Amazon's Kuiper responds to SpaceX on FCC request

Forget the names of the companies and their leaders for a second. We have a shared public resource, like a pond. Company A showed up and says "I am going to set up shop on this side of the pond, and we will leave the rest of the pond open for other people to use." Company B then says "okay, we are going to set up shop on the other side of the pond so we don't interfere with each other." Company A then says "no, we actually want to use that side of the pond, too. too bad for you".

In what universe is Company A in the right here, and why does it matter who gets there first? It's clearly anti-competitive practice on the part of Company A trying to shut out Company B, and the only people who will suffer from it are the general public.

It's worth noting there's bad blood in the general space community already after Blue tried to stop SpaceX from doing barge landings, attempted to also take over pad 39A vs SpaceX even though Blue has nothing to launch, their $10 billion HLS "40 foot ladder" proposal and Bezos infamous "Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!" back 6 years ago gives a general gist of why Bezos' claims are being treated with skepticism by many. https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/679116636310360067

To Elon Musk everything he's done in his life so far has been so that he could eventually do this space thing and that is what defines him. The two couldn't be more different. For Elon failure is not an option, for Bezos it very much is.

How likely is it that Starlink and whatever amazon is planning will end up polluting space with satellite garbage that will make future missions difficult/impossible due to high velocity collisions?

Looking at richest people of the world right now, none of them strike as eccentric.

Average plumber or musician is order of magnitude more eccentric or radical.

Every other company in the space is opposed to this move, because Starlink's unilateral reconfiguration would interfere with nearly every other company's operations. Part of the FCC's mandate is to prevent that from occurring, and SpaceX absolutely deserves to be slapped down for its anticompetitive behavior.

>Musk had fired at least seven members of the program's senior management team at the Redmond, Washington, office, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites, according to the two SpaceX employees with direct knowledge of the situation.

https://www.businessinsider.com/r-musk-shakes-up-spacex-in-r...

From what I can see, Starlink is using a lot more power to transmit than cell phones are really capable of given the battery constraints.

I think the more likely possibility is Starlink offering backhaul for rural cell sites where it might be cost prohibitive to run fiber. However, I'm not sure it would be more cost effective to use satellite backhaul than terrestrial microwave or fiber. Satellites aren't cheap, but who knows.

In terms of boosting the data transfer speed, that won't be simple. Terrestrial wireless (like cell carriers) can offer good speeds because each cell tower is covering a very limited area. If you're 20 miles away from me, we'll be connecting to different cell towers and therefore can use the same radio spectrum without interfering with each other. With satellites, a lot more people will be sharing the same radio spectrum. Now, I'm sure Starlink is operating under the idea that they can launch lots of satellites and get decent spectrum re-use. However, cell carriers have around 80,000 cell sites each. Starlink is only planning on launching 10,000-15,000 and hoping to get permission to get up to 30,000. That still means a lot more sharing of the same spectrum.

You can get higher speed by using more spectrum. However, that spectrum needs to be licensed, it isn't always cheap, and other people want to license it too. The way that the gigabit speeds from wireless carriers work is by using many hundreds of MHz of spectrum that can't go very far (because it gets disrupted by things like buildings, trees, etc.). Lower frequency spectrum can go further (since it penetrates objects better), but there's a pretty limited amount of it and most of it is already spoken for (whether that's TV, FM radio, current wireless service, etc.).

I think Starlink will provide a good option for many people who don't live in areas well-served by current internet options. It's a huge jump to believe that it will offer competition to cell carriers. It just isn't that type of technology and you run into limits that you can't really get around.

That's not to say that Starlink isn't important. It is important for many people who don't have access to good internet in the US and around the world, but it isn't going to provide competition for your cell phone provider.

So short answer, is no, it's impractical for cell phones.

It does not inherently prevent anybody else from operating. In every orbit their are many different sats and sat providers operating.

Amazon claims are entirely based on their inability to run their theoretical system when SpaceX is there. If their system is that fragile, then maybe they shouldn't be allowed to launch it in the first place.

SpaceX could have equally claimed the planned Amazon system was interfering with them, but they didn't.

This isn't a fair characterization. In order to have knowledge of something, you need more than theory: you need to validate your idea with observed experience. The first person to actually achieve something, demonstrated by an existence proof, can in most cases be said to have gone through both steps.

The second part of this is that individual rights guarantees that innovators are free to achieve ("the sky's the limit" is out of date"). Innovators do this for their own benefit, as they should. As a side effect, the rest of us also benefit enormously! There are a lot of people in rural areas stuck with incredibly poor internet service, via HughesNet or DSL, and Starlink is a massive boon to us. It's amazing to pull 150 Mbps on the side of a mountain or on the open ocean...

Why is it just that Bezos take a backseat here? Without the pioneering achievements from SpaceX, Bezos wouldn't have the certainty that such a network is even possible. Over the past two decades, many, many ventures have gone bankrupt trying to achieve what SpaceX has done.

SpaceX has earned its success, and Bezos shouldn't be allowed to run to the government to kneecap his competitor.

Same with cellular networks. There's some theoretical sharing, but in practice we're covering same area 3x times at 3x slower total bandwidth...

Some governments are starting to realise this is huge ripoff and start their own networks with MVNO's, similar how copper/fibre telco's and power companies are have been sorted for decades. Unsure why space should be different. Sat tech is reasonably simple, it's just launch cost where competition is at. Same way the only competitior between cell network operators is tower installation (third party) and support (abhorrent).