Hacker News Reader

Comment by dr_orpheus | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, a significant portion of the latency is just the distance to the existing satellites in geosynchronous orbit. For light to get out and back to the geo belt is around 240 ms, excluding any other factors. Getting up to the promised gigabit speed will be significant challenge. The original demo satellites that SpaceX launched only had data rates of ~15 Mbps.

View on HN

These satellites are planned below 2000km altitude, where the radio signal delay is more like 3 milliseconds. It should be comparable to accessing AWS us-east datacenters from St. Louis MO

Perhaps their true market will be for industrial IOT devices that need to connect from all over the world.

If I'm selling large HVAC units with cloud monitoring functionality, it'd be attractive to ship units that are pre-connected to SpaceX's satellite network. I wouldn't have to worry about setting up agreements with multiple cellular providers or having to depend on site-provided Wifi/ethernet.

The point is, those devices could very lucrative for SpaceX without requiring as much bandwidth (no need to stream Netflix).

There is definitely a market for this. Orbcomm already does this for a lot of machine to machine communication. However, their data rates are quite slow on the order of kbps.

Same with Iridium Certus/Next - their devices are rumoured to be tiny chips (even with current constellation the hotspot is just slightly larger than modern 4G ones).

You don't really need much bandwidth for most IoT apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com