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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed how little coverage Starlink, OneWeb, etc get. It's the next revolution and the most important tech since the smart phone.

Think about the great firewall of China. It's dead after this. Having a cell provider and home internet provider. Gone. Poor bandwidth anywhere on Earth - a thing of the past. This is important and huge.

Buy rural property that is undeveloped. In 10 years time you'll be able to power it with solar and battery arrays and connect it with these satellites. A self driving carriage will deliver whatever goods you need the same day. Water is a well away and a septic tank isn't difficult to build.

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Iridium didn't escape national regulations. Why would this?

If this system is to be operable in China, an agreement must be reached. That might mean a firewall for all people in China, all Chinese citizens everywhere, or both.

Operating without permission from China would generate a complaint to the USA. The USA is obligated to enforce international RF restrictions on satellites operated by US companies.

It's going to be pirate radio all over again. How long do you think the USA will exert complete control over a privatised space industry? I'd bet the first satellite shootings will happen over copyright violations, not national security.

Yup I agree, wiki from space will get it taken out first.

Unless it's broadcast for free or with some cryptocurrency scheme... I'd expect the only challenge will be collecting money from people. The government should be able to interfere with that. Otherwise I don't really see what they could do otherwise to stop it.

the great firewall is not dead. Chinese authorities with spectrum analyzers could easily locate any rooftop customer premise radios. These things need to transmit. and they will need clear unobstructed view to the sky, nearly Horizon to Horizon.

there are already a number of countries in the world where men with guns will come and take your rooftop equipment if you try to operate an unauthorized two-way, small satellite link to the outside world. Uzbekistan for example, go take a small cheap 1.2 meter ku band VSAT terminal there, and operate it...

China is also a perfect example. I could totally go out right now and spend monthly recurring transponder kHz lease money to get a small to medium amount of two way capacity on Russian geostationary satellites that have ku band spot beams covering parts of China, and set up a two way link to a teleport in Germany.

But I give the chances of being able to operate a 1.2 to 1.8m size small VSAT in Xinjiang province for more than a week or two, very low odds. Whoever does this is going to end up in a prison or reeducation camp.

being able to operate a 1.2 to 1.8m size small VSAT in Xinjiang province

Right; I think people are visualising this like a sort of Thuraya iPhone, which it very much will not be, because physics.

I mean Thuraya is amazing if you in the middle of the ocean, but no one under 40 has ever used a modem at that speed before...

If they are successful with some sort of most-flat-panel phased array that can talk to two or three satellites simultaneously, I don't think it will be quite as obvious on a roof as a 1.2m cheap small VSAT... But it will still need to be big enough to have sufficient gain for a real link budget, and CNR ratios for complex modulations.

And its EIRP to Tx to a satellite >300km away at bitrates of 0.5 Mbps or better will be easy to find with portable spectrum analyzers hooked up to directional horn antennas.

That’s a beautiful vision of the future. But I’m pretty sure convincing my family to go live without human contact, might be difficult.

Some people can be alone, but most of us actually enjoy the company of friends and family.

There's always been explorers. It's biology.

No doubt. I just believe that interest in rural living will explode in certain areas that are beautiful. And not even that rural necessarily.

The reason I think it becomes more popular is that people won't feel so remote any longer with modern conveniences and communications. The big no-no for many people today who choose city or suburban life is that they can't easily communicate with the rest of the world, don't have easy access to consumer products and certainly don't have modern things we take for granted. This changes very soon I think.

So it's not even that most or a majority of people would do this but I think there's a lot of people relatively speaking that would choose this if they had these modern accommodations which are simply impossible right now.

This seems like one of those mundane-seeming posts that you later look back on, and realize someone accidentally predicted the reason the US and China started World War 3.

Or maybe China just keeps really, really close tabs on what goes in and out of the country, and having a receiver is immediate grounds for re-education.

I know India bans satellite phones altogether.

Even for people in this industry that follow the news, you're right. I see hardly anything about it. However, there are a few really good analysts on Twitter that talk about it, and the consensus seems to be that starlink is in trouble. Between taking debt and the questionable status of the satellites that were launched, it seems it needs to be written about more.

