Indonesia, SpaceX Launch Satellite To Boost Internet Connectivity

Indonesia and Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX on Monday launched the country's largest telecommunication satellite from the United States, in a $540 million project intended to link up remote corners of the archipelago to the internet. From a report: Roughly two-thirds of Indonesia's 280 million population already use the internet, but connectivity is limited in far-flung, underdeveloped eastern islands of the Southeast Asian country. "Satellite technology will accelerate internet access to villages in areas that cannot be reached by fiber optics in the next 10 years," Mahfud MD, senior Indonesian minister, said in a statement ahead of the launch. The 4.5-tonne Satellite of the Republic of Indonesia (SATRIA-1) was built by Thales Alenia Space and deployed into orbit from Florida by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which then returned to an offshore site in a precision landing.

Almost going back to root

[BigFire]

SpaceX's first successful commercial launch (Falcon 1 launch 4 had a dummy payload) was for RazakSAT for Malaysia satellite operator. That was an imaging satellite that had some issue after getting into orbit. Now they've launch a much more ambitious communication satellite for Indonesia.

geosync or out of reach half the time

[aRTeeNLCH]

If they have one, it will have dreadful ping times (0.4s if memory serves) if geosynchronous, or it will be below the horizon half the time. Strangely, the story is more about musk, it seems...

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[drinkypoo]

Real world ping times on Viasat, the only internet-providing bird I have experience with, are 500-750ms. The time of flight isn't the whole latency story.

This is just narrowly good enough to do VoIP with tolerant settings, so while it is horrendous for many purposes (forget gaming, try editing a file with vi over a ssh connection) it is useful for most of them.

Re:

[aRTeeNLCH]

As my professor for telecom asked back in the day, "is a delay of half a second a problem in a phone connection? Well, it adds in an undesired pause that is normally not necessarily without meaning in a discussion, such as when I'm away on a conference and my wife asks: so with whom did you have dinner last night, dear?" Bringing the point home that there can be information in silence...

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[Pascoea]

it's geostationary. [satbeams.com] I'm sure those people who currently have zero Internet will be dreadfully upset that their new Internet will have a 400ms ping time.

Re:

[supremebob]

In a world where Starlink exists almost everywhere with sub-80ms ping times, setting up a new geostationary satellite doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

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[Pascoea]

I understand that Starlink is better, as far as latency and probably speed. But if I were the government of a country I wouldn't want to rely on the whims of a private entity from a foreign country to supply my Internet. Especially when that company is run by someone like Elon Musk who seemingly gets a chubby from being a professional troll. I wouldn't trust any of his companies with something mission critical if I had other options that weren't subject to being turned off because one of my colleagues sai

Starlink Backup?

[aaarrrgggh]

It would seem like Indonesia is one of the perfect places to use Starlink for backhaul. Maybe it can be used in some supplemental fashion.