Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Starlink has the potential to provide lower latency around the globe than terrestrial fiber because light travels faster in vacuum than in optical silica fiber.
"Delay is Not an Option: Low Latency Routing in Space"
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062262/
http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf
"We conclude that a network built in this manner can provide lower latency communications than any possible terrestrial optical fiber network for communications over distances greater than about 3000 km."
Things that happen outside New York have an impact on stock prices in New York. Much of HFT is essentially companies racing each other to be the very first to act on external news/stock movements.
I'm curious about who came up with this idea. It's kind of brilliant.
That is, the initial constellation (my guess, the first 800 satellites) goes up without intersat links and acts as a bent pipe only. Lasers are still very much a plan for the later parts on the constellation, and the laserless satellites will eventually be replaced with ones with the lasers once they age out, but the laser links were simply not ready yet and their spectrum license essentially forces them to put the birds up on as quick a schedule as they can.
The laserless sats will not use radio to communicate with each other, but rather will use it to communicate with customers and fixed earth stations.
Fiber optics of various types are usually on the order of 2 to 3 (closer to 2).
Then again, maybe it's useful for arbitrage between different exchanges, where they would likely have equipment next to each exchange, and have a wide distance between them.
Closest available is $80/mo satellite internet, 12Mbps & 40GB/mo cap (overage => deprioritized), latency measured in seconds.
While little to go on, assuming Starlink will be aggressively competitive on all factors.
To me one of the lures of the wilderness is the fact that I can go 'off-line' there. I paddled the Yukon from Whitehorse to the Bering Strait without being connected to the outside world, my only means of communication being the letters I sent to friends and family. The experience would have totally changed - and been markedly less - had I been in constant communication with the outside world, having a communication device go 'bleep' while running some rapids, sending that photo of that elk swimming in front of the canoe to whatever social network I might use for my share of likes and instant gratification.
I have had a lot of times when I thought I was indispensable but things were just fine without me. This can be liberating because you can now focus on other things and don’t get stuck with the same stuff.
At the worst it doesn't impact me at all, at best it means a large number of people are going to be able to get online for cheap who previously weren't.
From a technical perspective, from what i've seen SpaceX is planning on eventually having them communicate as a web across themselves. So your "average" communication will be something like "user>base station>sat>sat>sat>base station near destination>destination". Or if the destination is nearby, something like "user>base station>sat>base station>destination"
I haven't seen anything claiming that they are going to route all internet through the US. I've actually seen the opposite about how they are planning on using this system to do intercontinental communication at faster latency than undersea fiber can currently do. And to me that implies that they will be taking the most optimal path, which means if neither the source nor the destination is in the US, the communication wouldn't have any reason to enter the US.
From a legal/political perspective I could see where you are coming from. It's a US based company, and they comply with US laws, so if push comes to shove they are going to do what the US requires them to. But I very much doubt that SpaceX will end up being a monopoly on internet access. They aren't the only player in this game (OneWeb and Eutelsat are 2 others I know off the top of my head that are working on similar products), and even if they were to become the only "fast satellite internet" company, they aren't targeting "all the internet".
For the foreseeable future, the base stations required to communicate with Starlink are expected to be large and power hungry enough that you won't see them in cars or phones or anything super mobile. They hope to get it down to the size of a pizza-box one day. They also don't have the bandwidth to handle all the world's internet access, and likely won't ever have that much bandwidth. Fiber in the ground is still significantly cheaper, faster (unless you are talking intercontinental), and more reliable for most usecases.
If things start to look like they could possibly end up at a total monopoly by SpaceX as "the internet company", i'd be right there with you about how this could be a nightmare. But i just don't see that happening, and until it does this is just another ISP.
Then, there are already multiple satellite networks for positioning (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BDS). Then there are a bunch of spy satellites.
So I don't really understand the problem for non-Americans, which I am too.
We can compare it to Windows, and the end result is exactly the same: not great.
Other countries censor other things, be it on political, commercial or "criminal" grounds.
Can someone explain a bit on these issues? Is the global internet going to be governed on US laws if Starlink becomes a thing?
Due to complications in US laws, this actually means that Starlink cannot directly offer service in much of the world, instead having to let a local company resell access. (Because SpaceX as a US company cannot do certain kinds of filtering without running afoul of US laws.)
Also, you presumably keep track of where your antenna is pointing anyway.
I find it very interesting because the governments see the control(or lack of) of the internet as an existential issue.
I am hoping for a censor-fee internet but I don't believe that it's possible. Someone will blow up these satellites if anyone happens to create a free(as in freedom) global communication network.
If you try to communicate with a satellite on the horizon, you will not hear it, and it will not listen to you.
They will have to turn off the sattelites over Austria to prevent connections in Turkey.
The source is the original Starlink FCC filing: https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8174403/S...
But the point remains: The Starlink satellites do not just radiate omnidirectionally. Nor could they; the system is intended to eventually serve a meaningful fraction of the entire population on earth. This is not possible on non-steered RF. The only reason their plan has any sense is that every transmitter and receiver is directional, allowing efficient SDMA, where the same frequency can be used by multiple people simultaneously to communicate withe the same satellite, because the satellite can discriminate between their signals by the direction from which they were received.
Because of this, in order for Starlink to be able to communicate with you, it has to have a pretty good idea of where you are.
> Advanced phased array beam-forming and digital processing technologies within the satellite payload give the system the ability to make highly efficient use of Ku- and Ka-band spectrum resources and the flexibility to share that spectrum with other licensed users. User terminals operating with the SpaceX System will use similar phased array technologies to allow for highly directive, steered antenna beams that track the system’s low-Earth orbit satellites. Gateway earth stations also apply advanced phased array technologies to generate high-gain steered beams to communicate with multiple NGSO satellites from a single gateway site.
Details of the downlink beams is found at A3:
> All Ku-band downlink spot beams on each SpaceX satellite are independently steerable over the full field of view of the Earth.
Just read the entire A3.1 for more details.
(edit: I remembered wrong. 1.5 degrees, or at 550km, ~10 kilometers.)
This is all technical assumptions at this point since the service isn't rolled out, but being in LEO instead of GEO simplifies things greatly.
It may simplify some things, but it also introduces lots of complications like managing satellite handovers, telemetry tracking for thousands of satellites, accident avoidance in space, etc.
Recently there was a flap about a satellite having to move out of a Starlink sat's way because the latter wouldn't.
On the Starlink website they call out the automated collision avoidance system. Seems the Starlink sat would have moved away automatically if there was a risk.
Or will prices for internet coverage in remote areas just as expensive as before?
Note: SpaceX is building out the Starlink coverage in a gradual way - they won't have satellites around the poles early on. Until the have truly global coverage Inmarsat will obviously stilll have an edge.
It will be interesting to see how the pricing plays out for the high latency satellite broadband offerings compared to the low latency Starlink offering.
Someone in a third world country can have the same speed as someone in a developed country.
Why should I keep my cell phone?
Will comcast go out of business?
None, but I can't imagine him joking about something that seems very important to him.
> Considering he turned his twitter account into a joke [1] after SEC investigation [2].
I challenge you to scroll down his timeline until before the SEC investigation. He was spreading memes way before that ever happened. Also, the SEC investigation was regarding Tesla and him running a public company. SpaceX is not a public company and he doesn't really have a history of tweeting nonsense about SpaceX projects.