Google to plonk tentacles on 'unwired' world with $1bn launch of 180-satellite fleet Google has embarked on an ambitious $1bn plan to launch 180 satellites to provide internet access to remote parts of the world, according to the Wall Street Journal. It seems the race is on to be the provider of choice for the enormous (and un-invoiced) emerging market, though who will advertise to it is yet to be revealed. …
> Not much per person but there are so many of them
It's not just poor people, but poor people in remote areas. Even in third world countries, a large proportion of the population are city dwellers.
So if their countries' infrastructure is so bad that there aren't even any phone lines (or internet cables) that can reach these cut-off individuals - will the roads be in any better shape? How are the goods they buy from all the tantalising advertisements going to be delivered?
Please let the advertising be for stuff that will actually help improve lives: not just for games add-ons and pr0n.
And will they have any electricity to power the devices required to connect to?
The poorest country in the world is The Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2012, there were 19.5m mobile phones for a population of 77.4m, which means that about 25% of the population has a mobile phone. Probably several members of the same family share a mobile phone, so the percentage of the population that has access to a phone will be higher than that, and the percentage of the population that has access to a phone signal will be higher still.
> which means that about 25% of the population has a mobile phone. Probably several members of the same family share a mobile phone,
Exactly. More people have mobile phones than they have electricity in their homes. Which is why it is so common in Africa (particularly West Africa) to see the bloke on the roadside selling petrol (typically one or two one-litre bottles of it) *and* offering phone charging services out of a little diesel-powered generator. He will also sell you credit recharges for your phone and if you're lucky, SIMs.
If not, he will be sitting (on a fruit crate) next to the more upmarket shop consisting of someone, typically a lady, inside a wooden booth, who will sell you the SIMs as well as do money transfers for you.
There are actually lots of micro-entrepreneurs in Africa (not much red tape to wade through, so people are happy to give it a go. [ARE YOU LISTENING, FRANCE!?!?]) As someone above said, they may not move much money, but there are so many of them.
Google and Farcebook know exactly what they're doing. Although I suspect the Chinese (and the Arabs) have got a good head start on this as they landed on these markets decades ago (centuries for the Arabs).
Delivery, not a problem. Perhaps the nearest GoogBalloon can double as a massive regional distribution centre, if made large enough. Small drones to carry out the orders, larger drones to disperse stock between the balloons from continental centres.
Wouldn't take much of a drone to carry a few freshly hatched chicks or some seed to the remote areas, all those <insert minimum unit of local currency as required> add up. Just because an area is poor, doesn't mean it can't be swayed to spending it on what you {they} want.
Is how Google expect to launch that number of satellites for only $1bn. Iridium are working on a replacement cluster for their current network. 66 satellites are costing them $2.9bn, plus nearly $500 million for SpaceX to launch them. Google want to launch nearly 3 times that number.
Google ordered their satellites using Amazon Prime with FREE Second Day Delivery and put the ISS as their address.
In seriousness, the Iridium satellites are vastly more advanced than what Google plans to use. This entire exercise is ridiculously far looking and there's simply zero justification for long service life satellites. There's no reason to deal with things like advanced atmospheric compensation or anything outside a very, very narrow range of variables and performance. Who is going to complain?
The Internet as we know it is absolutely meaningless (except for porn, everybody understands that) without the incredibly large infrastructure we built before www ever came to your house. We tend to forget about it, but that's just because that infrastructure is so mind numbingly enormous that we consider it 'part of the world' just like trees, or oceans or the sky. We see the BIG Names like Amazon or BT or Exxon or Tesco or Wal-Mart and we forget they too are built on the same infrastructure that holds up hundreds of thousands of other businesses. The Internet is worth little without all that and worth even less if the users are largely illiterate and don't have computers or electricity besides.
My point, is that you can launch the equivalent of science fair satellites and the only people who will complain are going to be (comparatively wealthy) Westerners who find they can't connect to blog about how shitty it is.
"Is how Google expect to launch that number of satellites for only $1bn."
Google are probably pricing based on likely SpaceX launch costs rather than other, more traditional launch systems. IIRC, SpaceX are predicting launch costs 75% less than everyone else with mainly reusable systems.
LEO versus GSO is irrelevant for the amount of data bandwidth, being closer to Earth helps only the latency. The data bandwidth is determined by the radio bandwidth and the type of modulation/error correction used. The difference between LEO and GSO unfortunately doesn't help improve the modulation/error correction you can use, because the limiting factor is the last 10-20 miles passing through the atmosphere, not the 220 or 22,000 miles passing through vacuum.
