Initially, the SpaceX system will consist of 4,425 satellites operating in 83 orbital planes (at altitudes
ranging from 1,110 km to 1,325 km). SpaceX has proposed an additional constellation of 7,500 satellites operating even closer to Earth.
For the end consumer, SpaceX user terminals—essentially, a relatively small flat panel, roughly the size of
a laptop—will use phased array technologies to allow for highly directive, steered antenna beams
that track the system’s low-Earth orbit satellites. In space, the satellites will communicate with each other
using optical inter-satellite links, in effect creating a “mesh network” flying overhead that will enable
seamless network management and continuity of service.
Later this year, SpaceX will begin the process of testing the satellites themselves, launching one prototype
before the end of the year and another during the early months of 2018. Following successful demonstration
of the technology, SpaceX intends to begin the operational satellite launch campaign in 2019. The
remaining satellites in the constellation will be launched in phases through 2024, when the system will
reach full capacity.
Where do you see anything about the antenna size? All I've seen is that this will be for Enterprise customers, and the antenna will be very large.
By the way, a very small phased array will be very low gain, thus using more capacity on their satellite for the same speeds. Unless they've invented a new type of antenna...
It's been said before, but what people need to understand is that the goal of this service isn't to make money- it's to balance demand.
SpaceX can plan to launch be 30% more launches than their actual customers need. All those extra rockets are used for internet satellites. If there's an accident (boom) or a sudden need for more rockets, the internet satellites get delayed, and the paying customer gets a rocket.
If customers are finicky about using re-flown rockets, that's fine, the internal customer doesn't care. If a customer backs out for any reason, the internal customer takes their place.
Rocket production gets a smooth flow going, which improves production efficiency.
"Musk himself has stated the goal is to make money to help pay for colonizing Mars."
Which I continue to misunderstand ...
You can go to Mars ... you can have an outpost on Mars ... you can have scientists and tourists and so on go back and forth to Mars - all very positive and exciting.
But you can't live on Mars for an extended period because the gravity is 1/3 of earths.
Your teeth will decay. Your bones will weaken (even with hours per day of resistance work, which will be mandatory). Your heart will weaken. Your organs will malfunction. You will get cancer from a weakened immune system. Red blood production goes down.
Your body is built for and tightly coupled to Earths gravity. I fail to see how one could actually live on Mars without sacrificing 30 or more years of lifespan.
We only know how the human body reacts in 0g - and it's as bad as you say. But we don't know if 0.3g is bad. Humans might live perfectly fine in 0.3g, or it might be as bad as 0g. However, there's no data either way to make the claims you are making.
> But you can't live on Mars for an extended period because the gravity is 1/3 of earths.
Can't you rather cheaply create a centrifuge where you'll sleep - and may be even work indoors - which will maintain 1G? Centrifuge big enough so no significant side forces would occur?
Feasible for a few billion people, eventually? This concept has been explored in many sci-fi shows, with the usual solution being to make a big ring and spin it in space.
> I fail to see how one could actually live on Mars without sacrificing 30 or more years of lifespan.
Maybe they just cant can't, but don't care. Some people could be willing to decrease their lifespan in order to colonize a different planet, making the human race interplanetary.
Also, theoretically, people will evolve over time to be able to handle those conditions. We're used to making plans a couple years ahead. When thinking of interplanetary colonization, we should think many generations ahead.
Reproductive fitness is less scary--it doesn't always mean "prevented from reproducing"
* Imagine 20% of the population has adaptations that make them better suited to mars--they keep their teeth, their bones are stronger, they do well in sports, they have more energy to take care of kids, so they have 1 extra kid on average. In one generation, that percentage is 30% and in one more it is 45%, one after that and it is the majority and heads toward 100%.
What we'll be looking at is speciation. Also, evolution is at-work on our population as we speak--it doesn't take breaks.
The alternative is to stay on a planet where 20-40% of people don't even "believe in" evolution or taking care of the planet which their eventual descendants would need to inhabit, many times in favor of short-term capital gains. I fail to see how we're not already, as of about a hundred years ago, pretty screwed either way.
And I bet it will help with that- but I don't see that as the sole purpose.
He's an industrialist. He saw he'd need batteries for his electric cars, so he said "I should make batteries". Then he said "Who else needs batteries? Solar producers". So Tesla now makes cars, batteries, and solar panels. That wasn't just by chance, that was planned.