Well, making debt is not a problem. Its inevitable. We are talking about a new mass production facility for satellites.

I have also read many people that SpaceX tech is ahead of everybody else in a number of areas. Not to mention that they can launch way cheaper then everybody else.

There were claims that they had propulsion problems and that might be true but we don't really know.

Where did you read that? The article specifically stated he wants less complicated satellites, and most of their technology is not in-house. SpaceX isn't making space-grade rf equipment with 300 people.

Not everything technical they do is done at that location. SpaceX has between 6000 and 7000 people. SpaceX already does lots of in-house electronics, for Falcon 9 and of course Dragon.

They have the propulsion system in-house and I think I have also read that they are doing the ground terminals themselves.

The article was only about spacex satellites, so that was the context of the thread. I mentioned originally that they're not ahead of other companies in the satellite space. They are definitely ahead in the launch category.

I've thought about the satellite internet & China firewall interaction a bit and I feel that ultimately, musk owning starlink and tesla will probably mean that he will have to play ball with the Chinese government. Tesla sold 2 billion worth of cars in 2017 in China. A handful of tesla features were purportedly included just to woo the Chinese market, namely the overkill air-filter.

As for buying rural land, I couldn't agree more. Looking towards the future, I do think that we will need to greatly increase the quality of our septic systems. Currently in my county, if your soil does not drain quickly, you need a UV sterilizing bed, which puts the cost at a new system around 20-30k.

What are the cost projections for system? If ~95-99% of customers (living in densely populated area) don't adopt it, economics may make it unviable for rest also.

> Buy rural property that is undeveloped

Wish it was that simple. Maybe when there is a big enough community (then it would get expensive isn't it). I once wished for that but after getting married the priorities change 1) kids schooling 2) ours and kids social life 3) medical emergencies 4) window shopping and cheese burgers dammit :) I think we the average folks are enslaved

this. If you are interested in a place with cheap houses which already has sanitization, electricity, and basic internet connectivity, many areas on the mountains in central italy are good.

They are also mostly de-populating, because people want a ton of other things from the modern life, which a small community cannot sustain.

Yes, the "getting away from it all" is a weird kind of fantasy; I don't know why a satellite would suddenly enable it.

> A self driving carriage will deliver whatever goods you need the same day.

Rural areas are going to be the last places for full driverless, surely? Badly paved or gravel roads with zero markings? Higher chance of animals in the road? Poor metadata or lack of postal codes?

Also very population density, making it less attractive relative to e.g. suburbs.

I believe there will be much larger communities than there is today. It won't be a majority or even a large minority but significant over what it is today. Hence the buy the property today for 10-20 years out.

Certainly not for everyone in every possible situation but there's a lot of people that would choose today if they didn't have to give up communications, electricity and other modern conveniences.

We won't see a flight like we did to the suburbs but I do think we'll see a renewed interest in rural living with all the modern tools of urban and suburban life. When "things" are virtual and physical things are easily shipped, it becomes real as disillusioned people try and reconnect with something more real - but not too real and rugged. ;)

Do you think its not going to have all the normal blocks on it just because its in the sky? A firewall is a firewall whether its in orbit or an exchange.

Privacy? Gone! Everything can send their data out without going through your own network.

I mean this is really cool, but as more and more network access is available that can circumvent my own network control, the more I worry about the privacy implications. And while cellular antennas exist now, that network seems too expensive for mass adoption in every IoT device.

Good bandwidth and terrible latency is satellite Internet

Not sure which bit you're replying to, but with this constellation latency is expected to be < 100 ms, more likely on the order of 35 ms.

I've heard reports of the test satellites achieving 25 ms, but haven't found a source yet.

The reason of course is that these satellites are in low earth orbit, so only a few 100 km away, rather than geostationary orbit like most internet satellites that are at 35 000 km away

Starlink, not having the speed of light slowed down by fibre, should have lower latency over long distances.

26ms lower from new York to London (total 50ms).

Past instances of this sort of speedup have shown that this is worth billions to high frequency traders...

