I'm from a third world country(Sri Lanka) and we already have really cheap LTE access, the connection I'm using right now(on my phone) gives me something like 1GB/1.5USD at average 4MBPS. What sucks is the speed and reliability, speed always fluctuate and even though most of the island is now covered by 3G, LTE is not a given. It has been improving a lot though because we have relatively good competition between mobile ISPs(something like 10 providers all island) and more than a quarter of the population has smartphones and demanding bandwidth.
I was visiting a friend in Sri Lanka in 2004 and he was checking cricket scores on his phone in the middle of the jungle. I still can’t get a signal the whole way between KC and Omaha. We Americans sometimes ave a distorted view of the world.
It's funny you mention that route, it's about 185 miles which is about how wide Sri Lanka is. Living in the US also gives us a distorted view of how large the typical nation is.
For reference for Americans that's about the distance from Providence to New York City. Or San Diego to Oxnard for left coasters. Drives that people wouldn't think anything about, and where you would probably have cell service for the vast majority of the drive.
Can confirm. My Cambodian wife’s family lives in the jungle and have 4G and she has perfect skype video calls with them. It costs them $1 a month and they get 5GB for that.
These developing countries are going all-in on mobile and it’s a good thing. They really don’t need these sattelites, but for Americans apparently it’s good for leveling the ISP playing field.
As someone who works through mobile phone based internet services in Africa and South Asia I agree that in many parts of the world, what you describe is happening, which is great. But there is a huge difference between countries. Just as an example:
I'm from a third world country(Germany) and we don't have cheap LTE access. I pay more than 40€/month (about 50 USD) for 4GB of LTE and I got my contract for half of what it would normally cost. The reception is very poor and I barely ever see the LTE popping up on my phone, most times it's just 3G. And that's in the ex-capitol of Germany. If I visit my parents, which live barely a 45 minute drive outside of the city, I got no phone reception at all (not even emergency calls). My provider (Vodafone) claims to have the best coverage of Germany.
Wired internet is very spotty, too. There are still a lot of parts within the cities, where you barely get a downstream of 1 Mbit/s.
So yes, when I say that Germany is a "third world country", I mean it (at least regarding the internet coverage).
I'm a web developer (my wife is an admin) and when we searched for a new home, we've had to turn down a lot of offers, because the houses/flats didn't have a proper internet connection.
Now we're getting our internet though cable but because the cables are to old, we can't get TV over cable at the same time.
Sorry, needed to get that out. I'm a little frustrated here, because I have been in several poor countries (Africa, Thailand, Moldowa) and they've all had a way better internet coverage than Germany.
Fellow German here. I know this issues. But I think the Bayerns strategy worked. They subsidied all the fiber from Telekom, and now we have in the south of Bayern incredible internet speeds at acceptable price : 110Mbit/35Mbit for about 40 euros. I can double that for extra 10 euros.
LTE is everywhere and in my home town I get 20Mbs/5Mbs rates over Vodafone. There is only one place, literally in the middle of a dense forest ( part of a Wandertour ) where there is no signal at all. The highways are well covered, I normally skype and other VoIP apps work flawless.
So while we are talking about Germany, let's not forget this is a federal state and each state can individually influence the development. Not sure if USA is the same.
I feel your pain. Germany is a bit of an anomaly in the 'West'. Even mobile contracts are stupidly hard to get out of.
I lived in Germany for about 5 years. Half of that the last 300m of connection to my house were over the thinnest legally allowable copper wire. 3.2mbps max speed down on a very very good day (usually sub 2mbps), about a tenth or slightly more up.
My in-laws previous house was semi-detached and the neighbours house have fiber, but theirs didn't. Same actual building but KabelDeutschland wouldn't run an extension just 2 meters to the wall on my in-laws actual house.
And I mean 'won't' not "couldn't". They scoped the cost and agreed to pay for it to be done, even at the overinflated price, and KD actually said they didn't want to do it.
I was under the impression that "third world" was supposed to be defined as "a country that was not on the axis or allied side during all of World War 2." Your use of the term directly contradicts this definition.
my sister lives in germany and i go there sometimes, internet in germany is just so weird, thank god for no roaming in eu now, so i can at least use my sim there.
I don’t know if I would call that cheap. Right now I consume 300GB per month on aversge, and that’s just my home use. I get 150Mbps for $98 per month. St your rates, that 300GB would cost $450 per month, though I do realize I would consume less on a slower connection.