Now he says "I have a rocket company I want to scale up, but I don't know if demand will be there". So what does he do? He makes a company that could be profitable, but more importantly fills in the demand he wants to have for his rockets. The rocket business is bigger, which makes it more stable. The internet company might work, or it might lose money, but it's still a tool to the real goal.
This is why Amazon made AWS. Because they needed cheap, simple cloud infrastructure. Alexa/Echo helps people buy more stuff. They're building a shipping infrastructure ostensibly for themselves but probably soon enough for customers as well.
Wrong. The goal is to make money. Billions of dollars.
That money is to help fund Mars colonization, which has been SpaceX's ultimate goal from the beginning. There's also some nice synergy in that similar tech can be used to deploy a global communications network for Mars as well.
If there's an accident (boom) then the paying customer's payload is destroyed and in most cases they will not have a duplicate payload just standing by to be launched. Building satellites takes a while.
I think the theory is that the next customer scheduled for the dead rocket can share some other rocket instead. The internal satellite(s) on that rocket get delayed, but at least it would be loaded to capacity even if the previous rocket didn't go boom.
And maybe they will make money. But they aren't making the company just to make a profit from it- they're making it to increase demand for rockets, which they also make.
The smart industrialist expands his business to become his own supplier and his own customer.
You said the goal of the service isn't to create money. It is. And it's intended to make the company profitable. Launches won't be for quite some time.
This is good news for the USA, but it's GREAT news for countries where the government regularly cuts off and controls the Internet for political purposes. If receivers can be as small as a personal laptop, expect a thriving black market in them in places like Iran and Egypt.
Such receivers can also act as backhaul for mesh networks, providing access to un-censored information in times of turmoil and peace alike.
EDIT:
Data customers would pay for access on an individual basis. Helicopter-parent countries might cry foul, but what leverage do they have? It's not like they were going to launch things with SpaceX and they can threaten to stop.
I think they need licenses to use the radio spectrum. I believe Iridium set up a system in China so that all calls are routed through Chinese systems, so there is some historical precedent. The government of China also has anti-satellite weapons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi... .
OTOH one country enabling communication infrastructure to another country's citizens without approval of their government would be rightly considered as violation of national sovereignty and could presumably be seen as an act of war.
But its the citizen of the country who initiated the communication, and the act of providing a service cannot be made as an excuse for war. At best, the citizen get prosecuted for illegal communication.
> Data customers would pay for access on an individual basis.
At a subscriber level, monthly billing to 'SpaceX Broadband, Redmond' might be cause for inquisitive State Police to visit.
At a state level, the legality of jamming / interfering with satellites over national territory has never been definitively established. So SpaceX might find it easier to just turn-off over hostile nations than have them upset the network.
The buying, selling and using of satellite internet equipment will be outlawed in countries that don't allow free access to the internet (unless of course the internet satellite company signs agreements to impose the blocking of choice of the regime in question).
SpaceX might be safe from the Turkish, Chinese or Egyptian governments, but the users won't be.
But what incentive would satellite communication providers have to agree? Wouldn't it be better to facilitate a black market by not putting any blocks?
Sometimes one government has more common ground with the government of another country than it has with its own citizens. A country that does not want its citizens to have SpaceX provided Internet could lobby the US government to require it to be blocked.
You can bet that the US government will want to exert control over it anyway to some degree so even if they are not always sympathetic to other governments requirements that lack of sympathy is a negotiating position not a matter of principle.
They can jam whatever frequency the networks operates on. Or embargo any receiver/tramistter that could be used to connect to the network. Yes, some people would be able to work around any attempt at blockage, but that wouldn't scale to providing non-technical people with cheap/unrestricted internet.
That's my point, if you have high gain in a particular direction, wouldn't interference coming from a different direction be mostly rejected? The point being, this could offer internet to people in repressed countries that can't practically be blocked or tampered with. If they coupled this with a free tier with low bandwidth it could be huge, assuming people could smuggle in the equipment to make it work.
Not an expert, but here is my take:
A phased array consists of many individual, non-directional antennas. The directionality comes by cleverly combining the signal of the antennas.
