Once space-based broadband Internet becomes widely available, I predict shortsighted ISPs will join the ranks of Kodak and Blockbuster.
But in your corner:
It's true that right now space-based deployment of broadband will provide broadband in locations where it's not currently available - perhaps spurring competition.
It's also probably true that space-based broadband will be able to compete directly with urban / dense areas where Comcast & company have an effective monopoly - also a good thing!
But there's no reason to think it will put comcast/company out of business at all. Has cell-tower based intenet service at all displaced comcast? Verizon and T-Mobile canvas my neighborhood claiming to offer the best internet, but as far as I can tell, everyone still uses Xfinity, even if Centurylink is much, much better.
There's no phone company that made all other phone companies irrelevant.
There's no tv channel that made all other tv channels irrelevant.
And there's no radio station that .. you get it.
And so it's hard for me to concolude that there's some ISP that will make all other ISPs irrelevant. Honestly most people will probably have about a 50/50 split between home wifi and phone internet. And that home wifi might have significant intrusion from space-based ISP, but not completely. (I realize spacex is also hoping to provide some phone service from satellites, but I digress)
I've heard it argued that podcasts make radio obsolete. That is more plausible.
This is much like saying satellite TV made cable TV irrelevant. Or magazines made newspapers irrelevant.
It was supposed to be for recording and playing back images. That was pretty much it. His original aspiration was for it to be employed in educational contexts to help make tge spread of visual information possible.
Now if you're talking TV Broadcasting as an industry, then you're absolutely correct. That was the business model settled on, but not without some foundational hmmm'ing, haww'ing and experimentation in coming up with business models in the radio broadcasting space. The history is in itself an interesting piece of work to dive into.
Now, anything that smells of BFT consensus, open decentralized protocols, smart contracts, distributed computing, gets lumped with “Web3” and downvoted to oblivion. I was surprised Freenet got through the other day without being associated with it, despite having WASM smart contracts and all of it.
Shouldn’t “hackers” welcome building new, disruptive things, especially if they are open source and disrupt entrenched centralized solutions of the entseeking “establishment” cartels? I feel like an old grandpa on HN today, still embracing the “old” “Hacker Ethos” that was being promoted by YC when HN was in its early days.
Has hacker ethos really today shifted to unironically supporting closed, centralized solutions, and attacking most disruptive technology by deriding it, downvoting people who speak about it in any terms other than dismissive, and trying to make sure it doesn’t take off?
It feels a bit like the story of the political left and liberalism — once upon a time the goal of liberals was to make race a non-issue, for instance, but now that same attitude is considered racist by many on the left. Once hackers were anti-establishment in an “information wants to be free” way. To liberate “systems” from “the man” and bust them open. I remember it. It was still the case a mere 10-15 years ago. On today’s “Hacker” News, if you’d look across a large swath of reactions to projects which aim to do just that, you’d never know it…
Why is this bad:
This sub-thread seems to be about using StarLink, which I don't see as any sort of "decentralized" given it is literally global and in effect controlled by one billionaire so hence my question.
Can you prove that?
Is that a reasonable thing to ask, or are we supposed to simply nod along and say “yes, your dogma is correct in 100% of cases”?
For example tell us how these are a grift: FileCoin. UniSwap. Aave. DID and Sidetree protocol (used by bluesky sky).
And decentralized systems go way past blockchains. Email. Heck even the Web itself. If anything I’d say they tend to centralize because of the “grift” which is capturing open protocols and doing rent extraction (eg GMail) or surveillance capitalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
That centralization and control over millioms and billions of people is worse than a grift. Why can’t we talk about disrupting THAT?
It's like there's a swimming pool full of sewage, and sure there might be a new PS5 Pro floating in there, but I'm sure as hell not wading in to find out.
Surely your local neighborhood isn't going to deploy its own dedicated satellite constellation.
If/when satelite broadband becomes widespread, it will likely be consolidated and provided by 1 provider (maybe 2?) which might end up resulting in higher costs for everyone all around.
IMHO, it's a question of capacity and acceptable service levels.
Starlink monthly pricing is higher than my DSL and nearby cable as well as my local muni fiber. But it's not so much higher as to rule it out. And the install fee is a lot lower than muni fiber. It's going to take a long time to get ROI on my installation cost for the muni fiber if I compare monthly cost to Starlink. Muni fiber service level should be much better, but Starlink service would probably have been good enough.
I can’t fathom how many satellites it would take to support all the internet users as a monopoly.
When Verizon laid down fiber optic cable in my (former) neighborhood, it was so much better than Xfinity’s service, and everyone I knew switched.
Not to say that the type of physical cable matters as much, DOCSIS 4.0 is in the cards, but latency and bandwidth will always be better on a (good) wired connection.
One quirk worth mentioning, though, is that WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband (which isn’t everywhere). Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi, the fastest wireless speeds I saw were on ultra-wideband connections to my phone.
> Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi
So after you upgraded your WLAN it was faster than your WAN until you bothered upgrading your WLAN.
That's a personal deployment decision not necessarily a matter of what was or wasn't' available at the time. >1G WiFi existed years before ultra-wideband was a thing.
Calling WiFi 6 >1G is a pretty far stretch. I don't think I've seen a real world test that breaks that barrier in favorable conditions, even with today's routers:
https://evanmccann.net/blog/2022/5/u6-pro-and-u6-mesh-review
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-wi-fi-router...
Whereas ultra-wideband was capable of pulling 2Gbps in 2020, something I have not even seen Wi-Fi 7 able to do. Ultra-wideband still has quite an edge:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/gbr335/this_might_be_a...
So yeah, when the author limits the tests to <1Gb none of the results were >1Gb. Who would have expected those results.
I've had >1G WiFi 5 networks in operation since 2018. It didn't require 6Ghz.
Your equipment or your environment may not have enabled it, but it was around.
Initially assume everyone is spread out uniformly, and that we need a broadband connection for every three people, and that 100 Mbps counts as broadband.
If all connected were in use at the same time downloading at 100 Mbps we need an aggregate bandwidth of 11000 Tbps. Actual usage would be more bursty, so let's assume we can oversell by a factor of 100. That reduced the aggregate bandwidth need to 110 Tbps.
Wikipedia tells me the satellite with the most bandwidth currently are those in the ViaSat-3 constellation of geosynchronous satellites, each with a bandwidth of 1 Tbps. Let's assume we can get LEO satellites with that bandwidth.
We would need 110 to get the required aggregate bandwidth. However, since each satellite only spends roughly 1/8 of its time over the US we need to multiply the number of satellites by 8.
That brings is to 880 satellites, but remember, we were assuming a uniformly spread out population. We need to take into account the non-uniformity of the actual population.
To do that we need to know the ground area that a satellite can serve simultaneously. That depends on the height of the satellite.
Google is telling me Starlink's around around 350 miles up, so let's assume that is what we use too. A naive distance to horizon calculation says that a satellite at that height would have an horizon around 2500 miles away.
I'm not sure if that means it could actually broadcast to people 2500 miles away from whatever its spot is over or if there would be problems due to the shallow angle the signal would have to travel to the receiver.
If each satellite can effectively broadcast to such a large circle then most of the 110 visible at a given time from the US would be visible over a wide enough area that how the population is distributed might not matter much.
This is assuming that the satellites do not interfere with each other. My guess is that there would be interference and they would have to operate more like cellular networks operate, with each satellite having a limited ground area that it broadcasts into using some kind of spot beam.
Feasibility now depends on the size of those spot beams and how accurately they can be aimed. If they can adjust the beams to cover large areas when they are serving a rural area and small areas when serving a dense area, and if they can aim that spot anywhere in that 2000+ mile radius circle where the satellite is visible then 880 satellites may be enough.
If, on the other hand, their beams are pretty much fixed in size and direction, then we would probably need a lot more satellites. Given the area of the US, for everyplace to have coverage the 110 satellites that would be over the US on average would have to each be responsible for a circle of around 200 miles in diameter, and could handle the needs of 3 million people.
If you've got more than 3 million people in a 200 mile circle you'll need more satellites over that circle.
Suppose we have an area that needs several satellites. It might be possible to arrange orbits so particular places always have a lot of satellites so that you could cover that area without having to simply make your constellation bigger.
I have no idea if that is possible. If not you may have to increase you constellation size so that you every place has the number of satellites that your highest density 200 mile diameter circle needs.
I don't think that there is any 200 mile diameter circle in the US that would need more that 20 satellites, which would mean we'd need 17600 satellites in the constellation.
Note that this is quite dependent on the circle size so could be way off from reality. Also I've not considered communications from the ground to the satellite which might also impose constraints.
Conclusion: it doesn't seem obviously impossible to provide 100 Mbps broadband via satellite to everyone in the US. A more detailed analysis is needed.
Comcast is generally in the 20-30 neighborhood, unless you are using their gigabit service, then it is more like 10-15 milliseconds.
So it is higher, but not debilitatingly so (unless your application is very sensitive to latency). I would imagine there is a lot more jitter in Starlink, but that is more a feel than real numbers.
Mainly on a terrestrial system you wind up bouncing through more substations on the way to the general Internet, whereas with Starlink you are generally bouncing straight from your dish to the satellite to the base station. So less bounces, but farther to go. The physics favors the wire, but not as much as it used to.
Space-based internet makes total sense for very remote areas or as a bridge technology, as well as a technology to compete with incumbent terrestrial monopolies, but I'd hate to see fiber and terrestrial 5G rollouts stopping entirely in favor of it.
It's the characteristic of the 21th century, trading resiliency and robustness for performance. As long as the world is stable, it's nice.