The term third world is often used incorrectly. It was created during the cold war to refer to countries that we're not in alliance with one of the dominant super powers (USA, USSR). [1]
People often use when they want to say "backwards" countries.
The correct term is developing world, which just means rapidly improving and doesn't cloudy the convo with connotations about the cold war.
Agreed. While not as profound as bringing access to the developing world, this will also be a major win for people looking to live alternative lifestyles, i.e. perpetual traveling, van life etc, where keeping a consistent internet connection is the one thing holding many back.
You can get decent 4G internet plans already in most parts of the world. While this will have better coverage of rural areas, mobile internet is very adequate for the van lifestyle.
That really depends on how much bandwidth you need. Several aspects of remote working like video conferencing large file transfers are too demanding for 4G in terms of bandwidth and transfer caps.
It won't be as good as you think. This one is going right next to the Model 3 in Elon's book of things he'll technically deliver but will progressively dial back the claims before and after delivery.
Even if he delivers half of the bandwidth he promised for twice the cost that he quoted, it's still a far better option in many places. I have two ISPs where I live. One only goes up to 12Mbps/1Mbps. The other is a gigabit connection, but it's $200/mo and has a substantial amount of downtime.
Current internet satellites with a geosynchronous orbit are about 35,000km above the surface. These Low Earth Orbit satellites will be less than 2,000km above ground, and as low as 300km above. This difference should have a big impact on the current latency number of satellite communication.
Edit: Please note that the data packets make a two way trip from the satellite. Many network communications assume a lot of two way communication from client and server, so this decrease in distance should have a big impact.
The best you can physically do is about 2 ms more lag than the fastest ground based system, and that's assuming you're only adding in the transit time from ground station -> satellite -> user.
So it possibly won't be a killer for video conferencing, but keep in mind that the USAF's current system for drone video has 2 seconds of one-way lag. There's three orders of magnitude between what we're currently doing and the physical limit.
SpaceX's system will undoubtedly be better than what is in use today, but even with two orders of magnitude improvement (a HUGE improvement) you're looking at adding 20 ms of lag on top of what you'd already have.
I think you have your distances wrong. Geosynchronous orbit is 36,000km not miles.
LEO is a range between 300km - 2000km. I suspect the satellites will be on the higher range to reduce atmospheric drag. The IIS has a 400km (250 miles) orbit and it's orbit decays at 2km/month without correction maneuvers.
That's the crazy part, he didn't have his distances wrong. Part of the constellation is planned for an orbit of 340 km which is ~211 miles so close enough. The satellites are only intended to have an operational lifespan of 5 to 7 years. That's not a typo, that also means that given the massive size of the constellation that SpaceX will need to average one launch a month for StarLink with 105 satellites on it. If one of the lower orbit satellites goes dead, without actively maintaining the orbit it'll decay fast enough that it'll passively deorbit itself without risk of it just becoming a derelict satellite for centuries.
I'm doing it (mobile internet, not van life). The conversations on RV forums deal with stuff like unlimited data in the middle of Wyoming for less money, or how to get a SIM card and plan from a connected car device that AT&T discontinued because RVers were using for other than it's intended purpose.
What the RVers are too cheap to do is pay for the product they want. Go to unlimitedville.com, pay $200 a month, and you have unlimited LTE in every city you travel to. If you want the best mobile internet you have to pay for it.
T-Mobile (or their wholly owned metroPCS MVNO which rides the same network) has plans which are "unlimited" up to about 50GB/month of usage, for a lot less than $200/mo... It's not a lot, but can be stretched pretty far if you're willing to refrain from watching a lot of youtube and netflix video. It used to have a 22GB soft-cap limit after which it rate limited to 128kbps x 128 kbps, they recently changed it to 50.
Seriously?
200$/month and you have unlimited data only in US?
It seems like a really crap offer to me.
I pay 17£/month and I have unlimited data in a lot of countries in the world, including US.
Sadly my awesome plan got discontinued and now it’s not possible to buy it anymore.
17£/mo is sustainable when your users are just scrolling through Facebook and streaming Spotify. When they're all using it as their primary data connection and watching a few hours of HD Netflix a night, you need to charge more.
Unlimited mobile data went away or got expensive in most places right around the time that smartphones gained the ability to act as wifi access points.
