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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

How do you plan to compete with SpaceX once they start offering low latency service everywhere?

All interactive traffic is latency sensitive (have built middleboxes to improve latency issues with tcp and other protocols)

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I'd take SpaceX's latency claims with a big grain of salt. They'll only be true if you're in close geographic proximity to one of their ground stations. Once you're routing packets between satellites to get to a ground station all bets are off.

The SpaceX ground stations are meant to be consumer owned (about the size of a pizza box).

There is a difference between the CPE (what you use to get the service) and what SpaceX uses to sink your traffic into the global internet. And in fact there is exactly zero incentive for somebody other than SpaceX to run the ground stations.

On the other hand it is completely possible that SpaceX's ground stations will use HW that is similar to their CPE box and thus they can build ridiculous amount of such ground stations (ie. at every IXP or so, althought the "lightweith non-IP transport" proclamation somehow precludes doing that)

That would be an interesting model for the ground stations. Everybody else builds large and capable ground stations with big dishes. Iridium for example provides global phone and slow data coverage using only one public ground station, but also uses a completely different band to talk with the ground stations vs. the handhelds.

Iridium used to have multiple gateways. I think Arizona, Italy, Middle East, and Asia. Do they only use Arizona now?

According to this Motherboard article [1] from Jan 27, 2018, only the Tempe, AZ gateway handles non-military traffic, with the US DOD and Russia operating the two other (military) gateways. I can't remember if the other gateways were shutdown during Iridium's bankruptcy.

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d34bmk/iridium-ne...

You (and the parent of my comment) are completely correct; I misunderstood.

Actually, because the speed of light in vacuum is faster than that in an optical fibre, SpaceX does great as long as the satellite-to-satellite hops aren't congested and land near your actual destination. The question no one knows the answer for is how often that will be, compared to the case of the ground station being farther away from the destination.

Because SpaceX is known to over-promise and under-deliver? They seem to have an extremely powerful institutional engineering capability. That's not fanboy talk e.g., we're going to mars! Just look at what they've accomplished. Landing a rocket on its business end is no mean feat -- for any engineering team, ever.

I know this is a YC forum but seeing the Astranis team's responses to people asking very incisive questions is troubling. Maybe they're far better at engineering than building confidence but I detect that sort of single minded dismissal (often of objective reality) that plagues a lot of entrepreneurs.

Maybe this is unfair but it sounds like someone got latched onto the idea of "micro-satellites" and won't let it go, ending up with "we can conceivably put up only X, so they'd have to be geosynchronous". Maybe there's a reason SpaceX is doing a LEO constellation, regardless of their unfair advantages in that regard.

Of course latency is an issue. Engineers will run away. Maybe you don't need them to succeed, maybe they are 0.1% of the market. Of course, where would Apple be without software engineer and designer buy in? Maybe the average customer shouldn't care, 'cause they're all high latency ok. Doesn't stop them from being swayed by marketing. A single infographic showing why low latency is better -- all else being equal -- what are customers going to choose?

Not sure why YC would have invested in this other than to broaden their portfolio. The chances of this company becoming a unicorn must be vanishingly small. If unicorns are no longer the VC mantra, cool, I've got a lifestyle business you can throw money at, provided there are zero expectations.

By all means prove me wrong and best of luck to you. Take this is as constructive criticism. If you're going to engage anyone in public bring your A game.

Because of the logistics of running a large number of ground stations, especially with the super narrow beams SpaceX is planning to use for their service. In order to achieve the latency numbers Musk talked about (beating terrestrial microwave transmission for front running purposes) you would have to deploy them like cell towers, and that's incredibly expensive.

SpaceX latency claims are based on the speed of light. Low earth orbit has only slightly longer line-of-sight distances between locations than the earth's surface, and:

- The speed of light is ~50% higher in vacuum than in fiber[1]

- Fiber on the ground doesn't follow straight lines

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-precisely-the-speed-of-light-i...

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