FCC Denies Starlink Low-Orbit Bid for Lower Latency
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
The only application I see where Starlink is preferred to "traditional" communication system is warfare.
I live an hour from SF and I don't have cell service in my house. I can make/receive calls because of Starlink.
I could see governments with more top-down approach would be able to complete “everyone gets covered” mission much easier than US/Canada. A lot of money burning since there is no/little profitability, but I could see it being a greater good for the citizens.
On warfare, it’s possibly the opposite - every major nation has ASAT missiles, and you don’t need to shoot down thousands - destroying just a small fraction will fill LEO with hypersonic debris and turn all remaining satellites into Swiss cheese.
Hence people using starlink in South Korea, Japan and in within cities like Sydney, Rome, London and Boston.
You'd be surprised with the bad performance of some Fiber providers
To get permission to build the mega constellation you need to convince a few regulatory agencies. To burrow fibers and building cell towers you need to convince and appease every local authority and land owner who is in your way.
Starlink also makes sense for rural uses.
This is why, to this day, many places in America still lack access to high speed internet. And then when a tower goes down, or a wire gets cut - it's a major issue that will result in downtime and require costly maintenance. By contrast a relatively small number of satellites can provide coverage to this entire area. And when a satellite goes down, it's not a problem at all - it's a perfectly normal part of the system, and is seamlessly replaced by another instantly. And all of this is just for one country! Starlink covers the entire globe meaning regardless of the state of the country you live in, you can get access to reliable high speed internet.
On land it’s usually easier and cheaper to use huts with power.
However, very seldom do you need or want to go that far on land since very, very few places worth connecting are more than 400 km from somewhere else.
Repeatered systems can go thousands of miles and the repeater sites are handy for local breakout.
That's quite a caveat, but still doesn't get you to 'fiber is feasible everywhere'.
Where I am (about 250km north-west of Sydney, Australia) my nearest exchange is 30km away, and no one is going to come up with the money to lay fiber out to me.
Starlink has been an amazing enabler.
And sure there’s going to be a few unprofitable edge cases, that’s what mandates are for. A company that wants to serve high density neighborhoods ends up paying for a few random houses far from each other. The average cost per home is what makes an area profitable at least when you setup the local monopoly correctly.
Additionally the distance to the GP home and the exchange it what matters. Unlike electricity, you maybe only have a small percentage of a rural area wanting fiber. If GP is not in a very dense area, he may be the only person within a reasonable distance that wants fiber and no company wants to foot the bill for that.
Subsidies as needed are fine, subsidies without mandates simply waste taxpayer money without actually fixing the underlying problem. Without a mandate companies just take that cash and build the same profitable network they would have build without it.
Also, 93% of Australian homes have home internet. Cheap fiber beats any other technology when it’s available. So perhaps the neighbor doesn’t want fiber today, in 2 or 20 years when someone else moves in you don’t need to lay a new fiber. It’s all just statistical noise from an investment perspective.
It is not statistical noise in rural areas. Maybe where you live is different than what I have experienced in rural areas but rural America is not dense enough to always warrant building and maintaining connectivity like fiber. Sat. or Cell service is usually much more cost effective.
Sure if a community/city want to build out their own fiber setup, I think that is a great idea but I do not believe mandates should be required for companies that want to build out fiber unless similar to some areas in electrical grids you separate the concerns of running and maintaining the fiber lines and the exchange/connects.
Also you keep saying mandates but I think from an American perspective it was actually subsidies. If you are saying the government should subsidize the infrastructure I do think that can work but I believe its up to the local government to do it.
However we didn’t attach strings to that money aka mandates so they effectively just pocketed it.
Speaking only for the US. I don't have the data but I suspect most of the grid in rural America was built long ago. Everyone needs power, it is a natural monopoly. When they were building it out, everyone got hooked up and only requires regular maintenance. Sure, if there was a sudden growth spurt maybe more lines are run or higher capacity but I suspect for most of rural America that this is not true. I even suspect most of this electrification happened for free or very low rates to the household. Now, if you are building a new home that needs a grid tie-in, it usually costs quite a bit.
Now fiber on the other hand, not so much of a natural monopoly. There may be state imposed regulation where a cable company has rights to areas. You could have a totally free market and many different providers. In a rural area you might be able to sign up only 20% of the population with your service, you would still need to build out the infrastructure though and perhaps that 20% would not even cover costs.
It is easy to say everywhere with power should have fiber but America is vast and that would be quite expensive, I am not even sure a local effort would be able to cover costs.
In the context of internet connectivity, I interpret a reasonable right-of-way policy being collectively-owned fiber which can be shared.
We don't say, "everybody who wants a road should build their own road along this path" we just build the damn road and share it.
Right of way being reasonable means that the owner of the transmission lines did not charge unreasonable fees or requirements for using the same poles to run fiber.
And you are partly wrong on your last part, yes of course each individual is not building their own road but again, roads are natural monopolies, everyone wants a road of at least some minimum quality (dirt). Additionally it would be near impossible to get "right of way" to build your own road. In rural areas roads are indeed just dirt and to get it paved would require some majority of the individuals living out there to pay for it, YMMV depending on local rules. Since its a road its easier to get a majority to agree to to pack it with gravel or pave it, everyone that lives down that road is driving on it. I am not arguing that internet is or is not a right that everyone should have but that it is not always a natural monopoly, some people maybe don't want it, some have cell service, some are using Dish, maybe there are some cable connections available in certain areas. So yes, each individual does not build their own road but often in rural areas the burden for that road is shared and often stays as a dirt road because of it.
