Amazon to offer broadband Internet from space

[searcyfarms]

it will be interesting to see how this works, basically these moving satellites will have to navigate handoffs to each other like we now do with a stationary tower, it should be better latency than satellite service now with the long lag times - larry caldwell, you can get satellite service now with better specs on the download than your dsl but you will still have slow upload speeds but not 28k ;-)

I survive on dsl with 768k up and 8M down on a good day. Do you have cellular signal at all?

 

[oosik]

I've had HughesNet out here for eleven years now. Since we seldom have a storm - there is seldom an outage. I'm not a gamer so it's fast enough for me.

No idea what I would do with a faster service..........

Cheaper service - I pay $50 per month - cheaper would be nice.

 

[ovrszd]

I'm all about this concept. The sooner the better.

Next is Cell Phones. WTH are we doing getting our Cell signal from a stupid tower???? Man that tans my hide!!!!! In 2003 I stood in the middle of the Iraqi desert and talked to my wife on a Cell Phone. Perfect signal, sounded like she was there with me. Wasn't a Cell tower within 500 miles. All from satellite. Here we are 16 years later still using towers...…. Did I mention how much that makes me mad??? Money grubbing big business...…

 

[cqaigy2]

I'm all about this concept. The sooner the better.

Next is Cell Phones. WTH are we doing getting our Cell signal from a stupid tower???? Man that tans my hide!!!!! In 2003 I stood in the middle of the Iraqi desert and talked to my wife on a Cell Phone. Perfect signal, sounded like she was there with me. Wasn't a Cell tower within 500 miles. All from satellite. Here we are 16 years later still using towers...…. Did I mention how much that makes me mad??? Money grubbing big business...…

I heard something like 3 trillion dollar industry.

 

[k0ua]

I'm all about this concept. The sooner the better.

Next is Cell Phones. WTH are we doing getting our Cell signal from a stupid tower???? Man that tans my hide!!!!! In 2003 I stood in the middle of the Iraqi desert and talked to my wife on a Cell Phone. Perfect signal, sounded like she was there with me. Wasn't a Cell tower within 500 miles. All from satellite. Here we are 16 years later still using towers...…. Did I mention how much that makes me mad??? Money grubbing big business...…

Well, it is not as easy as it all looks. It is much easier to build a million dollar cell tower and feed it with fiber than to launch 100's of millions of dollars of satellites AND the ground stations to control and make the hand-offs of these Low Earth Orbiting satellites. I don't know if you have ever "worked" LEO birds, but they don't stay in sight for very long. The closer in they are the faster they go and the faster they cross our horizon. The time between AOS and LOS (Acquisition Of Signal and Loss Of Signal) can be as little as 5 minutes on low angle passes and even a pass at the zenith will likely not be over 15 minutes. What these hand-offs will do to streaming video and how well this will all work remains to be seen. I am pretty skeptical.

Having an expensive sat-phone with expensive minutes so that you may converse out in the 3rd world is one thing, and it is a wonderful thing, but bringing it to the masses at a reasonable price is totally another. If it could be done, IT WOULD BE DONE. Maybe with Musk's investment and vision, maybe this can happen. We shall see. Or this is the biggest boondoggle since the launch of the Edsel.

 

[k0ua]

Also keep in mind this must all be done with low gain omni-directional cross polarized antennas. Not high gain Yagis. You can't have gain antennas on either the spacecraft OR the customers earth stations as there will be no way to track or orient gain type antennas for the average customer/subscriber. So something like a turnstile cross polarized dipoles on the receiving end would be the best you could do. This is do-able, but it causes the spacecraft to have to have a larger power budget to maintain the link. This all brings back old memories of OSCAR 10 and 13, "back in the day" when I was doing a lot of Amateur satellite work.

 

[ray66v]

If the proposed Sprint/T-Mobil merger goes through, they have promised to make 5G internet available to 99% of the country, at an affordable price.

My understanding is, the 5G network will use a lot of mini towers, and repeaters on telephone poles and office buildings, so coverage will be substantial. They already own a ton of 600Mhz spectrum to do it all with.

I am sure the rest of the cellular companies will also be using their finished 5G networks to go after more of the internet market too.

 

[k0ua]

If the proposed Sprint/T-Mobil merger goes through, they have promised to make 5G internet available to 99% of the country, at an affordable price.

My understanding is, the 5G network will use a lot of mini towers, and repeaters on telephone poles and office buildings, so coverage will be substantial. They already own a ton of 600Mhz spectrum to do it all with.

I am sure the rest of the cellular companies will also be using their finished 5G networks to go after more of the internet market too.

I suspect this will be the leading technology in our future. I am pretty skeptical of this swarm of LEO satellites being a success. I could be wrong, and I have been before.

 

[kcflhrc]

I'm all about this concept. The sooner the better.

Next is Cell Phones. WTH are we doing getting our Cell signal from a stupid tower???? Man that tans my hide!!!!! In 2003 I stood in the middle of the Iraqi desert and talked to my wife on a Cell Phone. Perfect signal, sounded like she was there with me. Wasn't a Cell tower within 500 miles. All from satellite. Here we are 16 years later still using towers...…. Did I mention how much that makes me mad??? Money grubbing big business...…

That would have been a Satellite phone and not a cell phone, big difference. Voice traffic is one thing, data is a whole other issue. If we were just concerned about voice traffic it would be substantially easier. But honestly, who the **** talks on the phone anymore?

 

[Oaktree]

If the proposed Sprint/T-Mobil merger goes through, they have promised to make 5G internet available to 99% of the country, at an affordable price.

And if you believe that less competition=better service & lower prices I have some waterfront property in Florida I'd like to sell you.