SpaceX Seattle 2015

What Hacker News said

Recommends matznerd · 2015-04 · on “Elon Musk wants to bring the Internet in space”

Elon covered all of this and more during the launch of the SpaceX Seattle offices. He pretty much goes over the entire game plan in this video -> [this video]

Recommends andrewtbham · 2016-11 · on “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

no one saw it coming? they anounced this in 2015. Here is a video where elon explains the system very well in 2015. [this video]

Cites matznerd · 2015-04 · on “Elon Musk wants to bring the Internet in space”

It's faster and more direct to go earth->satellite->earth for certain routes/types of data, than traversing through various routers and undersea cables. Roughly paraphrased quote from Elon Musk SpaceX Seattle Office Opening: "The speed of light in vacuum is 40-50% faster than in fiber. So you can do long distance communication through space(vacuum), a lot better than if you route it through fiber and use far fewer hops. Lets say you want to communicate from Seattle to South Africa, the path is extremely convoluted, follows outline of continent, goes through 200 routers and repeaters, if done with satellite network, it can be done in 4 hops" Video link to time of quote -> [this video]

Cites schiffern · 2016-11 · on “SpaceX FCC Application for over 4000 Internet Satellites”

Completely agree on WISPs. I think SpaceX will be pursuing mesh networking too. Could an OTA update (and repointing 90°) turn a satellite terminal into an auto/calibrating point-to-point MIMO link? >global data infrastructure is made up of things like the Hibernia Atlantic cable Surprisingly the stated primary goal of the SpaceX constellation is actually to compete with long-distance fiber backhauls. Their sell for satellite backhaul is that it's lower latency (no need to avoid continents, 50% faster speed of light, fewer hops) and works everywhere. Giving global gigabit internet to rural areas and ~10% of urban customers (with the rest on fiber) is only a bonus. :) Most of what we know abou

Cites schiffern · 2016-11 · on “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

>An astounding O(54% of global internet traffic) [2]! Thanks for working this out. This matches with Musk's stated goals for the project from January 2015 ("the majority" of internet traffic): [this video] >The focus is going to be on creating a global communications system. This is quite an ambitious effort. We're really talking about something which is... in the long term it will be like rebuilding the internet in space. The goal will be to have the majority of long distance internet traffic go over this network , and about 10% of local and business traffic. Probably 90% of people's local access will still come from fiber, but we'll do about 10% of business and consumer direct, and more than ha

Cites schiffern · 2016-11 · on “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

> That means routers and intelligence which means uplink, interlink, downlink hops in both directions. 600 ms here we come again. The story from Musk is 20-30 ms latency anywhere on Earth. [this video] Fiber has an order of magnitude greater number of hops/routers/repeaters, moves 50% slower, and has to travel more distance to route around continents. See [LINK] In the linked video Musk says 4 hops to go from Seattle to South Africa, so they're skipping satellites. It works out that at 1100 km altitude they have vacuum line-of-sight for any satellite within 6000 km ground track in any direction. >I don't know how they're going to ... >Managing that ... hurts my head. It is indeed a Hard Problem.

Cites schiffern · 2016-11 · on “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

>it's curious noone mentions how this have been attempted and failed Musk mentioned Teledesic the very first day it was announced (back in January 2015). [this video] >Things to consider about success? Well, I think it's important to assume that terrestrial networks will get much better over time. >You know, one of the mistakes that, say, Teledesic made was not assuming that terrestrial networks would get much better over time. So we need to make sure that the system we design is good even taking into account significant improvements in the terrestrial systems. >But I do there there are some important differences between what we're doing and, let's say, Teledesic. In the case of Teledesic they we

Cites schiffern · 2016-11 · on “SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed”

>Is this going to scale? ...not that much bandwidth for any given densely populated area. We're going to keep having our local ISP in cities (they're giving between 0.1 and 1 Gb/s on fiber right now) Except the goal isn't to replace fiber in densely populated areas. Musk said this during the initial announcement: [this video] > The goal will be to have the majority of long distance internet traffic go over this network, and about 10% of local and business traffic. Probably 90% of people's local access will still come from fiber, but we'll do about 10% of business and consumer direct, and more than half I think of the long distance traffic. [this video] > And then space is also really good for sparse c