SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed

Free, global internet access is the next step toward a smarter, more progressive planet. I don't even care about the speed - if the only thing users could access was wikipedia, I'd still personally donate to the project. I cannot emphasize how important democratizing knowledge is to me (and many others).

napkin math (chemistry style): (4425 satellites * 23Gbps) &#x2F; ((60,000PB of fixed internet traffic &#x2F; 1 month [1]) * (12 months &#x2F; 365 days) * (1 day &#x2F; 24 hours ) * (1 hour &#x2F; 60 minutes) * (1 minute &#x2F; 60 seconds) * (8 bits &#x2F; 1 byte) * (1024 Tera &#x2F; 1 Peta) * (1024 Tera &#x2F; 1 Giga)) =<p>An astounding O(54% of global internet traffic) [2]! Obviously there are many many more variables in this [3]. Nonetheless this will be super interesting to follow.<p>[1]: my estimated current data usage from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Internet_traffic#Global_Internet_traffic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Internet_traffic#Global_Intern...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input&#x2F;?i=(4425+*+23)+%2F+((60,000+%2F+1)+*+(12+%2F+365)+*+(1+%2F+24+)+*+(1+%2F+60)+*+(1+%2F+60)+*+(8+%2F+1)+*++" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input&#x2F;?i=(4425+*+23)+%2F+((60,00...</a> (1024+%2F+1)+*+(1024+%2F+1))<p>[3]: Side note, someone should create a multi user algorithm website (it might be able to be done over google spreadsheets) but adding in extra factors like revenue streams and what not sounds like it would be fun to play around with.

Something I find interesting about this: what does it mean for countries who monitor and filter&#x2F;block content (think China)? Presumably since this isn&#x27;t using their national infrastructure they would lose all control of it, no? I wonder how those countries would respond to SpaceX wanting to let their citizens use the service. Unless I&#x27;m missing something it seems to me like they wouldn&#x27;t really be able to stop it.

I don&#x27;t understand the math. 800 satellites at 23 gbps seems to be able to provide 1 gbps to 18,400 connections at any given time. This seems to be many magnitudes off from what would be needed to have any impact. What am I missing?

Is this going to scale? &quot;Each satellite will provide aggregate downlink capacity of 17 to 23Gbps&quot;. Some 20 Gb&#x2F;s per satellite times 4425 satellites spread around the globe is not that much bandwidth for any given densely populated area. We&#x27;re going to keep having our local ISP in cities (they&#x27;re giving between 0.1 and 1 Gb&#x2F;s on fiber right now) but it will be great to get connectivity in the countryside and the mountains. And when traveling abroad, if they&#x27;ll sell a small antenna that can be operated on a battery or connected to a laptop over usb. I wonder if there are chances that those antennas can be made so small to fit into a phone and tablet. Iridium&#x27;s ones are still pretty big, like the ones of wifi routers.

Such a genius move, surprising nobody saw it coming. Just think: he will already have access to a large base of customer&#x27;s roofs (which SolarCity effectively owns) --- 1 million by 2018.<p>Then, it&#x27;s just a hop, skip, and a jump to an on-demand, fully-cached, mesh network. They&#x27;re probably not far from being able to provide internet service to all SolarCity customers, just a bit of a modification to the contract.

Latency Math (Almost 100ms faster then current technology)<p>EDIT: This is only one way<p>ALSO Grace Hopper telling David Letterman what a nano second is! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;1-vcErOPofQ?t=4m26s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;1-vcErOPofQ?t=4m26s</a><p>1 Nanosecond = distance light travels one foot<p>1 mile = 5260 nanoseconds (In a vacuum)<p>Current Satellite Internet = 22,000 miles or 115720000 Nano Seconds = 115.72 ms<p>SpaceX Low Orbit = 715 to 823 Miles<p>823 miles = 4328980 nano seconds = 4.3 ms

Here&#x27;s the thread on r&#x2F;spacex that has a bunch of analysis:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;spacex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5d9724&#x2F;spacex_has_filed_for_their_massive_constellation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;spacex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5d9724&#x2F;spacex_has_f...</a>

Man, you have to tip your hat to Elon Musk and his teams. They manage to consistently up the scales - its almost like accelerating towards future!