That doesn't make any sense. An AP is just an AP, it has no internet connection. How does the smartphone get internet connection? With UMTS/LTE or similar. So you still need a data plan (or a combination with it).
The point is that without a way to tether your phone to a 'real computer', you have to be actively trying to use more than a couple of GB of data per month, so "unlimited" really means "up to maybe 5GB". While tethering was possible beforehand, it became much easier when wifi tethering was added to Android. This let anyone push a button and use their 3G / 4G data connection for torrenting, streaming and other such heavy duty usage, and suddenly "unlimited" phone plans were seeing hundreds of GB per month.
"Incidentally", I suspect your plan was discontinued right about the time the number of competitors in the UK mobile market dropped from four to three. When 3 bought O2. And right about the peak of the 4g rollout. The same happened to my £13 plan. I'm not sure which of the above was the larger factor, or whether it was because usage patterns (tethering, Netflix) did in fact make these plans unsustainable. Interestingly, 3 also had their "one" plan (IIRC) which specifically allowed tethering, with unlimited data, for ~£20/mo.
Also, for completeness, it's probably worth mentioning the conditions of your unlimited data roaming were bandwidth limits, and a maximum trip duration of thirty days. Though I know people who considerably exceeded that duration in Europe and weren't noticeably restricted or penalised. Of course it's moot now (yay!- I write this message from Madrid airport..).
> Data abusers are those who purposefully push limits or conduct known illegal activity like torrenting etc. If you consistently burn through a half terabyte or more a month (that’s over 500 GBs!), that is not normal internet usage and you could be asked to split your usage between two accounts or the service could be terminated by certain carriers.
Why would you pay this much just to get what's basically a high FUP plan?
500 is effectively unlimited compared to the 22 GB that AT&T throttles you at on their native plans.
My Cox internet also had a 500 GB warning.
Plus, Netflix HD streaming is about 3GB per hour. You can stream a two hour movie every night and only use 180 GB per month. I've never gotten to 500 GB, so it's effectively unlimited.
If it's good enough for you, I'm glad. But imagine someone that replaces a TV on in the background with an internet stream. Now 2 hours is 6 or 10. Then multiply that by multiple people in a household.
It doesn't take abusive behavior to hit a limit like that on a home connection. If you took a 2007-era 250GB cap, and kept it price-constant, you'd be looking at something like 20TB caps these days.
I know exactly the meaning that you intend here, but at first I thought "how exactly is this going to be beneficial for polyamorous triads of hemp farmers who attend burning man every year?"
I've just driven through 21 countries in West Africa. [1]
Every single country has 3G, a few have 4G. Often the speeds were faster than what I get in Canada.
A pre-paid SIM costs $1, data is anything from $1-$10/GB in a pre-paid bundle. So I think the biggest difference the SpaceX Constellation can make is price.
A huge percentage of the population in virtually every dirt street town has a smartphone with facebook and whatsapp.
If you really want to get excited for the developing world - research the number of new submarine fiber cables that have connected coastal cities in many major African nations in the time frame from 2004 to 2018.
That's a lot of capacity. Now a big part of the problem is outdated regulatory regimes and government-controlled telecoms that are keeping prices artificially high, and keeping out competition in the 4G/LTE market and ISP market.
As some who sells B2B SaaS in Africa (among other places): There is no question that a lot is happening, but there are huge swats of countryside in many parts of Africa that are not covered yet. The question is, who gets there first, and at what price.
I don't see how corporations meddling with the government can produce any good for the developing world, apart from generating profit for themselves masked as charity. Digital natives will be offered a walled garden, terrorcorp version of "the internet" as we know it (e.g. Facebook meddling with Albanian government).
Decentralized alternatives, like Freifunk, are the best option in my opinion.
Bare in mind that Space X doesn't really care about trying to control the internet - their focus is making money from putting stuff in space so they can build the BFR.
So a better comparison as others have said is comcast and mobile broadband providers. The more competition the better as far as I'm concerned.
not just the developing world. there are large swaths of the US without decent broadband either. Also large areas with no internet whatsoever beyond satellite. (and I mean really shitty really expensive satellite)
ubiquitous internet will make remote weather stations, drones and a multitude of other things far more cost effective or possible. (especially here in Alaska)
ACS and GCI have recently spent a great deal of (partly subsidized) money to build high capacity point to point microwave to reach a number of fly-in type communities:
The goal for these is to build network bridges to alaskan terrestrial fiber, getting to Fairbanks and/or Anchorage, from where connections are possible into Alaska's subsea fiber cables to WA state and the Seattle area.
