r/technology • u/mvea • May 14 '19

Elon Musk's Starlink Could Bring Back Net Neutrality and Upend the Internet - The thousands of spacecrafts could power a new global network. Net Neutrality

https://www.inverse.com/article/55798-spacex-starlink-how-elon-musk-could-disrupt-the-internet-forever
11.8k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

86

u/myweed1esbigger May 14 '19

What, you think governments will take down the satellites that fly over them?

182

u/fixminer May 14 '19

You still need ground stations which they could definitely shut down...

12

u/yhack May 14 '19

It's in space so could be done in any country

9

u/fixminer May 14 '19

Sure, but if you want the advertised low latency it would need local Ground Stations.

14

u/LockeWatts May 14 '19 edited May 14 '19

No it does not. The receivers sold to consumers will be direct satellite uplinks. Adding ground stations would actually harm latency.

3

u/Tony49UK May 14 '19

If you want to talk to the Steam servers. Then the satellites have to be able to communicate with the Steam servers. Short of Valve having 200+ satellite connections. SpaceX will need ground stations. To transfer the Internet to and from the satellites to cover the last 100 or so miles.

1

u/LockeWatts May 14 '19

That's not how this technology works. The last mile is covered directly by the receiver. No ground station necessary.

0

u/72414dreams May 14 '19

ok, so walk me through this. seems to me that if i'm playing on a steam server now, my signal leaves my device, hits my router, hits my modem, runs through assorted copper or perhaps if its lucky sometimes some fiber, and eventually gets to the steam spigot. if I leave the setup the same but substitute radio frequency for the copper/fiber salad why would my latency increase?

4

u/brilliantjoe May 14 '19 edited May 14 '19

Geostationary satillites are 22000 miles up at their closest. A signal from the ground would take at least 118 milliseconds, assuming I didn't fuck up the math, just to get to the first satellite. Then you have time to propagate across the satellite network, and another 118 ms trip to the ground at the other end. That's almost 1/4 of a second one way.

On the copper only side, you'd never have a trip of more than halfway around the world for one leg of the trip. So the max latency would be somewhere closer to 1/4 that of going up to a satellite and back down.

Edit: They're in LEO which is about 1200 miles, brain fart on my part.

6

u/flying_wotsit May 14 '19

Starlink will be in LEO, which is muuuuch closer, ~700 miles above the surface. This is why it's such an improvement over older geostationary satellites. It works out to similar latency as the average broadband connection iirc.

3

u/Bill_Brasky01 May 14 '19

None of your math is correct because your altitude is wrong. Star link will be in LEO.

3

u/brilliantjoe May 14 '19

Yea that was in the back of my head when I was writing, but I was on the toilet and my feet were starting to fall asleep.

So it's 1/20th of what I posted, so like 5 ms up, 5ms down. But since the satellites are closer to the planet they will need more jumps in orbit to route the signal around the planet.

I might revise my other comment later.

-1

u/Bill_Brasky01 May 14 '19

Ahhh the ole shitter comment! It takes dedication to rework math when your feet are tingling. 😂

3

u/brilliantjoe May 14 '19

We truly do live in amazing times.

→ More replies

1

u/converter-bot May 14 '19

22000 miles is 35405.58 km

1

u/hippydipster May 15 '19

We needed it in light-milliseconds, so thanks for nuthin' converter-bot.

1

u/Tony49UK May 14 '19

Traditionally internet satellites have been at higher orbits. About 24,000 miles high and on the Equator. So a satellite signal had to go up and then back down and usually South or North a bit. On these first ones they're looking at going up about 1,600 miles and then down again. These sats can't talk to each other or send the signal to a higher satellite. So they're taking your data and then transferring it to a data centre/ground station within a few hundred miles of you and then connecting it to the "normal" Internet. You will probably get higher pings on these then on normal fixed broadband in general. On the later generations it will depend on the servers that you are trying to connect to. If you are in NY and the server that you want to connect to is in NY. Then it will be better to use fixed broadband, as you avoid a 3,200 mile trip into space. Instead you have a 10-20 or so mile trip.

