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Comment by grondilu | Hacker News Reader

> 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??

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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.

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