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Comment by strikelaserclaw | Hacker News Reader

Anyone wanna offer me their hypothesis on what Amazon and other tech companies gain from offering internet to people who probably aren't valuable consumers?

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Not valuable? Ships, oil rigs, airplanes, remote vacation destinations (e.g. ski lodges), etc have lots of money and a good concentration of rich people with lots of money.

I've been wondering about remote cell towers as well. When I'm out in rural areas I'll regularly get 'LTE', but my downloads will be considerably slower than when I'm in a city (despite a much lower population density). My assumption is that it's very expensive to get highspeed internet out to these locations.

This should enable cell phone companies to place a tower as long as they can run power to it (and solar panels might be an option for really remote towers).

In a lot of rural areas the cell towers are linked together using some sort of wireless tech, usually microwave links or similar line of sight technology.

So in effect all those towers share their Internet bandwidth.

It's not likely this. Microwave transport is fast. The real difference in rural sites is a combination of spectrum (ie. 5mz of 850) vs 20mhz of 1700/2100.

850 has better propagation, hence its usage in rural.

The other factor is antenna patterns and site sectors. Many rural sites have an omni antenna, and with no tilt.

In cities you may see 6+ sectors on a site with 12 degree tilts. So your site has more bandwidth(20+ mhz), and way more capacity.

Long story short.. They give you less of the interwebs in rural because it's cheaper

Yeah and there's already a lot of providers of satellite internet. But, Starlink has not published their pricing, so it's unclear how much of the market will they capture.

Sure, there are competitors. Starlink (or any other proposed LEO constellation) offers a fundamentally better product as a result of low latency (ballpark 640ms vs 20ms). Which they get as a result of being in low earth orbit instead of geosynchronous orbit. Starlinks costs per unit bandwidth are almost certainly far lower, meaning the ability to out compete on price.

I don't see the existing constellations remaining competitive for long.

This is completely incorrect. There is no evidence whatsoever that starlink costs are "almost certainly far lower".

> Starlinks costs per unit bandwidth are almost certainly far lower

Interesting, how do you know that?

It's not true. LEO systems are far more CAPEX intensive than GEO, and neither Starlink, Oneweb, Telesat, or Kuiper will be cheaper than Viasat-3 and will not be able to compete in terms of cost per Gbps.

Do you have any good sources on that? Not that I doubt you, but would like to read more on the subject.

See the cost of phased array, which Leo needs to work. They're significantly more expensive than standard parabolic dishes, and there's no evidence SpaceX has changed that.

Based on Elon's standard playbook, I'm guessing he's going to try to bring down unit economics with much larger scale in phased array manufacturing than we've seen in the past. If he didn't think he could do this, I don't think they'd be launching Starlink.

That said, I know almost nothing about phased arrays, so I don't know if it's expensive due to some fundamental reason, or if it's partly because it's been a niche/low volume device before now.

Right, Elon needs that to come down to work. The satellite part is very cool and all, but the ground station cost is where the uncertainty is.

Well, look at Oneweb as an example. They have raised 3+ billions, still need more funding and their total system throughout is not that much larger than Viasat-3's,which has a cost of ~1 billion (?). I don't think that Starlink is gonna be significantly (maybe a factor of 0.5x) cheaper in terms of cost per Mbps.

It's an opinion based on:

- Number of satellites launched at once

- Stated bandwidth numbers of satellites

- Lack of concern over intentionally deorbitting satellites for testing and sending experimental prototypes to space with an apparently expected not negligible failure rate.

- Stated cost of the phased array groundstations (in the hundreds)

One of Starlink's planned markets is global high frequency trading. The latency of radio and laser transmission in atmosphere and space is much lower than undersea fiber optic cables. (Light moves significantly slower through glass than through air.) Even with the longer distance and retransmission they stand a good chance of being lower latency across oceans than undersea cables.

I originally though this would be a good market, and have voiced that opinion on HN, but afaik SpaceX has never said anything about it.

