In the developing world, we've seen a leapfrog effect in telecoms - they skipped over fixed-line phones and went straight to mobile phones. It's far easier to blanket a rural area or a dense slum with 3G signal than to run wires to every house.
That poses a problem when you need fast fixed broadband - there's only so much mobile spectrum to go around, you can't really cheat the Shannon-Hartley theorem, so you end up with tight data caps and unreliable performance. Rolling out fixed infrastructure can be prohibitively expensive, so a lot of areas are stuck on mobile-only.
Low-orbit satellite broadband potentially breaks this dilemma. The low orbit provides tolerable latency (within 30ms of fixed broadband), there's an abundance of spectrum in the Ku and Ka bands and you can steer a tight beam with a phased array. Starlink and OneWeb could potentially offer a satellite broadband product that is competitive with fixed-line broadband on cost, latency and bandwidth, but that is available almost anywhere on earth. Becoming the default broadband provider for half the world's population is Kind Of A Big Deal - maybe enough of a big deal to bankroll a Mars mission.
I think there's obvious potential for this to be Kind Of A Big Deal on a purely personal level. Is your local cable monopoly absolutely terrible? Within a couple of years, it might not be a monopoly any more. Huge amounts of rural real estate becomes a heck of a lot more attractive if literally everywhere has good broadband. This might just be one of those once-in-a-generation technologies that meaningfully changes human geography.
With self driving cars you can go out, drink alcohol, socialize, and get back home whenever you want, you can even sleep in the car
By building a GSV and naming it Kind Of A Big Deal.
But limited mobile phone service and no high speed internet limits a lot of people. StarLink hopefully comes along by the time we start our planned future expansion.
At present we are three owners each building own house, we have 5 different people interested right now joining us to build their homes and our planning is no more than either 50 quarter acre or half acre lots which will let us leave about 15 acres untouched.
The real short term is just Wifi, with ethernet cables for the further homes. Once we get more people, we will look into fiber for everybody.
But it doesn't, despite the marketing of Starlink as a "broadband" network they simply can't service high population density areas.
So it might be a backbone to a 4G tower and possibly usable by consumers in rural areas, but it won't be installed on the roof of a car nor offer connectivity to individual consumers in urban regions.
How come?
Antenna alignment could also be a factor, which becomes more difficult if the antenna is attached to a moving object.
If a single satellite can cover a 9km diameter, I think it will be just fine for vehicles. Especially so as the idea is for overlapping satellites. Also, much of the starlink bandwidth will be used for extra cellular / wireless / internet backbone areas. Areas that need long haul fiber optics to have bandwidth suddenly won't, so it will actually improve existing internet service providers as well since their addressable market will increase.
I'm not saying that you're definitely wrong, but Starlink is designed to provide a truly phenomenal amount of throughput. The V-band VLEO constellation is clearly intended to serve urban areas.
https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
Population density in Boston is over 5000/sqKm, so 250,000 people have to share that satellite. If 10% are subscribers and they use it 10% of the time, that's 2500 simultaneous users.
Starlink has claimed 20Gb/s per satellite, which gives 1 Gb/s per 125 simultaneous users in this high-density area. That's not great, but it's also not awful.
In any less population-dense area, it can be reasonably competitive, especially as the end-user deployment model is expected to be "here's a pizza-box sized antenna: make sure it's pointed in this general direction of the sky, and give it power and ethernet."
thats per satellite... wouldnt you, in theory, have access to multiple satellites? i though the theory was overlap, etc...
If I remember correctly, Starlink could potentially serve roughly 40 million customers globally in far to reach areas. Including ships and aircraft. It's not economic solution for the urban population.
No, but you can work within it's limits to achieve some fairly spectacular things.
I predict that if low-orbit sat service starts bringing competition to rural areas, we will see the cell companies start using spatial diversity antennae to dramatically up the available bandwidth.
Towers are not cheap to build or maintain, if you only get a couple hundred people per tower it may not make sense to do(and why you don't see a lot of community WISPs except in unique cases).
I was all aboard the SpaceX hype train until that comment. I remember looking into his argument, and it seemed like everything checked out.
Personally I pay $30 a month for 15 Mbps. I remember EarthLink or Prodigy being like $15-20 a month for 56Kbps. I remember leaving the modem on all night to download a 30MB demo of Monster Truck Madness in Elementary School. Now speeds are ~250 times what they were and the price has only doubled in the past 20 years? That's f-ing amazing. Prices are not getting out of control if you stick to the bottom end. I'm not even sure what I'd do with gig internet.
For areas going from no internet to satellite internet it's probably going to be amazing, but going from high latency satellite internet to low latency satellite internet will not be a huge game changer.
Adoption of http2 would probably help the quality of existing satellite internet more and be cheaper than this endeavor. As everyone started moving to HTTPS, the handshakes take much longer on a high latency connection and multiplexing would help alleviate that issue.
