Very interesting. The latency may be <10ms which is good enough for most applications.
ViaSat1 has an overall capacity of 140Gbit/sec and that was launched in 2011. I'd imagine that higher capacities are possible (though considering they are very low weight, that may restrict the amount of beams it can push out).
However, the continual problem with satellite internet is that the satellites have a life expectancy of 15 years or so. While 140gbit/sec+ is probably enough now, it certainly won't be much in a few years time (when you have to consider that the bandwidth is shared across an awful lot of potential users).
Edit: I'd also add that while the proposed market is for areas without current internet connectivity, people do need to realise that a lot of Africa has very good 2G/3G coverage and some areas have very good LTE coverage. The problem historically has been backhaul capacity
a) from the towers back
b) from the core network back to the internet
a) is still an issue as in Africa most if not all backhaul from the towers is provided via microwave relay and daisy chaining them, which causes capacity problems (most of the West has fibre or similar connecting each tower)
b) is slowly being improved with much better fibre runs around Africa.
Considering that most very basic smartphones will have LTE chipsets by the time this system is up, it may be more cost effective to use LTE than this system. This system is likely to require expensive ground terminals that need to be fixed in place.
I see this as partially being that Musk is effectively filling his own volume demands for SpaceX. So even if this venture breaks even, or loses a modest amount of money, ramping up the launch volume for SpaceX is a big win for him. Every launch he can have with SpaceX that pays for itself, is a big win. It might also help demonstrate the economics that he has always had in mind for space, over time; an evolving proof of concept (that it'll likely get cheaper over time).
Yes -- even a breakeven on the satellite business that pays for more launches would be a big win, though I don't think SpaceX would do this without having good ideas for a niche with decent margins. But I wonder if this might mean foregoing potential future launch business with other satellite providers who would see SpaceX as a competitor instead of just launch service provider.
"people do need to realise that a lot of Africa has very good 2G/3G coverage"
This true, but the price is prohibitive. Most cell phone users in Africa are on prepaid mobile services which charge the equivalent of 20 US cents per MB for 2G/3G data. This is a lot of money for the average 3rd world cell phone user.
That bundle price in Kenya is pretty good by African Standards, but I do not think its representative. And even if it is, the masses do not have 5$ to put towards data bundles (bare in mind that they also have to buy airtime bundles just to use voice and SMS), so they end up paying the out-of-bundle data rates, which are about 20 times higher than the in-bundle rates.
God damn I just "topped up" my paltry 1GB per month in the UK at a cost almost twice that.
I don't care if information wants to be free, but I want my bandwidth to be free :-)
Edit: more seriously is control over the bandwidth usage. I notice my phone does a lot of background work that I either don't have control over or might do but is so diffuse to control I cannot be bothered. A few tens of dollars a month is annoying but it's not making me choose between food or bandwidth as it might in other areas.
I would hope that phones like the locked down android become more widespread or some other approach (can you write an app that controls other apps bandwidth?)
Was in Senegal a few years ago, frequently bought 100MB for 5,000CFA (about $10). At least that's what I remember. Is Orange just cheaper or is that about right?
Don't know about the rest of Africa, but in Cape Verde I was paying 15 euros for 5 gigabytes of 3G bandwidth. I was buying two of those cards per month on average, which was on par with an internet bill in the US or in Europe.
On par with an internet bill that provides far more than 10GB of data. I get 300GB for that price for example, and anything I transfer at night doesn't count towards that cap.
But the claim was the Africa doesn't need better internet because they have 2g/3g. Go ask anyone in Africa if they wish they had more bandwidth, more data, and lower prices.
In Portugal we have prepaid prices of €1.25 for 30MB and €1/hr for 2G/3G. I still find it insanely expensive.
EDIT: Those 30MB are only valid for 24hrs max. As soon as midnight comes, you have to pay more €1.25 to get another 30MB valid until the end of the day.
200MB... like that lasts a month. After you spend the 200MB you'll have to pay €1.25 for 30MB, valid only until midnight of the same day. There's no paying €2.9 for 200MB more.
Nuances...
When i was in Zimbabwe (5 Years ago) the biggest prepaid refill card you could buy was around 1$. (That was enough for a several minutes call back to Europe.) If you wanted more you had to buy several refill cards.
