matmatmatmat

This is happening in Seoul, SK and Toronto, CA right now. I wish it weren't coming to parts of the US, but also, I don't see why it wouldn't. Only with sustained economic decline would home prices drop. Or, maybe if supply increased substantially, but people in the suburbs love their home values and that sort of thing tends to turn people into NIMBY's.

Also, there will always be limited supply. COVID-19 and remote work changed that a little bit, but there's other reasons people want to live close to population centers: Restaurants, entertainment, shopping, schools, and friends, to name a few. Most people will always want to live not very far (but not too close!) to some group of other people.

I think pretty much everyone hopes you're right.

Ah, those numbers are from the Viasat earnings calls and some rough estimates. Each Viasat-3 satellite will have about 1 Tbps capacity and have a lifetime of 15 years. I don't know about cost, but Viasat-2 was in the neighborhood of $300e6, so, I assumed the same for Viasat-3. Viasat-4 is claimed to have a capacity of 3-5 Tbps and I assume a similar lifetime.

Now, these numbers are all well and good, but they don't include the cost of the ground system and the terminals, and I don't know what those will be. But, I would expect them to be cheaper, most crucially because GEO gives you more flexibility in where you place ground stations (vs LEO) and once you aim the dish, you pretty much never have to move it (LEO dishes spend their whole life slewing to match the satellites; it turns out that requires some parts that aren't so cheap.)

Anyway, I don't know what Starlink or Viasat's pricing will be in a few years, but I think Viasat will have a competitive edge in terms of overall cost.

Latency is definitely an issue for some users and some applications. If you watch what Hughes has been saying for years, it's that the future is hybrid, where a terminal uses both LEO and GEO, for what they're best suited for (i.e., interactive traffic over LEO, big, cheap bulk bits over GEO.) If you Google a bit, you can see the Viasat press releases alluding to this same capability. I don't know if/when that tech will make it to residential service, but I would expect that if there's unmet market demand, they'll get it out there.

Don't know why you're getting downvoted, I think you're right. Whether deserved or not, the news cycle 2016-2020 was one conflagration after another, sometimes with not even a day between them to absorb things.

Wish they had mentioned the efficiency and how it compares to existing options. Anyone know?

Yeap, and full self-driving is coming at the end of this year.

Yeah, they will never get to 42k, it's just marketing hype. Once they have one shell with sufficient coverage, adding new shells just tanks the economics of the constellation because of the uneven distribution of demand.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see, although Viasat-3 will be 1/4th the cost of Starlink (on a $/Mbps/month) basis and Viasat-4 will be about 1/15th. Even launching for "free", it's gonna be pretty tough for SpaceX to meet those numbers. The GEO satellites also require simpler and cheaper ground infrastructure, both on the ISP and on the customer side.

Closer to 20 Mbps, even, for a full-bandwidth OTA broadcast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards.

That makes sense, thanks!

It varies from constellation to constellation.

O3B's MPower constellation promises 10 Gbps terminals, but those terminals are very likely to go to big enterprise customers, as they will cost several $10k's.

Telesat's Lightspeed constellation is aimed at rural areas of Canada and 5G backhaul. To do the latter, they'll have to deliver at least 1 Gbps. Telesat's been in the game for a long time, so I wouldn't doubt that they'll deliver.

There's two Chinese constellations going up. They'll probably deliver anything and everything they can, but it remains to be seen what the satellite and terminal capacities will be. The west still has an edge here.

Starlink started with residential service but they'll try to expand into everything they can. One of applications I expect to see is to use Starlink to get data out of Teslas and back to the ML team so they can improve their self-driving code.

Kuiper? I mean, who knows. It's Amazon, so, they'll probably also try to expand into everything they can. I wouldn't be surprised if their delivery trucks will use it as backhaul.

You might notice that none of the above, so far, are actually aimed at connecting the unconnected. That's because the terminals, so far, are too expensive and too power-hungry. The only two initiative I'm aware of that are actually trying to connect the unconnected are:

OneWeb, which has truly global coverage (including the poles) and has a quite smart design, including working crosslinks and a relatively affordable terminal. Also, in the arctic, they can provide connectivity to militaries, so there's some good cashflow there.

