Starlink - A Deep Look at SpaceX's Internet of the Future

this video was brought to you by skillshare hi welcome to another episode of cold fusion a lot of you that are fans of all things space related or even just following the journey of spacex would have at least heard of starlink an ambitious plan to revolutionize the way we think about satellite internet but today let's get into the details what is styling how do you go about building a global broadband internet service in space and what are the larger implications for spacex as a company let's take a look you are watching cold fusion tv [Music] starlink is a network of orbital satellites its aim is to enable almost anyone anywhere on the planet to have access to a broadband internet connection the development of starlink began in 2015 when elon musk stated that there was an unmet demand for low-cost global broadband capabilities he thought that this demand was significant enough to be very profitable the first prototype satellites were launched into orbit in 2018. with the data spacex received they could fine-tune the technology by january of 2021 after about 20 launches spanning three years starlink had over 1 000 satellites in orbit and it now serves more than 10 000 customers who are in its beta testing program and by may of 2021 starlink had received over 500 000 orders so it is clear that there is indeed demand spacex can build 120 satellites per month and wants to release 42 000 satellites by 2027. this is pretty crazy because only about 8 000 satellites have been sent into orbit since the soviet sputnik mission in 1957. [Music] spacex president gwynne shotwell states that starlink quote is best suited to rural and semi-rural populations in places where the internet is unreliable or unavailable she went on to state that starlink is not a replacement for giant providers like at t and comcast but rather very complementary to the services that they provide interestingly the potential for styling to be better than existing ground internet is possible and we will talk about this later in the episode speaking at a satellite conference in april of 2021 shotwell stated that the company will be quote able to serve every rural household in the united states or roughly 60 million people starlink will um serve the hardest to serve customers that uh telcos otherwise have trouble doing with with landlines or even with with uh cell radio stations you know with cell cell towers 60 million people is a huge market for just the united states so there's a great deal of earning potential here and if we consider worldwide the potential user base is massive these internet beaming satellites get put into space by spacex's falcon 9 rocket which usually releases 60 satellites per launch so the customer setup is as follows the styling hardware simply includes a satellite dish and a router which you'll set up at home to receive a signal from space so why do this all in short to make money by solving a problem back in 2018 elon musk stated that starlink would help provide spacex with the revenue needed to fund the company's long-term ambition to establish a base on mars he estimates that it could generate between 30 to 50 billion dollars in annual revenue by 2025 when the service has over 40 million subscribers admittedly that is a very lofty claim and we'll have to see how that pans out as for the problem starlink is trying to solve laying fiber optic cables is expensive and infrastructure can be just plain impractical in some areas for these scenarios satellite internet makes more sense if it can be done cheaply enough but that's not to say that building satellite internet is easy it involves launching rockets into space after all but there's less competition in that sector and spacex is the best rocket company around reliably delivering payloads into space for many clients at lower cost than anyone else with reusable rockets not only this but the company just took their second crew to the international space station but with a reused capsule and a reused booster a historical first basically spacex has made rocket launching become routine look no further than their rideshare website where with the click of a button you can select what payload you want to send into space so say that i wanted to send a subscriber to space let's say they weigh about 90 kilograms i'll just select that and there we go so with this pedigree in mind spacex is the best company to launch thousands of satellites in a cost-effective manner each satellite costs about three hundred thousand dollars a lot cheaper than other communication satellites because spacex also builds their own satellites they've baked in some pretty cool features for example the krypton plasma thrusters are just awesome according to a 2019 spacex press release the thrusters allow for the satellites to autonomously avoid debris automatically correct their trajectory and when their time orbiting the earth is up they can safely maneuver themselves to self-destruct by positioning themselves to burn up in the earth's atmosphere the release also stated quote additionally 95 of all the components in the design will quickly burn in the earth's atmosphere at the end of each satellite's life cycle exceeding all current safety standards with future iterative designs moving to complete disintegration starlink currently has over 1 