Reddit post that includes includes links to the academic paper that latency number is coming from, and lots of other useful information: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/9sy4q7/starli...

This shouldn't be down voted. While photonic-bandgap fiber can approach speed of light in a vacuum (to ~99.7%) it is not commercially deployed in any volume AFAIK, and standard fiber propagates signal at only about 70% of vacuum. Starlink will of course involve a minimum fixed distance penalty of a few hundred kilometers on each leg and some amount of inherent constellation bounce penalty each sat. Even so over distances of a couple thousand kilometers or more having the signal go near maximum (even up/down, air is not vacuum but with an index of refraction of only 1.0003 is damn close) vs 70% actually looks to be quite significant. I see no reason while standard fiber couldn't be beaten even under optimal point-to-point conditions (like NY to London, around 5500 km) if they were able to get it up fast enough in the near term.

And that's point-to-point from an HFT viewpoint, whereas of course in most situations fiber will not be even close to taking a direct route between locations. Even if photonic-bandgap fiber got deployed for transoceanic or continental backbone links Starlink could still of competitive practical latencies if the satellites are orbiting low enough and impose a low enough overhead.

> I'm amazed how little coverage Starlink, OneWeb, etc get

Most of what Musk is doing (if it works) will strip tens of billions (trillions?) of dollars from very, very established industries.

Telco (Starlink), Auto (Tesla), Oil (Tesla), Transport (Boring), Power/oil/gas (SolarCity).

There are extremely rich and powerful interests that have no interest in him doing that, and you can bet they don't want the media telling the world what's going on.

Please don't compare everything he's doing in the same bucket. Even if starlink were to succeed technically, it's not clear how they'd pay for the ground system. The satellite is the only piece talked about, but the ground system is betting on technology to take a massive cut off what it costs currently. It's more likely to will only be sold to enterprise/business customers, and not Joe schmo in rural Kansas.

SpaceX needs this to succeed to increase revenue, based on a wsj story from last year. The launches, while fascinating to watch and a huge technical achievement, won't pay the bills forever.

In my antenna design course in graduate school, our Professor had insider information about the specifications the Starlink people were targeting for their mobile ground stations. He gave designing a similar antenna system as one of the final projects for the course. The exact numbers aren't important (nor are they really a tight secret; if you are well-versed in antenna design I imagine you could spend 10 minutes and come up with a list of specifications that are pretty close to what we were given in the course). We found that the mobile base station would be neither complex to construct, nor expensive (Conservatively <$100. We were focused on the antenna (with the right manufacturing deals we estimated ~$15-20 for total antenna fabrication costs) and we didn't investigate the radio or amplifier too thoroughly so we just budgeted $80 for those pieces and called it good).

The fundamental requirements were things like: at least X dB main lobe gain, electrically steerable to any point within a the cone 60 degrees off of azimuth, total physical size less than .5 m^2, operates at Y.YY GHz with resonant bandwidth of Z.ZZ GHz, etc... The design my team went with was an array of microstrip antennas with a network of phase shifters to electrically steer the signal via beamforming. It's actually quite amazing what you can do if you just get the right shape of metal to vibrate at the frequencies you pump into it. Antenna design is a wonderful confluence of mathematics, design and black magic.

Are you saying that your class came up with an antenna design that's about 100x cheaper than anything else out there today for leo satellites, and you didn't patent, nor start a company with it? Something is fishy about your story.

Not really. You'd be surprised how easy a LEO link budget is, the free space path loss isn't much more than a cell phone link.

I'm familiar with a link budget. That doesn't have anything to do with how much a phased array antenna costs.

I’m not sure what you’re referring to when you say 100x cheaper. Googling “LEO satellite antenna” will result in plenty of hits that are well below $2000. As I said before, the $20 price point was for manufacturing of the antenna itself (micro strip antennas are very cheap, materials-wise) and so do not include any of the other auxiliary systems needed such as a radio transmitter, an amplifier, etc, although for LEO you dont need to shout very loud to be heard by the satellites.

I googled it, and didn't find any that were suitable for something anywhere near what SpaceX is doing. Please provide links if you know of some.

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