Curvanet, an initiative by Tom Choi. They promise a sub $100 terminal that can run on 5 W (!) and does not require an ESA but can still deliver up to 50 Mbps. If they can actually pull this off I will buy a unit and stick on my roof just for fun. Also, if they succeed, they would be absolutely best-positioned in the market, as no one can (so far) match their cost or power consumption.

That's interesting, can you share anything about why we never really seemed to see much of this team's work?

I'm a meat-eater (have been my whole life), but I've always been partial to this argument. This is why I'm looking forward to lab-grown meat and would pay a bit of a premium for it.

Sure, maybe, but why should my or my family's life be put at risk until they figure it out?

Bro, I remember when multitasking became possible.

... except politics, engineers are usually not very good at politics, and climate change is, in large part, a political problem.

Different power companies use different smart meter tech, not all of which is easily readable.

SDG&E uses encrypted Zigbee to transmit data. AFAIK, it has not been cracked.

Statistical significance is whether or not the data support rejecting the null hypothesis. Effect size is the difference between the two samples. You can have statistically significant results with a very small effect size.

Whether in EUR or USD, those numbers will feel pretty good in Hungary.

Or "volunteering" at an animal sanctuary at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which they happen to have climbed while there over the summer.

I'm not finding a hole in this argument. It's especially interesting because Elon has a reputation as a risk-taker, so I would expect him to steer Tesla in this direction if it were possible and profitable.

Which is a shame, because the wind blowing across Wyoming is savage.

OP could've admittedly done a better job with this, but let me give it a try.

The problem comes down to spectrum, how much power you can push across that spectrum, and how you share that spectrum with other devices. The more bandwidth you have available, the more power you can send across it, and the fewer devices you have sharing it, the higher your information rate between a sender and receiver.

5G, in theory, brings a lot of spectrum to the table, so they can talk about, say 1 Gb/s or 10 Gb/s connections. The problem is, you've got to find a way to share that among users. Sharing spectrum is never a 1/n process because of inefficiencies, so you end up with a bit under 1/n speed for n users.

Meanwhile, cables might have less spectrum, but you can push comparatively more power through them, but more crucially, everyone gets their own connection and there's much less noise. So, more aggregate bandwidth across cables than over the air.

This is all very handwavy, so if someone would like to put some numbers to this and/or fix any mistakes I made, please have at it.

Yeah, no, not gonna happen, although I have heard of people getting better offers from incumbents by threatening to leave for Starlink.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, I think you make a really valid point: It appears to work well-enough for many people that they lower their guard, but not well-enough to actually work reliably, so it actually increases the overall risk profile.

Could you link a few of these? Genuinely interested in reading. Thanks in advance.

There is actually a counterexample to this that is happening right now. The Scripps hospital system in San Diego was hit with ransomware about two weeks ago and has been more or less down since then. Patients are not able to make new appointments, medical records are unavailable. My understanding is that doctors are still seeing patients if they have existing appointments, but surgeries are getting performed at other hospitals in other health systems.

I've heard of this security that comes from a bit of taxation phrased as "guillotine insurance".

Something I haven't seen in the comments, yet, is that kids are truly a one-way decision. I knew this before I went into it, but the repercussions didn't really hit me until after we brought the kid into the world.

You will find out things about your spouse and yourself that you never knew about, but your kid will have inherited them. Some of these things are attractive features, others are not. You might have to figure out how to deal with a feature of your kid that is not attractive. Some of these things can be fixed in post, others, not so much. Some of these possibilities include genetic diseases, which absolutely no one deserves, but do happen.

Having a kid is an enormously brave and risky decision. You roll the dice and you get what you get. There's no going back.

Edit: All that said, I do not regret my decision, even though I've been exhausted for coming up on two years and so has my wife. When it's bad, it's the worst. When it's good, it's the best. You will find yourself capable of more patience and resilience than you ever thought possible.