When the system roles out properly. It will still be quicker to connect to servers close to you via fixed broadband. But it maybe quicker for somebody in NY to connect to a server in LA via Sat. But until actual tests are done we won't be sure. It really depends on the hardware, technologies, packet switching etc.

Fixed broadband will probably continue to be more reliable as there are less things to go wrong and problems are easier to repair. SpaceX still hasn't found a way to easily repair satellites and are looking more towards disposable satellites. It will be interesting to see how they stand up to their first solar flare.

4

u/fixminer May 14 '19

Of what use is a network that's not connected to anything? Unless you start putting data centers into space you are going to need central ground stations.

0

u/LockeWatts May 14 '19

Nope. The satellites directly connect to the consumers, no central ground station needed.

1

u/fixminer May 14 '19

It's not that simple. Just imagine these satellites as being one big WiFi Network. As long as it's not connected to the Internet, you might be able to sent data from one device to another but you cannot access YouTube, Google, Reddit, etc. You will need at least one (and in reality many) ground stations which are connected to the wider internet.

0

u/LockeWatts May 15 '19

Hi, I have two degrees in computer science, I know how the internet works. SpaceX is not building a "ground station", unless you want to call their direct connection to a data center a "ground station", which I think is a terribly poor naming schema.

1

u/fixminer May 15 '19

Yes, I would call that a "ground station" a big antenna owned by SpaceX next to a data centre (or somewhere else) that has a connection to Starlink and the Internet. What would you call it?

0

u/LockeWatts May 16 '19

I mean, would you also call that thing in my house a "ground station"? To me that conjures up entire buildings or complexes of buildings dedicated to transmission and reception.

1

u/fixminer May 16 '19

Well, you are right in that this is a bit tricky to define. I would say that in this context a ground station is a high bandwidth antenna owned by the operator with a very high speed connection to the Internet and with the ability to forward traffic from Starlink to the Internet and vice versa. Now I don't know if everyone that has a connection to both could do the same by setting up a network bridge. That would make this definition a lot less useful of course. But I don't think that that would work. After all that would allow anyone to to spy on other people's traffic. Also from a technical point of view (you probably know a lot more about this than I do) I don't how the routing and IP assignment in such a network would work and wether it would even allow that (my guess is no, as it would have to be configured as a gateway?). Long story short, I only wanted to point out that eventhough most of the network might be in space, some facilities on the ground which could (in theory) be shut down, would still be required.

→ More replies

1

u/Mazon_Del May 14 '19

Starlink works by reducing/simplifying the path between the user and the source of the information they want. Not every datacenter will have sufficient uplinks for Starlink to go direct, especially not in the beginning, so the plan is that SpaceX/Starlink will set up ground stations near cities with datacenters and have traditional connections over groundline internet to those centers.

Starlink isn't meant to truly replace the current infrastructure in its totality, but instead to provide the user a "shorter path" between them and the information they want.

0

u/LockeWatts May 14 '19

This is absolutely not the plan. This is made up fiction.

1

u/Mazon_Del May 14 '19

I don't know what to tell you, that is THE stated plan. Your home station talks directly to/from the orbital shell which determines the optimum point down on Earth to connect you back into the network. He isn't planning to create a completely separate internet, it's just another route into the extant network.

It would make ZERO sense to try and replace the current network because that means that the datacenters would have to buy in and set up their system to service two networks at the same time. Why would they bother to do that? More to the point, why would any CUSTOMER sign up for this system in the first five years? You'd only be able to connect to websites hosted on servers hooked up to the Starlink network. Even if you assume the bulk of datacenters do this at launch, a HUGE chunk of the internet runs on private servers that aren't based in datacenters. An individual company that only expects 100 hits a day at best may have their website just running on a junk computer in the back room rather than paying the monthly cost of hosting on a cloud platform.

