It's crazy that this economically makes more sense than providing the Internet over a wire.
Can we have a law passed that would mandate to lease the last mile to others (kind of like phone companies were required phone lines for DSL) so once again we can have competition?
It is just dumb to require every ISP to run a dedicated line to your house.
In the US the regulators have been captured or are neutered. Attempts to install effective regulators are stalled until they withdraw from the appointment process.
The fiber itself is owned and maintained by the public and any number of private ISP's can offer service over it. Changing ISP provider is a software decision and as such the average cost is 42 euro/mo
Similar story in France, ISPs have to give each other access at regulated costs, after an initial grace period (if an ISP builds a new line they have exclusivity on it for 1-2 years, to still incentivise investment). Internet is broadly affordable, and there are tons of villages and towns in the middle of nowhere with proud "commune fibrée" sign on their entrance. (Ironically sometimes such villages and towns are better connected than midsized cities due to the costs involved).
First time I see someone plainly refer to 'Holland' and it's not in The Netherlands but actually a city in Michigan.
Checked on a map and it's actually near a place called Zeeland, which is also in The Netherlands. Wow "Noordeloos" also sounds Dutch. I guess they just have many Dutch-named towns over there.
In the village where my brother lives there are no wires. There is a 4G tower but it runs on solar panels and the connection isn't very stable on cloudy days. I spoke to a person who works at a company in that area that uses Starlink. One satellite dish would probably be enough to provide Internet for the entire village.
That's true, but they aren't doing this to provide internet to villages. As you pointed out, there's not much demand there and that's why no one bothers to provide internet access (I guess the good thing with Starlink and Amazon's version of it is that once it works, it should work in those places too).
Anyway the real reason they are doing it is that is extremely hard to enter the ISP space. It's not even the cost of fiber to run to every home, it is the cost of laying it and all the hoops the existing monopoly will use it.
Google has tried and failed. What often happened is that when they enter market with its 1Gbps offering, suddenly the 30Mbps ISP had 1Gbps and even at a cheaper price. They could sell it at a loss, because they were making a killing in other regions. They also created all kind of obstacles when Google tried to run a wire.
It is ridiculous and we really need a law to force competition.
I'm sure there is demand, it's just too remote to be practical. They did get a fiber connection to the closest city a few years ago which made 4G faster. One million people live in the region and there are more places like that in the world. 32% of the Latin American population don't have access to high speed Internet. Schools, hospitals and businesses could be connected which would be good for education, healthcare and economy.
I spent a few days in Leticia and the Internet connection was really shaky, sometimes they can't even work at the migration office because the connection is so bad. 50 000 people live there and 67 000 in the neighboring city Tabatinga. And there's a lot of islands in the world too.
It’s not clear that it does make economic sense. Amazon may be burning margin for growth, or placing bets on the future relative costs of satellite vs 5G and cable/fiber which may not pan out.
News like this always reminds me of how the Western world polluted the earth and then got snippy when the rest of the world started doing the same on scale. China, India, North Korea - everyone have equal rights to do this too but I don't think it will happen without a lot of western news articles, hand wringing by experts, talking heads talking, etc. and likely some politics too.
I wish we had laws that made sure a fix of future problems (ie. with debris, astronomy, etc.) had to be guaranteed before a launch was allowed. A bit of insight of how new technology often end up causing unintended problems later (or in the case of astronomy, sometimes right away).
> News like this always reminds me of how the Western world polluted the earth and then got snippy when the rest of the world started doing the same on scale
That's a simplification to the point of no sense.
The "West" (as someone who grew in "the East" with "the West" being the others, it's weird to me to talk about "the West" with regards to the EU, since my home country is an EU member) doesn't get "snippy" because someone else is doing what they used to do. It's because we have collectively, mostly, realised that those things that were done were terrible, and our morals of today condemn attempts at replicating it. If a Western company was dumping pollution in a river like they used to up until 1960s, you'd get outcry, of course. Germany gets rightfully criticised all the time about their stupid coal policy.
Of course there are the people who still have a colonial outlook (those savages polluting my vacation spots!), but that's not the prevailing attitude. It's our planet, of all of us, and it's understandable that developing countries want to develop further; they should be assisted so that development is as sustainable as possible, for their own sake, but also for humanity and the planet as a whole.
>it's understandable that developing countries want to develop further; they should be assisted so that development is as sustainable as possible, for their own sake, but also for humanity and the planet as a whole.
I wholeheartedly agree, but more often than not these countries do not have the technology available or it costs more than older tech. Either they should be allowed to pollute with the old tech and "we" must pollute less to make it up or "we" must pay for/give the technology for free to countries that doesn't have access to it. We could even build it (with no strings attached of course).
Pointing fingers at -for example- China or India because of coal power plants while they are struggling to lift millions out of poverty is not helping anyone. In my opinion it is shut up or pay the bill. That includes North Korea, Iran, etc. and as long as we don't do this we have zero rights to criticise.
> News like this always reminds me of how the Western world polluted the earth and then got snippy when the rest of the world started doing the same on scale
This claim makes zero sense. Western environmental movements have predominantly focused on reform in western countries and stay relatively mum about others.
Depends on execution, we could have billions of satellites without huge problems. But Kessler syndrome could happen even just with the amount of satellites already in orbit if people had been actively malicious. So, the “limits” are mostly just a question of what assumptions you’re making.
> Kessler syndrome could happen even just with the amount of satellite
Kessler as in a catastrophic loss of satellites. In LEO, it wouldn’t be a denial of space programme, nor even a systemic issue—there aren’t high enough orbital energies.
