Here's one way I could see this killing Comcast, even in major cities:
As a homeowner, you by a small box which lives under the eave of your roof. The box has high-bandwidth, low-latency satellite uplink to SpaceX which gives you your internet.
The same box also has a terrestrial wireless repeater which serves the local neighborhood. Internet is available through your "tower" to neighbors and passers-by. You and SpaceX split the revenue from the traffic.
Basically, it's like a solar roof, but for internet. Photons/bits rain down from space onto your roof, and you sell the energy/bandwidth back to the local area for a price that amortizes your investment.
In areas very poorly served by internet, or with very poor broadband choices, there could be an especially strong financial incentive to be the guy on your block with a SpaceX repeater.
It would certainly scale a lot better than every house having an uplink-- customer connections are instead concentrated into micro-regional nodes. If there's a node in your area, you buy internet from them. If there's no node around, you invest in becoming one.
This could drastically decentralize and cheapen internet across the globe, if done right. It could be extremely disruptive to telecoms, and profitable for SpaceX.
this model already exists (google "WISP micro pop"). One of the primary problems with doing this at a large scale is that the bandwidth via satellite will not be that great, compared to what's possible with current terrestrial technology. the second is that the micro POP needs some kind of serious battery backup and a way to meet five nines or better reliability. you can't start hanging downstream customers off of the rooftop radio system on some random person's house unless you can be absolutely certain that the main uplink won't be unplugged by somebody's kid messing around with a power-over-ethernet injector underneath a desk.
one of the challenges with a wisp micro POP approach for current last mile FCC part 15 unlicensed band operators is that you need to (a) keep the equipment powered independently of whatever the POP-host customer might be messing around with inside of their house, and (b) provide a good sized UPS for it, and (c) ensure that the POP stays in place and contractually "survives" the original resident moving out, either new tenants or new homeowner. The (c) part requires a fairly long and ironclad commercial lease agreement that becomes attached to the property title, which is not something either ISPs or homeowners take lightly.
Maybe not so much for homeowners given the regulatory issues you describe, but combining this with solar panels and a backup battery could be a cool way to provide cell service to sparsely populated areas using satellite backhaul. I wonder how expensive that would be, it would be fantastic if it changed cost calculations sufficiently to make it financially viable.
Oh, and it’s a SpaceX/Tesla synergy, so Musk fans will be delighted ;)
Depends if it is data only or if you will be offering Voice Services. If you are going to offer Voice Service e911 regulations come into play on Residential Services. Most state require additional reliability as part of the service.
Thet is why my Fios Service has a Battery Backup for the voice circuits (even though I do not have them active)
An ISP serving from 5 to 30 downstream customers needs the micro pop to be up and online at least five nines, if not, something has gone terribly wrong.
I think you're perhaps over-estimating how much bandwidth the system will have. Satellites are limited by power, earth ground-station uplink/downlink, the amount of spectrum they have for customer access in each spot-beam, etc.
Definitely for rural and less densely populated areas you could potentially get hundreds of Mbps per subscriber, but even for the crazy high number of satellites they're talking about in their constellation, at this point you're probably only going to get tens of megabits per subscriber in a densely populated city with any decent take-up rate...
I've long opined network routers should have an "ad-hoc" mode (preferably on by default) whereby users can create a decentralized network, leveraging whatever long-range/high-bandwidth connection that can be accessed. With enough market penetration, the need for a direct service provider drops (from per-endpoint to per-region or even per-backbone; poor description of intent noted).
Xfiniti wifi has this pretty much. If you have an xfiniti account, you can connect to anyone's xfiniti wifi. That saved me from installing internet in a small commercial shop because the neighbor had xfiniti and we had an account.
It would be nice to see other providers do this, but a lot of tech users have reservations about other people using their routers.
Only if wireless would actually work, instead of fading in half after one wall and 10m distance. Also, imagine how crowded the limited 2.4GHz spectrum will become with all additional networks and connections.
