Comment by tidepod12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tidepod12 | Hacker News Reader

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Secondary comment: SpaceX's behavior in this instance is not unlike every other ISP in America engaging in anti-competitive behavior to keep newcomers out. Remember when Google Fiber was rolling out and tried to use fiber/utility poles in a way that allowed ISPs to share public utility poles? But then ATT pitched a fit [1, 2] saying "actually we don't want Google Fiber to do that because it could possibly harm our business in some unspecified and vague way", basically killing the expansion of Fiber [3]? And who suffered? All of us unlucky Americans who are now stuck with exorbitant prices for ridiculous internet plans from ATT because we don't have any other options.

We already have an absolutely terrible oligopoly of wired ISPs, do we really want to start down this path of allowing the same to happen for space-based internet, too?

1: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160923/06590635601/att-s...

2: https://www.slashgear.com/att-files-lawsuit-to-hinder-google...

3: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/7/18215743/google-fiber-leav...

And then there is the little detail that this is being decided for the whole world but actually just benefits one, possibly two companies from the United States. Space belongs to all of us, not just to the USA.

Yeah, it's not clear to me why the FCC (and not ITU or some multinational body) has jurisdiction here. What remedy would Musk have if Russia decided to launch CosmosNet or whatever that was interfering?

The ITU does have jurisdiction. Since SpaceX (and Amazon) are US companies, they work with the FCC, who then works with the ITU on behalf of SpaceX/Amazon.

This is tangential, but you seem like you know a lot about this :).

How come I can't easily find a registry of the UP/DL/Beacon transmission frequencies for every satellite. Am I just not looking in the right place? I can find various hobbyist's catalogs, but nothing that looks remotely official. Any satellite with downlinks between 30 MHz and 1.2 GHz is potentially useful for helping to calibrate one or more of the radio neutrino experiments I work on.

For partially historic and partially current reasons, detailed satellite catalogs are considered militarily sensitive to some degree... not to a huge extent, but to such an extent that it's prevented the formation of an open, international coordinating system for satellites, keeping most of the coordination work done behind closed doors. The closest thing to an "official" international satellite catalog would probably be that maintained by USSTRATCOM but it's post-facto. UN Space Affairs facilitates coordination and has a catalog but it does not pretend to be complete and has only limited information.

A good source of downlink information is the FCC International Bureau records of satellite ground stations in the US.

Yeah I can find TLE catalogs easily enough (celestrack and space-track) and it seems NORAD IDs are an almost standard. The FCC ground station list that I can find has some of them, but lacks a lot of notable ones (NOAA satellites, MUOS, Gonets...).

It is available on the ITU website. You will have satellite names (which should be similar to what you'll see in space-track, most of the time). I believe you need to pay to have access to those, but when you have a direct link to a specific satellite anybody can read it.

Also note that this shows licences, not actual use. You can have a satellite licenced to a particular frequency but not using it.

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