Elon Musk wants to bring the Internet in space | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk wants to bring the Internet in space

ekjeacheblog.com

37 pointsekjeacheblog31 comments

My big question is how fast can this put Comcast out of business? Because that would be awesome.

> The director of SpaceX is developing a network of satellites above the Earth that could speed up web surfing and could provide access to isolated communities. And the most interesting thing about this project is that it will use the profits to help colonize the planet Mars.

Is there that much money to make in delivering internet to isolated communities??

Nope. Many people have theorized that this is to ensure that Tesla cars and other automated vehicles (land, sea, air or space) have access to the internet at all times, anywhere.

This is an existing market called M2M [1], and interestingly enough, one of the existing players in this worldwide is Orbcomm, which is halfway through launching their new constellation on Falcon 9!

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_to_machine

It's not about selling internet to people, certainly not initially. The money here is in bringing internet to sophisticated entities in isolated areas. Networked industrial control systems, mines, drilling operations, shipping, etc.

It's faster and more direct to go earth->satellite->earth for certain routes/types of data, than traversing through various routers and undersea cables.

Roughly paraphrased quote from Elon Musk SpaceX Seattle Office Opening: "The speed of light in vacuum is 40-50% faster than in fiber. So you can do long distance communication through space(vacuum), a lot better than if you route it through fiber and use far fewer hops. Lets say you want to communicate from Seattle to South Africa, the path is extremely convoluted, follows outline of continent, goes through 200 routers and repeaters, if done with satellite network, it can be done in 4 hops"

Video link to time of quote -> https://youtu.be/AHeZHyOnsm4?t=209

There is lots of money to be made in global business communications. The plan is to use the funds generated by this global communications network to fund a future colony on Mars.

I'm sure this must have been mentioned before, but one of the biggest issues with a usable network connection of any type is latency. Given that the satellites will be in space, hundreds of kms away, and there has to be a return journey, how is the latency issue going to be addressed?

Mentioned in this discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8944944 The New Space Race: One Man's Mission to Build a Galactic Internet (businessweek.com)

Here's the actual discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8945672

    ================================================

And now that I've searched, that's pretty much the only discussion. Although there may be more, here are the others I've looked at:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8599177 Elon Musk confirms plans to provide global Internet from 100s of satellites (rt.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8624500 Elon Musk: SpaceX Will Launch Micro-Satellites (thenextweb.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893525 Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch ViaSat-2 high speed Internet satellite (utsandiego.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8903135 Revealed: Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet (businessweek.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8903450 SpaceX to build 10B global satellite Internet (geekwire.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8903658 Elon Musk spills details on SpaceX's $10B space Internet venture (engadget.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8904304 Elon Musk wants to spend $10B building the Internet in space (theverge.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8904435 Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet (businessweek.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8905059 Elon Musk wants to spend $10B building the Internet in space (theverge.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8905277 Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet (businessweek.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8905474 Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet (businessweek.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8905562 Elon musk is going to build Internet for space (thenextweb.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907045 Elon Musk is trying to bring the Internet to space (cnet.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908019 Elon Musk wants to build a new Internet from space (venturebeat.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8917258 I Told Elon Musk We Should Have Space Internet, Musk Announces It a Month Later (adamslists.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8922038 Elon Musk and SpaceX Plan a Space Internet (businessweek.com)

The hundreds of kilometers between the Earth and the satellites must surely be a drop in the bucket with regards to latency. After all, the distance between Europe and the US is roughly 6000 km at the minimum, nevermind the distances to Australia or East Asia.

I'm not entirely sure why today's satellite internet connections have such high latencies, but it doesn't seem physically impossible to develop low-latency satellite Internet access.

Edit: It appears nearly all of the current Internet access-providing satellites are in geostationary orbit, which is much further away than a few hundred kilometers, causing a great amount of latency. If Musk can successfully find a way to use satellites in low Earth orbit to provide Internet access instead, that will get rid of most of the latency.

> I'm not entirely sure why today's satellite internet connections have such high latencies

Geosynchronous orbit's radius is 42164 km. Ever tried to play FPS on an Australian server?

Yeah, see my edit. I didn't realize that all the satellites providing Internet access were in geostationary orbit until after I posted my comment.

Reading Wikipedia, it seems Internet access through LEO satellites is possible today, but provides far slower Internet acccess speeds.

Latency is really not that big of a deal, as there are already protocols that deal with it quite successfully. And remember that slow Internet is better than no Internet.

Latency is a big deal for some things. Although it's from 1996, the principle given here are still applicable:

    http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html[0]

Discussed here:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826768[1]

And while it's true that slow internet is better than no internet, people still don't grasp that latency is a big deal - it really is.

I see that in this case the latency issue is being dealt with by using LEO satellites and doing clever things with hand-overs, and that's good. The question is whether it's enough, although given that it's Musk at the helm, it probably is.

Edited to add real links:

[0] http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826768

of course for some things latency is important, but not for all of them.

No not for all, but perhaps for more than you think. Even simple web browsing.

Are you aware of just how many resources a typical modern web page loads, and how many requests it makes? As an experiment you could try putting a half second delay on every request and see what happens to your browsing experience. It's horrible, which is why I always worry about latency. It looks like Musk is avoiding it, but it needs considering.

