Cybersecurity specialist Luke McOmie lives completely offline next to a mountain in Colorado, where there is no cell phone service or fixed broadband internet. However, he recently gave a talk at a convention in Japan on the lethality of drones. It was live satellite, that is, its own satellite Internet connection.
With a constellation of hundreds of satellites and speeds comparable to American broadband, the Starlink service allows Mr. McOmie to do his job despite being in the middle of nowhere. He and his wife, Melanie McOmie, live the kind of lifestyle that can be envied by pandemic-tired urbanites and clinging to the table: raising chickens, watching over mountain lions, and taking in an expanse of uneducated forests.
The McOmies are part of a beta testing program for a new type of Internet service from Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX. Their experience has been phenomenal so far, they say. They periodically get download speeds of 120 megabits per second, and because the antenna emits a good amount of heat, they have been able to stay connected for most of the winter time. Yes they had to clear it after a recent snow wind, despite this.
It is unclear what kind of speeds Starlink will offer to millions of people, compared to the more than 10,000 that are now being made in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Depending on how many people sign up for SpaceX, future users could have Internet speeds that are only a fraction. of what is available during this demonstration period. And even if Starlink and its soon-to-be-launched competitors run as advertised, there are many other potential challenges to their viability, let alone profitability. They include headaches from the shared wireless spectrum and the threat of space debris.
But at least with three other serious, deep-pocketed contenders in the internet race from space, including Amazon,
OneWeb and long-standing operator Telesat: Getting fast and reliable internet service from anywhere on earth with a clear view of the sky soon may not seem more miraculous than a cell signal. It may not be much more expensive either: Starlink’s current price is $ 499 in advance and $ 99 a month for service.
How the Internet works from space: Earth stations connected to the Internet communicate with satellites via radio signals. In the near future, these satellites will communicate with each other using lasers. The signal is then sent to the antenna of a house.
Photo:
Illustration by Mario Zucca
The Internet from space has obvious implications for potentially closing the rural / urban digital divide, not only for Americans, but also for the rest of the world. It could also encourage new ways of working and living, disconnected from cable and fiber optic internet connections. And offering a huge selection of Internet service providers to large swathes of houses, regardless of their geography, could mean a shift in the users, revenue, and value of traditional telecommunications companies.
Nick Buraglio lives on the outskirts of Champaign, Island. It has many wired and wireless broadband options. Still, as a professional networking engineer, you are testing Starlink out of curiosity.
Unlike established ISPs that manage your installation, Starlink requires you to do it yourself. But that was “incredibly easy,” Buraglio says. He connected the pizza-sized Starlink antenna to the provided router and power supply, and then followed the Starlink smartphone app. Because he needed a free view of the sky, free of protruding trees, he decided to mount it permanently on the roof. This, along with running the data cable and antenna power supply to your home, was the hardest part. Still, he says, it was no more complicated than installing a TV antenna on the roof.
Anyone who wants to replicate this experience will need to go online, though: Starlink’s waiting list lasts up to a year.
The experiences of Starlink beta users are enabled by the approximately 1,000 satellites launched by its parent company. While this makes SpaceX the owner of a third of all active satellites orbiting the Earth, it’s just the beginning: Starlink has received FCC approval to launch nearly 12,000 satellites. .
So many satellites are needed because each one passes over it very quickly and is relatively close to the Earth’s surface, up to about 1,200 kilometers, in what is known as the “low Earth orbit.” The advantage of this orbit is that signals can travel quickly from Earth to a satellite and back, so Starlink is able to offer a service with low “latency”, the time it takes a signal when making a round trip. The McOmies say they are able to use their Starlink service to attack opponents simultaneously with the demanding, fast, first-person online first-person shooter, “Apex Legends.”
Traditional telecommunications and Earth observation satellites are usually located much farther from Earth, in what is known as geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 kilometers above the equator. This allows them to reach many more places on the planet at once, but the round-trip signal time is so long that apps like internet telephony, video chat, and most types of games are virtually impossible.
