SpaceX Gets $886 Million From FCC To Subsidize Starlink In 35 States (arstechnica.com) 129
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: SpaceX has been awarded $885.51 million by the Federal Communications Commission to provide Starlink broadband to 642,925 rural homes and businesses in 35 states. The satellite provider was one of the biggest winners in the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, the results of which were released today. Funding is distributed over 10 years, so SpaceX's haul will amount to a little over $88.5 million per year. Charter Communications, the second-largest US cable company after Comcast, did even better. Charter is set to receive $1.22 billion over 10 years to bring service to 1.06 million homes and businesses in 24 states.
FCC funding can be used in different ways depending on the type of broadband service. Cable companies like Charter and other wireline providers generally use the money to expand their networks into new areas that don't already have broadband. But with Starlink, SpaceX could theoretically provide service to all of rural America once it has launched enough satellites, even without FCC funding. One possibility is that SpaceX could use the FCC money to lower prices in the 642,925 funded locations, but the FCC announcement didn't say whether that's what SpaceX will do. Starlink is in beta and costs $99 per month, plus a one-time fee of $499 for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router. The 35 states where SpaceX won FCC funding are Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
FCC funding can be used in different ways depending on the type of broadband service. Cable companies like Charter and other wireline providers generally use the money to expand their networks into new areas that don't already have broadband. But with Starlink, SpaceX could theoretically provide service to all of rural America once it has launched enough satellites, even without FCC funding. One possibility is that SpaceX could use the FCC money to lower prices in the 642,925 funded locations, but the FCC announcement didn't say whether that's what SpaceX will do. Starlink is in beta and costs $99 per month, plus a one-time fee of $499 for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router. The 35 states where SpaceX won FCC funding are Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Where The Fuck Is Texas? (Score:3)
Come on guys! Texas invented rural. This kinda blows.
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Texas believes in the free market, not socialist crap. If it's government funded, we don't want it.
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Re:Where The Fuck Is Texas? (Score:4, Informative)
Especially if the socialist crap means increased profits for monopolies. It's the American way!
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Because it's only socialist if it is a sign of failure, not if it benefits me directly.
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That sounds better.
Re:Where The Fuck Is Texas? (Score:5, Funny)
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Took long enough. Knew this comment was coming. Just not on my face.
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And wankers like Texas Congressman Randy Weber know it too.
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Go on then, recite the mythology you learned as a child, and see if it still stands up to scrutiny.
The mythology that the Confederate States started a war because they wanted to continue to own people like property?
Because that is not mythology, that is reality.
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Because that is not mythology, that is reality.
Is it? have you ever really looked into that?
While schoolchildren are satisfied with that simplistic answer, historians still manage to write whole books on the causes.
Did you know that after the war, most (surviving) blacks continued living and working on the same farms? They got the vote, but you can't eat a vote.
Meaningful change did not come for another hundred years, with the Civil Rights Movement.
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The point was clear enough. American states are not allowed to secede. It is the Hotel California.
evidence: the guy who killed countless Americans who tried to secede is still a national hero. (like Mao to the Chinese)
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That's a nice wrinkle on the old "Lost Cause of the Confederacy" myth I hadn't heard before. Not too sure what it has to do with the freed slaves though.
You might as well go ahead and start calling it "The War of Northern Aggression" just to remove all doubt who you are.
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What freed slaves? On paper yes, but in reality they had nowhere else to go, no freedom to do anything except stay on the farms. Read your history.
It took another 100 years before the North did anything for the blacks. The war was all about money (same as every war).
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You seem to be arguing that the North should have let the South secede and not defend itself against attack, and also the slaves were better off.
Read your history
Get fucked. What you're arguing is not history.
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Get fucked.
There is a sure sign that facts support your argument :)
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Either that or come clean and tell me all about "The Lost Cause" or how happy the slaves were.
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The proposition is about how emotional and defensive Americans get when anyone even questions the narrative of the civil war.
Just questioning it gets you marked not as wrong, but as a troll, because such questions are not allowed.
What alternatives did the North have? The South's economy was not good. The European powers (and trade partners) were opposed to slavery.
Trade sanctions and blockades against the South would have been brutal, but not remotely as brutal as a civil war.
Why are these questions not a
Que the whine-fest (Score:2, Insightful)
Que the Telecom / ISP whine-fest about how they should be given the opportunity to provide said service.
