Bankrupt OneWeb Seeks License For 48,000 Satellites, Even More Than SpaceX (arstechnica.com) 64
Yesterday, SpaceX and OneWeb filed applications to launch tens of thousands of additional satellites into low Earth orbit. "SpaceX's application to launch 30,000 satellites -- in addition to the nearly 12,000 it already has permission for -- is consistent with SpaceX's previously announced plans for Starlink," reports Ars Technica. "OneWeb's application to launch nearly 48,000 satellites is surprising because the satellite-broadband company filed for bankruptcy in March." From the report: OneWeb is highly unlikely to launch a significant percentage of these satellites under its current structure, as the company reportedly "axed most of its staff" when it filed for bankruptcy and says it intends to use bankruptcy proceedings "to pursue a sale of its business in order to maximize the value of the company." Getting FCC approval to launch more satellites could improve the value of OneWeb's assets and give more options to whoever buys the company. "OneWeb has already secured debtor-in-possession financing and expects to soon exit the Chapter 11 process in a manner that maximizes the value of OneWeb's strategic assets and also ensures a viable path forward for its stakeholders and customers," the company said in its FCC application.
"It's important to understand that the reason OneWeb filed for so many satellites is that it will make others' efforts more difficult, especially [for Amazon subsidiary] Kuiper, and thereby potentially enhance the value of OneWeb's first gen license. Similar rationale to SpaceX's 30K satellite proposal," satellite-industry consultant Tim Farrar wrote on Twitter. FCC rules give satellite licensees six years to launch 50 percent of licensed satellites and nine years to launch all of them, unless a waiver is granted.
"It's important to understand that the reason OneWeb filed for so many satellites is that it will make others' efforts more difficult, especially [for Amazon subsidiary] Kuiper, and thereby potentially enhance the value of OneWeb's first gen license. Similar rationale to SpaceX's 30K satellite proposal," satellite-industry consultant Tim Farrar wrote on Twitter. FCC rules give satellite licensees six years to launch 50 percent of licensed satellites and nine years to launch all of them, unless a waiver is granted.
Dear ISP (Score:2)
Sorry, but now I have 2 more choices for Internet access, so after 30 years together, I'm going geo-sync.
Re: Dear ISP (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Dear ISP (Score:2, Interesting)
Enjoy that latency. I hear it's out of this world.
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Enjoy that latency. I hear it's out of this world.
LOL, I don't care about latency, I'm not gaming on my laptops, kodi system or roku-tv.
Re: Dear ISP (Score:5, Informative)
Enjoy that latency. I hear it's out of this world.
Starlink is in LEO, about 500 km up. That adds 0.002 seconds of latency.
Re: Dear ISP (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus, speed of light in optic cables is only about 2/3 of radio wave speed so this is planned to be actually faster (less latency) for some routes.
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Then let the HFT crew pay for it,
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The 20ms Musk claimed is obviously a lie as it violates the laws of physics.
Starlink is at 550km, around 17-18ms latency for the radio waves, one way. Double that because it has to come back down, assuming the satellite is within range of a base station and doesn't have to go to a neighbour first.
Thing is you don't get to just send a packet whenever you want. It's a shared service, bandwidth is divided up into time slots, so you have to wait for yours to come around, adding more latency. No one knows how mu
Re: Dear ISP (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Thanks for that buddy! I did a double-take when I read GP but for some reasons, I did not managed to calculate it properly. Thank You!
--
C.D. Reimer the writer
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Knowing how many of the servers I hit are way >550km away, and I get 17-35ms latency, I thought that was off. And I am not skilled in the maths,
Yes, posting in a haze sometimes entertains us out here...
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Well spotted. Note to self, don't post when half asleep.
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Yes but the comment at the top of this thread said "going geo"
Someone somewhere is confused
Re: Dear ISP (Score:1)
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Actually, it depends. LEO is not bad, but there may be issues with hand-over and satellite endurance. An, of course, having weather-dependent internet connectivity is going to suck.