Implemented properly this can be significantly faster than satellite, bringing a 1 to 2 Gbps full duplex connection to each town with licensed microwave bands. From the perspective of ACS and GCI and similar operators, it can pay for itself pretty quickly because they can stop paying monthly-recurring geostationary satellite transponder kHz leases.
It will not affect it in any way. They have released their plans for Starlink and there will be a "blackout" zone over China, so China doesn't shoot down their satellites. In 2007, China shot down FY-1C as a test of a kinetic kill vehicle (leaving tons of high speed space debris). Unless they receive approval from China to broadcast, they won't over China.
China won't shoot down commercial satellites, they'll just either jam the signal, or block ownership of the ground terminals. Shooting down satellites is very expensive, and would cause an incredible hue and cry internationally. It's one thing to shoot down one of your own defunct satellites, quite another thing to shoot down someone else's.
China might or might not shoot down the satellites, but the FCC would absolutely not have authorized the satellite network had SpaceX been so blatantly antagonistic towards China as to provide service there.
I doubt it, since a single Falcon Heavy launch would carry dozens of Starlink satellites but the existing anti-satellite technology can only hit one at a time. Keep in mind they have said the final constellation will be 12,000 satellites!
I'm not sure that it is cheaper, but I am sure there is a cheaper way to shoot something down than to keep it up. Idon't know if the tech and economics are correct, but the physics says it should be.
Moving something to the same altitude as Leo requires much less energy than moving something to Leo. Rockets don't fire straight up because the need their momentum to be at an angle. In addition, the payload of a communication satellite is more expensive than the payload required to throw it either disable the satellite or put it into a declining orbit.
Maybe Elon's rockets are just so cheap he can make it up in margin, but we are really talking about we aren't talking about marginal amount of difficulty difference, but an entire order of magnitude.
Yeah I completely agree it could be done cheaper because physics, my comment was about the current economics.
I'm not sure how efficient China's military industrial complex is, but I wouldn't trust the US's military to be able to build a weapon system that could destroy SpaceX satellite's more efficiently than SpaceX can launch them, haha.
Are you sure? If China knocks out one of ours, we’ll knock out at least one of theirs. We’ll also likely implement a suite of sanctions. Shooting down a satellite is an act of war.
>If China knocks out one of ours, we’ll knock out at least one of theirs.
No, we won’t. We’ll impose several decades of meaningless tariffs and embargoes with tons of loopholes so it looks like we’re doing something until everyone forgets what everyone was mad about in the first place.
The linked source says nothing about a "blackout zone" over China. More likely SpaceX won't sell ground receivers in mainland China and/or the PRC will simply ban Starlink receivers.
> I’m sure lots of North Americans wouldn’t want Chinese satellites overhead for concern of privacy.
Umm, there are of course Chinese satellites overhead and they have excellent imagery of all of our military bases. As we do for theirs (and every other country!). Orbits aren't very friendly to avoiding airspace.
National sovereignty over airspace does not extend into orbit. Otherwise nearly every earth science satellite in polar orbit would be in violation of international law.
no nation-state wants to start the game of shooting down another's satellite, either military or commercial, because everything up there is so vulnerable. it would open china to retaliatory strikes taking down their own polar orbit LEO, inclined LEO (35-45 degree) molnia, MEO and GEO satellites. satellites are fragile things and can be killed with one 200g chunk of tungsten at a closing velocity of 18,000 km/h.
Why is a Chinese sattelite less private than a sheriffs helicopter, private imaging plane running grids or an American satellite? Or my neighbors drone?
If China shoots down a SpaceX satellite, that is an act of war against the United States. China wouldn’t risk it. This is a great opportunity to break the great firewall and finally give the Chinese people access to unfiltered information.
Your comment implies they could successfully destroy said satellite. It might be a better distraction to tell NK there's one overhead, "leak" it's orbit, position, etc. and watch the fireworks month over month.
I know NK has made some major advancements in their missile capabilities but shooting down a satellite is pretty advanced stuff... any indications that they're capable of doing what you claim they would do?
> If China shoots down a SpaceX satellite, that is an act of war against the United States.
