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Comment by mrep | Hacker News Reader

For rural areas, with all of the low earth orbit internet constellations being proposed, I'd rather wait to see how they end up doing rather than massively investing in laying down a ton of fiber at enormous costs especially when spacex has already demonstrated speeds of 610 megabits per-second to a flying airplane [0] and their expected cost is $10 billion [1] which is 1/15th of the $150 billion dollar plan Bernie is proposing.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-starlink-airforce/...

[1]: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/05/block-5-spacex-incre...

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Providing 610 megabits to a moving plane is great and all, but can you provide gigabit internet speeds to literally millions of people at the same time? I find it hard to believe that the spacex satellites will be able to handle that kind of load anytime soon.

42,000 satellites × 21 gbps per satellite for first gen satellites × (2,959,064.44 miles squared in continental us ÷ 196,900,000 miles squared on earth) = 13,254 gbps over continental us assuming they are evenly orbiting around the planet (they won't be and instead most will cluster around continents but let's make it easy). 2% of the US population are farmers * 325,000,000 Americans = about 6 million people. At an over subscription ratio of 5:1 (Google search gave many different answers for this so no idea on what wireless networks actually use) gives users 10 mbps which isn't too bad and you can multiple that by 15 if you want to match Bernies planned cost by launching 15 times more satellites.

Using "farmer" as a proxy for "lives in an area too rural to get non-satellite internet" is going to be an extremely poor estimate.

For one thing, the rural population of the US is, depending on your definition, somewhere between 15 and 20%. [1]

For another, a lot of farmers and rural areas get perfectly good cable internet and even fiber.

[1] https://www.hrsa.gov/rural-health/about-us/definition/index....

At what latency and upload speeds? Satellite internet has historically been high latency and ultra-low upload speeds; not an ideal condition for internet. Sure, if you have no other option, satellite will work, but fiber will blow it out of the water.

> Satellite internet has historically been high latency and ultra-low upload speeds

please read any article on starlink, putting the satellites into low earth orbit makes a huge difference, no it isn't marketing bullshit.

It's important to distinguish between Starlink and the old kind of satellite internet - they are entirely different.

Latency will be on par with using a VPN a few hundred miles away (the satellites are in low earth orbit, not geostationary like previous generations). Upload speeds will also not be like with previous satellite internet, which often used dial-up for upload because the satellite+dish setup was not designed to receive signals from users on the ground.

Existing satellite ISPs have their satellites stationed in geosynchronous orbit, which is like 35,000 km above sea level. This allows them to send up fewer satellites, since they have a line of sight to more of the Earth's surface. However, that distance that results in those high propagation delays.

SpaceX (et al) have a different strategy. They are instead sending satellites to Low Earth Orbit, so they'll be about 500 km above sea level. As a result, the propagation delay will not be nearly as bad. Perhaps under 50 ms, compared to the 600 ms I've seen on geosynchronous satellite internet.

At that low altitude, you need a lot more satellites (because each satellite can only "see" a small-ish area of the earth), so they need to send a swarm of those satellites. This is now possible because satellites are much smaller and cheaper than they used to be.

Will fiber blow it out of the water? Yes. Will The phone company run a fiber line out to my house for less than thousands of dollars? No. Would they do it if there's some competition from above? Maybe so.

Satellite internet like Starlink will actually be lower latency than fiber, since light travels faster in a vacuum and unlike fiber the constellation will be point to point rather then zig zagging between cities on the ground.

Why wait for market to solve when you can give that job to the government?

Because the market is a cartel with no incentive in this case.

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