No international supervision (Score:2, Insightful)
It's going to be fun when other countries start adding theirs, after all, US didn't ask anyone, right? Mesh wire night sky, woo hooo!
We never learn (Score:2, Insightful)
We're still polluting the planet with waste but that means nothing to a bunch of socioopath "entrepreneurs" who want to fill near earth orbit with space junk just so they can make a few more billion (oh sure, I'm sure connecting people is their true magnanimous goal - not).
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"the rich western nations who took advantage of an unfair head start they gave themselves by colonizing and enslaving others "
Yawn. Google Barbary Pirates.
If you've drunk the revisitionst Kool Aid that only nasty white people ever undertook slavery then I've got news for you.
"The typical resident of the African bush has equal right and needs to use the internet as you do."
Even in 2020, no one *needs* to use the internet unless its part of their job. I doubt that applies to many African bushmen. And if you t
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1st world ignorance strikes again. Time to revise your doubt and get with reality.
Particularly in the low tech parts of the world, like rural Africa and India, a village may collectively "own" a cellphone and a solar charger. That is its link to the outside world, It's how they get news like weather and agricultural prices that affect the entire population. It's how they get information. It's how they can contact the government when help is needed.
The closest thing to a self-sufficient villager might be a
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"1st world ignorance strikes again. Time to revise your doubt and get with reality."
Unlike I suspect you, I've actually travelling around a fair amount of Africa so I know the deal there. So don't lecture me from your sociology textbooks about what happens there.
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And how you register a birth, marriage, death, and possibly even assert land ownership.
Africa is interesting, but not so backwards in tech as we wish.
Re: We never learn (Score:1)
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It's important to close the digital divide between the rich western nations who took advantage of an unfair head start they gave themselves by colonizing and enslaving others and their historically oppressed victims in places like Africa.
That's not actually how it worked. Everyone was colonizing and enslaving others; our lot just did it "better". There was nothing unfair about it and any pack of bastards could have won. I mean - who do you think the first European slavers bought their slaves from (and largely continued to)?
So I don't think "the west" owes anything for that. Which doesn't change the fact that we should be trying to equalise the chances for everyone wherever they happen to be born; it's just that there's no connection with an
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Careful, you're going against the all non whites are victims infantalising groupthink so beloved of naive self flaggelating western liberals.
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The typical resident of the African bush has equal right and needs to use the internet as you do.
Satellite internet competes with land based options. Which is more cost effective, may depend on the cost of red tape.
If you have lots of red tape, telecom monopolies etc, then getting internet access to a small African village through a fiber optic cable or 'nearby' cell tower could be slow & expensive. And satellite networks like StarLink or OneWeb could make a killing.
But if government is on the ball (or the opposite: stays out of the way), and infrastructure costs drop down to 'putting the cabl
or aircraft (Score:2)
Aircraft, particularly military aircraft, have a strong need for low latency global communication coverage. They will pay a high rate to have prioritized Starlink service.
> Remember this is poorly-developed-area infrastructure costs you're comparing against. Not typical $/mile infrastructure costs at US levels. Fiber optic cable is cheap, so is labour in many parts of the world.
If it were so cheap and easy then they would be building out rapidly already.
> and infrastructure costs drop down to 'puttin
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Da fuq?
Then run fiber. Solves the unemployment problem, wires the nation.
I know this is heresy - have the government own the glass and the pole attachments - that's all - then let the local ISPs fight for access. Keeps prices low.
Problem solved, and you're not polluting LEO.
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Terrestrial radio. Please, stringing wire around the hinterlands would have been done already if it were economical.
And 'terrestrial radio' will likely be a cellular system. Spread Spectrum, etc, aren't flexible. These radio nets will serve more than data, and will welcome outsiders who didn't bring a proprietary receiver.
Strategy (Score:2)
Buy it and then sell it for profit.
