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Author Topic: Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet  (Read 1968 times)

Mackin USA

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Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet
« on: January 17, 2015, 05:37:33 PM »
Musk wants to build a second Internet in space and one day use it to connect people on Mars to the Web.

“Our focus is on creating a global communications system that would be larger than anything that has been talked about to date.”

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2015-01-17/elon-musk-and-spacex-plan-a-space-internet
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Mr. Mackin

ergophobe

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Re: Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet
« Reply #1 on: January 18, 2015, 05:35:20 PM »
This would be huge for places like where I live. My internet is currently off the geosynchronous satellite network at 22,000 miles away, so ping times are regularly over half a second.

If I were pinging satellites 750 miles away, it would be a massive speed gain. We pay $70/month for high latency, slow internet with a 10GB/month transfer cap. I think everyone around here would gladly pay $100 for Musk's service.

We actually tried to get a T1 line which would have been $340/month for 1.5Mbps, but the phone lines are saturated and they can't offer that. They can't offer DSL because of distances to the CO, but T1 lines don't have that problem, the problem they have is they take a lot of dedicated bandwidth on a very narrow pipe and we already have six neighbors who are running T1 (yes, six out of 150 houses in our neighborhood are paying over $300/month for 1.5Mbps service and more would be paying it if it were available, plus one person with a commercial satellite system that costs over $300/mo).
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ergophobe

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Re: Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet
« Reply #2 on: January 18, 2015, 05:44:22 PM »
BTW, the Mars part of this is absurb. You would have ping times between 4 and 24 minutes. If there's going to be "internet" on Mars, you need a massive pipline capable of mirroring the entire internet on Mars and updating.

Imagine running rsync for the whole internet.... that's what you'll need. I guess by the time we have a large enough population on Mars to warrant such a thing, maybe that will be a simple problem to solve.
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ergophobe

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Re: Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet
« Reply #3 on: January 18, 2015, 05:45:24 PM »
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littleman

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Re: Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet
« Reply #4 on: January 19, 2015, 06:42:20 PM »
Wow, caching the entire Internet once a day would be quite an ordeal today.  I'm sure by the time there would be enough people on Mars for it to have it's own mirror the Internet will be 1000x bigger.  Also, there would have to be syncing up in both directions.
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ergophobe

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Re: Elon Musk's Plan to Build a Space Internet
« Reply #5 on: January 19, 2015, 08:25:26 PM »
Exactly and who knows how much data will be created every day when everyone is on 3d 4K holographic movies.

I think the Mars reference was actually just a PR bid and it has worked. Overwhelmingly the article and the plan seem to be about high-speed terrestrial internet that is freed from the phone/cable infrastructure, which would be seriously disruptive completely apart from the fact that I would pay $200/month in a heartbeat if it were available today. I think the Mars part is just a red herring to divert attention from that.

BTW, a 0.5 to 1-second ping time is already miserable. I can only imagine what a 44 minute ping time would be like. It would be like internet versus telegraph.

In terms of caching, this already happens to some extent with satellite internet. They actually run servers on the satellites with the most requested resources (say JQuery from the biggest CDNs) so that it cuts the ping time in half for secondary requests (that is what kills you is not the ping on the html page, but on all the resources the html page loads, so if those are on the satellite it helps).
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