Someone has since pointed out to me that HFT is currently done by bouncing microwaves off the atmosphere. This, unlike fiber, should be faster than SpaceX's constellation making that business unlikely to work out. (Possibly unless high bandwidth almost as low latency is useful).

Bouncing waves off the ionosphere has different ranges depending on the time of day. Do you have more info on how that's currently used? I'm curious to learn more.

Not really, sorry

> Someone has since pointed out to me that HFT is currently done by bouncing microwaves off the atmosphere.

I would love to read up on this. Is this similar to HARP?

This is not true as far as I can tell. HFT does not appear to be part of spacex’s strategy at all.

Specially now that the satellites have no crosslinks.

My understanding was that was just a limitation on the first batch, as they're still developing the design, but they're intending to cross link in future. Is that not the case?

Sure, but that's significant feature. Other satellites will be built and launched by the time they get there, and they absolutely need to OSL for capacity.

I did the math on this. It probably wouldn't be good for hft. The highly profitable hft is done on the floor of the nyse. There's some from Boston but they typically use directed radio instead of fiber-optic. Satellites will be even slower, but maybe cheaper if you're sending date from California or Australia. But it's still probably cheaper (and more profitable) to put a machine on the floor or even just in NYC.

I'm not sure why hft would be a major pitch. These people fight for floor space at the nyse because that much latency matters.

Think London to NYC, or NYC to Tokyo. Fiber will be slower. https://youtu.be/QEIUdMiColU?t=196

What I'm saying is that it's faster to just buy a server in NYC.

The idea is you profit on acting on cross market trading before anytime else can. It's not about latency to any single market.

Seeing something before someone else can IS latency. That's why servers on the NYSE floor (or ANY SE floor) are really expensive. Because it gives you an advantage. It isn't humans reacting and buying in HFT, it is computers. The humans are constantly updating algorithms, but HFT means it is the computers doing the reactions (based on algos written).

They have servers in both locations. If you see that a stock starts falling in London you have a time window where you can still sell it at a higher price in say New York, until the price drops to the same level thus closing the opportunity for arbitrage.

How quickly can you "see" the price falling in London and get that message to NYC? Whoever "sees" it first wins, right? That's what they're talking about.

I don't think you understand what many HFT firms do. They arbitrage between exchanges. For example the option or futures price of a security in Chicago and price of the underlying in New York. Also arbitraging between equities listed on multiple exchanges.

Co-location isn't a solution to these problems, and low latency lines between exchanges in different parts of the country and world is a huge huge factor to successfully implementing many/most HFT strategies.

GP is obviously not talking about HFT on the NYT, but HF arbitrage between different global exchanges.

s/nyse/arbitrary exchange/g

It seems useful, but tricky to monetize. But if you gave priority to hft traffic then you could charge more as it would still have a small advantage over a standard StarLink plan.

How would that be hard to monetize? You literally just charge people for internet access.

* HFT firms will pay for it if the latency is lower

* Online gamers that play with other people around the globe would also probably be willing to pay to get their ping down.

* Maybe they could have a LEO CDN.

* People like me who travel a lot would be willing to pay for it. It would be especially sweet if I could somehow ditch my phone plan and just have global satellite coverage and use VOIP via Google Voice or something.

Because HFT firms can pay for a standard StarLink and get the same results. There are few HFT customers and you have to offer them something that can't get from your consumer service if you want them to pay commensurate to the value provided.

Your other points have nothing to do with my HFT specific comment.

It's very likely that standard Starlink plans will downlink traffic as close to the customer as possible to reduce lateral utilization, but HFT needs to route traffic on the constellation all the way across the Atlantic.

It will have to be something like this that gives best possible latency for a higher price.

"standard StarLink"?

StarLink doesn't exist yet, and when it does, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that two satellite constellation providers could serve the HFT market and both be profitable.

