Satellite can be amazing tech. But it's still not going to be the best viable option for high bandwidth connections in medium to large sized cities. As companies like centurylink build GPON and 10GPON based FTTH networks (example: Capitol, Hill, Seattle) it's quite possible to do 900 x 900 Mbps symmetric, though slightly oversubscribed, residential connections.
DOCSIS3.1 over old copper coax cable, with enough RF channel bonding, can also do 300 to 900 Mbps downstream, again slightly oversubscribed. With much less upstream because the RF channels are usually allocated asymmetrically at a ratio of 10:1 or thereabouts.
This is by no means going to hurt Comcast. Comcast (and similar companies like Wave, RCN, Charter, Shaw, etc) are building DOCSIS3.1 and also overbuilding their own networks with fiber. They have the established right of way through major cities, both on pole and underground, and can incrementally build a FTTN/FTTdP architecture with existing copper, and will eventually overbuild everything with singlemode fiber to the customer.
What this will be revolutionary for is small towns, remote/rural areas. In the US as an example the market for ISP last mile connections that is presently served by either WISPs, or in places where no WISP exists, two-way Ku/Ka-band VSAT terminals (HughesNet, ViaSat, etc). The capacity constrains on traditional geostationary consumer grade VSAT services result in terrible things (TDMA oversubscription that pushes latency to 1150ms during peak hours), and things like 20GB/month transfer quotas. That's for a typical $100/month, 24 or 36-month term with the latest generation of Viasat's services.
For polar regions this will be a big deal because they are presently almost entirely dependent on geostationary C and Ku-band satellite capacity.
On ships: Very relevant and has the potential to capture a ton of market from Inmarsat's I-4 and I-5 series satellites and tech, and Iridium's upcoming maritime products. With a sufficient number (thousands!) of polar orbit satellites it can cover mid ocean areas very effectively.
> The capacity constrains on traditional geostationary consumer grade VSAT services result in terrible things (TDMA oversubscription that pushes latency to 1150ms during peak hours), and things like 20GB/month transfer quotas. That's for a typical $100/month, 24 or 36-month term with the latest generation of Viasat's services.
I live in a rural town. This is most definitely the status quo, and your description might actually be rosier than what happens in reality. It's quite a stark difference compared to the +100Mbps fiber connection that you can get about 60 minutes away in the city.
yes... From a US consumer perspective, although I work in two way satellite but not in consumer-facing stuff, I've experienced it in places in Idaho where a whole town's population is 150 people.
There are some "middle of the night" lows in traffic use where a few of the consumer VSAT operators offer quota-free traffic. Can be used with bittorrent clients that support time-based scheduling and automatic pausing such as to download a few episodes of your favorite TV show between 0100 and 0445 every morning.
But during peak evening hours, for human-interactive use like web browsing, it's generally going to be a miserable experience.
Well, it could, couldn't it? Satellite internet does have the potential to make regional pseudo-monopolies go away, which means Comcast now has price competition. Even if speeds end up being much lower, it will still be plenty fast for lots of people, and the price will be the determining factor.
At the very least, I think this will force Comcast to lower their prices and/or be better.
Maybe in very far suburban areas verging on rural. I have seen a number of edge cases where a cable MSO (multi-system operator, basically triple play TV/Internet/Phone) such as Comcast, Shaw or Charter will demand a one time payment of $2,000 to $5,000 to extend service to a house that is on the edge of their current service area.
Those sorts of customers at present usually end up going with a local WISP instead (terrestrial based point-to-multipoint microwave wireless, which can be quite good if implemented right), or something like the consumer grade VSAT systems from hughesnet/viasat. Or maybe a slow but usable very-long-loop-length ADSL2+ connection at only 3.5 Mbps from the ILEC.
But as for places that are solidly in the comcast network, no. Increasing use of feeding small CMTS from 1/10GbE via fiber, and the very high data rate capacity of DOCSIS3.1 as coaxial cable plant segments are broken up into smaller chunks, means that it's feasible for comcast to offer 300 to 900 Mbps service at fairly low costs to large numbers of people in suburban areas. Satellite won't be able to compete with this. And Comcast will be able to come and overbuild their coax with singlemode fiber incrementally to sell either active-ethernet based FTTH or GPON FTTH.
> But as for places that are solidly in the comcast network, no
There are a couple of things which, if they happened, I think could make SpaceX very competitive.
The first is if they could drastically cut the price to consumers. The cheapest Comcast plan in my area (New Mexico, USA) is $75/month. If they offered something like $15 for 15 Mbps I think a lot of people (including me!) would buy it. This would put pressure on Comcast to cut prices (and their margins).
The second would be making a much better product. Imagine being able to take your internet with you wherever you go. I could climb up a mountain, open my laptop, and start working. That sounds pretty appealing.
WISPs sound really interesting, and thanks for all this info!
Yes, but same general idea. It's 100GB, not 100Gb. Compared to terrestrial based networks it's not much - very easy to do far more than 100GB/mo with a land based WISP that offers last mile connections of 15 Mbps down x 6 Mbps up.
The oversubscription for consumer grade VSAT services is an economic necessity, based on the fact that with current technology and launch costs, it's a $150 to $200 million project to build and launch a new 5000-6000 kilogram high powered satellite into geostationary orbit. It will have an estimated 15 year usable lifespan.
There is only so much spectrum to go around. Even with tight beams, providing high speed to everyone in a densely populated area is much easier to do with fiber than with any radio-based system.
In many regions this will be serious competition to comcast, but in cities traditional ISPs won't go away in the next 30 years.
Cities are gaining a higher proportion of the population over time too. It's clearly the better market.
Everywhere on Earth is going to get a big bandwidth increase, expect for cities (and places not allowed for political reasons). It's an advancement that will continue to help fewer and fewer people.
Their satellites will be low-earth orbit and have latencies ~50-70ms supposedly. Current internet satellite systems are much, much higher in orbit and thus have horrendous lag.
What remains to be seen is what packet loss will be like with environmental disturbances. That latency is perfectly fine for gaming, but bursts of 20%+ packet loss will quickly flip it back to "sucks for gaming" territory while still being perfectly fine for browsing or Netflix.
I was just looking at Iridium and they seem to have very low latency of around 40ms roundtrip [0] but very small throughput. If SpaceX (or whoever else) can address the latter, then 40ms will challenge any ISP. If you combine this with the adoption of new protocols like HTTP/2, the user experience will be definitely comparable.
In real world practice Iridium's current satellites (not the next generation) have latency from 700ms to 1400ms to the gateway. It's also 2400 baud for data, something like 2400baud+1200bps of FEC for voice. Actually kind of amazing that they can fit intelligible voice through that bitrate with voice codec technology that was finalized 19 years ago.
The raw RF latency of Iridium in its present state does not correspond with the network topology at layers 2 and 3.
Comcast is no more just a dumb pipe. Thanks to their acquisitions they would, in case of this scenario, simple reinvent themselves as a content producer (which they already are).
