SpaceX Seattle 2015

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

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

Not really feasible. The only reason Starlink DTC works is because it's not trying to supply coverage inside dense cities. Musk mentions this in the very first announcement of Starlink. ▶ this video

They did not "expect over 20M by now". That article is some bad reporting. It pulls from a private forecast given very early on to investors in 2015 that depended on a lot of things going different than they actually did. For example, the pandemic not happening, and Starship actively flying. 2015 is when they first opened the early development facility in Redmond. No hardware, not even prototype hardware, no government applications filed. Didn't even have an office building. The entire design of the system went through multiple massive revisions before it even launched the first test satellites, as well as a firing of most of the entire executive staff (who went to work for Amazon, which still has yet to launch any of their satellites). In a presentation[1] in 2015 to a group of people (early employees?) he mentioned that they plan to launch prototypes in "3 months" (standard Elon time), they didn't launch any prototypes until 2018. That'll kind of throw off your plans to getting to 20 million. 1. ▶ this video

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 about the plan comes from this video. Timestamp is to the start of the juicy bits. ▶ this video

>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 half I think of the long distance traffic. >As you guys may know, the speed of light in a vacuum is somewhere between 40-50% faster than in fiber. So you can actually do long distance communication faster if you route it through vacuum than you can if you route it through fiber. >And you can also go through far fewer hops. Let's say if you want to communicate from Seattle to South Africa. If you look at the actual path that it takes it's extremely convoluted[1]. It will follow the outline of the continents. It will go through 200 routers and repeaters, and the latency is extremely bad. Whereas if you did it with a satellite network you could actually do it in two or three hops. Well maybe four hops; it depends on what the altitude of the satellites are, and what the cross-links are. >Let's s

> 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. ▶ this video > So it's something that would both provide optionality for people living in advanced economies, as well as people in poor countries that don't even have electricity or fiber or anything like that. So it's a real enabler for people in poor regions of the world and it gives optionality for people in wealthier countries. > So I think it's something that definitely needs to be done. And it's a really difficult technical problem to solve. So that's why we need the smartest engineering talent in the world to solve the problem. > And, you know, at the same time to make sure that we don't create Skynet. So... [laugh] Ironically, the server room at Spacex (jokingly!) was called Skynet. [laugh] Though fate has a great sense of irony, so we really need to make sure that doesn't come true...

>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 were trying to talk to phones, and that gets back to that problem of a roof penetrating situation. And particularly when stuff is coming from space, like if you're in a skyscraper and it's got to go through 27 floors to reach you, that's not going to happen. There's nothing that will... you know, short of like a neutrino [laughter] ...a neutrino phone [laughter]. >In the case of Teledesic there were some fundamental issues there.

>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 connectivity. So if you've got large swaths of land where there's relatively low density of users, space is actually ideal for that. > It would also be able to service, like I say, probably 10% of people in relatively dense urban and suburban environments. And so in cases where people have, you know, are sort of stuck with Time Warner or Comcast or something, this would provide an opportunity to... [unintelligible due to cheering] >I wonder if there are chances that those antennas can be made so small to fit into a phone and tablet. As revealed in the above video, it's a rooftop antenna about the size of a pizza box. No wall/roof penetrating spectrum. Of course it automatically aims itself, so as a mobile AP it should be "plug and play" unlike current GEO internet user terminals which need

>Free, Not free according to Musk. ▶ this video > Well it can't be free. Because then we'll, like, we'll go out of business. [laugh] > No, no, it can't be free to the user. I don't think so. > This would be... this would cost a lot to build. Ultimately over time to build the full version of the system, we're talking about something that would be 10 or 15 billion dollars to create. Maybe more. And the user terminals would be at least 100, to maybe 300 dollars, depending on which type of terminal. > And this is intended to generate a significant amount of revenue, and help fund a city on Mars. So looking into the long term, and saying, "what's needed to create a city on Mars?" Well one thing's for sure... a lot of money. [laugh] So we need things that will generate a lot of money.

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