Facebook Confirms It's Working on a New Internet Satellite (wired.com) 48
A host of companies believe the better way to connect the estimated half of Earth's population that's still offline is to launch "constellations" of smaller satellites into low Earth orbit, around 100 to 1,250 miles above our planet. According to emails from the Federal Communications Commission, which Wired obtained by filing a Freedom of Information Act request, Facebook is officially one such company. From the report: The emails show that the social network wants to launch Athena, its very own internet satellite, in early 2019. The new device is designed to "efficiently provide broadband access to unserved and underserved areas throughout the world," according to an application the social network appears to have filed with the FCC under the name PointView Tech LLC. With the filing, Facebook joins Elon Musk's SpaceX and Softbank-backed OneWeb, two well-funded organizations working on similar projects. In fact, SpaceX launched the first two of what it hopes will be thousands of its Starlink satellites just this past February. The emails, which date back to July 2016, and subsequent confirmation from Facebook, confirm a story published in May by IEEE Spectrum, which used public records to speculate that Facebook had started a satellite internet project.
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Yep, this is all about Facebool being able to track and data mine you without another ISP being in the middle. End-to-end tracking of all your activity is all these companies care about.
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It guarantees your personal data will be sold.
It should provide better chances of it not being leaked though, as it has commercial value.
Re: Connect? (Score:2)
Will launch from Russia (Score:2)
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To "improve" your "browsing experience"?
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Or even most African countries have pretty good cellphone coverage. Kenya for example is the world leader in mobile payments.
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The USA is not well-served. There's millions of people, I expect, not-in-cities and far off the cable routes that just don't have access other than the damned geosynchro satellites, which means they're useless for some specific applications like first person shooter games, anything else requiring quick response. There's plenty of people in my own county which don't have the cable access, and have to rely on lesser means. The county is even getting involved in providing service to everybody. I'm conce
100 miles??? (Score:2)
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For SpaceX’s strategy, mass-producing and launching a couple hundred satellites each year might not be that big of a deal. It gives a way to continuously upgrade the hardware.
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At that height, no satellite will stay in "orbit" very long, due to atmospheric drag. I don't have the figures here but at 100 miles up, the daily loss of altitude will be easily noticed. And it is expensive to correct that loss. Mind you , it is much easier to launch to 100 miles than to a more stable altitude like 600 miles, provided you don't mind losing the satellite very soon.
This is a very good thing. There is so much junk in space already, it is already making launch windows short due to avoiding all the other stuff possibly in the way. All sorts of companies are talking about constellations of "thousands" of small satellites. The last thing we need in orbit is thousands of satellites with decades-long orbital decay times. Even the idea of launching thousands of small satellites is not a good idea given the possibility of collisional cascading [wikipedia.org].
It is my belief that we sh
No thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
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Once trapped on a social media network with its own connection the user has trust the provided encryption and the ads.
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Don't forget that satellites, by design, have huge lag. So enjoy playing games at 650ms minimum latency.
It's almost like you have to beam something to space and back, and convert the signal multiple times across multiple hops.
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That applies to geosynchronous sattellites, which isn't what is being discussed.
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I apologize for my misunderstanding. But we're still talking...satellites right?
It's still got to go to "orbit" (even if orbit is "near earth") and pass a round trip (possibly through multiple satellites too). You can't go around physics. Even the speed of light has a latency.
This article says, per the company itself, "could be" as low as 30 milliseconds. Which means it won't be anywhere near that--just like your internet speeds are nothing compared to what your ISP says it "could be".
https://arstechnica.co [arstechnica.com]
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Geosynchronous orbit (where most existing internet sats are) is about 35,786 km (22,236 mi) above sea level, or 42,164 km from the center of the Earth. Since we're transmitting from sea level or above, we use that number.