Part of the problem is that web designers are largely protected from the effects of slow networks and bad latency, they design as if these things don't matter. And usually they don't, but it's becoming more important because they don't realise.

I remember computing when the speed of light didn't matter. Sometimes I miss those days.

Edit: Changed "Someone's" to "Sometimes" - auto-corrupt struck again.

That's an artefact of us not having to deal with that much latency, though, and is being fixed with the ability for the server to pre-emptively push resources you will need.

(as a side note, my first "web browsing" experience had a typical round-trip measured in hours; I requested my pages with CERN's email-to-web gateway, but I got my e-mail via UUCP exchange to a local BBS which again did their UUCP exchange to an internet connected host every 4-6 hours, so if I timed my exchanges right, I might upload my request right before an exchange, and get my page back right after the second exchange 4-6 hours later - of course it sucked, but it was still massively better than no web access, and at the time I had never experienced "live" internet access)

I think that people, especially web developers, tend to forget that the Web is not the Internet.

It sounds like you think I'm a web developer who thinks the web is everything. I'm not, and I don't. I work on safety critical systems doing hard-real-time and soft-real-time image analysis, object tracking, data correlation, and tactical overlays for widely distributed systems consisting of a mix of servers, embedded, and customer facing systems. More than one customer has come to me and said - "This is easy - just send it via satellite!"

I have dealt with and feel I have some understanding of the issues here.

Earlier you said[0]:

    "Latency is really not that big of a deal,
     as there are already protocols that deal
     with it quite successfully."

I'd be interested to know of which protocols you speak, and your experience in working with them. I'd be very happy to benefit from your experiences in this regard, as there's always a chance that you know things I don't.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9327656

Don't make blanket statements without looking at the actual numbers first. The satellites will be in LEO. An added 5ms (or say 50ms with slack for demodulation, processing, etc) RTT is totally insignificant for their target market.

Their target market is unlikely to stay still, and once people have some internet access they will start to ask for more. Worse, suppliers will take it for granted that they have internet access, require that they use it, remove other methods of accessing information, and still ignore the question of latency.

See also my comment[0] about trade-offs between LEO and MEO, number of satellites versus number of hops, and other issues. I am aware of (some of) the issues, and it concerns me that many people seem to be less so and just assume that all will be well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9328145

Its only 127ms to geosynchronous orbit. So 256ms round trip. Not a half second. Not much different from going from USA to India.

The "half second" was as an example that's not too far off the right value when you add problems like congestion, retries, and similar, it wasn't intended to be exact. Even so, it's only off by a factor of two.

See also my comment[0] about trade-offs between LEO and MEO, number of satellites versus number of hops, and other issues.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9328145

Its also right in line with existing web service delays i.e. USA to India. So nothing we haven't been dealing with for a decade now.

I get it; satellites have their challenges. But the delay is probably a small part of the issue.

Well, I don't know what latency the handoffs will cause, but 750 miles straight up is 4ms each way. Considering they'll often be at an angle, you might get roundtrip latencies of 10 to 15 ms. That's on top of anything else, but it's pretty good for most purposes.

> how is the latency issue going to be addressed?

Musk's plan is to not deploy in geosynchronous orbit. Instead, an orbit near LEO (but far enough to not be too crowded already) is being used. That means that the satellites will have quite an angular velocity to the base stations. The actual innovation comes in form of networking technology that can do very fast handovers and is capable of communicating in a stable way with such a network. Latency could actually be reduced when compared to our current networks for long distances since line-of-sight can be more closely approximated as soon as you get the initial hop to LEO (which is not a large one in terms of latency).

Latency depends on the satellite's orbit. This article does a great job explaining the current state of satellite internet, and upcoming network rollouts:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2015-01-22/global-inter...

Takeaway is that with a grid of many, many satellites in low earth orbit, you can have fiber-like performance.

Latency also depends on the methods used to route the packets around among the satellites, to decide which satellite (or satellites, plural) to send the packet(s) to, whether there are any or will be any close to the intended destination, how many satellite hops it needs to make[0], and more.

In short, it's complicated, much more complicated than I can see any of the articles discussing, which is why I raise the question. All the articles ever talk about is speeds, which is worrying.

[0] You need LEO to get low surface-to-satellite latency, but then each satellite can only see a comparatively small part of the Earth's surface, so you need more hops to get the packet(s) to the right satellite. I remember working on a system where the engineers helpfully(?) doubled our radio range, effectively halving our system-wide throughput. It's experiences like that that make me worry about these things.

Elon covered all of this and more during the launch of the SpaceX Seattle offices. He pretty much goes over the entire game plan in this video -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4

Surely you can send emails to the ISS? I think this is how the astronauts are tweeting - they send the tweet via email.

Astronauts on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/AstroSamantha

https://twitter.com/AstroTerry

https://twitter.com/StationCDRKelly

https://twitter.com/AntonAstrey

This could be a huge deal. What I wonder is if repressive regimes like China will be able to block or censor the signal from internet satellites.

Good, because space would get boring without being able to check my emails or see my Facebook feed.

You wouldn't even be able to send selfies.

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