( While completely oblivious to the fact they were given said chance and money in the past to do exactly that and failed to deliver )
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A Question on the Timing (Score:2)
Out of curiosity, does anyone know if this decision was due to be made know, or did the current FCC leadership bring it forward so they could make the decision ahead of a Democratic-led decision being made? It feels almost churlish to ask, but with so many current departments being saddled with political decisions and wholesale staff changes, maybe it is a valid question?
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We know that the incoming Biden administration will bring changes to the FCC and we know that Ajit Pai is going to step down. Out of curiosity, does anyone know if this decision was due to be made know, or did the current FCC leadership bring it forward so they could make the decision ahead of a Democratic-led decision being made? It feels almost churlish to ask, but with so many current departments being saddled with political decisions and wholesale staff changes, maybe it is a valid question?
I've no idea, but I do know that it makes no damn difference whatsoever which administration is in charge of wasting taxpayer money. They are pretty much head to head in that game.
libertarian (Score:3)
Charter is getting over $1k per home for delivering service? And they get all of the profits from that? And they've been paid to do this in the past and didn't?
If this isn't enough to make you libertarian, fuck you.
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Charter is getting over $1k per home for delivering service? And they get all of the profits from that? And they've been paid to do this in the past and didn't?
If this isn't enough to make you libertarian, fuck you.
So, basically I've been paying for my Spectrum line twice over the last year and a half.
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Charter is getting over $1k per home for delivering service? And they get all of the profits from that? And they've been paid to do this in the past and didn't?
It's really going to blow your mind when you find out that the US government (We The People) has paid hundreds of billions of dollars to telcos to build out the last mile and deliver "broadband" (by FCC definition) to all customers, and the telcos have been giving that money away to executives (in the form of bonuses) and to shareholders (in the form of buybacks and dividends) instead of using it in the way they were instructed.
If this isn't enough to make you libertarian, fuck you.
Fuck me? Come and try it, kiddo. Instead of responding to selfishness with selfi
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Buildout requirements (Score:3)
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What I do wonder is how they build out the 'last mile' from the Starlink Terminal to users.
With a satellite. Are you new?
The best way seems to be a 4G/5G cell towers (with Starlink for uplink), but the phone companies own the licenses for that bandwidth.
So what you meant is how they build out the 'last mile' from the internet to the starlink terminal? Answer, they site it someplace where that is easy. It only has to have LoS to both the satellite and the user at the same time, so it only has to be relatively near them.
Also, before 5G (or even 4G) existed, people were using point to point microwave links to connect remote sites (or towers) to larger networks. But what you really want is to just use fiber. And as it happens, fib
Re: Buildout requirements (Score:2)
AFAIK they don't have any birds with that capability yet, though they plan to.
Charter you say? (Score:2)
I'm an astronomer (Score:4, Informative)
And let's be clear, this isn't some alturistic project from Elon, it's a business to make money. I just wish he would find a way to darken the devices in the night sky to not interfere with astronomy & scientific research...
Re:I'm an astronomer (Score:5, Insightful)
As an anature astronomer I get where you are coming from and I feel your pain.
As someone who has lived and worked in some of the most underserved places on the planet where they barely have access to any sort of information infrastructure and all the things that go along with it (education, banking, heath etc...) I can see the difference that this is going to make to billions of people's lives.
It sucks for us night sky lovers, but we are just going to have to suck it up and work around the problem.
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Stop spreading the myth that this will F up the night sky. The satellites are only visible at dawn and twilight because beyond that the satellites are well in the Earth's shadow and can't reflect sunlight. Furthermore the positions of the satellites are known and predictable down to the millisecond in advance so any camera can briefly shut off the sensor for the instant a satellite passes its field of view).
Re:I'm an astronomer (Score:5, Interesting)
Stop spreading the myth that this will F up the night sky.
Your using hyperbolic language there, I did not say that.
The satellites are only visible at dawn and twilight because beyond that the satellites are well in the Earth's shadow and can't reflect sunlight.
And radio astronomy? Radar? Infra red? You need to learn a bit more about astronomy before you are qualified to comment.
Furthermore the positions of the satellites are known and predictable down to the millisecond in advance so any camera can briefly shut off the sensor for the instant a satellite passes its field of view).
