This could facilitate vehicle to vehicle communications where cell coverage isn't available. I wonder if it can also provide GPS style location service? Higher satellite count would work in normally occluded areas.
GPS requires 4 satellites using triangulation at different positions in space. I think it would be very accurate and provide HD mapping for navigation and self driving.
IIRC at one point they were talking about pretty much replacing "the internet" with this as well as offering real time GPS as a service. So if a fishing company wanted to track a school of fish or a car company wanted to track how many cars their competitor had in a parking lot etc. Wonder if they might tie this into the Tesla autopilot strategy, seems like real time gps could be useful for that too?
Current systems use high accuracy atomic clock, if they have a cost effective way to provide that, then good to go. Given the bidirectional nature of the communications, they may be able to do something completely different... There is a large market for remote sensing/ monitoring applications Starlink would be great for, current options are limited bandwidth/ data and many require equatorial/ geostationary visibility.
SkyNet. Tesla needs to build some kind of ICBM system to put those suckers down when ASI tries to take over
This is rather exciting and in 2019 I'm sure there will be many changes to how we communicate and what the internet looks like.
I'd like to see an essay from Elon first: "What have I learned from Teledesic and why I won't make the same mistakes that McCaw and Gates made."
I remember when Wild Blue starting talking about low Earth orbit satellites for internet nearly 20 years ago. Current geosynchronous satellites work but the latency is horrible. A network of LEO satellites would definitely have less latency and could outperform terrestrial networks. I think Wild Blue was only going to have ~400 satellites...so if SpaceX has over 4000, they should have really good coverage with lots of redundancy.
Trump was elected and now women can't be harassed in the workplace. Eliminating net neutrality will do nothing but speed the advent of ubiquitous fast internet access. On another Space X note....a used Falcon 9 just pushed a used Dragon module toward the ISS. We're that much closer to a fully sustainable space taxi. Sick.
LOL, Comcast guy in my place right yesterday because I was getting 1 channel out of the 100? that I've been paying, even the local channels that are free with antenna. Guy is really nice for the record, we even talked about Tesla, but sometimes I wonder if it's time to cut the cords completely.
See Twitter According to user Haxorlols, two Starlink “microsats” will launch on the NET Jan 30 PAZ mission at Vandenburg. We already knew that sometime in 2018 SpaceX was going to launch the first two Starlink sats to test out their technology. This is great news that it will be so early in 2018. For those who don’t know what the SpaceX Starlink system is: it will provide global high speed/low latency internet access via a constellation of 4,425 small satellites in LEO. See SpaceX’s worldwide satellite broadband network may have a name: Starlink Elon has stated in the past that you will only need a receiver dish the size of a “pizza box” to access the network. All part of cutting the cord! And building a similar network in Mars LEO for planet-wide communication.
From the linked article: The launch of 4,425 operational satellites is slated to begin in 2019 with the system reaching full capacity in 2024. SpaceX has also proposed an additional 7,500 satellites operating even closer to the ground, saying that this will boost capacity and reduce latency in heavily populated areas. But Cooper offered no specific timeline for this part of the project during the May hearing. SpaceX is not the only company seeking to build a low-Earth, high-capacity satellite broadband network. A company called OneWeb was the first to seek Federal Communications Commission approval for such a system, and it received a key approval in June. OneWeb, which intends to use 720 satellites, is planning to start offering broadband services in Alaska as early as 2019. Another company called LeoSat says it is launching up to 108 low-Earth-orbit satellites. End quote.
More seriously now, this is the kind of disruption that really has me excited. When you make access to space cheap and fast, some really exciting stuff can happen. If you're thinking that it's not going to cover all communications, please remember that The Boring Company is starting to make some very big conduit, er, tunnels, I mean tunnels.