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posted by azrael on Sunday November 09 2014, @11:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the interplanetary-internet-soon dept.

Elon Musk is talking with satellite industry executives about creating smaller, less-expensive satellites "that can deliver Internet access across the globe", according to a Wall Street Journal article today.

Citing anonymous sources, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk is working with Greg Wyler, a former Google executive who founded a new company called WorldVu Satellite.

"In talks with industry executives, Messrs. Musk and Wyler have discussed launching around 700 satellites, each weighing less than 250 pounds, the people familiar with the matter said," the Journal wrote. "That is about half the size of the smallest communications satellites now in commercial use. The constellation would be 10 times the size of the largest current fleet, managed by Iridium Communications Inc."

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 09 2014, @11:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 09 2014, @11:30AM (#114246)

    Surveillance beam says buy more shit! Post to Facefuck! Follow more gossip! Consume! Consume!! Consume!!!

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday November 09 2014, @12:49PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 09 2014, @12:49PM (#114256)

    So launch at a high altitude and you'll need tons of non-overlapping bandwidth. About "thirty" GPS satellites results in about "ten" visible at any given time. At least hand offs will be trivial if its a 12 hour orbit and the average user session might only be a couple minutes. Heck, the battery life and bandwidth caps are likely to be such that it won't be usable for more than a fraction of 12 hours anyway.

    Or launch at low altitude and you won't have the visibility so dropouts will happen depending on ground station location, and low orbit means a whole pass might only be 10 minutes or so under ideal plains/mountaintop geography, so handoffs are going to be an exciting problem.

    And before the accusation of binary thinking and "just launch both kinds" the link budget / battery budget / bandwidth budget aren't going to support that. You'd basically have one company launching and operating two completely different systems. Which might be their secret sauce, seeing as nothing else is technologically new or advanced, at least from a high level (so maybe the modulation method will be interestingly new/patented, who cares).

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by goody on Sunday November 09 2014, @04:36PM

    by goody (2135) on Sunday November 09 2014, @04:36PM (#114284)

    The problem with satellites in regards to Internet access is that they're really much better suited for pushing content (like video), not interactive two way communication due to latency and the nature of satellite coverage footprints. The technology to transmit the uplink channel is much more expensive than the receiving equipment and not practical to deploy on a widespread scale economically in the areas they're probably trying to reach. A more practical use would be to distribute content from major sites to caching servers in these poor, remote areas. I know that doesn't address the last mile problem, but they're going to be pushing water uphill to do that with satellites.