<10ms is assuming that the satellite you connect to is directly accessing a base station... if the signal needs to be routed across the world to get to the base station then its a lot higher than conventional fiber.
> ~1000 satellites @ 100kg each that's about 2 saturn V launches so not crazy launch economics.
Unless you have a couple Saturn V's tucked away somewhere no one knows about, it's more likely they'll be launched on SpaceX vehicles.
Assuming Falcon Heavy ever flies, and has performance characteristics similar to those listed on spacex.com, they could launch 1000ish 100kg sats in 2-3 FH launches.
It might be more likely that they'll simply fit as many as they can as secondary payloads in their normal launch schedule. Slower deployment, but effectively 'free'.
I was so excited by Teledesic and so disappointed when they folded. If someone actually pulls off what they planned I'll be right in line to be a customer, likely regardless of price.
I want to move far away from people and the only real limiter is decent high speed internet so I can do my work.
I think it is still quite expensive and there is a lot of latency when doing a voice call. The solution works for rural telecoms in areas like Zambia, where it is difficult to connect a fibre or microwave system.
The current rural telecom systems are basically just a 3m pole with an antenna, with a solar panel and a small satellite link, and you have to work with the chief of the village in order to get permission and to ask them to look after the small tower. It is really fast to deploy and for internet connectivity it works okay but you have to start looking at caching pages like wikipedia, and other popular sites, and there will probably be a few days delay in the web content.
So, this seems to be an evolution of Greg Wyler's WorldVu Constellation,
Musk's comment follows reports that he's looking into
lending support to a small-satellite venture established
with the goal of providing global Internet access. The
venture, known as WorldVu Satellites, was founded by former
Google executive Greg Wyler...
Anything that brings down the ridiculous fees for internet access at sea will be a breath of fresh air for technologists that dream of living and working away from terra firma.
As it stands the receiver equipment alone runs $10K to $15K, and then you get whacked with a $3K+/month fee for unlimited access[0] O_o
A fleet of SpaceX sateillites should bring that price down significantly. If so, could usher in a new wave of telecommuters that ditch high priced apartment rentals in favor of nomadic living at sea ;-)
A great idea, but I wonder what Elon Musk's ideas about addressing the possibility of the Kessler syndrome; collisions between orbiting debris at an exponential pace ultimately leading to the denial of safe orbits to humanity.
Given SpaceX this is clearly something he should be deeply concerned about, but is he addressing it in any way, or just adding to the problem?
I'd say he is having a positive impact with his focus on reusable rocket stages, therefore less debris in orbit... a cloud of micro-satellites (how manueverable?) might be going in the other direction.
This may be a silly question, but when it's said that these are not in a "stable orbit", what is the mechanism of decay? I'd imagine if they were in an elliptical orbit, they'd simply continue that way forever in a "perfect" system. I'd imagine tidal forces would be too weak and the satellites too small for them to have any effect.
Are they passing through the atmosphere and experiencing atmospheric drag?
Property rights still apply in space: Any vehicle you launch is yours and you can be held accountable for damage you do to somebody else's vehicle. Proving that somebody killed your satellite on purpose should be pretty difficult though.
I don't think it works like that. If one of Elon's Satellites get hit (intentionally or not) by a Russian/Chinese missile/satellite... I don't think SpaceX has any realistic way to enforce rights.
But I don't see why they would wanna do that. I don't know how these things works but it seems like there's enough space in space for all the satellites SpaceX would wanna launch.
You're talking about a company that makes tricked out ICBMs. I suspect that SpaceX could handle a tit-for-tat exchange with any space power. The only real limit would be budgetary, but I'm pretty sure the U.S. government could find a way to funnel funds. Of course, none if this would ever happen in the real world, I just wanted to point out that SpaceX is making some if the bigger rockets flying today, and they far from helpless.
Yes, it is being pedantic ;). You may also have noted that nobody "tricks out" ICBMs (the aftermarket parts available for ICBMs is rather limited...), and may have concluded that the original post was simply taking a few liberties with the language...
Is that really how it works in practice? There's no legal system with any real international jurisdiction. I'd have thought if state actors were going to be "held accountable" it would be done diplomatically, and that non-state actors would be held to account by the states in which they reside.