Still totally missing the point. You have to offer something extra to the HFT traders to sell them a $10000/month plan instead of a $49.99 plan. Discriminate on latency somehow for their traffic. Prioritize packets, prefer shortest links over most expedient links, minimize hops. Otherwise if they will just buy your standard plan and you don't monetize them effectively.

Where did you get the idea that satellite constellation internet will cost $10000/m? Or that HFT firms aren't already paying much more than $49/m?

... They're just numbers picked out of the air for one last illustrative attempt to explain why you need something special to entice HFTs to pony up way more than a standard internet plan so you can monetize them effectively.

The point is that HFTs aren't going to be ponying up "way more"...

It's going to be a bit more, for a bit better latency.

Your comments are predicated on the assumption that this internet service is going to be significantly more expensive than existing fiber subscriptions, and therefore needs many benefits to outweigh the increased cost. But I have seen no reason to believe that this will be the case. Every statement I've seen indicates that these services will be quite competitive on price.

No, you've still completely missed the point. I give up.

They could just charge extra for the “last ms”. So add a ms of latency for the standard plan, and remove it for the HFT plan.

I live in West Virginia and have no household access to broadband internet service. (No cable or DSL available here) The square mile around me has dozens of homes with incomes above the US median. Our area is not especially rugged, but the West Virginia government is both corrupt and incompetent. We are all cheering on Starlink and this new effort from Amazon. The only question is whether 5G will get here first!

Why not use 4G? Starlink's bandwidth (price per gigabyte) is probably not going to be great.

Oh, they will be valuable customers: poor people are too poor to afford choice. If Amazon offers "internet access" for x¤ monthly, and "Amazon internet access" for x/3¤, what option will poor people take? After that, all of their online spending will be as profitable as selling groceries in the company town store.

They probably are valuable customers. Tech companies have literally no reach where the internet does not touch. If they want to expand to their full (terrifying) power, they would need to give internet access to everyone, and then control it.

Terrifying power? Amazon has succeeded by getting customers what they want, and doing it cheaper, faster and more conveniently than their competition. Of all the tech companies to be cynical about, they most obviously make people's lives better, and expanding their reach (along with the "ancillary benefits" of giving people access to the internet...) is a moral good.

Really, this knee-jerk paranoia is difficult to understand. If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business. If it pisses people off it'll go out of business. If it tries to break the law it'll go out of business. It has limited power -- effectively none compared to any kind of government -- and no ambitions, incentives or clear paths to acquire that kind of power.

"If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business. If it pisses people off it'll go out of business." This is the central myth of the free market. Part and parcel of a massive internet company is having control over the flow of information, how can people protect their rights if they don't even know they're being violated, or if they're being distracted from protecting themselves by lies and manipulation? That is essentially the stated goal of a company's PR, and the sort of technology that goes into actively manipulative practices that we just accept out of tradition (the entire concept of marketing is a violation of "invisible hand") has now reached the level where people stand no chance, the amount of money and research that goes into making you make decisions that are in a large corporation's interests over your own are something any particular individual could never possibly match.

> This is the central myth of the free market.

Tell Sears and Kmart that it's a myth.

Top US retailers in 1970: Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, McCrory's, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, May, Dayton-Hudson (Target)

Only one of those remains on the list now (in an entirely different form at that).

The Internet has changed nothing fundamental about whether a retailer can be replaced by competition. And no, Amazon's warehouses don't make it impossible to compete with any more than Sears previously having thousands of physical stores supposedly protected them via reach / scale that others couldn't match. For retailers, the Internet is a better catalog. Sears rode the last version to temporary dominance, Amazon rode this version to temporary online dominance.

The myth here, though, is not that companies are taken out by competitors with better technology or more ruthless practices or better PR, that happens all the time. The myth is that when this happens it is always in the customer’s best interests, or that the customer will even be allowed to become aware of what their own best interests really are. For a company there is no difference between genuinely benefitting their customers and manipulating their customers into believing that they have been benefitted. Making that determination falls on the customer themselves, and in the competition between global corporation and median consumer the consumer is wildly out-matched.

and more generally than retailers:

http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2017...