I worked for a company called Lightsquared that tried to do this. Big problems were faced from lobbyists, maybe SpaceX has more money to protect themselves though:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ligado_Networks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ligado_Networks</a>

Does anyone know:<p>(A) the potential lifespan of these satellites are?<p>(B) Why has this not been done to date? I assume SpaceX expects that it&#x27;ll be relatively affordable since they can reuse rockets.<p>(C) Will this impact the launch capabilities of future rockets (4500 satellites are a lot)? My assumption is that the low earth orbit will likely aid in destroying those satellites as opposed to leaving them up there at end-of-life

Am I the only one that thinks Elon Musk is scattered and overextended? Literally a new grand idea every few months..

&gt; “Optical inter-satellite links permit flexible routing of traffic on-orbit. Further, the constellation ensures that frequencies can be reused effectively across different satellites to enhance the flexibility and capacity and robustness of the overall system.”<p>Is optical communication between satellites an existing technology that&#x27;s already known to work, or is this new? Also, is this sort of thing done (or expected to be done) by aiming laser exactly at the destination satellite, or is it more of a non-directional blink-a-really-bright-LED sort of thing?

Now might be a good time to familiarize everyone with Kessler Syndrome:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kessler_syndrome" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kessler_syndrome</a>

My dream of an off-grid cabin with internet access inches closer!

Some countries are not going to like this, network infrastructure are important national assets and are often done with high levels of regulation to ensure availability and pricing, so a lot of nations will not think it&#x27;s in their competitive advantage to have this provided by a foreign entity.

yesterday&#x27;s comments:<p>SpaceX FCC Application for over 4000 Internet Satellites <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12973223" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12973223</a>

Everyone has their worldwide internet solutions, Google balloons and Facebook gliders, but this is easily the most plausible. Musk tends to see his ideas through.

Now I want to buy an island and build a new kind of community.

Wonder if we&#x27;ll see CDNs in space too. Would solve one side of the transmission problem.

How much will the base stations weigh? Light enough to be carried on a drone?<p>High speed &#x2F; low latency internet will be important in self-driven cars. Especially with phased array ground stations which can respond faster than the motion of a car. So now a crossover between SpaceX and Tesla?<p>How much cellular cost the Tesla fleet, especially as the model 3 come out?

Perhaps the next step will be selling cloud services from in-orbit data centers that have no cooling bill.

Will this high number of low-altitude satellites cause a tracking and collision nightmare for the world&#x27;s space agencies? Sorry, I recently finished &quot;Seveneves&quot; and I have space debris anxiety right now.

Here is the FCC filing: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;licensing.fcc.gov&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;ws.exe&#x2F;prod&#x2F;ib&#x2F;forms&#x2F;reports&#x2F;swr031b.hts?q_set=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC&#x2F;File+Number&#x2F;%3D&#x2F;SATLOA2016111500118&amp;prepare=&amp;column=V_SITE_ANTENNA_FREQ.file_numberC&#x2F;File+Number&amp;utm_content=bufferda647&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;licensing.fcc.gov&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;ws.exe&#x2F;prod&#x2F;ib&#x2F;forms&#x2F;report...</a>

Seems a logical step for SpaceX. One of the biggest challenges facing Mars colonization would be internet connectivity over such tremendous distances.<p>A super cheap (relatively) satellite mesh network would be just the thing to handle Earth to Mars communications.<p>Getting out of left field here but could imagine the whole Solar System dotted with these. Add a few sensors to each satellite and you could start detecting and monitoring some pretty interesting metrics.

I love Musk&#x27;s plans as much as the next Hacker, but he&#x27;s proposing to significantly more than double the number of satellites in orbit. I hope he succeeds.

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&gt; “Once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low-latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally,” SpaceX told the FCC.<p>Maybe this will finally provide the competition US ISPs need, while going around their local monopolies. I hope 1Gbps is actually real, and you won&#x27;t get more like 50-100Mbps.

Can the beams be intercepted, maybe if the signal scatters a bit, or isn&#x27;t 100% targeted? Do they need to be encrypted between satellites?

I don&#x27;t know how they&#x27;re going to get 25&#x2F;35ms hops. If they&#x27;re using low orbits to reduce latency, the surface coverage is going to be lower so they&#x27;re going to have to mesh them in some way to span large areas. That means routers and intelligence which means uplink, interlink, downlink hops in both directions.<p>600ms here we come again.

If they can pull this off it would be amazing because the technical challenges to meet this goal are pretty considerable if you&#x27;ve ever tried satellite internet in the past it was the worst thing ever. If he can pull this off just the technical feat alone would be pretty amazing given the challenges involved.

