SpaceX faces daunting challenges if it’s going to win the internet space race
latimes.com
latimes.com
"In 2017, more than 26% of people who lived in rural
areas in the U.S. were not covered by terrestrial
broadband internet service, according to a May report
from the Federal Communications Commission."
There are well-heeled communities adjacent to large urban areas that can get nothing worthwhile; they're inflicting substantial new property taxes on themselves to fund FTTH build-outs. I suspect the actual market for rural broadband is many times larger than whatever is assumed in this story. I also know for fact that there is a cohort of people that will go further out into the hinterlands the instant they can solve the bandwidth problem at a reasonable cost. I'm one of them.
Thank you.
At risk of piling on a "+1" comment, I will add a little bit of context.
My parents live about 35 miles from a "midwest urban core", they are served by Frontier. Supposedly they can get "1.5Mbps DSL" which qualifies as broadband. On a good day they can get 64k. This has degraded from about 768k ~10 years ago, to ~64k today. Absolute no maintenance other than "electrons kinda flowish" has been done on these lines.
But, my parents and their neighbors of ~150 households totally count for "broadband" stats.
The fraud going on here is absolutely mind boggingly in scope. The "lie big if you're going to lie" thing comes into mind here. Billions evaporated due to nothing other than absolutely in-your-face fraud.
I work online so a stable internet connection is a must. Right now we're surviving with boutique wireless ISPs (not cell, think point to point networks used in rural areas but deployed in the city because you have post-apocalyptic levels of collapse) They buy their uplink from the monopoly government ISP but pay handsomely for priority.
I pay $30 a month for a 2mb connection.
I would GLADLY pay for Starlink.
Edit: I was responding to parent's first sentence, "I live in Venezuela and our internet service is crumbling and censored (Dont fucking vote for communists or populist socialists)". That is like living in Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, etc. (look here if you want more examples: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_Censorship_... ), and then blaming Capitalism for the censorhip of the Internet.
I'm sorry and I hope it gets better. Here is one article, as a source, its long though. Source: https://nacla.org/news/2018/05/18/united-states%E2%80%99-han...
"The first UN rapporteur to visit Venezuela for 21 years has told The Independent the US sanctions on the country are illegal and could amount to “crimes against humanity” under international law.
Former special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas, who finished his term at the UN in March, has criticized the US for engaging in “economic warfare” against Venezuela which he said is hurting the economy and killing Venezuelans."
Per the Indpendent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/venezuela-...
"Socialism was working too well, it brought huge swathes of the population out of poverty. A working less-capitalist model being dangerous to the global status quo, had to go."
This is ideological drivel so far removed from reality, it's basically trolling.
Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/reagan-...
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, that would be good.
If Venezuela's form of socialism was working so well, then it should have sustained itself no matter what the US did. Instead it was supported by oil money, and as soon as the oil dollars were cut off it collapsed because there was nothing revolutionary or innovative about it. I'll be voting for Andrew Yang this primary because I like the idea of UBI and a social safety net and how he's planning to implement his policies. I think that form of 21st century socialism might work - the form that Venezuela chose just led to cronyism and oppression.
Good domestic policy makes you impervious to interference by foreign powers with 40x your GDP?
I don’t get it, what’s the logic there?
It's very difficult for an ISP to make much money at $30/mo per customer, unless you go the Google route and only provide automated customer service. That's why established ISP such as Verizon are losing interest and selling their operations to bottom-feeding companies like CenturyLink. All of the money is in Mobile.
I can't see SpaceX itself actually providing the retail experience. It's entirely foreign to how the company functions. I'd see SpaceX either contracting to provide technical services (like Level3), or wholesaling the product to sort-of MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators). If wholesale, it could be a captive sister company (Musk does have the retail experience) (by analogy, like Mobile PCS which is owned by T-Mobile), or to independent operators (analogy being Virgin Mobile).
I don't have any deep insight into the market, but some interesting possibilities would be a hungry cell carrier like T-Mobile branching out into ISP service, hoping to provide more attractive land/mobile bundles.
I have also heard people (not in this thread) talk about Starlink as a way to bypass censorship in places like China, but this is almost certainly not possible. What authoritarian regime would allow the sale of the Starlink antennas in their country and the local downlinks needed to have good latency?