This is literally Big Data in practice. If a superhuman level of intelligence is achieved (as in, comprehension beyond that which any individual human could possibly contain) it will be in the field of controlling groups of humans' behavior.

We could already be there. We won't know, because by definition we won't be able to grasp the scope of it.

My own theory is that this is the strong claim to a-life as practiced by collective organisms. To a cell, a human is a bunch of nearby cells, but to the human, the cell could be a potential fingernail clipping. To collective a-life, humans are no longer the point.

> If Amazon stops serving its customers well it'll go out of business.

You have no evidence for this, and the fact that a court case to hold Amazon liable for bad products was even required provides a counterfactual.

Real engineering made a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQ8xEWjnBs

I recommend watching. The channel does really good explanations.

I quite liked that video. It was indeed worth watching.

High speed trading. You can send a packet faster from London to nyc via a LEO network than an underwater fiber.

Why are there people investing so much money on these things, filling up the space, just for some stupid trading. Why is humanity doing this ??

Dude, we blasted from New York to the San Francisco to enable high frequency trading.

If we had a way to remove all oxygen from earth, require people to wear astronaut suits, in order to reduce 10ms off the speed for HFT, you'd have companies start sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere.

Would you pick up a $20 bill on the ground?

I think we all know the answer to that question, and if you know the answer to that question, you know the answer to your question:

To make fucking money (of course).

"just for some stupid trading" is one of the underlying forces beneath the success of all modern economies. Without it almost everything you buy would be more expensive.

Being able to trade milliseconds faster is about as pure zero-sum as you can get. The comparison isn't versus having no stock markets at all.

They referred to HFT only - how does it contribute to "success" of modern economies?

It just sucks out value due to stock market implementation.

That argument can apply to any improvement in efficiency of a process.

Admittedly any contribution of HFT to economic success (other than that of the traders themselves, of course) is probably fairly marginal, but more efficient markets are probably a good thing.

Are you considering “having cheaper stuff” actually progress in terms of humanity ?

you've grown so accustomed to modern conveniences that you don't realize that you're kept alive by things that not even a king could've afforded 100 years ago.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/26/the-a...

Yes, when everything becomes cheaper we can pursue greater technology. Having a 5GHz computer would have been impossible some decades ago; now they can be used for scientific research by anyone who has $500.

Ultimately price is just a measurement of how many resources it takes to make something, with the currency added in as the medium of exchange. A product being cheap means it is now easy for us to make; the previous price of the now-cheap product will be taken up by a better product.

Sure, why not? Cheaper stuff, from another angle, means you can work fewer hours to achieve the same lifestyle. And that's pretty good!

But you don't. None of us do. At some point theory has to run into a reality check.

You can if you're a contractor or running your own business.

But it would definitely be nice for businesses in general and employment law to stop being obsessed with 40 hours as a magical number. Working 4 8-hour days, or 5 6-hour days, or 4 6-hour days should be just be an option by default.

(And wages have to stop stagnating relative to prices so that the premise of "cheaper stuff" actually happens in the first place.)

Yes, the march of human progress can be measured in the decrease in prices of all of the things we produce.

$$$

Telecoms are among the most tightly regulated and jealously held national level industries. If you can put up a global network in a few years that pushes down 4 and 5G speeds, the national telecom companies become obsolete.

There will be some holdouts, but eventually it will become stupid for many places to invest in terrestrial infrastructure just to protect a technologically inferior domestic telecom company.

There will still be bandwidth limitations. Same with 5g whenever that comes. Fibre isn't going anywhere.

There's a few, but mostly AWS.

If you're going to put up satellites to do low latency internet, they need to be in LEO. (Speed of light is slow and GEO is far away) This ends up allowing you to provide internet in most locations as well. Kinda a spin-off.