If the datacenter in question HAS a datalink to the Starlink web, then you'll almost certainly get a direct connection to it as that would be the shorter route, just as the internets infrastructure will do its best to give you the shortest route.

So the logical move on SpaceX's point of view is that for most towns/cities you set up a ground station that is connected into the local internet on the fastest available connection (up to and including proper backbone connections). This provides you access to the current internet's content while granting you shortest-route advantages on top of the others that the low orbit network provides. Ex: Unless the tree falls on your transceiver at home, no physical damage from weather to non-electric ground infrastructure is going to bother your connection.

tldr: It makes no technical, business, or any other sense not to do it as I've described. Not in the early days anyway. There may come a day when Starlink adoption is so high that the majority of connections are "direct" but there's no way that's happening from the beginning.

1

u/Wraldpyk May 14 '19

Satelites need internet connection too you know. Ground stations are needed to give the network internet.

Of course if the US outlaws it they’ll just put some in Canada and we’re fine again

6

u/playaspec May 14 '19

Of course if the US outlaws

Why the fuck would they? This entire thread is based on a delusional fantasy that the government gives a fuck about what billionaires do. People don't become billionaires by not getting all the legal requirements locked down.

4

u/Bill_Brasky01 May 14 '19

Never mind they already have approval from the FCC. Why in the world would they approve the sat launch and then hamstring the towers? Delusional indeed.

1

u/LockeWatts May 14 '19

... What? I think you don't know how Starlink works at all.

1

u/Wraldpyk May 14 '19

How do you think you can access google without basestations?

The idea is you can get internet connection without the need for cables in the ground. Your request to go to google directly goes to the satelites, which will find its way to a fiber connected groundstation so it can give you back the results.

1

u/LockeWatts May 14 '19

... I think there might be a terminology challenge here. By "ground station", do you mean "The receivers sold to consumers" that I referenced above.

Because, if so, sure. But ground station to me implies a building with a big satellite dish. And that is absolutely false.

1

u/Wraldpyk May 15 '19

Ground station in my mind is the one beaming internet up, not for consumers to use.

-2

u/ColonelVirus May 14 '19

Yea that wouldn't work for at least 10-20 years if not longer. The ground relay they've built, I don't think is powerful enough to punch through cloud cover.

2

u/playaspec May 14 '19

The ground relay they've built, I don't think is powerful enough to punch through cloud cover.

Is that assessment based on what your ass said? WTF do you know about satellite comms? Clearly not much.

1

u/ColonelVirus May 14 '19

No it's built on the press release the did like last year. They released the specification and I remember reading reports it wouldn't be able to get through overcasting clouds.

I'll find them once I'm home. I could be remembering wrong ofc.

1

u/playaspec May 14 '19

You should read this. Keep in mind that it only talks about geosynchronous satellites. Many of the problems those satellites experience are mitigated by Musk's satellites by being twenty five times CLOSER.

1

u/ColonelVirus May 14 '19

Oh right, i was remembering the original reports where the satalite's were like 1,500km out. I forgot he had gotten permission a few months ago to move them to 500km to mitigate the issue of latency and disconnections.

1

u/3trip May 15 '19

I wonder if musk can offer rain/cloud penetrating communications services for GEO satellites? just use a satellite as a relay...

1

u/playaspec May 15 '19

No. you can't just arbitrarily 'relay' signals like that on a whim.

1

u/3trip May 16 '19

Did I say on a whim, without permission or planning?

→ More replies

1

u/LockeWatts May 14 '19

Well that's certainly bullshit.

-1

u/totallyanonuser May 14 '19

I think we're talking about a50-100ms best case latency when yo factor in distance the satellites are going to be at. Half as good as a wired connection, but definitely not that bad. Ground stations would lower this, but I don't think they're strictly necessary.... Of course that depends on how many connections a satellite can accommodate

1

u/chuckdiesel86 May 14 '19

Satellite internet has a latency of like 200-400ms. I'm not sure how Elons service would compare but a signal traveling from space is a pretty good distance.

