Marc Handley has a technical analysis of how ground stations and idle user terminals can be used to relay Starlink and can eventually halve the latency across the United States. However, even the minimum coverage configuration and a few hundred ground station terminals would let SpaceX prove lower than 100 millisecond latency.
Marc has run many simulations of Starlink constellations across different orbital planes and with different concentrations of satellites and with and without laser links.
SpaceX can qualify for the pot of $1.6 billion per year over ten years in the low latency category for rural areas. They need to provide 25+ mbps down and 3 mbps up and be consistently under 100 ms latency. I would expect SpaceX to exceed those specs.
SOURCES- Marc Handley
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
The UK accidentally bought a 20% stake in OneWeb, hopefully some viable continuation will result.
I’m curious what sort of price point they’re targeting; If it’s low enough, I’d tell my current ISP to take a hike, and be glad to get high speed internet that I could take with me when traveling. Camping, say.
Granted, I’ve currently got substantially faster internet, but nothing I’m doing would be compromised at the speed mentioned.
Don’t forget access to physical goods. That’s where Amazon comes in. Living in remote places, you might travel for hours to procure simple goods that those in a city can pop out and get (or have delivered in an hour)
What’s not to love about China, nation that is doing its best to bring about an Orwellian dystopia? Love their new social credit – rat on your neighbor – experiment.
It’s the pervasive zero sum mentality, fear of losing out is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Up till 16 billion would allow a lot of satelite launches, satelites and improvements. And not only that, It would probably be a very big step towards Mars colony. Would give tham a lot of funds to develop Starship as well and other technologies. I am pretty positive if Musk gets it, it will spend it for good things. And they already have a lot of satelites in orbit, they are proving a lot.
Imagine the political implications of rural communities not having to rely on broadcast network news anymore.
And what happens if even a small fraction of urban people move to rural areas to flee covid and crowds?
Good internets everywhere, newly liberal work from home policies, and a fear of crowds could turn red counties purple.
This is probably the very market they were targeting.
The many, many faraway, hard to reach corners of the Earth, which also require Internet access. Where the governments even offer subventions to get people to invest there and connect them.
Those are the poorly lit part of the information economy, mostly served by cell phone service and bad ISPs or none at all.
Starlink can actually change these places, giving them first class citizen level all of a sudden, and making the prospect of distributed, open space living much more enticing.
I know I’d be more interested in living in a ranch in some scenic place, if I had very good Internet (and electricity) and that’s where solar power can really shine for most cases. The combo of solar panels, Tesla’s power wall and Starlink would really allow that kind of life.
Don’t know about that, I started reading it again recently.
And I thought that it’s NextBigAmericanFuture. There were a lot of China hating articles here.
Last time I stopped reading this blog, it was because it turned into NextBigChineseFuture and the articles about Chinese vaporwere dominated. Now it reads like NextBigElonFuture…