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posted by chromas on Thursday June 11 2020, @06:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-ping-in-your-general-direction dept.

Ajit Pai caves to SpaceX but is still skeptical of Musk’s latency claims:

The Federal Communications Commission has reversed course on whether to let SpaceX and other satellite providers apply for rural-broadband funding as low-latency providers. But Chairman Ajit Pai said companies like SpaceX will have to prove they can offer low latencies, as the FCC does not plan to "fund untested technologies."

Pai's original proposal classified SpaceX and all other satellite operators as high-latency providers for purposes of the funding distribution, saying the companies haven't proven they can deliver latencies below the FCC standard of 100ms. Pai's plan to shut satellite companies out of the low-latency category would have put them at a disadvantage in a reverse auction that will distribute $16 billion from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).

But SpaceX is launching low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites in altitudes ranging from 540km to 570km, a fraction of the 35,000km used with geostationary satellites, providing much lower latency than traditional satellite service. SpaceX told the FCC that its Starlink service will easily clear the 100ms cutoff, and FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly urged Pai to let LEO companies apply in the low-latency tier.

The FCC voted to approve the updated auction rules yesterday. The final order isn't public yet, but it's clear from statements by Pai and other commissioners that SpaceX and other LEO companies will be allowed to apply in the low-latency tier. The satellite companies won't gain automatic entry into the low-latency tier, but they will be given a chance to prove that they can deliver latencies below 100ms.

[...] SpaceX met with commission staff over the last few days of May, telling them that its broadband system "easily clears the commission's 100ms threshold for low-latency services, even including its 'processing time' during unrealistic worst-case scenarios." We contacted SpaceX today about the low-latency change and will update this story if we get a response.


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday June 11 2020, @07:40PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday June 11 2020, @07:40PM (#1006547)

    Sure, different features will attract different customers. The high-frequency traders are the big cash-cows, and latency is pretty much all they care about.

    Rural people in wealthy countries will have another option which may well outperform terrestrial services, and will collectively be another huge chunk of income.

    The military is an obvious customer - for remote bases, sure, but even more significantly, having high-seed low-latency internet infrastructure already in place from the moment they deploy has *immense* tactical value - especially given their increasing dependence on drones remotely-operated by soldiers in the US.

    As for the rest of the rural world - don't think "broadband internet" so much as "any internet". Whether you're in the South Pacific, Eastern Russia, Northern China or India, most of Africa, heck, even much of Canada and Australia... all those parts of the world that are dark at night ( https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/earthday/gall_earth_night.html [nasa.gov] ) your internet options are somewhere between "slim" and "none". And Starlink is going to have a whole bunch of satellites overhead that are just sitting idle until they get back over populous areas. They can provide high-speed internet to those areas practically for free, and still make a profit.

    You make a good point about rural areas being subsidized though - and even with subsidies they're still grossly under-served. But that's one of the beauties of satellite service: it perfectly complements terrestrial services since it actually sucks for urban areas - too many customers too close together all trying to share a handful of satellites. Urban areas are prime candidates for wired service, with a minimum of infrastructure needed per customer, and wireless is really only an advantage for mobility.

    You overstate the case about about latency though, even if people don't actually know they want it. Try browsing the internet with a 2s (round trip) latency - you'll often be looking at 10-20 seconds before the page "settles down" since so very many things today have "page loads X, which loads Y, which loads Z..." each of which adds another 2s delay, and all of which has to complete before the final layout can be determined. Heck, even a simple page would take a minimum of six seconds to appear after you click the link: 2s to convert the domain name to an IP address, another 2s to start receiving the web page, and a final 2s to start getting the images used on the page.

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