If there is a jamming signal, all antennas would receive it. In theory, it would then cancel out when the signals are combined. The question is now: Before the signal is combined, is there any element which can be saturated by the large jamming signal? If so, you can jam.
The phased array direction is tune-able, so I assume the combination is done in the digital domain. That means ADC in between, which can be saturated. So my guess is: yes.
If you couldn't jam the receiver, could you jam the satellite itself while it is over your territory? Direct enough signals at the satellite from your country that it can't respond to actual users? Sort of a DDoS attack?
I'd say it's more of problematic than great news for places with state controlled study. But it has potential.
Where it's Great news is places which already can use only satellite internet, but have very poor experience. Rural Australia for example. Having low local (or even global) latency would be amazing.
I'm pretty sure NSA will want a backdoor in the system. If it can do what they say it can do, they are basically the new pipes of the Internet. It's too good for NSA and our current US govt to leave untouched.
For plaintext communication, you should already assume someone's either listening, or will get recorded traffic in the future. Why do you think a specific backdoor in satellite traffic would change anything? The bandwidth there would also have physical constraints, more than a magic box at Telco, making full slurping harder.
It's not going to be better than GPS/GLONAS. If there is a specific location component in the ground stations, it will be known pretty soon. Otherwise, the location will be very weather dependent.
If you have a phone with you, you're likely providing a better location to Google/Apple right now.
"SpaceX has also proposed an additional 7,500 satellites operating even closer to the ground, saying that this will boost capacity and reduce latency in heavily populated areas."
This should be interesting, depending on how this is regulated on the legal side it could result in the major ISP's updating our infrastructure, of course nothing has stopped them from agreeing to update infrastructure then running off with our tax money in the past. Not to mention they will probably use legal means to hamstring this if possible. Hopefully this spurs competition in areas with stagnating ISP's and increases availability of low latency connections in sparsely populated areas.
One possibility is passing laws/regulations about how many sats can be in a orbital plane or single launch, as they will want to launch dozens, if not the full 53 they want to put in a plane, with a single booster to reduce costs.
They could also get some silly RF regulations passed that make it not feasible economically.
My aunt's town in rural Western Massachusetts still only has broadband in the library plus scanty LTE service and current terrible satellite— how and whether to wire the town with broadband is driving the first contested election in decades.
This could make a major difference for that type of rural town.
I'm in central Kansas. The options here are basically satellite or if you are close to town, then up to 6Mbps DSL. We have DSL, but most of our friends/neighbors can't get it...
Same situation for our mid-Atlantic home. There's a ton of pent up demand for this service in all of the rural and semi-rural pockets of the U.S. We have been very poorly served by Congress, state, and local government.
>I live in a semi-rural area. I chose to live there. Why should everyone else pay to give me top-tier internet access?
One could as why everyone else should have to pay to give you postal service at the same price as someone in, say, NYC when the cost of provision is much higher.
The reason the person above you mentioned government is that it's likely that government owns the streets that any net access would run through as well as having countless other regulations that would need to be followed.
It's a cool system. There's a slight disadvantage that the satellite-to-ground link is at 10-15 GHz for users, so it will go down in a heavy rainstorm, and some fraction of the time due to other atmospheric effects. Should be reasonably reliable but far from fiber, and it will be interesting to see what uptime they guarantee. Assuming this all ever actually happens.
I assume the sensitity to weather etc depends on the type of equipment you have? Couldn't a community use a huge high power and high sensitivity common receiver/transmitter station, that provides fiber to 10-1000 households? The community station could also provide some kind of limited bandwidth fallback such as DSL or LTE that just ensures peoples fiber lines limp along when the satellites can't be reached (so their juice machines don't stop working...).
I think that's true in places like (large parts of) the US where the "last mile problem" exists. However for lots of rural Africa, China, Australia there surely must also exist a "first 1000miles problem".
Interesting. What would this be able to do ? Current wireless speeds, even with state of the art technology, is going to be something like 10Gbit. That'll have to be shared by an entire city at least (correction: about 2 satellites per state on average. Less for New York), and of course there won't be any CDNs or HTTP caches "upstairs" so to speak. So 1 bit in = 1 bit back out.
Even at 4425 satellites that means, let's see. The earth is 500 million km2, and they don't need the same density everywhere, so some optimizations may be possible, so let's say 5000 satellites. That means 100,000 km2 per satellite. That means one satellite per decent sized country, only about 100 for the entire US. This is not geostationary orbit, so they'll have to aim for evenly spaced satellites.