Thanks. It looks like their orbit is around 800 miles compared to the usual 22,000. Expected latency seems to be around 25ms. Would satellites be used for first hop only? I image latency would quickly increase if used for multiple hops.
I imagine SpaceX could eventually perform the majority of routing in orbit, with packets returning to earth for the "last mile".
If they're successful, you could potentially see a high bandwidth SpaceX link on the roof of every major data center on the planet. They could be self-reliant for connections to every major online service.
If they're very successful, you could potentially see data providers like Netflix and CloudFlare joining SpaceX in orbit, most likely embedded into a future SpaceX satellite...
Space is just about the worst place to put a datacenter.
Price to orbit is thousands of dollars per kilo. Maintainability is zilch. And you have lots of cosmic rays flinging charged particles into your sensitive memory banks, flipping random bits. Also, heat management is very difficult.
I couldn't think of a worse place to put a datacenter than space. The bottom of the ocean would make more sense.
And existing streaming services already have a latency of several seconds. Twitch for example can have a delay from 5 to 20 seconds or more. Unless you're using WebRTC or similar technologies you won't see latencies below a second.
Once the constellation is built, you can do worldwide routing in orbit, which is actually more efficient latency-wise (at least for international hops) as you're not dealing with political and physical boundaries and light is passing through vacuum not fiber.
While this is possible, it is very challenging to actually achieve. Your latency numbers go to hell in a hurry if you're bouncing around satellites in orbit (eating a queuing delay on every hop). Iridium did this, but at the end of the day their mobile to mobile latency numbers are similar to Geo satellites.
SpaceX's plan is almost absurdly ambitious and there is a lot of skepticism in the comm satellite community that they will achieve their stated goals, especially at an affordable price point.
They don’t necessarily have to be affordable. You can be premium. They just have to be able to provide high speed internet and not be Comcast.
They might even make it realistic for more people to live out in rural areas where there either is no internet or what’s available is inhibitingly slow. That would be an interesting niche. People who choose to live out further than where telecomm companies will support have money to spend too. There’s pent up demand.
Satellite internet: a radio based internet connection (like cellular or wifi) but now instead of having the antenna/base station sitting on something it's hurtling around the earth at an unimaginable speed and a rather large distance from everything connected to it.
This might disrupt cellular and satellite ISPs and it will affect wired ISPs in the same sense that cellular affects them now which is all pretty exciting, but I don't think it will do anything beyond that.
TL;DR: insanely great for sensor networks, exciting for mobile internet (especially at sea), not quite irrelevant for home internet unless you live in the middle of nowhere like my parents.
Even for your parents you need to consider the cost. There are a number of satellite internet companies already providing service, but none of it is affordable to your typical rural customer. Often billing is still measured in megabytes, and denominated in full dollar amounts. Think $5/MB, if you buy a lot of data up front to keep the costs down.
Even a highly disruptive network that drops the cost by two orders of magnitude will still be expensive.
As a homeowner, you by a small box which lives under the eave of your roof. The box has high-bandwidth, low-latency satellite uplink to SpaceX which gives you your internet.
The same box also has a terrestrial wireless repeater which serves the local neighborhood. Internet is available through your "tower" to neighbors and passers-by. You and SpaceX split the revenue from the traffic.
Basically, it's like a solar roof, but for internet. Photons/bits rain down from space onto your roof, and you sell the energy/bandwidth back to the local area for a price that amortizes your investment.
In areas very poorly served by internet, or with very poor broadband choices, there could be an especially strong financial incentive to be the guy on your block with a SpaceX repeater.
It would certainly scale a lot better than every house having an uplink-- customer connections are instead concentrated into micro-regional nodes. If there's a node in your area, you buy internet from them. If there's no node around, you invest in becoming one.
This could drastically decentralize and cheapen internet across the globe, if done right. It could be extremely disruptive to telecoms, and profitable for SpaceX.