100km is the altitude where lies the Karman Line[0]; the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space. So technically, space IS what's above 100km ;)
who do you go to war with if the satellites are owned by a corporation? their home country? I am more sure that the home country would regulate such a company to prevent them from putting satellites where others don't want them
Nations have no jurisdiction over outer space. Hence no nation can prohibit an orbit over its landmass. However the definition of where space begins is not precisely defined [1].
These would be placed in a relatively high LEO of 800 & 950km, 20 satellites per plane on 18 orbital planes (likely 18 launches, but a remote possibility is using a bunch of fuel over multiple maneuvers to do 9 or 6).
Orbital lifetimes to Earth decay according to altitude are highly variable, especially with the form factor of the satellite and its mass & profile against the remnant atmosphere, but for typical satellites very, very roughly:
150km minutes to hours
300km days to weeks
450km months to years
600km years to decades
750km decades to centuries
900km centuries to millennia
35,786km (GSO) effectively unlimited
Something this high would indeed pose an addition to the Kessler threat by virtue of remaining up there for many doublings of debris density; And redressing that would not be so difficult, in actuality. Chemical deorbit, ion deorbit, electromagnetic tether deorbit, and sail deorbit are all possibilities; The last does not even require orientation control. All that's needed is some incentive for them to implement controlled deorbitting.
It's supposed to be a constellation of ~700 satellites, that definitely suggests low orbit.
(Rationale: With high orbits like GEO, a single satellite covers half the planet, so there's no obvious reason to have hundreds of them. But LEO is much nicer for many reasons (latency, launch cost). If you could cover the whole planet from LEO, that'd be the logical choice; and planning ~700 satellites at once suggests that's the aim).
The problem with low orbit is increased drag. This is basically why Iridium went bankrupt trying to charge $7/minute for phone calls - the lower you are the more fuel you need to expend for station keeping. A satellite that would last decades in geostationary orbit may only last four or five years at 120km.
> The difference between their satellites and others in use would be the size of the fleet .. and the size of the satellites, which would be much smaller than those currently used for communications.
Pretty sure we're looking at satellites far far smaller than 250 pounds if this is going to work.
Realistically you can't make them much smaller than that. I know everyone's excited about "cubesats" that are shrunk down to ten cm on a side, but those things are always part of some "swarm" experiment that runs for a short period of time (usually hours) and ends. Here we're talking about something that needs to work for an extended period. And it's not some made up task like "Let's see if we can get ten tiny satellites to fly in formation!" You're actually going to be slinging RF energy around. So you're going to need:
1) Power. How much really depends on what's going to be on the ground. If your customers are going to be using twelve foot tracking dishes (they won't), you can get away with maybe a quarter watt or less. I'm not exactly sure what they'll need, but remember you're trying to communicate with something that's 100+ km away, minimum. Nobody's going to let you put up 700 plutonium RTGs, either, so that means solar cells and probably some sort of mechanical deployment system. And batteries - you still need power on the night side.
2) RF antenna(s). The more you skimp on your antenna, the more power you need. And vice versa. And you'll probably need at least two - one to point at your customers, and one to point at whatever you're using as a relay.
3) Thrust. Probably small, light thrusters and a comparatively large, heavy fuel tank. The lower your orbit, the more you need.
4) Stabilizers. Of some sort. Your antennas need to be pointed in specific directions, and your solar cells need to face the sun. So... gyros (and more electrical power). Plus more fuel, because you need to keep the gyros in their design range.
You're not going to be able to fit all this in a twenty pound satellite.
Question: Assuming the UN, an individual state or private donors want to support economic development in underdeveloped states with poor infrastructure, would funding free or very cheap internet access be useful?
One of the problems with badly run, weak and/or underfunded governments is lack of infrastructure. Mobile access arrived before rads, sewage or mains electricity in places because of the easier infrastructure that depends less on these things.
Yes, free/very cheap internet access would be very useful.
One of the keys to economic development is access to credit/micro-finance. It's often not economical for banks to have a branch nearby so basic financial services are lacking. Sometimes the government provides something rudimentary (the post office in India is also a bank of sorts).