Let's say they fix their satellites and do 10x what is currently possible, so that means 100Gbit/satellite. Current internet traffic into and out of the Netherlands is 50 times that (granted, more and denser cities than portugal, but the Netherlands would have to share one SpaceX satellite with Belgium and parts of the UK).
They would only be able to provide about 1/10,000,000th of a Satellite to a cellphone in the US, and if they have 100 Gbit/satellite, that's not even 1kbit on average. Even 10x or 100x that capacity wouldn't change much. Doubling or tripling the number of satellites won't fix this, we'd need between hundreds of thousands and to millions of satellites.
This will either need to be rather expensive (certainly as much as your cellphone, probably more, as this seems to indicate the system can only support 100x less users than the mobile network in the US, and even less in smaller dense countries or cities like the Netherlands or New York). Even at state of the art technologies, bandwidth limits are going to be tight. Like any satellite service, I can't see this work at city densities, or for mobiles.
Within the city there's usually wifi. Broadband that you can use anywhere on the world (or at least anywhere there aren't so many people), even Antarctica or Everest or Crimea or the middle of the ocean, seems like it would be worth paying quite a premium for.
Seven years. US Broadband providers have seven years to take us over the coals, practice full bore capitalism with our data and generally run oligilistic practices until their time even begins to run out
I'm afraid I don't understand what you're trying to insinuate here. Capitalism is part and parcel to disruptive services such as this one entering a space where established players have created price fixing opportunities for themselves. The oligopoly you're deriding is what enables innovations like this in the first place.
They bash it exactly because they don't understand it and they listen to whatever they read on Facebook that tells them why it is evil. Basic Economics education outside of University and even within University is strongly lacking in this country. We need mandatory personal finance/macro economics courses as part of high school.
You have alternatives now; 4G cellular is one example. But they are difficult and/or expensive. We'll have to see if this solution is different; right now it's just a plan.
I'm using 3G or 4G as a cheaper alternative to landline broadband. It's… acceptable, but not amazing. 20 GB per month doesn't go as far as it used to before I started watching so many YouTube videos, even though I use 144p whenever possible.
You should check out T-Mobile. They have free video streaming if you enable it, but it forcibly downgrades the video streams to no higher than 720p. That still sounds like much better than you have however.
The price for 50/50mbps is staying the same in my area, however they have dropped the 75/75, 100/100, 150/150, and 300/300 options entirely and now offer 50/50 or 1000/1000 (which is actually 940/880 which is around the limits of "normal" ethernet).
And while they advertise $69.99 on the site, clicking through to "more info" shows it as $79.99 and calling in to ask about it they are telling me it will be $89.99 for the first year, then $99.99 for the next year with a 2 year contract as a new customer only. And when I told them I am already a verizon customer, they had to re-run it and found that it will actually be $119.99 for the first year, $129.99 for the second year on a 2 year contract.
And that's before I even get the bill which in my experience with verizon is often 10% larger than the quoted price with internet only (and when I had phone+internet+tv it was almost double the quoted price after taxes, fees, expired discounts, required equipment rentals, and other bullshit).
I negotiated them down to 75 bucks (im still on contract for 6 more months). I had to pay 90 bucks to install a new fiber termination point though. And my price is only set until Nov.
I don't know, but I know it's taught me to literally never believe a word of anything they say in terms of price, and to literally never sign a contract of any kind with them ever because they can't guarantee what the first bill will be (they can only give estimates), and by the time it actually comes you are already locked in for the 2 years.
Gigabit fiber is being rolled out in my area. It is amazing how quickly it is progressing compared to the work of Verizon or Google Fiber. So at least from that one example, there seems to be new players entering cities
Comcast just released Gigabit (over copper, DOCSIS 3.1) for all of Utah. It's only 40Mbit up, but I'm pretty happy with it. I thought it would take a lot longer.
This is exactly why cable providers have been so reluctant to spend huge amounts of money on FTTH. Squeezing more bits through existing copper infrastructure is a win-win situation for everyone.
