Do you think we'll have global coverage high speed satellite internet within 8 years?
Do you think we'll have global coverage high speed satellite internet within 8 years?
Levi Martin
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Jonathan Green
Nah, technologically wise speaking that's unlikely. I know a bit about the relevant technology and could explain that in more detail if you cared.
Kayden Campbell
Possibly. But, along side that, we'll also have mass surveillance at every corner then, too, which is unfortunate.
Benjamin Roberts
It's perfectly doable and there are plans. but considering the fast evolution of technology these satellites will be obsolete in less than a decade. Sending new ones into orbit every 5 years is going to hurt somebody's wallet quite a bit. Also this
Adrian Reed
Yea I'm interested.
Zachary Ross
maintenance wont be cheap but it's cheaper than laying that much fiber lol.
At 440km altitude sats are traveling at 7+km/s and with the precession of Earth a single sat can get within service range of a ton of ground throughout the year.
Grayson Baker
99.9% of wireless applications use electromagnetic waves to communicate which are restricted by physical laws. We use them because they have a bunch of cool properties like how depending on the frequency they act more like a focused laser beam or more like a source of sound.
However they all have the limitation that any beam spreads. Think of it like a flashlight: If you stand really close to a wall a patch of the wall may appear really bright, if you go farther away the intensity decreases while the circle of light gets bigger.
This means that the signal intensity drops. Now if you would imagine you'd have a hole in the wall where someone sits on the other side and tries to verify if someone points a flashlight at the wall or not he will have an easy time determining it when you're really close, but the farther you move away the harder it will be. Maybe after some kilometers (or miles) he won't even notice at all. That describes the point where sensors fail to pick up a signal. Now you could increase the range of your flash light by focussing the light beam which would lead to a laser beam which would drastically increase your range - however now you've traded covered ground for intensity. For one sensor (for instance one hanging at your phone) that wouldn't matter, but if you intend to cover the earth with reception of any type you can't have it that focussed. In fact you'd want a pretty spread signal.
>cont.
Aiden Hughes
Now assuming we'd be able to have a sattelite that produces the insane amounts of energy to radiate enought signal to cover relevant surfaces on earth, we'd encounter a very interesting problem:
Contrary to what sci-fi keeps telling people space is not necessary cold. It is a vacuum which has really good heat insulation properties. Astronauts and machines in space have much more of a problem with overheating then with staying warm which is why all space suits are white and all materials reflective. So let's assume we had somehow fixed that problem aswell and we'd also add a large fucking nuclear power reactor to it because we'd need it we could start to transmit lots of data. But we'd need a lot of sattelites to achieve that. Very large, very expencive sattelites. It is much more cost effective to plaster earth with stations which you can access and replace as necessary compared to replacing a sattelite.
>cont.
John Perry
And now given that we had taken care of all those problems we'd encounter the problem of superposition. Imagine a room where several people talk. Every couple of people just wants to talk to one another - this is essentially the situation of several people accessing one access point - may it be a sattelite or base station. However if you add more and more people to the room you'd realize that it gets increasingly loud and conversations get harder and harder. At some point you might get the idea to establish rules when someone is allowed to talk and that maybe a portion of the room talks in another language. With that you can squeeze some more people into the room, but that has its limits. So there is a certain physical limit how many people can access one access point simultanously with a reasonable data rate. So you'd realize that because there's so many people covered by one sattelite the communication gets slow. To counter act that you could again increase the focus of the signal (think of the laser pointer analogy) to cover less space. You could then cover fewer people, but with guaranteed high speeds of connection. On the downside you'd need more sattelites again. Sattelites which as mentioned above are very very expencive. So the approach to cover just the right amount of space (to keep the room small) with high data rates you'd want to be close to the target: On the ground.
Grayson Walker
Just one more thing:
One thing that may appear in the near future is small access points on lanterns which could give you extremely high data rates.
That may be achieved either through LI-FI (information transmission through light) or a neat little technique clalled beam forming (maybe both).
Either could drastically increase the data rates so peoples hunger for 4K videos of kittens on their smart phones could be temporarily saturated, but it's probably not happening in 8 years. The relevant technology is still in research phase, so i'd give it at least 10 years, maybe 15.