Cliff O
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2015–2024
25:54 · 46K views · Jan 17, 2015
Full recording of Elon Musk's January 2015 presentation and Q&A at the SpaceX Seattle office announcement. He lays out plans for a satellite constellation to provide low-latency global internet, tied to funding Mars ambitions. Pauses between questions have been edited out.
It is the primary source for the original Starlink concept, so commenters cite it for Musk's stated goals on latency, hops, pricing and timelines.
11 comments from Hacker News
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
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
>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
>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
> 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...