The cameras used in astronomy are not your average cell phone camera and they literally do not work like that. It takes minutes to hours of continuous photon counting to produce one frame that will be one of thousands used in post processing to create a single image.
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So clouds, water vapor, various atmospheric phenomena, birds, and airplanes are totally fine with you? IR astronomy from Earth being crap is why we're launching JWST. The atmosphere has too much water vapor. As for radio astronomy, I havent seen NRAO file a complaint. And besides, what the heck. Serious astronomy should occur in space. Especially radio, which should be behind the lunar far side.
And don't BS me about image stacking .. I've done it before .. quit acting like there is no way to subtract unwant
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So clouds, water vapor, various atmospheric phenomena, birds, and airplanes are totally fine with you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
IR astronomy from Earth being crap is why we're launching JWST.
JWST is better, but IR astronomy is not crap.
As for radio astronomy, I havent seen NRAO file a complaint
That is because they are just going to deal with it for the greater good.
I've done it before
I actually don't believe you. You know too little to have actually done any actual astronomy.
Finally, global broadband is far more immediately valuable to the world today that fake Earth-bound astronomy.
That is LITERALLY what I said in my post that pissed you off so much. Go home, take a chill pill and relax, you're too angry to internet.
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Thanks for the useless link to "whataboutism" .. it doesn't invalidate the fact that you are throwing a hissy fit over satellites when there are far worse things to worry about that you seem to be able to live with. It's like complaining about some peeing in the ocean when you are about to be eaten by a shark.
You seem to have done far less astronomy than me if we are going by knowledge levels. First, you didn't know that image stacking is the way most astronomy is done. Second, you obviously didn't know thi
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Thanks for the useless link to "whataboutism"
You did not seem to be familiar with the logical fallacy you you were engaged in, I was being helpful.
it doesn't invalidate the fact that you are throwing a hissy fit over satellites when there are far worse things to worry about that you seem to be able to live with. It's like complaining about some peeing in the ocean when you are about to be eaten by a shark.
What hissy fit? Me saying that we need to just deal with it? The part you finally decided to agree with me on?
You seem to have done far less astronomy than me if we are going by knowledge levels. First, you didn't know that image stacking is the way most astronomy is done. Second, you obviously didn't know things like meteors, clouds, even airplanes, are a non-issue when you stack thousands of short exposure images in software like registax. How can we take you seriously?
Again, you know shit and your lies pretending to don't impress me. Just your statement about turning off camera sensors tells me that much.
Dude, you need to calm down and take your head out of Elons ass. Just because I say something that you perceive to criticize him (but did not actually) you h
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You need to learn a bit more about astronomy before you are qualified to comment.
Personally I don't need to learn about astronomy. I'll let AAS do the qualified commenting, since they are actually qualified. And their comment is that so far Starlink is fucking up astronomy and the only positive things they have to say about Starlink is that Musk's company is at least in two way communication and looking for engineering solutions to the very real problem.
And no, the special coating was far from enough.
It takes minutes to hours of continuous photon counting to produce one frame that will be one of thousands used in post processing to create a single image.
Yep, and they are already negatively affected by satellites, especially when you're try
That's OK for tropic an most temperature areas.. (Score:2)
That said, the changes they have made make them all but invisible one they are in their operational attitudes and, altitudes.
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It's not a myth. The satellites are visible well after dawn and before twilight because of their altitude. They can remain in sunlight while still being visible above the horizon on the night side of the planet [wikipedia.org].
I ran some rough calculations [slashdot.org]. With the current Starlink altitude of 550 km, you can be
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So you say it's a problem for 1.5 hours after sunset. Why in the world would anyone try to do astronomy within 1.5 hours of sunset? "Astronomical twilight", so named because it's pointless to do astronomy before then, is also about that long after sunset.
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Some good news is that (IIRC) they have scrapped the plans for anything higher than around 550km. The 1000km-ish orbits were for the more inclined ones that were going to serve the pole regions, or mostly stuff over 55 degrees I think.
Instead they're just going to run them lower and use more of them like they do in denser areas. So, that's probably bad news.
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Horseshit. A significant chunk of the Starlink constellation will be high enough that the satellites will be visible as much as an hour or more after full darkness. (Heck, I've seen the ISS after full darkness (not "twilight") - and many Starlink birds will be much higher.)