But that doesn't scale. Gigabit speeds are possible with DOCSIS but that hinges on massively oversubscribing their last mile infrastructure and usage patterns to slowly increase. With DOCSIS, nodes can be huge and encompass hundreds of homes. The bandwidth available is shared with everyone on that channel in the entire node. For GPON it's similar, but nodes are somewhere between 16 and 64 homes and there's even more bandwidth available.
ISPs aren't letting congestion get to record levels to YouTube and Netflix because they want to screw with you, they're keeping the congestion "contained" at certain peering links because that cuts down quite a bit of the amount of aggregate bandwidth they have to deal with at the last mile. If they upgraded their peering links then they'll just cause congestion for everything instead of just video services that will gracefully degrade to worse quality in the face of congestion.
Moving to FTTH is a win-win situation, ISPs get a break from the endless struggle of keeping the last mile free of congestion and customers get something closer to net neutrality since the ISPs don't have perverse incentives when it comes to peering agreements.
It would be super cool if amateur cubesats could interface with this network. I've always wanted to run a server on orbit, where energy is free and regulations are limited to RF spectrum issues.
Now, I pay ~$60/m for internet. That's $720/yr. If they want to recoup costs after 10 years, it'll take ~61.5 million subscribers.
For the U.S. alone, that'll probably never happen. But worldwide? Maybe. Though worldwide the price per subscribe will be less, often times substantially less.
On the other hand, SpaceX will have lots of operational discounts because its their own rockets, and they already have all the supply channels for building space tech. And maybe they aren't looking to payback in 10 years for this initial run; maybe they only want to break even so payback in 15 is good enough.
Just some numbers for thought.
P.S. Businesses unlucky enough to be in "rural" areas, aka most commercial business parks outside of tech cities, are in the unfortunate position of paying the local telephone company/AT&T/TimeWarner thousands per month for roughly dial-up speeds. SpaceX could charge the same but offer broadband speeds and get a nice chunk of business, methinks.
This isn't a very useful comparison. For one, according to their FCC application SpaceX is planning on launching satellites with a mass of less than 400kg. For comparison, SES-10, a communications satellite SpaceX launched recently, had a mass of around 5300kg. Secondly, they're planning on deploying them to an altitude of 1000km. Again, for comparison, SES-10 went to geostationary orbit, which is a reasonably common communications satellite orbit, at 36000km altitude, though the Falcon 9 only had to push it into GTO, which still takes quite a lot of energy.
Finally, the plan is obviously contingent on bringing launch costs further down and realising economies of scale in the satellite manufacture. I'm not sure if they can do it, but being able to launch at least 10, and maybe even as many as 20 at once makes a large difference.
I doubt that the per/satellite cost would be anywhere close to $80-100 million. I remember hearing that the plan was for these satellites to have significantly less mass than other satellites and therefore, one orbital launch could deliver many satellites. With these satellites orbiting ~30-34x closer to Earth, the satellites would need to have significantly less mass if they were going to not have their orbital distance not degrade too quickly. I don't know what the expected lifespan of these satellites will be, but I assume they will eventually burn up in the atmosphere.
Saying their mass needs to be lower to reduce orbit degradation is the opposite of true. Assuming two spheres of equal size, their drag and thus change in momentum will be the same at the same altitude. But if one sphere was made of lead and the other made of styrofoam, the styrofoam one will decelerate much faster than the lead one. So: lighter satellite of the same shape means shorter life span. But drag dies down roughly exponentially in altitude, so if they're at 1000 km, rather than 100km, that's not a super big factor.
1) Space is huge. This is a little like asking if there's enough space left in earths oceans to float a few thousand pingpong balls.
2) Present internet satellites are all in mostly geostationary orbits that are much further away then the proposed leo's. Realistically the ones we have now introduce a whopping 650ms. This will be a huge improvement.
> This is a little like asking if there's enough space left in earths oceans to float a few thousand pingpong balls.
I'd be pretty nervous about throing 10k pingpong balls into the atlantic IF the collision of two pingpong balls was disastrous :)
Obviously these satellites will be carefully placed NOT to collied - but the effect of a collision is pretty bad. The problem is that any one of them might collide with some tiny piece of junk, turning it 1000 pieces of junk (which is now 1000x more likely to collide with something, and impossible to control). These satellites won't tip the scales, but it's a nightmare scenario that comes ever closer with every satellite launched.