A lot of the cell towers don't support data in these regions so even if there is phone service there's no internet, or if there is it is prohibitively expensive. Internet could drive the cost down of a regional branch/or enable a stripe for the masses kind of thing (where the shops could get some low cost internet device that also acts as a card swiper and/or credit card)
This would also enable a lot of education possibilities which is also limited due to limited resources and poor internet options. Children could attend more advanced schooling in classrooms where the teacher is there via telepresence (Cisco is/was working on something like this)
Adding to that simple doctors visits. A doctor supporting one region could see more patients from all over more quickly identifying issues before they get out of hand.
> "[There is] no clear evidence that microfinance has any positive or negative impacts," said Maren Duvendack, ODI [Overseas Development Institute] fellow and author of a recent systematic review of microfinance, while David Roodman, of the Centre for Global Development, added: "I [wouldn't] say microfinance doesn't work, I would say it does not systematically reduce poverty. We do not have credible academic evidence that microcredit on average lifts people out of poverty... We [also] do not have evidence that microfinance is systematically making people worse off."
I suppose with enough satellites and efficient routing the latency would be OK.
In the 1980s things were different. I was using servers scattered around the world and the latency was a second or two because of multiple hops from the ground to a few high altitude satellites.
Very low cost Internet is a good thing, especially if it is combined with self imposed net neutrality, which I would bet that this team would respect.
All these new internet options are quickly chipping away at the ISP oligopoly. Tell me again why we need a ham-handed federal approach to net neutrality?
This service has to exist first before it can chip away at anything.
Part of the reason the US regulated ISP's the way they did was the thought that different technologies could compete: Dialup/DSL, Cable, Power Line & Satellite. Unfortunately, internet over power line never panned out and satellite's latency and cost only make it worthwhile for a handful of people. (These are grouped by companies that control them)
So our 4 options ended up as 2 because we counted our chickens before they hatched.
How can satellites compete? They have exactly one 'cable' for everybody - over the air. That doesn't scale; its already not enough. This will be some niche market for backups or secure link or something; it sure won't be streaming Netflix for hundreds of millions of people. Maybe for hundreds of people.
Add satellites to a quickly growing list of unforeseen options that includes google fiber, municipal broadband, etc. and collectively they will soon be enough to make slow/fast lanes a suicidal proposition for major ISPs. The whole raison d'etre for net neutrality is D.O.A. and trying to shove through a bloated set of internet regulations tainted by the corporate lobbying process that defines American politics is unnecessarily and likely damaging to openness and freedom.
But they don't really add much. The bandwidth is infinitesimal, compared to your neighborhood cable in a medium-sized city. And they're godawful expensive. What's the point?
The point is that the upward trajectory of internet-providing innovations is steep, and only getting steeper, which makes federal ISP regulations unnecessary and harmful to the prospects of small innovative competitors.
This is kind of game changing for internet access in developing countries!
I'm originally in Iraq and when $#it hits the fan, the government turns of Internet! Now Imagine if one of these babies could talk to a V-Sat and broadcast even when there was no local Internet!
There are just so many great uses for these Micro-Satellites.
Hopefully so, but there may be some control by governments to still block access. I'm sure the States are going to have rules before these V-sats can be launched; no?
Will be interesting to see if there is an option for road warriors that won't involve a cumbersome satellite dish.
Regarding Latency - I spend greater than 50% of my life on > 500 msec latency connections (IPSec VPN back to California, often over Cellular) - so anything that beats that is a win.
I trust Musk a little more with something like this than Google or Facebook, but I'm not sure what he'd do when he'd be confronted by the NSA, especially when his SpaceX is so tied to government contracts.
You can assume at this point that any significant communications network like this has traffic recorded by at least FVEY and probably other agencies too. They could probably intercept traffic leaving ground stations, even if the company didn't want them to.
If that's important to you (say you're a lawyer, accountant, doctor, business, politician, judge, journalist etc ;), you'd be better to use encryption than worry about the network layer which you have no control over.
What’s the difference from your current ISP in this regard?
To avoid surveillance you need to use a secure protocol like TLS, but even then the attacker might access the server on the other end (e.g. via physical access).