These are not government satellites and china owns the airwaves over their nation. I highly doubt the US government would retaliate whatsoever against China if they shot down a satellite that illegally interacted with their airspace.
> China wouldn’t risk it. This is a great opportunity to break the great firewall and finally give the Chinese people access to unfiltered information.
Take this with a grain of salt since this is mostly based on what I have heard hearsay, but they can jam the signals and/or monitor who transmits back and go after the citizens using said signal (and china is not a country where you want to poke the government). I doubt this will have any effect on the great firewall.
Not much effect. The Chinese government will prohibit import and possession of the ground terminals. Smugglers will bring in a few but not enough to really bypass the Great Firewall for many people.
Also, even if they were manufactured in the US, China is literally the best country to reverse-engineer electronics and produce knockoffs ;).
That said, AFAIK those satellites aren't meant to be dumb routers/repeaters - so China might just politically/economically pressure US to tell SpaceX to pretty-please don't service connections to/from China.
If you can get a 1Gbps up-link and VPN within China that's going to be harder to track down and could service a lot of people.
However, I suspect SpaceX will however allow China to monitor/limit connections. Further, China has a lot more power to crack down on purely internal operations would deter many.
a) the rooftop CPE needs to be reasonably large and have high gain to be used effectively, and needs clear unobstructed line of sight to as much of the sky and horizon as possible.
and
b) It needs to transmit, it will transmit in very known frequency ranges, and the chinese authorities have plenty of budget to buy portable spectrum analyzers, horn antennas and to reach people how to use them. It only takes a couple of hours maximum to reach somebody how to use a portable spectrum analyzer to physically locate and identify transmitters in almost any band.
A) all radome materials have some degree of loss. Ideally you want no loss at all. The path loss in higher than 10GHz frequencies to LEO is already extreme.
B) not just up but to the sides and toward the horizon as well. This will be a non moving phased array antenna that can talk to two LEO satellites moving across the sky at the same time. I predict that any reasonable amount of blockage to the sides will not be a good idea for their network architecture.
C) all Tx have some sort of sidelobes and nothing has a perfect f/b ratio. Will still be detectable by spectrum analyzers from the side.
A) 1% signal attenuation is not going to kill this and that's plenty to work with.
B) Depends on how many satellites are in the constellation. Ideally you want a lot of them as there is vastly more atmosphere the lower your angle to the horizon.
C) detectable at say 50 feet sure, but a signal you can detect from 10+ miles in a van doing 60mph without a lot of false positives is another story.
the threat model for hiding from spectrum analyzers is not 10+ miles in a van doing 60 mph. With the resources of a nation-state at the disposal of the spectrum analyzer operators (Iran, China, Ethiopia) it will look more like a person walking around a neighborhood with a portable spectrum analyzer and horn antenna. Multiply by however many people are needed to canvass a metro area in a reasonable amount of time.
With the resources of China, spending $15,000 per spectrum analyzer kit x 8 kits, plus training, is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money and effort they are currently spending on IP cameras that feed into facial recognition systems, etc.
I was more thinking a FSO link ~2km into the middle of nowhere vs having one of those sitting in someone's house. But directional wifi is probably safer as it's also not going to look strange to a spectrum analyzer.
However, if you want to catch individual usage in urban areas, with guys on for that's going to easily be into the 10's of of billions as users don't need to keep them on 24/7. AKA within the capability of nation states, but not without significant effort.
And those people who would be interested in smuggled ground terminals will already be using VPNs. Maybe this will be more convienient and possibly somewhat safer, but not it won't be a game-changer for even a minority (at least not in the firewall problem, general internet connectivity in rural China is another issue)
Probably not really a factor. Countries were the government wants to control the Internet or communications in general will outlaw the possession of sat-com equipment if they can't get adequate control over it through some other means.
I can, basically anything that transmits needs an indian license from their version of the FCC. No license, it might get taken away by men with guns. You can't even bring a handheld Iridium satellite phone into India without a license. It is not rigorously enforced, because the Indian version of the FCC is certainly not fitted out with Sprinter vans equipped with $60,000 of spectrum analyzers, but it is occasionally enforced. The more traffic you move or the more significant your thing becomes in your local area's telecom infrastructure, the more likely it is to be noticed.
Doubt it. I was downloading Linux distros among various other things in a developing country in the 90s. This might be useful for the most isolated areas.