We need space regulation. ASAP. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is nuts. When every odd year 5-digit amounts of satellites get launched. something is going wrong. We need to regulate this, globally. Now. What's with Satellite platforms or joint-venture missions? It can't be that the sky gets clogged with yet another 20 000 pieces of gear just because a few billionaires want to have a dick measuring contest.
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Since these are both doing the exact same thing (satellite internet) there does seem to be a really good case for sharing platforms.
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Can't share what never gets launched. OneWeb will go the way of O3b, launching on quarter of one orbit that at most serves a half dozen customers before going out of business.
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Probably. It could end up like the last mile for broadband though. Too expensive for new entrants faced with existing competition, so you end up with only one ISP available and it's Starlink.
They'll be shared by millions of people (Score:2)
The Oneweb plan is to have enough bandwidth to provide 50 Mbps down to THEIR customers (less upstream). How many households do you want to split your 50 Mbps with?
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Very much so, yes. I think they should be required to deposit enough money to an oversight-body that all these satellites can be de-orbited reliably. Yes, that will be expensive. But we only have one near-earth space and we need it.
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Very much so, yes. I think they should be required to deposit enough money to an oversight-body that all these satellites can be de-orbited reliably. Yes, that will be expensive. But we only have one near-earth space and we need it.
And money would do that how? They're already required to include deorbiting tech and demonstrate that it works, but if they lost the activation keys there's no real cost efficient way to bring down dead lumps in space. I'm not saying it's impossible to do as an exception but the vast majority needs to decommission themselves.
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We need to regulate this, globally
You obviously don't understand "America First" - if the USA simply fills the available space real estate with crap, there's no, well, space for upstarts such as China, Russia or Europe. They can then go and buy expensive shared capacity on those US-owned satellites.
just because a few billionaires want to have a dick measuring contest.
I see you don't understand much about capitalism, either. Because yes, that is exactly how it works, and that is exactly why - except that they don't want to measure their dicks, they want to enlarge them. Everything these people do is somehow re
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If my memory serves me, their earlier plans were for more satellites at higher orbits, and they lowered a bunch of them to address the concern of space junk.
Soo, what if 30k satellites get abandoned? (Score:4, Insightful)
This looks like an extreme clean-up problem that is bound to happen and if a non-solid company does it may happen soon.
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It depends on the orbit. A lot of these are in LEO (like SpaceX is), where they'll automatically decay after a few years if they're not actively boosted. OneWeb is in MEO, so it'd be a lot longer there.
Dear OneWeb, (Score:1)
Kessler Syndrome incoming (Score:1, Interesting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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One more step towards Kessler Syndrome (Score:1, Interesting)
Applied to whom? The FCC? (Score:2)
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Never (Score:2)
"OneWeb is highly unlikely to launch a significant percentage of these satellites under its current structure,"
Especially since SpaceX has the cheapest flights and most likely won't give that price to the competition.
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Orbiting trash field (Score:2)
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They deorbit. They're deliberately deorbited at near-end-of-life or with any recoverable failure (high reliability is required to be permitted for launch). Otherwise they naturally deorbit. The lower orbits will deorbit within a few years without reboosting.
This is a bankruptcy pump and dump. (Score:2)
By getting these approvals they are setting the regulatory stage to fluff up their balance sheet and "intangibles" for potential buyers.
More tech company scammy behavior. Nothing to see here.
No. (Score:4, Insightful)
So look what this says:
They've applied for a license for 48k satellites
This is AFTER they've restructured for bankruptcy, leaving a gutted shell to "sell"
So it's basically a land grab: They want us (the public) to give them something to sit on and sell to the highest bidder while doing absolutely nothing to make it happen except sucking money out of the process.
No. This should be denied. It's embarrassing how transparent this effort is.
Is there a finite supply of licenses (Score:2)
Investing in radio spectrum you're never planning to use?
If licenses are currently available for nothing or a trivial fee, you could buy a big pile of 'em. Now they are your (worthless) property.
Later when the supply is restricted, (Per many other posters in this forum, it should be, and soon)--your property is not quite so worthless.
A great advertising tool (Score:2)
Telescopes (Score:1)