After today's misadventure with Tesla Tech being UNABLE!!!!! remotely to unlock our P85 when the fob wouldn't do the trick, primarily because Wickenburg, as most Phoenix-Las Vegas travelers know, is in an AT&T dead zone, here is one owner who not only hopes this story comes to fruition but also becomes the backbone of a worldwide (??????????) Tesla-Communications setup. Perhaps???
What a guy, launching all of these satellites to give the Tesla fleet free voice & data for life :smile:.
Yay, an advanced global satellite network. What could possibly go wrong? In a briefntwitter conversation, maybe with DrTaras, he said it'd be low cost. They don't have reusability yet.
Anybody remember Teledesic? It's been almost 20 years but it's a similar technical story: 840 satellites, 120 kg, T1 speeds from orbit. Bill Gates and other tech giants supplied the initial funding. They got one satellite off the ground before selling the company as the scheme proved too costly ~$10B IIRC. We'll see.
All I can think is "LAG". Maybe they could be placed relatively close to earth and provide decent ping times. Still I don't know about gaming via satellite.
Typical satellite Internet works with slow ping, slow upload and faster download. But most data are downloaded, and for a car, much could be multicast. Maybe Elon Musk has worked out that it'll be cheaper to use satellite smartly than pay for cellular data. Or maybe he hates Sirius enough that he thinks it's worth spending a few hundred million to replace them.
Yeah but ping time is what matters when playing online games. Doesn't Hughesnet come with about 1 sec ping times. Can't play any sort of real time game with that much lag. Granted GSO is a lot farther out than you would have to be if you just stayed in LEO. Not sure what sort of latency you could get with a 'cloud' of LEO com-sats. And what sort of packet dropping you might incur swapping satellites that often. - - - Updated - - - Ok I just looked. A LEO com-sat cloud would probably provide "as good" latency as ground based communication systems. I didn't quite realize how far out GEO/GSO really is in comparison.
Lag/ping does not come from satellites being far away - EM waves travel faster through air/vacuum than through copper wires (300Mm/s in vacuum, only 2/3 of that in Cu) - but from inadequate bandwidth of their back links.
Satellite internet has slow ping times because it usually uses geostationary satellites in a high orbit. Original satellite telephones were like this too, in fact they were painful to talk on because of the delay. Modern satellite phones are really no different than talking on a cell phone or landline, the new ones use a constellation of low earth orbit satellites instead of a single geostationary. By switching to low earth orbit, ping times for data could be greatly reduced. Maybe not quite to the high end gaming market, but enough that normal use would be no problem at all, even with interactive web applications. Problem is that what you used to do with one satellite, now needs many, which tends to be expensive (both the companies that did this for satellite telephones went bankrupt almost immediately after setting up their networks, and one of them doesn't even have enough satellites up there for decent coverage) What is proposed here is that they can make both the satellites themselves, and the launches for them, inexpensive enough for this to be practical. This is something I've speculated would happen for some time, generally people have told me it'll never happen, and that I'm crazy to expect it, but I'll take crazy if it puts me in the same category as Elon...
Yeah lag/ping does come from distance when you are talking GEO/GSO. It takes ~1/2 second to make the round trip to GEO/GSO at the speed of light! That is why news "via satellite' news feeds have those awkward gaps in them.
I've long thought that cheap launches would mean cheap satellites, because cheap launches would lower the cost of failure and shorten the required lifespan. Maybe this is SpaceX preparing for the next step.
xkcd: Orbital Mechanics Obligatory xkcd link.. - - - Updated - - - http://xkcd.com/917/ Also applies.
Is this a solution looking for a problem? Why one would need this, when we allready have working mobile internet?
One word (really, one acronym): IoT (Internet of Things). Internet of Things - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For this concept to fully catch on and be truly useful and incoorporated in everyday life you need full coverage of everywhere. The bandwith requirements would perhaps not, at least initally, be that enormous since a 1st gen IoT will consist of many, many objects communicating limited ammounts of data per object (position, simple metrics such as for example temperature, state of charge, pressure, etc. etc). In a more avanced IoT situation you would eventually need higher bandwidth since the number of objects in communication will increase as well as the complexity of data (live audio and video streams, continous data on position, speed, rotation etc. etc.)