So they want to provide high speed internet to any first world without having to build tons of physical towers (you still need them). I also wouldn't be surprised if Sl Americans who live in sparsely populated areas use Amazon as a primary place to obtain things (I know I did).

So now we can also do things like provide high speed and low latency internet to ships, islands, and people all over the world. Remember that most of Amazon's business is AWS, not Amazon.com. Less than half the world population is on the internet. More users means more servers. Easy to see the the major advantage. Amazon doesn't care if they're using Amazon.com but if they're using AWS. Which there's a good chance they will.

Tldr: AWS is where they currently make their money and where more users will just increase that capital.

They're playing the (somewhat) long game. While the portion of the world that doesn't internet access right now is generally poor, adding an internet connection to that populace will drastically speed up their development. This then gives Amazon new customers.

Their options are either wait around for 3rd world governments to build the infrastructure to get them those customers, or do it themselves faster.

Lower latency internet backbone for cross continental links. Latency around the world via satellite is less than via optical fiber, since speed of light in fiber is much less than in a vacuum. For AWS, it's a huge selling point for many customers if they can offer lower global latencies than anyone else! Think of all the algorithmic traders, the canonical example.

It s a ruse. The US will win the landgrab for controlling the communication networks of up and coming regions like Africa before the Chinese do

Better the US than China, honestly. For all its faults, the US is still a (flawed) democracy with a free press. Its capacity for abuse is at least moderated.

Not a bad point at all, especially with Amazon joining at the hip with the U.S. government lately.

Once they have their own satellite-based cell network, they can take another stab at launching a mobile phone. The Amazon Fire2 phone will be able to use this proprietary network. Amazon could then go for entry into mobile markets by selling phones with data service included free, trying to become a third major mobile platform.

Alternately, Amazon is developing their Alexa-fronted Internet-of-Things (home automation, etc.). This network could serve those devices and make their setup easier. (No need to connect them to your wifi network. Amazon could claim their IoT is inherently safer because they control the entire network that they operate on, so your security camera won't get hacked. (Note that Amazon owns the Ring doorbell products.)

Imagine how many customers will jump at the chance to carry a pizza box-sized antenna for a cellphone!

Honestly, if I could get home wifi speeds in my car, I would.

I hate watching Netflix and having pauses as I drive on the highway.

Define "valuable".

If you gather a lot of people with just a bit of money each, they'll collectively have a lot of money.

Won't this offer internet to everyone on Earth?

Due to bandwidth limitations, most of these systems won't work well in densely populated areas. The orbits also have an inclination that won't take them over more extreme latitudes

For those who can afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a receiving, sure.

(starlink, for example, will require a pizza box sized dish at what they hope will be a price of a few hundred dollars)

It won't be that cheap. I'd bet money on it.

Satellites are outside the regulatory authority of countries they operate over. They can do far more of value than merely provide Internet access to poor people.

Satellites also have to be specialty built for their purpose. You can't just take a small communications satellite, attach a small camera, and have a spy satellite.

Well you "could" but it would be so crappy that it'd be useless.

Also LEO satellites lose their altitude rather quickly, not a great investment for spy satellites.

> Satellites are outside the regulatory authority of countries they operate over.

Except the United States (Assuming the satellite was made/operated by a US entity such as a citizen or business), so they still have PLENTY of regulations to follow.

These would make poor imaging satellites you are correct, but what could possibly be more valuable intelligence than a global scale firehose of data. Just the metadata of packet routing across the constellation would have huge value to intel agencies.

To say nothing of the implicit value in denying an adversary access to that information.

There's far more efficient ways of tapping global data than launching satellites.

Just build undersea fibre if surveillance is your goal.

But they would be good for measuring graphical changes and some weather. Though NOAA has a lot of this already covered and better.

Are you imagining they'll provide uncensored internet in China or something?

I agree it's mechanically possible, but Amazon isn't the company I'd have expected to do it.

It's also dependent on consumers being able to purchase the receiving dish, hide its installation, and the government not to jam the signals. That's a lot of ifs.

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