSIS3.1 over old copper coax cable, with enough RF channel bonding, can also do 300 to 900 Mbps downstream, again slightly oversubscribed. With much less upstream because the RF channels are usually allocated asymmetrically at a ratio of 10:1 or thereabouts.
This is by no means going to hurt Comcast. Comcast (and similar companies like Wave, RCN, Charter, Shaw, etc) are building DOCSIS3.1 and also overbuilding their own networks with fiber. They have the established right of way through major cities, both on pole and underground, and can incrementally build a FTTN/FTTdP architecture with existing copper, and will eventually overbuild everything with singlemode fiber to the customer.
What this will be revolutionary for is small towns, remote/rural areas. In the US as an example the market for ISP last mile connections that is presently served by either WISPs, or in places where no WISP exists, two-way Ku/Ka-band VSAT terminals (HughesNet, ViaSat, etc). The capacity constrains on traditional geostationary consumer grade VSAT services result in terrible things (TDMA oversubscription that pushes latency to 1150ms during peak hours), and things like 20GB/month transfer quotas. That's for a typical $100/month, 24 or 36-month term with the latest generation of Viasat's services.
For polar regions this will be a big deal because they are presently almost entirely dependent on geostationary C and Ku-band satellite capacity.
On ships: Very relevant and has the potential to capture a ton of market from Inmarsat's I-4 and I-5 series satellites and tech, and Iridium's upcoming maritime products. With a sufficient number (thousands!) of polar orbit satellites it can cover mid ocean areas very effectively.
I live in a rural town. This is most definitely the status quo, and your description might actually be rosier than what happens in reality. It's quite a stark difference compared to the +100Mbps fiber connection that you can get about 60 minutes away in the city.
There are some "middle of the night" lows in traffic use where a few of the consumer VSAT operators offer quota-free traffic. Can be used with bittorrent clients that support time-based scheduling and automatic pausing such as to download a few episodes of your favorite TV show between 0100 and 0445 every morning.
But during peak evening hours, for human-interactive use like web browsing, it's generally going to be a miserable experience.
> This is by no means going to hurt Comcast.
Well, it could, couldn't it? Satellite internet does have the potential to make regional pseudo-monopolies go away, which means Comcast now has price competition. Even if speeds end up being much lower, it will still be plenty fast for lots of people, and the price will be the determining factor.
At the very least, I think this will force Comcast to lower their prices and/or be better.
Those sorts of customers at present usually end up going with a local WISP instead (terrestrial based point-to-multipoint microwave wireless, which can be quite good if implemented right), or something like the consumer grade VSAT systems from hughesnet/viasat. Or maybe a slow but usable very-long-loop-length ADSL2+ connection at only 3.5 Mbps from the ILEC.
But as for places that are solidly in the comcast network, no. Increasing use of feeding small CMTS from 1/10GbE via fiber, and the very high data rate capacity of DOCSIS3.1 as coaxial cable plant segments are broken up into smaller chunks, means that it's feasible for comcast to offer 300 to 900 Mbps service at fairly low costs to large numbers of people in suburban areas. Satellite won't be able to compete with this. And Comcast will be able to come and overbuild their coax with singlemode fiber incrementally to sell either active-ethernet based FTTH or GPON FTTH.
Wow, that is very expensive.
> But as for places that are solidly in the comcast network, no
There are a couple of things which, if they happened, I think could make SpaceX very competitive.
The first is if they could drastically cut the price to consumers. The cheapest Comcast plan in my area (New Mexico, USA) is $75/month. If they offered something like $15 for 15 Mbps I think a lot of people (including me!) would buy it. This would put pressure on Comcast to cut prices (and their margins).
The second would be making a much better product. Imagine being able to take your internet with you wherever you go. I could climb up a mountain, open my laptop, and start working. That sounds pretty appealing.
WISPs sound really interesting, and thanks for all this info!
The oversubscription for consumer grade VSAT services is an economic necessity, based on the fact that with current technology and launch costs, it's a $150 to $200 million project to build and launch a new 5000-6000 kilogram high powered satellite into geostationary orbit. It will have an estimated 15 year usable lifespan.
viasat-2 weighs 6400 kg: http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/viasat-2.htm
In many regions this will be serious competition to comcast, but in cities traditional ISPs won't go away in the next 30 years.
Everywhere on Earth is going to get a big bandwidth increase, expect for cities (and places not allowed for political reasons). It's an advancement that will continue to help fewer and fewer people.
What remains to be seen is what packet loss will be like with environmental disturbances. That latency is perfectly fine for gaming, but bursts of 20%+ packet loss will quickly flip it back to "sucks for gaming" territory while still being perfectly fine for browsing or Netflix.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Medi...
The raw RF latency of Iridium in its present state does not correspond with the network topology at layers 2 and 3.