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It's only visible at dawn and twilight. Use common sense. Are you really an "astronomer" .. I'm suspcious of people who hate the space/rocketry industry but claim to love the stars.
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I prefer to use reality rather than parrot propaganda and bullshit. (Which you mistakenly call "common sense".) How long after sunset and before sunrise a satellite will be visible is a function of it's altitude - and there will be a significant portion of the constellation higher than the ISS... which is often visible well after full dark.
Internet access is more valuable to humanity. (Score:2)
The eventual solution is to end terrestrial astronomy and spend the needful to do it from space. Terrestrial communications are more important than non-urgent research which can be delayed as long as expedient.
Those affected should push for a new space race with research as the goal. Astronomy works better without an atmosphere but we tolerate the current arrangement because it's an inexpensive legacy.
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So where's your proposal to stick a bunch of cameras on the backside of some of those satellites, use the network for data transfer, and create a giant synthetic aperture space telescope?
Life and lemons, right?
Re: I'm an astronomer (Score:2)
Could some proportion of the starlink satellites have radiotelescope equipment on the outward facing side like atacama? It would immediately be one of the largest radiotelescope. The bandwidth to deal with the data is already there.
Cable Companies (Score:2)
Cable companies like Charter and other wireline providers generally use the money to expand their networks into new areas that don't already have broadband.
Haaaa-hahahahaha!
Someone's been reading the press releases. The reality is that most companies getting free Federal millions use it to fund their respective CEO's next excessive bonus for screwing the customer. I suspect that SpaceX will become the first company to use Federal millions for their intended purpose.
Hooray! Georgia is on the list! (Score:2)
Data Point (Score:2)
I was at my sister-in-law's house last night near Shelbyville Tennessee. Their only broadband options are HughesNet and cell-phone hotspot.
They had HughesNet and it was practically unusable. They advertise 60ms latency, but it's BS. The jitter was through the roof.
Their cell-phone provider clarified the unlimited plan so now they spend at least two weeks a month at 128kbps.
Starlink can't spin up fast enough, IMHO.
Sheb'vull ya say? (Score:2)
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Starlink may play it like that, but they could equally just take the money and not meaningfully change their pricing model.
Let's imagine that they make an option to rent the modem for $20/month. They're now $120/month with nothing down.
They have to offer services that are 'reasonably comparable' with similar services in urban areas.
There are plenty of urban broadband offerings at $100/month for 100/15, so they're already there before subsidy. (I'm assuming $120 is reasonably comparable with $100)
Perhaps the
Damn physics and math (Score:5, Informative)
Physics and math is such that we've almost peak wireless bandwidth.
If you want lots more bandwidth, you have to have a cable.
Suppose you have a radio channel at 900 Mhz. The way you send data over that channel is by varying it's frequency from say 899 MHz to 901 MHz. That's frequency modulation, or FM. If you vary the frequency in the range of 899 MHz to 901 MHz, your channel is 2 MHz. That channel width, how much you can vary the frequency by, determines how much information can be carried by the variation. You wouldn't be far off if you said "the maximum bandwidth of a channel is equal to the width of the channel". The math is actually a little more complex, but you're limited by math to a small multiple of the channel width.
That's actually why it's called "bandwidth" - it's the width of the 900 MHz band, or whichever band you're using. 850-900Mhz is 50Mhz wide, it's 50 MHz of bandwidth. The megabits is limited by math to a small multiple of the megahertz. (See Shannon's Law for details).
Note that's the maximum bandwidth TOTAL for ALL users of the channel in the area. So if you've got 100 MHz radio bandwidth = 200 Mbps for 1,000 people, each person can use 0.2 Mbps *on average*. (But one person can use all 200 Mbps for a second, when nobody else is using it.)
So you say "let's make channels 10 GHz wide". Well, the signal is blocked by walls, rain, and other things once it gets higher than about 3 GHz or so. So our total wireless bandwidth, for all things - radio, TV, ambulance radios, internet, EVERYTHING is a couple GHz, so a few Gbps for everyone in town to share.
Beyond that, you need fiber, coax, or some medium that keeps your pipe separate from your neighbor's.
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The problem with your premise is that you're neglecting directionality and assuming omnidirectional broadcasts are the only kind. The narrower your beam, the more "cable-like" you become.
