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Communications

Elon Musk Enters In-Flight Wi-Fi Market With Small Satellites (bloomberg.com) 40

Posted by msmash from the up,-up-and-away dept.
SpaceX wants to show the world its Starlink satellite system can deliver Netflix and YouTube at 30,000 feet. So it recently held a demo for the media aboard a jet operated by its first airline customer, regional carrier JSX. From a report: The short jaunt from Burbank to San Jose, California marks the start of Elon Musk's bid to seize in-flight business from satellite providers Intelsat and Viasat that already serve thousands of aircraft. It won't be easy, even for a serial market disrupter such as Musk.

"Are they a serious competitor? Yes," said Jeff Sare, president of commercial aviation for Intelsat, a leading provider of wireless service on airlines. Still, Sare said, "We don't believe there's anybody that can beat us." Starlink, part of Musk's Space Exploration Technologies, delivers broadband from a constellation of low-flying small satellites. Lower satellites circle the planet in 90 to 120 minutes. That's a departure from the established practice of using a few powerful spacecraft in higher and slower orbits. An upside for Starlink is its signals arrive sooner.
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Elon Musk Enters In-Flight Wi-Fi Market With Small Satellites More

Elon Musk Enters In-Flight Wi-Fi Market With Small Satellites

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  • The planes are a few km closer to the satellites, so they get first dibs on the signals.

  • Throughput (Score:4, Insightful)

    by enriquevagu ( 1026480 ) on Friday September 16, 2022 @11:37AM (#62886959)

    An upside for Starlink is its signals arrive sooner

    Reduced latency is a benefit, but not the main concern. If the satellite orbit is lower, it will cover a smaller surface of Earth, and will serve less subscribers. Of course it will require way more satellites in the constellation to cover all the surface, but the number of customer devices per satellite will be lower and, thus, their individual throughput will be higher.

    Of course, this will depend on the eventual number of customers served by SpaceX; but in general a much larger constellation in LEO orbit scales much better.

    • And furthermore, lower orbit means lower power for a given antenna size. Supposedly the 2nd-gen Starlink satellites will be able to talk directly to existing LTE phones.

    • but in general a much larger constellation in LEO orbit scales much better.

      But do they have to be LEO?
      What is preventing "traditional" providers like ViaSat from increasing the number of satellites and thus the throughput?

      Is it just cost, or is there are there technical reasons, too?

      • I have to take issue with asking whether the issue is "just cost," since many many things are possible with unlimited resources. Cheap launch is the #1 advantage Starlink has.

        That said, LEO does require far more sophisticated technology compared to geostationary because the ground-based antenna has to be able to track the LEO satellites as they move across the sky, which is accomplished using a phased array antenna. Those were used exclusively by the military and for research until quite recently. I do

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by uncqual ( 836337 )

          What the customer pays for their equipment has increased to $599 (plus shipping) - at least where I live in the U.S.

          • Starlink is subsidizing the cost of the phased array terminal. It costs more than $500 to manufacture it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hank21 ( 6290732 )
        Lower = less distance = lower latency = better real-time/interactive performance/

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ksevio ( 865461 )

        Latency is much lower, but also transmit power is greatly reduced on both ends. Then there's cost

      • Sure you could definitely put your comsats higher and have them be larger/more numerous. But as your orbit increases in height so does the launch/satellite costs, and with satellite/launch costs historically being in the hundreds of millions of dollars the subscription costs were always going to be high. SpaceX kind of changed the metrics, first with much cheaper launch costs. I would wager that internally they pay less than $25 Million per launch (Musk claims $15m per launch but that probably doesn't in

  • I can't access the article and I'm dying to know why Intelsat thinks it can survive this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skaag ( 206358 )

      Let me guess, you're trying to read this while connected to Airplane WiFi?

      Jokes aside, I fly weekly and I use Airplane WiFi all the time. It absolutely SUCKS. Half the time it doesn't even work. When it does work it's slow and cranky.

      • I sure hope somebody like Gogo doesn't get to play middleman with Starlink for airplanes. Like you said, half the time you get literally nothing for your money. Unless despondently clicking 'reload' over and over for 2 or 3 hours is worth $19.

  • Al other Sat providers are fucked (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Friday September 16, 2022 @11:43AM (#62886979)

    The premise behind the old satellite system was that you charge outrageous prices and don't improve, because you're collecting your monopoly rent.

    The problem medium term is the old guys have no real way to compete with SL...and once they start losing contracts they lose financial viability. It only takes one contract loss for the death spiral, because at some point you need to cut staff because expenses...but then you don't have enough staff to do new things, etc.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Most of them are not competing with Starlink. They sell services to other businesses, with things like guaranteed bandwidth and availablity. They don't oversubscribe the system used by aircraft to communicate important diagnostic data, for example. They target markets like IoT sensor networks where the requirements are very different, e.g. 130W for the transceiver is not acceptable.

      Most if them are not doing in flight internet access. The ones that are, yeah, they are in trouble.

  • Friendly Reminder (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SodaStream ( 6820788 )
    Elon Musk isn't doing this. SpaceX is, and Starlink is. Musk is not an inventor; he's an investor.
    • Sir I saw no less personage then Tony Stark praising Elon musk's brilliance!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by vivian ( 156520 )

        Still waiting for that electric plane idea Elon promised Mr Stark. Others seem to have taken the idea and run with it though.