200 working satellites in orbit and by 2025 no less than 11 943 of these satellites will circle the earth and as mentioned the final system will have 40 000 plus satellites and when this system is completed it should look something like this in this animation by mark handley you can see that the satellites will blanket the earth the first 1500 satellites will operate in orbits of 550 kilometers or 341 miles above the earth spread in 24 orbital planes inclined at 53 degrees to the equator even right now if you head to the satellite tracking website leo labs you can see trains of styling satellites traveling and criss-crossing patterns it's pretty entertaining now here's where it gets really interesting starlink plans to use laser light to enable the satellites to communicate with each other and when the lasers are used to connect satellites to each other to create a true network styling has the potential to be faster than ground internet connections this is because light travels faster in a vacuum than through fiber optic cable a simulation by mark hanley calculates latency for starlink in a connection from new york to london a very important one for the global financial system starlink latency is under 50 milliseconds while the current internet is around 70 milliseconds and the longer the physical distance the better it gets london to singapore starlink 90 milliseconds current internet 159 milliseconds okay so far all of this sounds slightly amusing or even cool but you may be thinking hey we've already had satellite internet for a long time so what's the big deal yes satellite internet has been around since about 2003 but starlink is doing it a bit differently but to understand that we first need to understand how satellite internet came to be the idea of satellite internet is almost as old as the internet itself it usually hinges on the idea of a geosynchronous satellite that is one that orbits the earth above the equator and remains fixed following the earth's rotation interestingly this idea was popularized by the science fiction author arthur c clarke all the way back in 1945 this stationary satellite idea was first done commercially in 1963 and then became adopted for use in television military and telecommunications applications from the 1990s when the internet gained popularity many tried to take cyberspace up into well space the most prominent effort was the 9 billion failure of teledisc a project partly funded by microsoft that aim to have a constellation of hundreds of low orbiting satellites the project was eventually abandoned in 2003 but in september of the same year the first internet-ready satellite for consumers was launched by utoolsat satellite internet prior to starlink was useful in both rural areas on the ground and for airlines to allow internet while flying but it was slow many satellite internet users would know that the speeds aren't that great and it's quite expensive for what you're getting and it takes a lot of time from the signal to get to earth up to space and back to earth again with average latencies of about 600 milliseconds and this is where space x comes in to solve these problems spacex decided to improve upon existing expectations of satellite connections by placing their satellites in a much lower orbit than traditional methods sometimes up to 60 times lower this low orbit approach means less distance for the starlink signals to travel and thus less latency latency plays a huge role in time-sensitive internet applications like delays and video conversation when video calling or gaming not only this but spacex decided not to go for the geostationary approach on the plus side this also reduces latency but on the other hand it makes tracking satellites much harder because they're rapidly moving across the sky instead of hanging stationary overhead so here's a question how do the starlink dishes on the ground track and receive internet data from a bunch of satellites flying through the sky at a rate of seven kilometers per second well the way they do this is also pretty amazing [Music] the starlink dish doesn't physically move across the sky to track all the satellites because that would be ridiculous instead there's actually hundreds of tiny antennas creating a phased array these signals are processed by a large integrated circuit which adds them together intelligently because the beam is moved digitally rather than physically it can be scanned so fast that it can accurately follow any satellite moving across the sky it can also be refocused near instantaneously at another satellite if the first satellite gets too close to the horizon or is obstructed technically you'd be able to use one of these in the middle of the pacific ocean and still be fine this setup is called a phased array antenna and it has its origins in military use and is traditionally very expensive so for spacex to bring this technology down to the consumer level is pretty outstanding [Music] so the question must be asked yes so starlink is doing all this fancy stuff but how is it better than the state of the art we're targeting latency below 20 milliseconds so somebody could could play a fast response video game uh at a competitive level like that's the threshold for uh the latency well according to ask technica the average satellite internet has latency of 638 milliseconds and according to cnet