One of the candidates for the online race from space is OneWeb, based in the UK, founded in 2012 and bankrupt in 2020. It was recently relaunched by a consortium that included the British government and Bharti Global. The company has already launched 110 satellites out of the planned 648.
Photo:
Roscosmos and Space Center Vostochny |, TsENK
UK-based OneWeb, founded in 2012 and bankrupt in 2020, has recently been relaunched by a consortium that includes the UK government and Bharti Global. The company has already launched 110 satellites out of a planned 648. The idea is for the 588 to be active at any time, says Chris McLaughlin, head of affairs for the OneWeb government. He anticipates that by the end of this year, the company’s network will offer Internet coverage in northern latitudes, with full global coverage next year.
Another competitor is the Canadian satellite company Telesat. Unlike the others, he has more than 50 years of experience operating satellites, says CEO Dan Goldberg. Telesat does not want to give everyone an antenna, as Starlink and OneWeb do. Instead, it would provide connections to ground stations owned by telecommunications companies, which would then connect to end users in conventional ways, such as mobile or long-range Wi-Fi networks. Users should not have to worry about how they got the internet connection they enjoyed and could use their phones and other mobile devices instead of specialized equipment.
Telesat will begin launching its new constellation of 298 low-Earth orbiting broadband satellites in 2023 and plans to have full world coverage in 2024, Goldberg adds. One of the reasons its constellation is smaller than that of its competitors is that each satellite is larger and orbits at a higher (but still low) altitude, he says. If the company’s plans bear fruit, Telesat’s satellites will also have high-speed laser-based interconnections with each other, so that they can transmit Internet traffic to each other, in space, before ‘send him to earth closer to his intended destination. (Starlink is also testing laser-based communication between its satellites).
A view of the broadband satellite constellation planned by Telesat.
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Telesat
Amazon’s Kuiper Project, on which the company has maintained a relatively narrow level, has announced that it is committing $ 10 billion to launching a network that, in all respects, closely resembles that of Starlink. Although the company has not announced its design or launch schedule, it will have to launch half of the planned network, or approximately 1,600 satellites, by July 2026 to comply with its FCC license.
In the future, there will be even more potential participants in the internet space race: China has announced its intention to launch its own network of 10,000 low-Earth orbit satellites, and the EU is also considering building a . Barely a month passes in which another startup does not announce an attempt by some portion of the market, including more than a dozen startups with the aim of using small satellites to connect the “Internet of Things” .
It’s not clear if all of these companies will launch their networks successfully or survive once they do, says Chris Quilty, a partner at Quilty Analytics, which tracks the space industry from a financial perspective. His own analysis of Starlink’s viability, for example, finds that his money-making prospects depend heavily on reducing the cost of the sophisticated and expensive terrestrial antennas he sends to customers. The initial $ 499 fee to join Starlink does not cover the $ 2,000 to $ 2,500 that Mr. Quilty and other analysts estimate that is the actual cost of each antenna.
That said, the FCC announced in December its intention to give Starlink $ 885 million to connect homes in the United States, if the company meets certain requirements, as part of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.
Countless other headaches await Starlink and its competitors. Among them are the rights to wireless spectrum satellites that are used to transmit data to Earth. OneWeb, SpaceX, and another satellite communications company argue that they should be granted superior rights to a certain wireless band in the United States. says Mr. Quilty.
Next is the dreaded Kessler syndrome, depicted in the movie “Gravity,” where orbiting space debris leads to a leaked space accumulation. Currently, there are recommendations, but there are few binding rules on how to use the Earth’s low Earth orbit.
Until the space pocalipse arrives, Brian Jemes, network manager at the University of Idaho, plans to continue enjoying his Starlink system. At home near Moscow, Idaho, satellite service has been 20 times faster than with your local ISP, which connected via long-range Wi-Fi.
Mr. Jemes, who spent 18 years at Hewlett-Packard and has been networking for 32 years, is happy to be part of the Starlink beta. Still, he knows that whether he continues to enjoy such fast internet speed will depend on how many satellites Starlink puts in the sky and the popularity of the service.
“It’s like wired Internet at first,” he says, “until the whole neighborhood was there.”
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Write to Christopher Mims at [email protected]
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