Even those areas with private roads [private developments generally] only have a single private road that everyone shares on a given route. The argument why is that it's a natural monopoly. But what does that mean?
It means high barriers to entry (often infrastructure) mean the first mover has an overwhelming advantage. Isn't that precisely the case with fiber, as you yourself were arguing?
So is provisioned fiber a sufficient barrier to entry to qualify as a natural monopoly or is it not? Please clarify.
I simply pointed out that when it comes to building infrastructure, right of way typically means the ability to build said infrastructure using someone's property. That could be land rights, rights to the transmission pole, rights underground etc. Additionally I was simply pointing out that people may be served by other forms of internet connectivity already (including starlink). That is all, nothing about politics, sorry to have ruffled your feathers.
It is certainly the case that (in the old US of A at least) we seem to make a sport of trying to tear up our roads as frequently as possible so that each individual utility can separately work on the same shared space, to the detriment of those living in the area. Is that an ideal way to organize infrastructure projects?
No, of course not! It would be much better if we all coordinated to commonly achieve our shared goals rather than stepping on each other in a vain race to the top! Oh well, a man can dream.
The US only has 4.09 million miles of road, that’s roughly how much fiber you need to get it to everyone’s driveway. At ~1-10$ a foot we’re talking ~20-200billion dollars etc and most of it’s already in the ground or dangling from utility poles.
We don’t have fiber everywhere because we didn’t mandate it the way we mandated electricity or phone lines to every home. It was billions of subsidies without sufficient strings so of course companies only built the most profitable networks.
The government already handed over the full cost of Fiber to the home everywhere. Just the Federal government alone has handed out over 90 Billion dollars for rural high speed internet. That estimate I gave also included profitable areas, the unprofitable rural network requiring strings is only a fraction of the total cost.
The money just didn’t have enough strings to require companies taking it to actually build out their networks everywhere.
Now let's compare to Starlink. That system was privately designed, built, and deployed for a total cost of ~$10 billion. And while I don't know their maintenance costs, I do know they're now already turning a profit with a relatively small number of users. So that's providing complete and stable connectivity for the entire globe, at half of the bottom of an unrealistically low price for wiring a single country. And you get vastly better reliability, and near 0 labor maintenance. I don't think this is particularly close.
The US is about the same size as Europe.
Size is not a reason why the US has lack of access to high speed internet.
"Just replaced by another" is massively oversimplifying every aspect of this, not just the act of putting an object in orbit, but also the coordination of that many MOVING satellites, their fuel levels / end-of-life procedures, all the ground infrastructure needed to support it, and the total amount of energy that this system requires (both on the side of the service providers and users).
Connecting rural or places without internet is not a technical problem, like everything in the world we built it is an issue of priorities. Starlink was not created "for the good of the farmer".
What happened in the last generation that you just so easily buy this cheap copout of "oh no, the whole nation is big and we now can't even cover a small state"?
You have never seen a ship or a plane before? Are you just perilously saying nonsense?
Much easier to setup a few starlink terminals and/or LTE antennas on the roof/container and temporarily bolt a few wifi router to the ceiling than run cables all around.
NIMBYs is why
Digging trenches in the ground is expensive. It’s a big country. You need immense amounts labor and at the end of the day, you just have a barely profitable fiber line, if that. Many of the new fiber lines will only survive on further government subsidies. Meanwhile, Elon builds a spaceship to launch satellites and people pay him handsomely for access to it. That’s not to mention that construction is heavily unionized, requires locality by locality planning permission and rights of way, etc.
This is for the more rural areas, or downright remote ones.
> very low earth orbits (VLEO) ranging from 340 to 360 kilometers
> Starlink currently has nearly 6000 satellites orbiting at around 550 kilometers
> its service ... with average latencies ... over 30 milliseconds at best, and double that at peak times.
What is unsaid in the article is how much of that latency is due to time of flight and how much is due to buffers and processing inside a satellite.
The stated fact that the latency "doubles at peak times" implies that some portion of the stated 30ms is not time of flight So how much is actually due to time of flight? One of the linked articles claims:
> 8 ms is the absolute minimum latency for a satellite at 550 km
When a satellite is exactly above head the round trip time at the speed of light is a bit shy of 4ms. This "8ms" must be some average over a minimum solid angle that still allows for an acceptable level of signal reception. It is a reasonable number.
Lowering to VLEO gives the above head latency of a bit over 2ms. Being lower, the solid angle for reception is less. They may actually need in total more satellites than at higher orbits. In any case, the average would probably be something less than the 2x from the 550km case. But, let's say "4ms" compared to "8ms".
So, by going to VLEO, the best they can do is knock off about 4ms from their "30ms at best". It seems that polluting VLEO will not even achieve "The biggest single goal for Starlink from a technical standpoint is to get the mean latency below 20 milliseconds," said Elon Musk.
There is some other reason for pushing into VLEO than reducing latency.
> They may actually need in total more satellites than at higher orbits.
This is a desirable feature. There are limits on how much bandwidth they can push through a single satellite, and minimum allowed angular separations between two satellites the same place can be talking to. Lower orbit allow larger constellations, because the ground stations cumulatively have "more sky".
The primary reason to push for VLEO is that it is a safer orbit. As a general rule, everyone is better off the lower large constellations are, because in case of a worst-case collision the debris will deorbit faster. It's also better for astronomy.
Genuine questions
Also, it's where you're located, not just where you're regulated. People have gotten their pp smacked pretty hard for playing the "oh, you won't grant an FCC license? We'll just use a launch provider in India" game.