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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the heck-of-a-mesh-network dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

OneWeb’s low-Earth satellites hit 400Mbps and 32ms latency in new test

OneWeb says a test of its low-Earth orbit satellites has delivered broadband speeds of more than 400Mbps with average latency of 32ms.

"The tests, which took place in Seoul, South Korea, represent the most significant demonstration of the OneWeb constellation to date, proving its ability to provide superior broadband connectivity anywhere on the planet," OneWeb said in an announcement yesterday.

The company said it's on track toward creating "a fully functioning global constellation in 2021 and delivering partial service beginning as early as 2020." The test described yesterday involved six OneWeb satellites that were launched in February. OneWeb says its commercial network "will start with an initial 650 satellites and grow up to 1,980 satellites."

While the 32ms latency figure is an average, the 400Mbps result seems to be the peak speed delivered during the test. OneWeb said its test also demonstrated "seamless beam and satellite handovers; accurate antenna pointing and tracking; [and] live-streamed video at resolutions up to 1080p."

OneWeb originally promised service in Alaska "as early as 2019," but by February 2019 the company said it would only be able to provide customer demos by 2020.


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  • (Score: 2) by legont on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:19AM (2 children)

    by legont (4179) on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:19AM (#868350)

    The plan is to send the satellites up in batches of 36 on top of Soyuz rockets operated by Arianespace, the same rocket that’s flying the satellites today

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/27/18242120/oneweb-650-satellite-constellation-arianespace-soyuz-launch [theverge.com]

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @08:55AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @08:55AM (#868419)

      Too bad Russian government really doesn't want its people to use that kind of Internet. Kind of ironic.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @10:58AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @10:58AM (#868436)

        Kind of ironic.

        Don'tcha think?

        Queue up Atlantis Marmoset ...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:23AM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:23AM (#868352)

    over how many SIMULTANEOUS links?

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:29AM (3 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:29AM (#868355) Journal

      One.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:51AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:51AM (#868360)
        That's why gateways (ground stations owned by SpaceX) will be one of the bottlenecks. Another will be the subscriber/satellite ratio. And yes, all the traffic will be conveniently concentrated at the gateways for surveillance :-)
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:58AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @03:58AM (#868363)

          And yes, all the traffic will be conveniently concentrated at the gateways for surveillance :-)

          Simple, keep the acronym, change its meaning to National Space Agency, done.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @08:20PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @08:20PM (#868658)

          i assumed that we could just point our little satellites at their big satellites. are they going to be the little satellite too and then irradiate the hell out of everything with 5g instead? if so, "boo" to them. "boo", i say!

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday July 18 2019, @07:32AM (1 child)

      by TheRaven (270) on Thursday July 18 2019, @07:32AM (#868406) Journal

      I can't speak for this constellation, but usually the advertised bandwidth is per square meter of coverage area. As the other poster says, that cuts both ways: if you want the data to go to the Internet, you need to have large dishes on the ground at the other ends and that quickly becomes your bottleneck.

      That said, the target market for this kind of thing is usually not densely populated areas, it's houses in the middle of nowhere that don't have any other alternatives. Even if they can deliver 10% of this bandwidth and the same latency to rural customers, that makes the competitive with consumer offerings in densely populated areas.

      --
      sudo mod me up
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @02:19PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @02:19PM (#868508)

        Hell, I live in a major metro area and I can barely get a tenth of that bandwidth and that latency from the existing DSL/Cable providers...

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday July 18 2019, @04:50PM (1 child)

      by Freeman (732) on Thursday July 18 2019, @04:50PM (#868571) Journal

      OneWeb still expects to begin service with its first-generation constellation of roughly 900 satellites in 2019, though the launch date for the first 10 satellites has slipped by two months.

      Wyler said OneWeb has three generations of its constellation already planned, with the first offering peak speeds of 500Mbps to rural users and other customers.

      “Our second constellation planned, for 2021, will enable ultra-high speeds beyond 2.5 Gbps — faster than fiber — direct to every rural home using a small lightweight antenna,” Wyler said. “We have a third constellation planned for 2023 which will continue to increase our total capacity until we can support 1 billion consumers globally by 2025. In total, we look to invest nearly $30 billion to achieve our mission of fully bridging the global digital divide by 2027.”

      Wyler said OneWeb’s first constellation will have 7 terabits of capacity, followed by 120 terabits in the second generation, and 1,000 terabits of capacity by 2025.

      https://spacenews.com/spacex-oneweb-detail-constellation-plans-to-congress/ [spacenews.com]

      7 Terabits of capacity would only provide simultaneous access for 17,500 customers at 400Mbps. 7 Terabits of capacity over 900 satellites would be 8Gbs of capacity per satellite. Though, I saw someone mention in the Ars comments that it was estimated there was 10Gbs capacity per satellite. Still, it seems unlikely that they will provide 400Mbps access, if only due to economy of scale.

      If they merely provided 25Mbps, that would make 400 customers per satellite, if the capacity is truly 10Gbps. Which sounds a lot more plausible and would be direct competition with what's offered by Fixed Wireless/point-to-point wireless providers. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be shaping up into an AT&T/Verizon killer at all.

      --
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      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Sunday July 21 2019, @06:05PM

        by TheRaven (270) on Sunday July 21 2019, @06:05PM (#869688) Journal
        Consumer ISPs sell peak speed, confident that they can oversubscribe and everyone will still be able to get that speed most of the time because most people's Internet access is pretty bursty. A 10:1 contention ratio is pretty common without customers noticing, so 7Tb/s would allow them to provide for 175,000 customers. More practically, it would allow them to offer 40Mb/s to at least 1.75M customers. That's competitive with low-end fibre and cable offerings and would be available in the rural areas where reliable 10Mb/s ADSL is currently an implausible dream.
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  • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday July 18 2019, @01:08PM (2 children)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Thursday July 18 2019, @01:08PM (#868476)

    Back in the 90s I was looking into TCP/IP over a satellite telephone network. For our constellation, if the bird was close to the horizon we were looking at 250 ms round trip just from the dish to bird to dish. Granted, there were 2 different dishes involved. But it didn't take much for the round trip to exceed 100 ms.

    If they're going to get 32 ms that means they have a lot of satellites, which means a lot of handoffs, which will eat into your bandwidth. Also remember, just like wifi not all your bandwidth goes towards talking to grandma. The protocol itself is going to need some bandwidth to operate.

    This will be fine for Netflix and such, but forget playing Call of Duty or Fortnight. Unless your goal is to keep your K/D ratio a low as possible.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 19 2019, @01:41AM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday July 19 2019, @01:41AM (#868779) Journal

      DUDE

      What altitude were the satellites orbiting at?

      I don't think you get what has changed with these new constellations.

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      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday July 19 2019, @03:19AM

        by Snotnose (1623) on Friday July 19 2019, @03:19AM (#868814)

        Not sure, but if memory serves horizon to horizon was something like 15 minutes. Definitely not Geo-synchronous.

        --
        Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
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