This is a fascinating project, but I hope we don't end up treating it as a panacea to all issues of information freedom.
- Expression of opinion almost always lets you being identified even if your IP address can't be seen.
- Most people won't support your opinion - because they are paid trolls (a large fraction of app posts, because a comparatively small - 'only' hundreds of thousands - trolls post in insane quantities) and because many online spaces are shaped by trolls and by people who are too afraid of expressing their opinion freely. Internet is simply not seen as a place appropriate for sensitive discussions in China and this will not change if people will be able to access all blocked resources, or reliably hide their locations.
Individuals bypassing technical restrictions is very different from having a commercial operation. Without the mandated censorship and monitoring, Starlink's entire business is completely illegal in China, so the entire thing (from setup to service to support) would have to be run underground, they'd have to accept payment in Bitcoin, no SpaceX executive could ever travel to China, and Tesla would probably have to get out too.
It's not gonna happen. There is no chance, none whatsoever, that Starlink ever does business in China unless it goes through the same filters as everyone else, even though from a purely technical perspective it theoretically could.
This is not entirely true. It's been getting tougher and tougher to get past TGF, even with obfuscation.
I wonder if that situation is exclusively true in China, or if similar situations exist where it is covert, rather than overt.
Some of their largest markets are going to be in countries where people cannot afford to have their own phased array antennas anyways. So yeah, especially early this will probably be their market.
I did the math a year ago and so numbers may be a little off due to memory, but they should be in the ball park. Also these would be optimal numbers, so realistic would be worse.
Any disruption in the current sat-internet market is welcome.
I see all this as analogous to the problem of beginning pilots: the cost of getting hours in a plane is expensive.
Offering <x> where x requires the pilot to fly a plane will get the pilot discount hours in the air. x could be flight lessons, flying packages around, aerial photo services, etc.
...and having multiple megaconstellations competing thus isn't necessarily a bad thing even from SpaceX's perspective. More mass to launch to orbit.
...that's one thing about reusable rockets that is key to understand. There's no fundamental physics that says reusable rockets can't be done. Shuttle proved upper stages can be reused and SpaceX showed first stages can be reused. The main question is demand: reusable rockets make sense IFF there's more than sufficient demand to pay back the R&D and the keep the factory busy.
To over-simplify things a bit: Rocket factories for even expendable rockets seem to struggle to be affordable unless you're building at least 10 airframes per year, so if you want to get 10-100 reuses out of your rocket, you'd best be launching at least 100-1000 times per year...
(where eggs = rockets and chickens = starlink)
:)
Starlink is promising well under a million per satellite, and OneWeb is reportedly already at a million. Satellite costs might end up lower than launch costs, and even if they're higher that doesn't seem like they'll dominate.
Given this constellation and phased array antennas are novel combination an expert’s opinion is worth about as much as most here on HN. Also, it’s annoying how the article questions finding a market, as the competition in semi-rural areas is Comcast, charter, Verizon etc if lucky. That’s a pretty low bar IMHO.
I hope we get some good competition in this area!
I have yet to see any real plans for downlink locations, the places where the satellite network will integrate with the fiber backbone that is 'the internet'. The system cannot be funneled through a handful of locations in the US. For the mega constellation concept to work you need hundreds of local downlinks so that connections don't have to hop across too many sats before exiting the network.
And if other countries have it and it prevents yours from 'staying competitive', important people pay attention.
And if that civic approach doesn't work, some rich farmer tells his senator buddy on a hunting trip that he wants Starlink to watch Netflix in the woods, and the senator tells the regulator to make it happen.
The latency will be top-notch, but only if they strictly limit total traffic. So, streaming will probably cost way too much for normal people, unless they can contrive to cache copies of the absolutely most popular stuff on all the birds. Then, everything big but not cached will be super expensive, throttled, or actually forbidden.
Of course they will charge the publishers for caching, by spot auction, and the publishers will use a good chunk of their allotment to cache ads.
But first he has to launch it, and, before that, raise money to launch it. Investors' tiny minds need to believe in massive disruption, just long enough. They will get paid, just not the way they might guess.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/spacex-sa...