That said, while Starlink has directional spot beams, any LEO-based system will suffer from the fact that it'll be overcapacity in sparse areas and undercapacity elsewhere, while targeting peak capacity somewhere in-between (such as suburbs or small town densities). But that's an issue fundamentally related to the fact that
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ED: undercapacity in sparse areas and overcapacity in cities.
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For a moment, let's assume the ISP does have a separate parabolic dish antenna for each customer, using laser guidance to keep the antenna pointed directly at each home.
The minimum beam divergence, which occurs for a laser, is the wavelength divided by (pi * the minimum beam diameter).
Which means, at a distance there is no such thing as "unidirectional". You can put a little more energy generally east than you do generally west but electromagnetic waves spread. That's just what they do.
For illustration, co
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Which is why Starlink is a great solution for rural areas.
And cables are still probably the answer in cities.
The technologies complement each other nicely.
Now all you need to do is un-f*** the anti-competitive behaviour of ISPs in cities and you're golden. Possibly bring in some kind of universal-service obligation for urban areas where a given ISP wants to 'play'
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Physics and math is such that we've almost peak wireless bandwidth.
If you want lots more bandwidth, you have to have a cable.
True. But you forgot about the part where the US military had reserved a large portion of usable over-the-air bandwidth.
So, the problem with wireless bandwidth in the US is partly self-inflicted.
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I can only assume you mean "government" rather than "military" - the low UHF frequencies ARE an important chunk, true. ... and it's 200 MHz. Less than the TV stations in the band.
Which really isn't that bad for all government operations. Certainly, it's not like it's another 10 gig or 100 gig, it's 0.2 gig.
It's a highly desirable 0.2, but still 0.2.
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100 MHz radio bandwidth = 200 Mbps
What, what? That's now how it works.
The data rate is a combination of the available radio bandwidth and how many bands within it you can reliable select at the transmitter and receiver. Say you can only distinguish steps of 1 MHz and your channel is 1MHz wide, well you can only transfer 1 bit at a time (say 800MHz = 0 and 801MHz = 1). But if you can work with 125kHz stops now you have 8 possible frequencies within the same bandwidth available, meaning you can send 3 bits at once. Your data rate tripled.
You
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That actually *is* how it works. You CAN'T distinguish 100 different values in one cycle. You can distinguish about 8 bits in a virtually noiseless medium like twisted pair, and about 2 bits wirelessly, where there is a lot of noise.
The exact multipliers can be found by a formula called Shannon's law. The maximum multiplier mathematically possible depends on your signal to noise ratio, but as a rule of thumb it's about 8 for short wires, about 3-4 for long wires (toward the end of an isdn or coax run), a
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Shannon was exceeded long ago due to error correction and being able to work even below the noise floor.
Re: Damn physics and math (Score:2)
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Check the technical specs for LoRa.
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LoRa doesn't exceed Shannon's limit, which is ruled by bandwidth and SNR. If you have high SNR, you can squeeze more data through a narrow band. LoRa goes the opposite direction, using very low data rates to compensate for the low SNR due to low power and long distances. GPS is even further along that scale, getting data through despite the signal being buried *far* below the noise, by transmitting data at a very low rate.
Forward error correction helps to approach, but not exceed, Shannon's limit. The ra
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There's MIMO if you count that, although you can easily argue that the separate spatial streams are... well, separate streams.
Re: Damn physics and math (Score:2)
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You think that wireless systems don't work in the rain above 3 GHz? You sure don't know much about real wireless systems. Yes "rain fading" (this is the technical term for what you describe) is a real issue but it simply has to be accounted for in the design margin when selecting antenna gains, transmit powers, and modulation depths. People have been doing satcom in the rain at Ka-band frequencies (roughly 10x the 3 GHz "limit" that you mention) for years and years.
Now the total data throughput per satelli
Re: Damn physics and math (Score:2)
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Gigabit Ethernet uses four pairs. Each pair at 100 MHz.
With properly terminated, shielded twisted pair cable, the noise level can be low enough to get 2.5 bits per cycle.
Re: Damn physics and math (Score:2)
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That's cool you did that.
It's my understanding that the shielding and termination specs allow it to work without significant packet loss in a data center - with hundreds of other nearby cables also operating, which would cause crosstalk interference without proper shielding. In your apartment, you may not have had much interference - especially when the TV and microwave and such aren't running.
