[opendtv] Re: SpaceX wants to beam Internet down to Earth. Here's how it will start.
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2018 02:59:43 +0000
Monty Solomon posted:
SpaceX wants to beam Internet down to Earth. Here's how it will start.
The company is launching its first test satellites on Sunday.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/02/16/spacex-wants-to-beam-internet-down-to-earth-heres-how-itll-start/
We've seen this before, recently, and my knee-jerk reaction is and was, look up
Teledesic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/04/business/can-craig-mccaw-keep-his-vision-of-teledesic-from-crashing.html
We're up against the same issues, only of course, 18-20 years later, way more
bandwidth is required.
Low earth orbit satellites avoid the latency problem of geo-stationary
satellite broadband, but of course, now the satellites have to fly by at large
speed, relative to the earth's rotation. But that problem can be solved.
The economic problem, I think, is not so easy to solve. To keep these schemes
affordable, it becomes virtually impossible to compete against cabled
broadband, offering the same level of service at comparable price, in high
density locations. So the answer that comes back is always, yes, but this would
be for rural or extreme rural areas. And the answer to that is, how to make it
affordable? Rural and extreme rural are always the problem, because there
aren't enough people, rich people, to generate the revenues. And we have to
expect that just as bandwidth demands grew enormously, from Teledesic's 2000
timeframe to today, the constellation of satellites sent up today would be
unlikely to meet the demands a few year down the road.
Back when, McCaw presented his plan based on how many equivalents of telephone
lines (each 64 kb/s) the constellation would offer. To some, it sounded
impressive, in those terms. Today, "thousands" of telephone line equivalents
don't impress anyone. Just one household needs at least 390 of those telephone
lines, for 25 Mb/s broadband, and even that is becoming eclipsed in a hurry.
So, the scheme is primarily to serve sparsely populated areas, where the
potential revenues are not, and then you have to compare it with terrestrial
wireless alternatives. Not a slam dunk.
Then again, for specialty and high cost service, ships at sea, military
applications, there's always the Iridium example. It was meant to be
satellite-based cell phone service. Same economic problems as Teledesic, the
inability to offer affordable service to the average mortal, but it was bought
out and is used for specialty applications.
Bert
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