It's a great question. Just the idea of a worldwide service brings up hundreds of legal jurisdictions and possible issues. And the limited bandwidth of the satellites may mean that equal service treatment may not be ideal, even if awesomely required by law (we can hope). We'll see how it plays out.
at any time 200 of the 700 will be above land and half of those over desert/tundra. so basically 100 sats will serve 1 Billion people. Assuming each can do 10Gbps that's 1Tbps divided by 1B. so average of 10kbps per terminal. which is enough for basic web, texting, twitter and voice.
I think that's a good lower bound, as it assumes no packet scheduling, and that everyone on Earth will be attempting to consume all the bandwidth available to them all of the time.
It also assumes that the "backhaul" between satellites wouldn't saturate under such a load.
I'd wager that under those assumed numbers you'd more realistically be able to expect somewhere between 100Kbps and 1Mbps.
the first problem is the evening peak when everyone tries to get on at the same time and watch netflix/youtube. The second problem is the link equation from your hemi antenna handset to the satellite 1000km away that passes by in 100s.
Yes with packet scheduling you can get higher peak bandwidth, but 1Mbps sustained over the course of a 5 minute youtube video is going to be hard.
It's much better to target the whatsapp crowd. That facebook will pay for.
Surely you mean kB/s, not kBps. Nobody uses kBps because it's misleading. The question always boils down to kB/s vs. kbps. In this respect, your parent also unfortunately used kb/s, which is also a misleading and confusing unit.
The standard units, as in units defined by various international standards like ISQ are B/s and b/s. bps is defined to mean b/s. Note that there is no Bps in any ISQ standard. The only reason b/s has an bps alias is to reduce confusion. Greater hamming distance means less potential for confusion.
Now you want to add the confusion back. Luckily, units are standardised by international bodies, not individuals, and the industry seems to be happy with the standards and uses them. Very seldom I have seen kBps (and in the few cases where I have seen it, it was wrong anyway). kb/s, while correct, I have only seen used by mistake, or by malice (e.g. ISPs intentionally misleading customers). Luckily, most professionals agree on only using B/s and bps, and no other combination, correct or not.
Does anyone know if this proposal is similar to 03b in which Google invested this year?
Besides that, i'm becoming skeptical on Elon's announcements since hyperloop.
Maybe he is just using this old public relations trick: let some information about a future product or project leak to the media to know how the public respond.
If you can own a market, such as cheaply launching anything into space, you reduce your costs compared to competitors for anything space-related - so why not extend into business that is a billion-dollar and eventually trillion-dollar industry with mining resources from space?
Please note that experiments of this sort will be far more expensive and sometimes be outlawed if government goes ahead with its plan to declare internet as "utility"by masquerading it as "net neutrality".
Experiments like these could be more feasible if large cos like FB, Google invest in it with greater control.
Does not really matter. Each economic recession sees vast expansion of government powers and we lose economic freedom. But the boom does not see the opposite.
The knife that is being put into hear will not be taken out, more will follow.
I don't see how that follows. My understanding of net neutrality was that the source of the packet couldn't be allowed to affect the delivery of the packet.
In this case, if the satellite connection is more expensive, the user will pay that higher cost. The price is for the uplink, not depending on what bits flow across it.
ViaSat1 has an overall capacity of 140Gbit/sec and that was launched in 2011. I'd imagine that higher capacities are possible (though considering they are very low weight, that may restrict the amount of beams it can push out).
However, the continual problem with satellite internet is that the satellites have a life expectancy of 15 years or so. While 140gbit/sec+ is probably enough now, it certainly won't be much in a few years time (when you have to consider that the bandwidth is shared across an awful lot of potential users).
Edit: I'd also add that while the proposed market is for areas without current internet connectivity, people do need to realise that a lot of Africa has very good 2G/3G coverage and some areas have very good LTE coverage. The problem historically has been backhaul capacity
a) from the towers back b) from the core network back to the internet
a) is still an issue as in Africa most if not all backhaul from the towers is provided via microwave relay and daisy chaining them, which causes capacity problems (most of the West has fibre or similar connecting each tower)
b) is slowly being improved with much better fibre runs around Africa.
Considering that most very basic smartphones will have LTE chipsets by the time this system is up, it may be more cost effective to use LTE than this system. This system is likely to require expensive ground terminals that need to be fixed in place.