Private company SpaceX has begun deploying a network of a dozen thousand satellites - the largest orbital constellation in the history of mankind. Esquire explains why this internet is better than the current one and why today's event is historical.
On May 24, 2019, SpaceX launched 60 satellites at once to provide low-orbit satellite Internet. Unlike the previous "Internet from orbit", this is not an inconvenient solution for remote places where there is simply no other option. SpaceX plans to take away about half of the customers from the rest of the providers around the world - at the expense of a lower price and higher speed. It is quite possible that she and her "satellite" competitors will be able to squeeze 4G and wired Internet.
Why is satellite internet much worse today than conventional internet?
The global network reaches the home of most of the inhabitants of Russia via fiber optic lines. This is a fairly quick "supplier", but it is only suitable for places with a high population density, such as Soviet-style cities. More than half of the world's population lives in a completely different way, outside the city or in the suburbs - in low-rise buildings with a moderate population density. And this applies not only to India and so on, but also, for example, to the United States. Residents of such countries often have no prospects of moving into apartments: in America, for example, 77 square meters of living space per person is laid down - city apartments of 200 square meters will simply be too expensive. In low-rise buildings, it is economically pointless to pull the cable - the density of customers is low.
While in such places 4G helps out. But such wireless Internet can be either expensive (like in the US, where the bill for it can exceed $ 50 per month), or limited in coverage (like in Russia). The reason is that a really large communication channel capacity is easily achieved using relatively short radio waves. But short radio waves are usually better absorbed by the atmosphere - which means that towers for truly broadband wireless Internet need to be installed very often. In the United States, a wealthy consumer pays for it. In Russia, a consumer cannot pay that much, so his 4G Internet often ends right at the outskirts of the city.
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Satellite: Rescue or Dummy?
A tower with a conventional 4G repeater covers a larger area, the greater its height. Quite a long time ago, many companies thought: why not raise a "tower" into space? There is no air in the geostationary orbit (~ 36,000 km), radio waves are weakly absorbed. This orbit is therefore called geostationary, because the satellite on it continuously hangs over one and the same place on the earth's surface, and sometimes covers almost half of the globe. Already in the 1990s, work began on such a satellite Internet, although noticeable practical results began only in the 21st century.
But it was smooth only on paper for presentations. In real life, the radio signal with data packets for the client first goes from the provider's server on Earth to the satellite in geostationary orbit, and then goes from there back to the client. 36,000 plus 36,000 - a total of 72,000 km, already a quarter of a light second. In practice, the measurements of American government regulators show the picture is even worse: the delay in the passage of a packet with data for satellite Internet today is on average 0.6 s. Video chat or online play with such a delay is not serious. A mass client will not go to such a provider, and where there is no mass client, prices, by definition, cannot be low. As a result, satellite Internet remains not only slow, but also very expensive - many times more expensive than 4G or cable.
Lower and lower
The 60 satellites launched by SpaceX on May 24, 2019 are from a very different breed. These are relatively small (227 kg each) vehicles equipped with flat antennas built on the principle of a phased antenna array - which allows them to programmatically control the direction of radiation of radio waves without changing the physical position of their own antenna. Most importantly, they do not hang over the selected piece of the planet motionless for 36,000 km, but revolve around it at an altitude of 440-550 km, approximately at the altitude of the ISS. This is 60-80 times lower than that of existing satellite Internet systems, which means that the signal transmission delay is potentially 60-80 times less - according to SpaceX calculations, it will not exceed 25 thousandths of a second, against at least 600 thousandths of a second of "geostationary" satellite Internet …
This leads to several very important consequences at once. First, with such a small delay, it is already possible to take on the mass consumer. Measurements by the US government regulator FCC show that a delay of 25 thousandths of a second is typical of the average US cable provider. Secondly, by transmitting data with a delay of tens of times less, it is possible to transmit it much faster - that is, one SpaceX satellite can serve more customers than one satellite of the traditional "geostationary" Internet.
In total, SpaceX is going to launch 11,943 satellites into space - 1,584 in an orbit of 550 km, 7,518 at 340 km and 2,841 at 1150 km. Permits for these launches have already been obtained from the American authorities. Higher echelons of satellites will act as intermediaries for satellites of lower echelons - taking advantage of the absence of the atmosphere, they will transmit data from ground servers to them through ultra-fast laser communication systems.
