Yea!
Happy Days are here again!
That SpaceX, Tesla, Elon Musk guy is launching the first of
his Internet satellites in a couple of days. Move over you nasty, nasty Comcast. I can breathe again!
SpaceX made headlines when it put a Tesla on its way to
Mars, with the successful launch of the Falcon Heavy. Now, much closer to
Earth, a Falcon 9 is getting ready to take its first two Starlink internet
satellites into orbit on Feb. 17.
If all goes well, they'll be followed by 11,923 other
Starlink satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO). The first two, Microsat-2a and
Microsat-2b, are test systems. These satellites will form a constellation of
satellites, which will deliver broadband internet across the world.
According to SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's Elon
Musk is working on this because, "Elon tends to find an industry where
customers are very angry and frustrated. Let's build little communications
satellites and provide global broadband capability for reasonable prices."
If this works, Musk plans to use the same design for a Martian internet.
These mass-produced satellites will use the relatively
little-used V band, which covers 40GHz to 75GHz, to communicate with each other
in a mesh network. They'll then work with Earth-bound receivers to deliver
broadband internet. How fast will that be? Good question.
By 2022, SpaceX predicted -- to the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) -- that: "Once fully optimized through the Final
Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per
user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US
and globally." And 1Gbps is much better than most of us get on the ground.
Happy Days Are Here Again - Leo Reisman & His Orchestra - 1929
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