Kessler syndrome is both loss of satellites but also rendering orbits unavailable. My comment was presupposing malicious actors so the hypothetical orbits aren’t going to be identical to what we currently have. It doesn’t take that much material orbiting in the opposite direction to render geosynchronous orbit untenable for example.
There are 1.5 billion cars in the world, and they all drive on a single plane on a very small percentage of the surface. Now increase the circumference by a lot and add a whole new dimension. I think we'll be fine.
One critical thing you're missing is that when cars smash into each other, the debris stops moving soon, and a spec doesn't completely destroy other cars a week later.
Also car interactions are seldom between competing space programs or warring nationalities with their own interests and limits on maneuvering capability and energy expense quotas.
Collision avoidance at spaceX is largely automated but for most operators there is a wide variety of response capability
Not disagreeing with the conclusion, but cars are almost always stationary (parked) and when they do move they are many orders of magnitude slower than satellites. Which means it's not an obvious 1:1 comparison.
And cars are very maneuverable -- can stop, start, and turn in seconds; and can safely pass within inches of each other. (Most) cars also have one human each paying full attention to where it is going and controlling its path.
Satellites don't have so many degrees of freedom.
A bad way to extend the cars analogy is to compare with people. There are 8 billion of us and we walk around all the time but almost never get damaged by running into each other.
Satellites follow a extremely well known path and are tracked by the operators to a ridiculous level of precision. I can't imagine us needing more than 10 providers of 100K sats each at an upper limit. You could fit them all in a few (10 say) large football stadiums if you piled them up (a sat is probably 5m³ at most, a stadium is 100x100x50m so 500000m³)
There have already been six "Unintentional high-speed collisions between active satellites and orbital debris" [0], the most recent of which was in 2021.
There is more to worry about than just tracking satellites following "extremely well known paths". You could have a situation like Intelsat 29e [1] where a satellite is torn to pieces, creating a debris field with parts too small to track. You can't avoid what you can't see.
It’s a great analogy but to nitpick a little I wouldn’t say the circumference is expanded ‘a lot’ - they’re generally in LEO at 5-600km so an additional 1000 km which is essentially 3,141.5 ish kilometres on top of 40,000ish - under 8%?
Of course, each additional orbital plane is basically another set of roads but for all the internet sat constellations being planned extra distance = lag, hence we’re going to see the most growth in that LEO category
Two cars sitting still in a car park won't collide with each other, but there's no way to sit still in orbit.
Any two circular orbits at the same altitude will intersect at two points. You have to be very careful to make sure objects in such orbits will not collide with each other. It's far easier to make the orbits slightly different sizes or shapes, so that they don't intersect at all.
In any case, the need to be in an orbit to stay in orbit severely restricts your free choices for where to put your objects, so there is not as much free space as you might expect.
Given that low earth orbit satellites supposedly travel around 17,000 miles per hour, that is a frighteningly small amount of space. If we're voting, I say let's not get that crowded.
That means the satellites should be aware of each other positions, just like aircrafts. It’d take care of collision. The majority of satellites will be commercial, not military. There will be space control for them.
Also may be not 500 billions, but how about 100 millions? So 5000 times fewer.
When two satellites cross each others plane it is highly predictable and easy to maneouver an avoidance. OTOH on a freeway lane changes happen constantly are sometimes very unexpected.
We could not do that inadvertently. To block even 1% of light using Starlink sized satellites (~30 m^2 with solar panels deployed) would require tens of billions of satellites. We could do it on purpose with huge rotating solar reflectors, and it should honestly be considered as a real option, but we couldn't and wouldn't do so just by launching communication satellites.
Starlink satellites mass 300 kg each. There's about 5000 of them in orbit, so that's 1,500,000 kg.
The Earth has about 5.15x10^18 kg of atmosphere. 5,130,000,000,000,000,000 kg of gas. If each satellite aerosolized completely (which it wouldn't, metals would rapidly precipitate out of the air) then they would make up a couple parts per trillion of the atmosphere. Way lower concentrations than cloud seeding.
In contrast, routine operations of Air Force One emit around 41,000,000 kg of CO2 per year. (They fly not just the president, but his security detail, and the presidential limo to every foreign visit)
> All told, Amazon has purchased 77 launches: 38 Vulcan launches, plus nine flights on ULA's soon-to-retire Atlas V, 18 Ariane 6 rockets, and 12 New Glenn missions, with a contract option for 15 more.
All three of the new launch vehicles have seen repeated delays. Also note that Vulcan and New Glenn both use Blue Origin's BE-4 engine.
I will bet a nice, cold beer that some of those satellites end up riding to orbit on top of Falcon 9 rockets. Too much has to go absolutely right for them otherwise.
No doubt this will irritate Jeff to no end. I hear he’s not a big SpaceX fan.
I would be shocked if this happened unless Amazon’s hand was somehow forced by shareholders. Even if none of the rockets fly when Amazon expects them to, it’s more likely for Amazon to quietly drop the whole project than go to SpaceX. It’s going to take years of delays for Amazon to realize that their launch partners aren’t gonna work out, and by then the market opportunity will be over.
Frankly, the whole satellite deal always smelled like self-dealing to me in the first place.
LightSpeed is indeed all backhaul. Whether it is a missed opportunity depends on how you look at it. Go direct consumer and you are competing directly against Amazon and StarLink. I guess TeleSat believes the bigger opportunity is going where these companies are not.
And I gotta say that "Lightspeed" is a hell of a misnomer given the rate that this program is plodding along. The longer it slides, the more that StarLink etc eat their lunch.
Can we have a law passed that would mandate to lease the last mile to others (kind of like phone companies were required phone lines for DSL) so once again we can have competition?
It is just dumb to require every ISP to run a dedicated line to your house.