OK that&#x27;s it. This is why I need to build a large company and become rich. So I can get all kinds of ideas that I have done, instead of listening to people telling me how hard it would be. They would just get done.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qbix.com&#x2F;blog" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qbix.com&#x2F;blog</a>

Google and Facebook are experimenting with drones, balloons, etc. to deliver Internet to their next billion customers, who live in impoverished areas with little network infrastructure. If it works, this seems like a much more attractive solution.

The mayor and city council where I live have a big hardon for municipal fiber. I have this feeling that if and when they ever get it built they will have spent a ton of money on something that is obsolete on day one.

With this many satellites being launched I hope he has a plan to clean them up when they&#x27;re ready to be decommissioned or worse if a couple hundred get destroyed. aka natural disaster or state sponsored

How will countries like China that aggressively censor the internet respond?

How do you get an uplink? I generally thought of satellites as providing pretty good downlink, but high latency because the uplink was through some alternative network - eg. phone&#x2F;dsl lines.

There was a plan to do this back in the 90s: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Teledesic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Teledesic</a>

We once heard about a company providing cheap fiber connections to major cities (and providing free WiFi to Africa via hot-air balloons). I think this goes in the same direction.

Allowing &quot;cell&quot; phones to need only satellite link instead of cell tower would be huge. Would also finally kill off the nasty cellular companies and their plans in the.

Teledesic. SkyBridge. Probably more. Of course the timing is better with SpaceX having its own rockets but it&#x27;s curious noone mentions how this have been attempted and failed.

This should not be privately owned. It should belong to the entire human race. Otherwise it will be more of the same fallacious drivel that landed us in our current predicament.

Will the inter-satellite links help? They may have to backhaul everything to a surveillance monitoring station, as Iridium does. That could bottleneck the whole system.

That&#x27;s a lot of satellites, I wonder if they&#x27;ll have to outsource to other companies like RocketLab who are going to do multiple launches per week from next year.

Thinking about this as a model for the Mars internet and I wonder if there should also be powerful optics&#x27;s on the satellite for live video streaming and weather. Put a reflex lens on a small sensor and you could get something like a 10,000mm equivalent in a fairly small package. With a lot of satellites you would want a very narrow field of view in order to have a high ground resolution. If you can have a utility satellite that does most of what you need (com &amp; pictures) that seems like a win for mars and earth. Live global video stream sounds pretty awesome.

I&#x27;m excited by the prospect of more competition for Broadband. This could do the world a lot of good. :)

I was disappointed to see Lightsquared go belly up. I&#x27;m glad to see another (more formidable) disrupter in this area!

Will this cause the Kessler syndrome?

How will this be affected by weather?

and when Musk puts into orbit gigantic solar panels beaming down the energy i wonder how the typical anti-solar-energy argument &quot;Sun isn&#x27;t always shining&quot; would sound then :)

How they are going to log data for NSA and similar agencies?

Sometimes, when I get very drunk, I&#x27;ll watch Warhammer distopian videos about how it all goes wrong. Is it wrong that I think of Musk as The Emperor, come to save us?<p>(Firmly tongue in cheek.)

Greate project and benefit the whole world.

And the infosphere will become reality

Do these positions also require ITAR?

Yes, yes, yes!<p>This is how progress is done.

what happen if this satellite is hacked?

And fair pricing?

maybe they blew up facebook rocket because of competition

Try reading to the third paragraph before asking your &quot;honest question&quot;:<p>&gt; SpaceX wants to launch 4,425 satellites into low-Earth orbits, with altitudes ranging from 715 miles to 823 miles. By contrast, the existing HughesNet satellite network has an altitude of 22,000 miles.<p>That&#x27;s about — basic arithmetic alert! — three percent the distance for the SpaceX satellites compared to existing geosynchronous ones.

Skynet

And hella pingtimes ;)

Didn&#x27;t SpaceX blow up the rocket carrying Facebook&#x27;s Internet.org satellites (which more or less were doing <i>exactly</i> this)?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;01&#x2F;a-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-just-exploded-at-cape-canaveral&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;01&#x2F;a-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-j...</a>

<i>update</i><p>23Gbps * 4425 satellites is<p>- 100k simultaneous 1Gbps users<p>- 1 million 100Mbps users<p>- 10 million 10Mbps users<p>Doesn&#x27;t seem like much of a subscriber base to recoup a fraction of the costs<p>(My) Estimated cost for satellites and ground stations: 50-100+ billion, maintenance cost: few billion&#x2F;year?<p>Might I propose instead genetically modifying insects to pass photosynthetic light signals in massive swarms controlled by ground stations (just for cool visuals) and spend the rest on ground microwave towers or anything else.