    • What? How dare you burst the myth of the visionary superman renaissance man that is Elon Musk? All of the engineers, commercial planners, sales people, and operations people would just sit around humming to themselves doing nothing if not for His Mighty Holiness Elon Musk. We should be changing our name from "mankind" to "Muskovites" for all that he has done for us.

    • Elon Musk isn't doing this. SpaceX is, and Starlink is. Musk is not an inventor; he's an investor.

      Sure he is - he made sure it said so in the contract! Just like he's a "founder" of Tesla...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      Yeah he's also the CEO of the SpaceX so they're doing it under his leadership. I don't think anyone thought Musk was up in space aiming the satellites and tapping out signals in Morse code.

      It's like if someone said "Biden is invading Australia" you would be able to assume that Biden is not actively storming the beaches but the US Military under his control is instead.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Yeah he's also the CEO of the SpaceX so they're doing it under his leadership. I don't think anyone thought Musk was up in space aiming the satellites and tapping out signals in Morse code.

        It's like if someone said "Biden is invading Australia" you would be able to assume that Biden is not actively storming the beaches but the US Military under his control is instead.

        No, I'd imagine quite the opposite — an almost-octagenarian in combat fatigues shouting "Help me liberate you from the king!" while running down the beach with a crazed look in his eyes — and I'd laugh for a minute or two before concluding that you must have meant the U.S. military and wondering why you didn't say that in the first place.

        If you mean SpaceX, say SpaceX. Attributing the work of a company or government or military to a single individual is hero worship, not journalism.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ksevio ( 865461 )

          Saying Elon Musk is basically just using his name as a metonym. It's very common in English

    • Elon Musk is a person who has seen new markets and new ways to service those markets. He has had the vision to think that things no one else has done at a reasonable price could be done. He has then hired the correct people and given them the resources to make new things. In many ways he was more important than the inventor. May inventions come about because the ground work is done. The path may not be easy or straight forward but humanity has the knowledge to do it. At times like that it is the visio

    • Re:Friendly Reminder (Score:4, Insightful)

      by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Friday September 16, 2022 @01:18PM (#62887233)

      Musk is not an inventor; he's an investor.

      The hard part of most things isn't the actual literal engineering it's finding a way of making it cost effective. "Going to Mars" would be easy if you just devoted a few trillion dollars.

      Everybody says "Pfffttt, Elon didn't do anything" and yet somehow magically no other company is doing what Elon is doing. "Pfft, Electric cars are easy" Ok... and yet Tesla is selling 70% of EVs in the US.

      High level engineering is engineering. Every level of engineering is engineering. Engineering mostly comes down to narrowing the infinite possible design space to a single functional solution. There are infinite possibilities and infinite balancing of tradeoffs with any solution. The guy working on the valve that opens and closes is solving the exact same problems as the guy who chooses which valve to greenlight.

      Elon is a covid denying, 4chan edge lording, douchebag. But he's also proven that as a high-level engineer he's very good at his job. The reason Autopilot is the defining feature of Teslas is Elon Musk. The reason automatic windshield wipers and auto high beams are unusable embarrassments on a Tesla... is because of Elon Musk.

      "SpaceX is doing this not Elon Musk" is such a classic idiotic Slashdot comment that thinks that the engineer who designed a valve is the reason SpaceX is SpaceX and Boeing is Boeing. Ignoring the significance of not just Elon Musk but also Gwynne Shotwell is just a way to protect your own fragile ego and significance in an organization where you probably are easily replaceable, and the company would never notice if you disappeared.

      I'm not saying that companies can't create products without workers. Collectively workers are important. But workers all independently fucking around don't achieve anything without direction and purpose and someone saying, "This is what we're all going to be doing."

      You might as well say "Steven Spielberg isn't a film maker, he just told people what to do." Exactly. Telling people what to do is the whole fucking point of leadership. Yes, it's super collaborative. No, that doesn't mean every idea comes from the top. But the person sorting through 300 or in the case of SpaceX 10,000 people's ideas is A Job. It's a difficult skill. And when you suck at it, you end up like Boeing or GM or Ford or ULA or Blue Origin or [insert company here] who had as much or more money than Elon but for some reason failed to do what Elon's companies did.

    • Actually, Elon IS an inventor with a number of parents, and a number of Tesla and SpaceX employees saying that he was(is?) an important contributor. With that said, you are likely correct that he is investor AND manager over starlink. I would be surprised if he is making many, if any contributions at this time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      He's the hype man. Starlink is already having contention issues in some areas where they took on too many subscribers.

      He talks about YouTube, but the bandwidth is split between hundreds of people on the aircraft. So either it's going to be priced high enough that only a few people use it, or it's going to have issues.

  • I vote Elon Musk as most likely to build Elysium [wikipedia.org] or The Aerium in Bay City [fandom.com].

  • Static or moving dish? (Score:3)

    by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Friday September 16, 2022 @01:13PM (#62887207) Homepage Journal

    I am curious to find out whether the SpaceX dishes are static, given the microarray approach it uses on the ground, or still need to move like the current ones [stackexchange.com]?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      A physically moving dish antenna only works for geostationary satellites.
      Low-orbit satellites like Starlink move too fast for that, plus you need to switch between satellites frequently.
      So it always uses a phased array antenna. They may still have servos to aim in in the right general direction for optimal reception.

  • LOL, pilots on a long flight watching a movie and overfly where they are going
  • I was hoping it would be Janet.

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