If there was interference when the microwave was in use, the devices would retransmit the list packets, so it woul
Re: Damn physics and math (Score:2)
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So our total wireless bandwidth, for all things - radio, TV, ambulance radios, internet, EVERYTHING is a couple GHz, so a few Gbps for everyone in town to share.
This assumes that the range of all of those technologies is the entire town, but things like WiFi definitely don't have that sort of range, and the cell network takes its own name from the way it splits the network up spatially. If you divide the city into N cells then you get N times the total throughput. With 5g, cells can be very small so N can be very large when necessary.
It's likely Starlink can do something similar, with satellites narrowing their downstream beams to a portion of the town to allow mul
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I actually chose the word "town" over "city" on purpose.
I didn't mean "metroplex". Maybe I should have been more specific, but I wasn't speaking in precise formal terms a
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They orbit low and will eventually use a pretty high frequency, so it might be possible to get a decently tight beam.
That said, it's not really a sensible option for urban areas. If you're going to do wireless in an urban area, the cell network is a better fit, since it can definitely scale down to smaller areas than Starlink will be able to. Maybe we can expect a combination Starlink/5G portable terminal at some point in the future?
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DOCSIS shares the 123 Mbps between how ever many customers you choose to join together at the CMTS. That could be a hundred customers or four.
Wireless shares the channel with everyone within range of the tower, and everyone within 2X that radius.
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By mounting an appropriate antenna on the customer's rooftop, they can (maybe) have several gigabits per city, in clear whether and some bandwidth on the K bands when it's very cloudy or raining. Which is great. For today.
I remember being impressed by a customer's 128Kbps. That was great, at the time.
The issue isn't that wireless can't possibly provide the bandwidth we already use in 2020 - it almost could, in theory. The issue is that 2021 and 2022 are coming real quick, and physics isn't going to change
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> What will improve is our ability to slice the provided bandwidth to an even finer amount
Yes, we could give each person less bandwidth.
About codecs - I don't think we're going to get a 10X improvement. I wouldn't be surprised if there were mathematical proof that's not possible. I can't cite the proof off-hand, though.
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The Sats are way too close for all but the heaviest of weather to have any impact. Early reports are that extremely heavy precipitation can lose signals on the birds when they are at steep angles rather than directly overhead. 80 More birds are being added nearly every 2 weeks right now, there are already more than 800 and there should be more than 1000 by year end. The more in orbit the more in view at any one time so as the density increases the bandwidth issues should fade away with multiple birds overhe
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There may be a few small cities that don't have good broadband options; Starlink might make some inroads there. But big cities are usually well served, and some people who live there don't have a clear view of the sky from their homes in any case.
I signed up to get info from Starlink pre-launch. But I don't expect to get an offer of service from them any time soon, since I live in a semi-urban neighborhood where gigabit wired service is available from two providers (Verizon FIOS and Xfinity). Nor would I si
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Yeah under near-ideal conditions over a shielded and/or twisted cable to keep out noise, QAM can send about 10 bits. More like 6-8 real world conditions, with a cable. That's the "small multiple of the frequency bandwidth" I mentioned.
You get those multiples on physical cable. Through the air, where you can't physically keep out noise (static etc), you'd get what, two or three bits? So roughly 20 Mbps on a 10 MHz channel, something like that.
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Come on, stop funding wired networks. Did people fund horse and buggy when the automobile was trickling out?
Fuck wireless. It's unstable, slow, with limited range, and high overhead. Not to mention fiddly. Whereas, you plug a cable in, you're done. Higher bandwidth, faster speeds, high reliability, longer distances.
If I had a dollar every time one of our users had connection issues at home related to their wireless, I wouldn't need to work any more.
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If I had a dollar every time one of our users had connection issues at home related to their wireless, I wouldn't need to work any more.
Maybe your business is charging for the wrong services.
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Aside from Indian Reservations, I'm not even sure why the FCC is involved at all, or why such funding should be made available. Rural internet access seems very much like it should be handled at the State and Local level. Other have pointed out the benefits of this subsidy get diluted in a thousand different ways, from suburban homes getting subsidized, to well-to-do country estates. And hand it to musk, he knows how to jump on the government gravy train to fund and jumpstart his businesses. Tesla, Spa
Re: A GREAT start at really serving rural communit (Score:2)
Those dishes do not cost $500 to make. (Score:2)
T
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like the hardware is pretty neat.