35,786 km / the speed of light = 0.119369247 seconds, or about .24 seconds round-trip. Most requests would go from you to sat, to ground station, to ISP, then back through ground station, sat, then you. That's two round trips to the sat, so 480 ms minimum; throw on 20 ms for the actual i
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This article says, per the company itself, "could be" as low as 30 milliseconds. Which means it won't be anywhere near that--just like your internet speeds are nothing compared to what your ISP says it "could be".
Speed of light delay is about 1 nanosecond per foot (1) so about 5.3 microseconds per mile and 0.53 milliseconds per 100 miles. Geosynchronous orbit at about 22.5 thousand miles contributes about 125 milliseconds. The interleaved error correction commonly used on high speed DSL and cable contributes 10s of milliseconds of latency. If you were using the old ISDN or SDSL standards, this is more like 1 millisecond.
So the contribution in latency from a LEO satellite constellation is insignificant even under
Be careful (Score:1)
When your GPS devices (from your vehicle, cell phone) send data to the satellite, are the signals broadcast in a way that all satellites are capable of picking up, or is there some authentication involved?
The question is - Is there a way to prevent Facebook from intercepting GPS data connections, because this is clear that this will be a natural progression for them, whether we'd like it or not.
With more self-driving cars on the road, which are always-connected (and no way of opting out), this makes things
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Well, that's what they sa..,.,_ ./.';
\/kj
no carrier
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When your GPS devices (from your vehicle, cell phone) send data to the satellite
That's not how GPS works.
Basically, all the GPS satellites do is broadcast a time signal and a code telling which satellite it is. Based on the signal delay, you can calculate how far away it must be. Knowing the orbits of the satellites, you then triangulate your position without sending anything to the GPS satellites.
The question is - Is there a way to prevent Facebook from intercepting GPS data connections
The question is very stupid.
This Facebook Internet satellite has nothing to do with GPS. Its orbit is vastly different. As is its methods of communication.
So basically a SpaceX Starlink ripoff (Score:1)
SpaceX has been working on this since 2015 and already launched two successful prototype satellites. It's called "Starlink" and production is already underway. Good luck competing with a company that builds their own satellites and has their own low cost launch platform.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-internet-satellite-starlink-production-in-house/ [teslarati.com]
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My company delivers internet through geostationary satellites. Not sure we can compete with Facebook and SpaceX. Time to dump all my stock?
Facebook already had a satellite destroyed by SpaceX before it even launched.
Next time, it will reach orbit only to collide with a SpaceX satellite that is aiming to serve the same people as the Facebook satellite
Our solution, your problem. (Score:1)
A host of companies believe the better way to connect the estimated half of Earth's population that's still offline is to launch "constellations" of smaller satellites into low Earth orbit
A host of companies is wrong.
Satellite is the best way to provide coverage on the high seas, where there is a dearth of cell phone coverage.
On land, glass fiber is always best. With the amount of it that has been dumped into the sea for intercontinental links, covering the quarter of the surface that isn't ocean should be no problem. Even if in practice the last mile tends to be radio.
And the population that doesn't exist on-line yet is not half, but between two thirds and three quarters. Availability of ca
Ka-Boom! (Score:2)
Didn't their last satellite go kablooey? SpaceX Falcon 9 explosion on the launch pad during fueling destroyed Facebook's co-leased AMOS-6 Satellite Sept 1st 2016. The satellite was to provide Internet service to large parts of West, East and Southern Africa. The satellite cost approximately $200 million. Sounds like the new plan is smaller, simpler and cheaper lower orbit satellites.
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Didn't their last satellite go kablooey? SpaceX Falcon 9 explosion on the launch pad during fueling destroyed Facebook's co-leased AMOS-6 Satellite Sept 1st 2016. The satellite was to provide Internet service to large parts of West, East and Southern Africa. The satellite cost approximately $200 million. Sounds like the new plan is smaller, simpler and cheaper lower orbit satellites.
Do you remember that PoIP (punch over IP) protocol? We are way beyond that now.