We're going to find out and that's the most interesting part.
I don't have it available and I live in an urban area. Hell, I don't even have a viable alternative to my cable company. There's a ton of bureaucracy around all of it.
Political nonsense aside, we rarely see the use for something when it first comes out. That includes really useful things. e.g. all of the super important inventions that were straight up accidents.
Sure, it could take years, but I can't imagine having faster communication between more people not having a huge effect.
It absolutely makes a difference. Rural/isolated communities are being left behind in terms of access to what are now basic staples of modern life: inexpensive, high-quality VoIP and video telecom, diverse sources of streaming video and audio media, real-time online gaming, telecommuting, etc.
The satellite internet available to most consumers today is cost-prohibitive garbage. Most options are doing satellite downlink paired to dialup uplink, and even the stuff that does two-way satellite links provides abysmal performance. All of it usually has a $100+ USD per month cost. Compared against 3G mobile, the latter is a far better deal.
I'm not sure if you're talking about the U.S. or not, but my parents have satellite internet and they don't even notice a difference unless the dish is full of snow, which I'm not sure is a problem Starlink will solve. They stream, use Skype, and wifi calling. I don't notice much of a difference when I visit. If I try to log into a remote terminal, sure, but I'm not doing that. Internet might be more expensive, but rural properties are cheaper.
Hi, I'm your counterexample. I held out moving to a rural area until the internet situation got better. It's great out here with a yagi on the roof.
Definitely not true. It is a big decision point for a lot of people.
Because net neutrality isn't exactly a thing everywhere, worldwide.
The cars will use LTE, although the backbone of those base stations could very well be Starlink.
Maybe future iterations will have extra hardware for terminal friendly applications, but I'd guess you'll see level 4 autonomy in a model 3 before they can upgrade Stsrlink to do that.
Never have needed a faster Internet in a Tesla and all passengers will be carrying their phones anyway.
https://i.imgur.com/leKbJ4k.jpg (Map from April this year)
Most super chargers are within about 120 miles of each other, so at 65mph, you have about 2 hours between them. They've done a pretty impressive job building out the infrastructure
Also, what are those white spots on the map? Unpopulated areas with no charger in a 2h radius?
Most of the car trips that I do are round trips... and I would guess that yours are too?
Makes more sense?
plugshare.com is a good site that shows all the chargers. supercharge.info is a 3rd party site that shows tesla chargers only, plus where the ones under construction are. tesla.com has one too.
I go skiing a lot, and there's one thing you learn - you use a lot of energy going uphill. An ev has much more accurate energy usage so you notice, gas cars of course use more energy doing more work too. But the huge difference is going back, going downhill, your electric car basically glides down hills for free, and because you are recharging the battery when you do moderate breaking, I can drive 20+ miles back and end up with more range than I started out with.
In Seattle I can easily go round trip to the 3 ski areas around town.
Basically I don't worry about it because I could charge on the way back if I needed it, and in 6 years of day trips I only charged once or twice on the way home - the one I remember was when I went to mt rainier for a week with no charging.
I'm willing to bet that you are an outlier
The latest model goes 370. not 500.
Also, this guy has some serious driving PTSD or something, he's so scared of cars that he thinks its dangerous to drive on an empty highway at night. Yikes.
People have driven them around Australia. Can't get much further away from populated areas than that.
e.g. https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/woman-drove-her-te...
They could colocate the teleoperators at Starlink ground stations to minimize latency, and prioritize teleop traffic.
At the speed of light latency to/from the satellite (3.5ms) and a vehicle speed of 60mph, that's about 4 inches of vehicle travel. Sounds pretty great-- probably better than almost any human driver.
At terrestrial latency (30-60ms), thats a few feet, maybe nearing 10. You're still in the margin for human reaction times.
Doubling that to account for compute latency and such is actually still in the noise for car brakes available today.
Cool how far things have come.
Assuming Starlink also works, I suspect the first company to make this work would make an absolute killing.
Why? Build on the ground with a fibre, far cheaper and far lower latency.
For certain global applications, a low orbit cloud consisting of many datacenters has some advantages. The virtual servers could virtually migrate to "hover" wherever they are needed, or to wherever would minimize latency.
Yes. But your reading comprehension is spotty. Look at the cousin comment:
The way the "hovering" would work, is that the entire state of one virtual server would be serialized, then sent via line-of-sight high bandwidth comms to the next satellite to go over the region of interest. This way, the entire application's server cluster could incrementally migrate to remain over one geographic area, but do so at a much lower altitude than geosynchronous orbit.
You're not understanding the proposal. The way the "hovering" would work, is that the entire state of one virtual server would be serialized, then sent via line-of-sight high bandwidth comms to the next satellite to go over the region of interest. This way, the entire application's server cluster could incrementally migrate to remain over one geographic area, but do so at a much lower altitude than geosynchronous orbit.
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-launches-t...