Remember that space is 3d. Not only do you have the surface area of the entire earth + the area from where LEO starts. You can then stack layers on top of that.
No, collisions are a very real risk. In fact, they've already happened. In 2009, an Iridium satellite accidentally collided with a Russian satellite. Space-X is talking about quadrupling the number of existing satellites, so collisions will be more likely and the resulting debris increases the chances of subsequent collisions much more. This escalating effect is know as Kessler Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome).
To get an impression I think it's a good idea to start with these pictures taken from the ISS [0], which is at about 400 km altitude (it varies a bit but not that much)
Note that they are to the side, straight down you would see a much smaller area!
So the SpaceX satellites would be three times higher. Still, you can see you may need quite a few stations on the ground, and also why you need so many satellites. They will fly over the area very quickly and by then the communication will already have to have been handed over to the next one. There is so much earth to cover, with satellites much higher up you cover a much wider area and you can have them in a stationary orbit. Earth has a diameter of 12,742 km, I have to keep reminding myself that even the ISS is barely above the surface if you were to look at earth from a distance.
The 4,425 satellites will "operat[e] in 83 orbital planes (at altitudes ranging from 1,110km to 1,325km)," and "require associated ground control facilities, gateway Earth stations, and end-user Earth stations," Cooper said. By contrast, the existing HughesNet satellite network has an altitude of about 35,400km, making for a much longer round-trip time than ground-based networks
Yes, until some of the thousands of small satellites about to be launched (not just by SpaceX) star breaking down and creating space junk that will become a serious problem to the launch of new satellites and spacecraft
That's the plan - but when you have thousands or tens of thousands of satellites malfunctions can happen. Also, lots of existing space debris orbiting the earth that can hit satellites
These low orbits aren't stable though, I think they only have a lifetime of 10-20 years before their lateral velocity decays and they de-orbit on their own, it's not like will just be stuck up there.
No, with orbit altitudes of 1,110km to 1,325km we're talking about many hundreds of years: https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html - "Debris left in orbits below 370 miles (600 km) normally fall back to Earth within several years. At altitudes of 500 miles (800 km), the time for orbital decay is often measured in decades. Above 620 miles (1,000 km), orbital debris normally will continue circling Earth for a century or more. "
Ah, I was under the impression that to achieve 25ms latency you would need something very low but it seems to be almost anywhere in LEO would give you close to those speeds.
I was thinking of older speculative articles where HN discussions seemed to think they would only be 300-500 kilometers up, this article states otherwise.
Well seeing as any future business in either rockets or satellite internet both depend on not creating space junk, I think they are pretty motivated to not let that happen.
Humanity is not so good at doing things in their best interests. We have over utilized any natural resource we have ever consumed often to our own determent.
Exactly. Evolution has not primed us with reward mechanisms linked to long term goals relating to pollution or over-utilisation of natural resources. Also financial incentives are often misaligned with these long term goals. As a result we have a tendency to create a mess - on land, in the oceans, in space, wherever we spread
The SpaceX sats at least are planned to be in very LEO. Their orbit will degrade very quickly if left to their own devices. Heck, that might even be the plan. If sats are cheap enough to launch and produce, then each sat can crash into earth after say 2 years.
Ugh. Are they really talking about Latency, or are the numbers they cite actually RTT? And are the numbers the loop latency, or end-to-end latency to some destination on the public network such as 8.8.8.8?
For comparison my CableCo connection in the left-middle of America achieves a loop RTT of about 10ms (5ms Latency), and an RTT to 8.8.8.8 of 25ms (12.5ms Latency).
1,110km ~= 4ms each way so 8ms from ground to satellite to ground but that only get you to the internet and you need to do that again on the way back so 16ms is the minimum latency possible. However, ~25ms round trips seems possible especially if they have enough ground stations near major interchanges.
PS: Remember, they can put these stations near anything that people want low latency connections to.
Neat, TeleDesic[1] V2.0 (or is it 3.0?) :). That effort stalled when single stage to orbit rockets became impractical due to insufficent launch demand when Regan's StarWars program was cancelled.
With a fast turn around re-usable F9 booster (so its relaunch costs are significantly less than launching a new one) Musk would have control over his destiny in this case. When Iridium was being built the whole ground station thing (up/down links into the switched telephone network) was nearly a decade slog of permission, licenses, and regulations.