The developing world needs fiber instead of satellite. This isn't going to change much over their current LTE speeds. This type of satellite internet is far too expensive far far too limited bandwidth to be useful for them. The energy cost of RF broadband is so much higher than fiber.
Really, the audience for this are ships and other remote regions, not anyplace that has a road going to it.
Nah, You’re thinking of different constellations like OneWeb. This constellation is being way overbuilt by SpaceX. They want gigabit speeds and way cheaper data than LTE. They want to compete with fiber (at least in non-super-dense areas). From Spacex’s perspective, they’re happy to build it so large that it only breaks even (even though I think it’ll do better than that) because it gives them something to launch on their huge, fully reusable rocket that they’re building.
Nah, they can want infinite speeds, but they're only going to get a few megabits of speed.
It will be much slower than LTE, since the satellites are going to be about 100 miles away. LTE towers are only a few miles away. How do you expect it to have higher bandwidth than LTE with communications a hundred miles away? It doesn't matter that they're putting in 4000 satellites, since those satellites are still 100 miles away from the terminal.
Again, I want everyone to be clear: This is going to be MUCH slower and more expensive than LTE.
Like Iridium, this project is only useful for remote areas that can't be reached by roads. Very few people will benefit from this project. It won't change society.
This is another one of Elon Musk's garbage projects that doesn't really advance the state-of-the-art.
Latency and bandwidth are two separate things, and the distance to an LTE tower has approximately nothing to do with latency to the server you’re connecting to, which btw is likely much further away than 100 miles. Now factor in that light moves 50% faster in air or vacuum than it does in fibre optic cables. The satellites are also going to be at a height of around 1000km (600 miles). But I t takes light only about 3.3ms to travel that distance. 30ms latency end-to-end should be realistically achievable this way. That’s more than a good residential connection but good enough for just about any application other than latency-sensitive multiplayer games.
There’s valid skepticism of SpaceX’s plan, but none of your points are among it.
Because otherwise your comment makes no sense. You can already get satellite data rates (100Mbps on a home plan) equal to or greater than LTE, from ~100 times further (36,000 km altitude Geosynchronous orbit) and the distance itself does not fundamentally limit the speed, but the latency there is terrible and is fundamentally limited. LEO satellite constellations address that.
SpaceX's particularly large constellation (allowing streaming from multiple satellites at a time and with large phased array antennae on both ends) will allow much higher bandwidth than existing satellite internet systems, but the biggest deal about these LEO satellite constellations over GSO satellites is the far lower latency.
How? Because both the satellites and the receivers will use large phased array (beam forming) antennas with hundreds to thousands of elements unlike LTE. No one will have deployed phased arrays to users at the scale of this constellation, therefore SpaceX has invested a lot in phased-array/beamforming technology.
“Another one of Elon Musk’s garbage projects that doesn’t really advance the state-of-the-art.”
OK but now you've limited your applications to non-mobile devices, unlike LTE.
And if they're targeting this for cellular base-stations, they're now on the hook to provide an even larger aggregate bandwidth to share among hundreds or thousands of local users per tower.
Something one of my history teachers used to go on about. I’m not sure I can do him justice now that I’m thinking about it. Big military upsets due to superior intel. Sometimes by new means. I’m wondering now if he was paraphrasing Napoleon (the secret of war lies in the communications).
Roman roads, pigeons, semaphore, radio, all used to project military power in profound and overwhelming ways. Radar, sonar (if you’re willing to stretch the definition a little). CDMA (invented by Hedy Lamarr during WWII for torpedos, but not used until the Cuban missile crisis). Cryptanalysis to defeat the Germans. ARPAnet was built to be literally bomb proof.
Your earlier post seems to intimate that technological leaps like this precede the start of wars, but your follow up comment intimates that technological leaps like this help win wars, and now I'm not sure I'm exactly following which one is supposed to be your central point to this.
Could you clarify this and help me understand your viewpoint a bit better?
Honestly my first reply was a moment of progress fatigue. Tech fatigue really. Tech is amoral. Tech means change, but change doesn’t mean progress.
I’ve been watching tech for a long time and we tell ourselves a lot of half truths. My good friend showed me a private demo of the first web browser that supported images. I was around people who wanted to change the world and it was all thrilling. But I can still recall conversations about how we were all going to slay Big Brother, but instead we made him stronger than ever. It’s really painful to look at your role in that. I’d bet money that half of them still don’t. And that was why I started my post with “careful”. War is just a conterexample. Especially if you have sympathy for the losing side.