the average download speeds range from 25 megabits per second to around 100 megabits per second starlink in its early stages has the following performance according to beta testers between 50 and 175 megabits per second with a latency of about 20 to 40 milliseconds linus tech tips in his testing got about 138 megabits per second download and 27 milliseconds latency according to spacex speeds should improve as more satellites get launched and the network gets filled out the target speed will be 1 000 megabits per second or 1 gigabit per second for context in perth australia i get about 17 megabits per second and 50 milliseconds latency and i'm a three minute drive away from the cbd but i guess that's just australian internet for you but back to starlink they do state that some interruptions in connectivity are to be expected in these early stages [Music] so what about bad weather well that's definitely one of the downsides of satellite internet as per starling's faq the satellite dish is actually capable of melting snow that gets on it but it can't do anything about snow buildup on either side or obstructions that might block the satellite's line of sight it also reads quote heavy rain or wind can also affect satellite internet connection potentially leading to slower speeds or a rare outage end quote [Music] so what about the cost well the styling service isn't exactly cheap on top of a 99 per month subscription fee customers must also pay 499 for the satellite dish and the wi-fi router but after knowing about the technology inside of the dish that kind of price is expected though spacex's president quinn shot well expects the upfront equipment cost to come down to quote the few hundred dollar range within the next year or two so we're almost at the end of the video but before we end let's take a quick look at the competition so a company called oneweb which is backed by airbus and richard branson have launched a few satellites for their global internet but filed for bankruptcy in 2020 though they recently have secured 1.4 billion dollars in new funding and then there's amazon's cooper which is backed by the fortunes of billionaire jeff bezos and they're looking to join the race to provide broadband services from satellite constellations but if you ask me i think spacex is miles ahead here though it has to be mentioned that there are some negatives to this project astronomers complain of light pollution caused by styling satellites painting the satellites black has been proposed but some argue that this isn't enough the other main issue is if something goes wrong in orbit say a tiny piece of debris is coming for a styling satellite and the satellite can't use its thrusters to get out of the way in time this would result in a cascading event where collisions occur from too many satellites in low orbit though the probability of this happening all depends on how good the autonomous systems are on the styling satellites if they are as good as claimed then this shouldn't be an issue so what about the implications for spacex well for spacex starlink is very interesting because already the performance of the system holds its own and is only set to get much better over time in other words much of the value of the system is in the future if the speed of the full satellite system is anything like the simulation that mark hanley calculates having internet speeds better than ground internet and being able to be anywhere in the world and receive a signal would really feel like living in the future the styling system is a huge feat but if all works out well and it turns out to be profitable it could spell a bright future for spacex although we should probably be skeptical of that 50 billion annual revenue by 2025 but even half of that is a great achievement and elon really does think that this is going to be massively profitable after all he has tweeted that starlink might be its own spin-off ipo so watch this space if you want to discuss more about starlink head over to the cold fusion discord there will be a new channel in there for some discussion before we finish off i just want to give a shout out to skillshare for sponsoring this video skillshare is an online community for learning anything from video editing to productivity or graphic design i'm sure a bunch of you know who marcus brownlee is he's one of the biggest tech youtubers on the platform and he recently released a course on skillshare it goes through everything from researching to writing scripts and planning for an actual video that he released on youtube marcus did a great job here and i thought the course was general enough for anyone to pick up some pointers so if you're after some self-improvement or just want to learn a new skill skillshare has you covered the first 1000 people get a free trial of skillshare premium membership and a membership is only ten dollars a month after that click the link below to get started so thanks for watching everyone my name is dagogo and you've been watching cold fusion and i'll see you again soon for the next episode cheers [Music]

Channel: ColdFusion

Views: 554,673

Keywords: Coldfusion, TV, Dagogo, Altraide, Technology, Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Tesla

Id: 7aL5fRjkjcI

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/clorox2]

This is about neither sailboats nor cruising.