That said, if he is successful he will suck a lot of money out of wallets that belong to some pretty big fat cats companies. And if he made every ground station a Tor exit node it would really mess with the powers that be.
I'm fairly surprised the US government is a-ok with all of this, or maybe they've already sat down and had a chit chat with Mr Musk. Or, if everyone moves to SpaceX internet service does it make no difference whatsoever to the NSA?
I'm not an electrical or signals engineer, but IIUC the low orbits would also help there, since shorter distances mean much less power requirements for transmission.
Get it up there, and you will have Australia as a client. We have made a mess of the national broadband network rollout, and this might be going live before the NBN rollout is complete. Probably faster, cheaper, and with reliability still to be seen.
I wish they don't go public anytime soon if they can avoid it. There is already enough nonsense we have to endure about TSLA every time any discussion about Tesla or Elon comes up.
We don't need the additional mindkill of 'Time to short SpaceX!'.
I once got a recruiting email from them, but when I looked later the guy was in prison. He was the "Silk Road 2" guy. So now I don't have any contacts there :(
"Basic principle is that while measurements between both sides will be correlated, it's not possible to tell how they are correlated until both sides compare measurements."
How do you reconcile your claim of FTL transmission with this statement directly from your link: "It is not possible, however, to use this effect to transmit classical information at faster-than-light speeds"?
The speed of transmission of Quantum entanglement would, I believe, be limited by the speed of light between the two points in space, without having to traverse a path that follows the curve of the surface of the earth.
So, communicating from Australia to Norway would traverse the diameter of the earth, rather than half of the circumference (plus satellites of course)
I don't think that it can be used to transmit information at all, but rather to establish a shared state. The key is that you can't influence the state in a way that transmits information.
It's like sharing the same random oracle, you could use it to encrypt stuff, but sharing the same random bits with another party doesn't actually let you send information
> I don't think that it can be used to transmit information at all
What if the "no-cloning theorem"[0] wasn't actually right? That would enable doing a bunch of copies of the same particle state, making it possible to predict the probability distribution of each particle. That way it would be possible to send information doing measurements[1] rather than forcing a particle state.
> What if the "no-cloning theorem"[0] wasn't actually right?
So, quantum mechanics isn't linear in nature any more? And it gets to transmit information superluminally? It's probably more likely that we're all living in a simulation and the devs accept a pull request from us increasing the speed of light so we can play games better. The no-cloning theorem itself is actually pretty fundamental to quantum mechanics and it would be very unexpected if it was wrong.
Do the same thing on Mars. Then get self-driving space internet machines that transfer internet from here to Mars. They always position themselves to be between here and Mars for best RTT. Thank me later, humanity.
And yeah, I know latency would be between 6 and ~45 minutes.
Compared to my connection Webpass with sub-1ms latencies this seems like ages. But of course not the same can be said about majority of ISPs so this is a big win.
Yeah my current options are Verizon DSL(1.5Mbps) or Comcast. During non peak hours, I can normally hit 200Mmb download/upload, but during peak hours I'm lucky to be able to stream a song or video without it lagging. I'm about 5 homes away from getting FIOS, and they recently started expanding in my area after years of zero growth, so I'm hoping I can get a single competitor to Comcast.
I was able to pay $20/mo for each month remaining on my contract to end service and start a new contract as a new customer when moving form 50/50 to 150/150.
Initially, the SpaceX system will consist of 4,425 satellites operating in 83 orbital planes (at altitudes ranging from 1,110 km to 1,325 km). SpaceX has proposed an additional constellation of 7,500 satellites operating even closer to Earth.
For the end consumer, SpaceX user terminals—essentially, a relatively small flat panel, roughly the size of a laptop—will use phased array technologies to allow for highly directive, steered antenna beams that track the system’s low-Earth orbit satellites. In space, the satellites will communicate with each other using optical inter-satellite links, in effect creating a “mesh network” flying overhead that will enable seamless network management and continuity of service.
Later this year, SpaceX will begin the process of testing the satellites themselves, launching one prototype before the end of the year and another during the early months of 2018. Following successful demonstration of the technology, SpaceX intends to begin the operational satellite launch campaign in 2019. The remaining satellites in the constellation will be launched in phases through 2024, when the system will reach full capacity.