> ... would have a lifetime of about a month in rural Africa.
In my experience, it's more like a day. The next morning, you'll find a grinning bloke who's set up his little stall next to the road and is selling you back your own optical fibre. Repeat day after day until someone decides to give the bloke a job that'll keep him away from your fibre.
God, I miss Africa! :'(
A series of unfortunate accidents will befall any location sporting a suitable antenna dish.
These are not, AFAICT, SatPhones like Iridium. More like the pirate TV dishes favored in some US-allied countries in the middle east. Even if the powers that be don't immediately destroy your dish, they will make a note who and where you are.
A series of unfortunate accidents will befall any location sporting a suitable antenna dish.
Just how, pray tell, are you planning to keep a consumer dish oriented at a bunch of low-orbit satellites whizzing over the sky in a matter of minutes?
These are not, AFAICT, SatPhones like Iridium. More like the pirate TV dishes favored in some US-allied countries in the middle east.
You might have heard TV satellites identified by their position as "XY.Z degrees east". Perhaps that's possible at all because they are, you know, geostationary, which the Google sats have been explicitly declared in the article not to be...?
Jamming, that's what Chincom will do. The signal is essentially radar frequency and not real high power so jamming has already been figured out.
Correct me if I am wrong but the upstream side of a satellite "internet" connection has to travel on terrestrial networks. Easy to block those too.
The upstream side of a satellite "internet" connection can go by satellite, too. It depends on the system.
If your goal is to provide connectivity to places without it, then the upstream obviously needs to go by satellite. If your goal is to make an existing connection (e.g. a dial-up modem) faster, then upstream can go by your existing connection, since most people download a lot more than they upload.
"Correct me if I am wrong but the upstream side of a satellite "internet" connection has to travel on terrestrial networks."
Iridium uses a "switchboard in the sky" back-haul concept. They can run with one (1) ground station, and I think that they are close to that in fact.
> Correct me if I am wrong but the upstream side of a satellite "internet" connection has to travel on terrestrial networks
Yup, you are wrong. Vastly so.
How do you think we get high-speed internet access at sea, or in the air, or at the International Space Station?
Or in remote areas on land?
Does VSAT mean anything to you?
They'll just shoot them down, they've already demonstrated that they can[1]. They could also hack into the control units of the things and de-orbit them, or jam/DoS the up-link and/or down-link. There are many other things they can do.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6289519.stm
Fun fact (and a correction): Moto did not spend $5B on Iridium. They built the constellation using Other People's Money, so they got paid and the dumb "investors" lost. Several other LEOsat projects were proposed and failed in the same time frame. GlobalStar is however still in operation; it was a much simpler and less ambitious design, which made more sense.
"GlobalStar is however still in operation..."
You've unintentionally left the impression that Iridium is defunct. It is, of course, as you know, alive and well. Iridium is also, by any reasonable definition, a bit bigger and arguably better than GlobalStar. Certainly better coverage.
Has Google been acquiring worldwide satellite spectrum? Or acquiring a company that already holds it?
I suppose if they're targeting unserved/underserved areas like Africa, there should be plenty of unused spectrum, and they don't really care about getting spectrum in places like the US and EU where there is a lot less to be had.
Whether the African spectrum has been snapped up by companies just sitting on it, or requires a series of bribes is another matter, however. Presumably they've already taken care of this need, because if they haven't the price of available spectrum in such areas has gone up overnight, since the holders would now know Google may be interested in it.
I can see why they have done it, £1bn or even a few bn is cheap for infrastructure investment on a global network. Google are also in the business of networks. Its pretty much pocket change for them and perhaps its even just an exec who wants net access *ANYWHERE* in the world. Eitherway a fuck load of satellites and google getting into space isnt going to hurt.Well hurt google anyhow...
Ok, 1 billion dollars - cool.
180 satellites - nice.
The one divided by the other... hang on, hang on... a hair over 5.5 million dollars per satellite.
Hmm. unless you can launch at least 10 of these things on ONE launcher (and yes, I'm assuming a Falcon 9 'cos ULA prices? Don't bother.) then no-one's going to take your money. I'm not an expert but I doubt that 10 or more of these things could reach their intended orbits from only one launcher.
We need a pedantic math nazi icon...
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