Tech will only be good if you exert yourself toward making it so. Here we are with three threads a day talking about how Facebook used their technology for negligence or evil depending on your point of view.
It's still going to be more expensive than wired Internet. In the developing world where PTTs impose crazy prices they will impose those costs on top of whatever SpaceX charges.
No chance it's going to be more expensive than comparable wired - fiber or cable - Internet.
You're leaving out the vast cost to build & maintain the wired infrastructure. Tax payers & consumers in those developing nations have to pay for that. That cost has to be included with the monthly fees to do a serious comparison.
The cost of building wired infrastructure has an inverse relationship with population density. This might be more expensive than wired internet in dense cities. The metal of city buildings and the high density of transmitters might make the performance lower in cities than suburban/rural areas.
The Manhattan and Tokyo speed tests are more important to me personally than The Grand Canyon and Indian Ocean speed test.
A key strength of the proposed network is its ubiquity, which makes it most competitive in un(der)served markets than in high-density cities. They can't just hover more satellites over Tokyo, so the service would inevitably become fully loaded there.
The idea is that most of the people (think around 99.5 percentage) of the people ll be hooked to the insta-gratification stuff provided by the internet, ending up perpetually distracted, manipulated, with new insecurities instilled and existing ones blown up, ad fed human beings...
So as I said again, it ll result in the exploitation of 99.5 percentage and may be empower the rest to attempt something that was impossible before...
As many of us learned from the unauthorized Swarm Technologies satellites the other week, the FCC approve satellite launches. So this is effectively SpaceX getting the final sign-off they need to launch this service - I think that can count as an advance. I think there are a lot of arguments to be made about the world-changing nature of this project but I'm not sure FCC approval is the best one to downplay.
I dont think parent meant that the FCC approval itself is what should be celebrated, but rather that the technology needed FCC approval to move forward, and every step closer is something to celebrate
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government created by statute (47 U.S.C. § 151 and 47 U.S.C. § 154) to regulate interstate communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the media, public safety and homeland security, and modernizing itself. [0]
Lots of that communication moves through electromagnetic radiation which practically anyone anywhere can use/interfere with. This is a textbook case of a common good which if unmanaged would be effectively destroyed due to the tragedy of the commons [1].
People aren't perfect, and some are terrible, so it makes sense to have government. However, it is reasonable to be critical of government removing your rights to work. Actually, it is a civil duty. I am not sure where the line should be drawn, but it has certainly gone too far. Should you need gov approval to download an IDE, or sell an app? What about to braid hair?[1]
I would bet that as soon as government begins infringing on the rights to work which affect HN usere, suddenly everyone here would be a civil libertarian.
You don't own the radio spectrum. Neither do I. No one individual does. We can license it, but since there's such a great opportunity for harm, it's controlled by the government.
You're against the government deciding on "removing your right to work", but the alternative is your neighbor or your competitor making that decision for you and overloading "your" spectrum. And you have no recourse to complain, all you can do is push more power, which impacts more people. And your competitor pushes more power, so you push more power and now no one gets to use it.
Libertarian ideas always seem to end in a corporate power struggle while everyone else gets locked out. That doesn't sound like a good outcome to me.
Yea, if you see the other comment I replied to, I tried to make it more clear that this case is obviously to the benefit of everyone. What you describe is a simple tragedy of the commons market failure, which need be regulated, and is not unique to radiowaves.
I think the point I was trying to make is missed. Should someone, the OP, criticizing the FCC's role for doing this be downvoted/ridiculed? No, I think it's an important job, because we should always question when rights are taken away from the people and handed over to government.
Maybe it's all too far gone and this is a better discussion to have for a Mars colony, but I still have faith.
What does any of that have to do with launching satellites and distributing radio bandwidth, both of which need regulation in order to provide safety for the masses?
I'm sorry, but it's completely self evident. The point was that the natural right to perform/produce a service/product should be the null hypothesis (as opposed to government removing that right and granting it at their discretion) in any such case; and while on the extremes the answers may seem obvious (launching communication satellites vs braiding hair), it's often not always so. Finally, I concluded that people should ideally care about this before it adversely affects them. In other words, the OP's post was not without reason.
This will make the 'Internet' truly global and ubiquitous.
So excited for the developing world.