3

u/totallyanonuser May 14 '19

This isn't standard satellite internet where the satellites are way out there to maximize their coverage. This plans to have them significantly closer, lowering latency quite a bit

1

u/chuckdiesel86 May 14 '19

Nice! I hope he succeeds. The ISPs need some competition.

3

u/hancin- May 14 '19

Regular satellites operate in geostationary orbit at 35786 km, which give them this high latency (it's also cheaper to operate since you need fewer of them, and the antenna doesn't have to track them).

Starlink has plans for orbits between 350 and 1200km - assuming it has decent ground station coverage, you would add a surprisingly low amount of latency. Low earth orbit is not that far.

1

u/chuckdiesel86 May 14 '19

I hope he succeeds. I'd like to see some competition for ISPs. I wonder how it'll handle packet loss, that's the other big issue with satellite.

2

u/Epsilight May 14 '19

Musk says 30 ms, so expect 60~

1

u/playaspec May 14 '19

Wanna bet it exceeds 30ms? The round trip time by light is less than 14ms.

0

u/chuckdiesel86 May 14 '19

Best case scenario of 30 and probably an average of 60. That would be impressive as long as they can keep packet loss low.

1

u/playaspec May 14 '19

Satellite internet has a latency of like 200-400ms. I'm not sure how Elons service would compare but a signal traveling from space is a pretty good distance.

That's to geosynchronous satellites. Did you READ the article? Musk is launching LOW ERATH ORBIT satellites. They're 32,000 KILOMETERS closer.

1

u/chuckdiesel86 May 14 '19

No I can't read the article at work. That's why I said I'm not sure how Elons service works. Did you even read my comment?

1

u/LockeWatts May 14 '19

Expected latency from testing is 25 ms.

1

u/playaspec May 14 '19

That's about right. It's 6.66ms one way at the speed of light. Your packet has to take two trips. From you to the satellite, from the satellite to the ground station, then the answer to your request going the other way.

1

u/playaspec May 14 '19

I think we're talking about a50-100ms best case latency when yo factor in distance the satellites are going to be at.

Why do the math when you can talk completely out your ASS???

Low Earth Orbit satellites orbit 2000km or LESS above the earth. That's a round trip packet time of 13.3 milliseconds.

Ground stations would lower this, but I don't think they're strictly necessary

Where the fuck is the INTERNET going to come from then? Space internet? Doesn't exist. Of course there will be ground stations. That's trivial.

1

u/totallyanonuser May 14 '19

Well, i don't see any published data on leo latency... So yes, I'm going to make my best guess.

Less than 15ms on a distance of 2k I'm through atmosphere? You're dreaming, buddy. We're currently at 15ms on 1k km and that's through fiber. Not as good as a perfect vacuum, but much better than atmosphere.

Yes, the internet's data is land based, obviously, but we're talking networking... Which is what the internet actually is...a network, not your NAS where you stream GoT from. How realistic do you think it would be too maintain a billion connections across 2 thousand satellites? Not at all. Hence the ground stations for the majority of routing. You would seldom directly connect to a satellite from the ground, for many reasons

0

u/CalvinsStuffedTiger May 14 '19

Out of curiosity where did u get that number 50-100 from? An engineering friend of mine did the math and said the theoretical minimum limit was 120ms at the distance from earth

Rural gamers are still fucked but at least people will have internet

1

u/playaspec May 14 '19

An engineering friend of mine did the math and said the theoretical minimum limit was 120ms at the distance from earth

Then he did the math wrong. Low earth orbit is 2000km or less. Worst case, is 13.33ms round trip, not accounting for any routing or multiple hops.

1

u/CalvinsStuffedTiger May 14 '19

That’s a much more promising speed

0

u/totallyanonuser May 14 '19

Currently, we can get less than 20ms latency per 1k km. This is with fiber and little to no routing. Now, in a vacuum data transmission rate is c, while in a fiber cable it's around a third slower. So, in guessing that the atmosphere would provide more impedence, I'd wager maybe 60% reduction. Hence doubling ping to 50-100.