Elon Musk and Amazon are fighting for satellite internet in your backyard

The McOmies are part of a beta testing program for a new kind of Internet service from Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX. Their experience so far has been phenomenal, they say. They regularly reach download speeds of 120 megabits per second, and because the antenna gives off quite a bit of heat, they have been able to stay in contact with most winter weather. They had to delete it after a recent snow stormhowever.

It’s not clear what kind of speeds Starlink will provide to millions of people, compared to the more than 10,000 currently being tested in the US, Canada and the UK. Depending on the number of people signing up SpaceX, future users could have Internet speeds that are as low as are a fraction of what is available during this demo period. And even if Starlink and its soon-to-be deployed competitors operate as advertised, there are many other potential challenges to their viability, let alone profitability. They include the headache of shared wireless spectrum and the threat of space debris.

But with at least three other serious contenders with deep pockets in the internet-from-space race – including Amazon

OneWeb and long-time operator Telesat – getting fast, reliable Internet service from anywhere on Earth with a clear view of the sky would soon seem no more wonderful than a cellular signal. It might not be much more expensive either: the current price for Starlink is $ 499 up front and $ 99 per month for service.

The internet from space has clear implications for potentially closing the digital divide between rural and urban areas, not only for Americans but also for the rest of the world. It could also encourage new ways of working and living apart from cable and fiber optic internet connections. And by giving vast numbers of homes a wider choice of ISPs regardless of their geographic location, it could mean a shift in users, revenues and value away from traditional telecom companies.

Nick Buraglio lives just outside of Champaign, Illinois. It has many options for wired and wireless broadband. But as a professional network engineer, he tests Starlink out of curiosity.

Unlike established internet providers that handle the installation, Starlink requires you to do this yourself. But that was “mind-numbingly easy,” says Mr Buraglio. He connected the pizza-sized Starlink antenna to the included router and power, then tracked in the Starlink smartphone app. Since it needs an unobstructed view of the sky, free from overhanging trees, he decided to permanently mount it on its roof. That, along with running the data and power cable from the antenna to his house, was the hardest part. Still, he says, installing a TV antenna on the roof was no more complicated than it used to be.

However, anyone who wants to reproduce this experience will have to queue: the waiting list for Starlink is now a maximum of one year.

Starlink beta users’ experiences are powered by the roughly 1,000 satellites launched by the parent company. While SpaceX will own about a third of all active satellites orbiting Earth as a result, this is just the beginning: Starlink has received approval from the FCC to launch nearly 12,000 satellites.

So many satellites are needed because they all fly very quickly above the Earth’s surface and are relatively close to the Earth’s surface, up to about 1200 miles, in what is known as ‘low Earth orbit’. The advantage of this orbit is that signals can travel quickly from Earth to a satellite and back again. Therefore, Starlink is able to provide service with a low “latency” – the time it takes for a signal to travel around. The McOmies say they can use their Starlink service to take down opponents simultaneously on the demanding, fast-paced online first-person shooter “Apex Legends.”

Traditional telecom and Earth observation satellites generally float much farther from Earth, in what is known as geosynchronous orbit, about 35,000 kilometers above the equator. This allows them to reach much more of the planet at once, but the return signal is so long that applications such as Internet telephony, video chatting and most types of gaming are next to impossible.

UK-based OneWeb, founded in 2012 and filed for bankruptcy in 2020, has recently been relaunched by a consortium that includes the UK government and Bharti Global. The company has already launched 110 satellites out of a planned 648. It plans to have 588 active at any time, said Chris McLaughlin, OneWeb’s chief of government affairs. He predicts that the company’s network will provide Internet coverage in the northern latitudes by the end of this year, with full global coverage next year.

Another competitor is the Canadian satellite company Telesat. Unlike the others, it has more than 50 years of experience operating satellites, says CEO Dan Goldberg. Telesat does not want to give everyone an antenna, like Starlink and OneWeb do. Instead, it would provide connections to telecom-owned ground stations, which would then connect to end users in conventional ways, such as cellular or long-distance Wi-Fi networks. Users didn’t have to worry about getting the Internet connection they liked, and could use their phones and other mobile devices instead of specialized equipment.

Telesat will begin launching its new constellation of 298 low-Earth orbit broadband satellites in 2023, and plans to have full Earth coverage by 2024, Goldberg added. One reason its constellation is smaller than its competitors is that each of its satellites is larger and orbits at a higher (but still low Earth) altitude, he says. Should the company’s plans pay off, Telesat’s satellites will also have high-speed, laser-based connections to each other so that they can transmit internet traffic among themselves, in space, before sending it back to Earth closer to its intended destination. . (Starlink is also testing laser-based communications between its satellites.)

Amazon’s Project Kuiper, about which the company has remained relatively closed, has announced that it is investing $ 10 billion to launch a network that is, in all likelihood, very similar to Starlink’s. While the company has not announced its satellite design or launch schedule, it will need to launch half of its target network, or approximately 1,600 satellites, by July 2026 to comply with its FCC license.

In the future, there are even more potential entrants to the space Internet race: China has announced it plans to launch its own network of 10,000 satellites into low Earth orbit, and the EU is also considering building one. Hardly a month goes by when yet another start-up does not announce an attempt at a slice of the market, including more than a dozen start-ups looking to use small satellites to connect the ‘Internet of Things’.

It’s not clear whether all of these companies will successfully launch their networks or survive once they do, says Chris Quilty, a partner at Quilty Analytics, which tracks the aerospace industry from a financial perspective. His own analysis of Starlink’s viability, for example, finds that its money-making prospects depend heavily on lowering the cost of the sophisticated and expensive ground-based antennas it sends to customers. The $ 499 upfront fee to join Starlink does not cover the $ 2,000 to $ 2,500 that Mr. Quilty and other analysts estimate as the true cost for each antenna.

That said, the FCC announced in December its intention to give Starlink $ 885 million to connect homes in the US, if the company meets certain requirements, as part of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

Starlink and its competitors are awaiting numerous other headaches. Among them are the rights to the wireless spectrum that satellites use to transmit data to Earth. OneWeb, SpaceX and another satellite communications company believe they should get senior rights to a particular wireless band in the US. This could mean that satellites from one of these companies – or their future competitors – would have to adjust their transmissions when they detect potential interference, Mr. Quilty says.

Then there’s the dreaded Kessler syndrome depicted in the movie “Gravity,” where orbiting space junk leads to a runaway space stack. At the moment there are recommendations but few binding rules on how low Earth orbit is used.

Brian Jemes, network administrator at the University of Idaho, plans to continue enjoying his Starlink system until the space junk pocalypse comes. At his home near Moscow, Idaho, the satellite service was 20 times faster than his local ISP, which connected via long-distance Wi-Fi.

Mr. Jemes, who has worked at Hewlett-Packard for 18 years and has built networks for 32 years, is delighted to be part of the Starlink beta. Still, he knows that whether he continues to enjoy such high internet speeds depends on the number of satellites Starlink puts in the sky and how popular the service becomes.

“That’s how cable internet was in the beginning,” he says, “until your entire neighborhood was on it.”

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