So far, only six dozen test satellites have been launched - into an orbit with an altitude of 440 km, from where they will gradually rise 550 km on their own engines ejecting krypton. The purpose of their operation is to gain experience with ground terminals, which for the first time deal with such low-orbit Internet satellites. A terminal is an end device the size of a folded laptop, which receives a signal from a satellite - and from which the signal is transmitted to a client device, router, laptop or PC.
Today's Internet satellites in geostationary orbits are capable of servicing up to 1,200 concurrent ground client connections. How many SpaceX satellites will be able to serve is still unclear - a lower altitude makes their work, on the one hand, easier, and on the other, more difficult, because they will constantly move relative to the ground client and switch it from one satellite to another. But even if a satellite can only "pull" 1200 connections at a time, a dozen thousand satellites will be able to serve more than 14 million terminals.
The speed of each channel Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX, designated 1 gigabit per second. Broadband connections today are typically 20 megabits per second. That is, one terminal, in theory, can provide communication to dozens of ground devices connected, for example, to a conventional router connected to a terminal that receives a signal from the SpaceX satellite. Therefore, in theory, such a constellation of satellites can serve hundreds of millions of users.
However, SpaceX estimates the possible number of connections for each satellite much more optimistically. The company believes that it will be able to serve 50% of all Internet-connected devices on planet Earth at once. In other words, take away half of the world Internet market from existing providers. Moreover, thanks to the gigabit speed and relatively low price, SpaceX expects to handle 10% of all Internet traffic even in large cities - that is, to directly attack even cable and 4G operators where their infrastructure is best developed.
Why does SpaceX want to be the largest provider on Earth?
So, the global satellite Internet of just one company today is already targeting 50% of the entire global Internet connection market. We are talking about over a billion customers with a corresponding sales volume. According to data leaked to the Wall Street Journal, SpaceX expects to receive $ 5 billion in revenue from the global commercial space launch market in the second half of the 2020s (one and a half annual budget of Roscosmos, for comparison), and from satellite Internet - $ 30 billion. SpaceX dreams of growing from a space cab into something like a global monopoly provider, the largest on the planet.
Highlighted in yellow - SpaceX's projected launch revenue highlighted in pink - from capturing the global market for Internet services.
The key reason for this Napoleonic ambition is quite simple. Elon Musk is planning human flights to Mars - with the help of the reusable Starship system that is being built by his company. This is a combination of a very large (weighing thousands of tons) first stage of a rocket and a second stage, which is also a spacecraft. The internal volume of this spacecraft is more than 800 cubic meters, more than that of the ISS. Musk can complete the development of such a ship and carrier, but he can only recoup it if there is a very high demand.
Any analysis of the space market shows that today there is no such demand: Falcon 9s, lifting up to 20 tons, cope with all current orders, leaving Russian rockets only crumbs from the space launch market they recently owned. The current market is simply too small for a monster like Starship, and SpaceX has no choice but to artificially create demand for such a huge ship.
The Starlink satellite Internet system, as the company calls it, requires a large number of satellites due to low-orbit satellites - otherwise, the departure of one satellite beyond the horizon will leave the client without communication. Satellites 350 km away after a few years of service due to braking on gas molecules will fall into the atmosphere and burn there, thereby ensuring the absence of dangerous space debris in orbit. And this means that maintaining the constellation will require the launch of a couple of thousand new satellites every year. Falcon 9 can launch 60 of these satellites at a time, but Starship is several times larger and more powerful - it will be able to launch hundreds of such devices per launch.
In fact, SpaceX's global satellite Internet project is an ax porridge, a project in which a crafty African native wants to make the rest of humanity pay for their expensive Martian projects. However, if the speed of the new low-orbit satellite Internet turns out to be close to the promised, and the price is moderate, then we will hardly have a reason to complain about Elon Musk's trick. After all, then curses to the slow Internet in the country may well become a thing of the past: Russia is a large country and simply due to geography, it will surely fall into the coverage area of the new satellite Internet system.
Of course, the real market differs from the textbook free market in that it is not nearly free. That is, our government agencies may well simply not allow SpaceX to sell their receiving client devices in our country and thereby block the company's efforts with us. Nevertheless, progress cannot be stopped like this: many players have already announced their intention to create systems similar to Starlink, including such large ones as Amazon.
Roskosmos, by the way, also announced its intention to deploy a satellite system "Sphere" with similar tasks (however, there will be twenty times less satellites there). Although, given the technical level of the satellites created by this company, we would not place too high hopes on them. And yet Roskosmos's "And we can too!" indicates that sooner or later, if we do not wash it like that, low-orbit satellite Internet will come to our country.
Alexander Berezin