Elon Musk and Amazon are struggling to put satellite internet in your backyard

McOmies is part of a beta testing program for a new type of Internet service from missile company ElX Musk SpaceX. Their experience has been phenomenal so far, they say. They regularly get download speeds of 120 megabits per second, and because the antenna emits a fair amount of heat, they managed to stay connected most of the winter. They had to clean it after a recent blizzard, in any case.

It is unclear what kind of speed Starlink will offer millions of people, compared to the more than 10,000 tests now conducted in the US, Canada and the UK. Depending on the number of people registered by SpaceX, future users may have internet speeds that are only a fraction of what is available during this demo period. And even if Starlink and its soon-to-be-implemented competitors operate as announced, there are many other potential challenges to their viability, as well as profitability. These include common wireless spectrum headaches and the threat of space debris.

But with at least three other serious, deep-pocketed competitors in the internet-from-space race – including Amazon,

OneWeb and the long-standing operator Telesat – getting fast and reliable internet service from anywhere on earth with a clear view of the sky could not soon seem more miraculous than a cell signal. It may also not be much more expensive: The current price for Starlink is $ 499 in advance and $ 99 per month for service.

The Internet in space has obvious implications for the potential closure of the rural / urban digital divide, not only for Americans, but for the rest of the world. It could also encourage new ways of working and living, unrelated to cable and fiber optic internet connections. And offering huge areas of homes to a wider range of internet service providers, regardless of geography, could mean a shift in users, revenue and value away from traditional telecommunications companies.

Nick Buraglio lives right next to Champaign, Illinois. It has a lot of wired and wireless broadband options. However, as a professional network engineer, he tests Starlink out of curiosity.

Unlike reputable installation providers, Starlink asks you to do it yourself. But it was “easy to think of,” says Mr. Buraglio. He connected the pizza-sized Starlink antenna to the supplied router and power supply, then followed up on the Starlink smartphone app. Since he needs an unobstructed view of the sky, with no trees above it, he decided to permanently mount it on its roof. That, along with running the antenna’s data and power cable in his house, was the hardest part. However, he says, it was no more complicated than installing a TV antenna on the roof during the day.

Anyone who wants to replicate this experience will have to line up, though: the waiting list for Starlink is now up to a year old.

Starlink beta user experiences are allowed by about 1,000 satellites launched by the parent company. While this makes SpaceX own about a third of all active satellites orbiting Earth, it’s just the beginning: Starlink has received FCC approval to launch nearly 12,000 satellites.

So many satellites are needed, because each passes over the head very quickly and is relatively close to the Earth’s surface, up to about 1,200 miles, in what is known as “low Earth orbit.” The advantage of this orbit is that signals can travel quickly from Earth to a satellite and back, which is why Starlink is able to provide services with low “latency” – the time required for a signal to make a round trip. McOmies says they are able to use their Starlink service to simultaneously blow up opponents on the first-person shooter, “Apex Legends.”

Traditional telecommunications and Earth observation satellites generally float much farther from Earth, in what is known as geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles above the equator. This allows them to reach much more of the planet simultaneously, but the round-trip signal time is so long that applications such as internet telephony, video chat and most types of games are virtually impossible.

The UK-based OneWeb, which was founded in 2012 and went bankrupt in 2020, was recently relaunched by a consortium that includes the UK government and Bharti Global. The company has already launched 110 satellites out of a planned 648. The idea is for 588 to be active at all times, says Chris McLaughlin, head of government affairs at OneWeb. He projects that by the end of this year, the company’s network will provide internet coverage to the northern latitudes, with full global coverage next year.

Another competitor is the Canadian satellite company Telesat. Unlike others, he has over 50 years of experience operating satellites, says CEO Dan Goldberg. Telesat does not want to offer everyone an antenna, as Starlink and OneWeb do. Instead, it would provide connections to ground stations owned by telecommunications companies, which would then connect to end users in conventional ways, such as cellular or long-range Wi-Fi networks. Users should not have to worry about how they got the internet connection they enjoyed and could use phones and other mobile devices instead of specialized equipment.

Telesat will begin launching its new constellation of 298 low-Earth orbiting broadband satellites in 2023 and plans to have full coverage of the globe by 2024, adds Mr Goldberg. One of the reasons its constellation is smaller than that of its competitors is that each of its satellites is larger and orbits at a higher altitude (but still low ground), he says. If the company’s plans bear fruit, Telesat satellites will also have high-speed, laser-based interconnections between them so that they can pass internet traffic between them, in space, before sending it back to land closer to the intended destination. (Starlink is also testing laser-based communication between its satellites.)

The Amazon Kuiper project, which the company has remained relatively close to, has announced that it is hiring $ 10 billion to launch a network that, in all appearances, closely resembles that of Starlink. Although the company has not announced its satellite design or launch schedule, it will have to launch half of the proposed network, or about 1,600 satellites, by July 2026 to comply with the FCC license.

In the future, there are still more potential participants in the space race: China has announced plans to launch its own network of 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, and the EU is considering building one. Almost a month goes by in which another startup does not announce an attempt to become part of the market, including more than a dozen startups that aim to use small satellites to connect the “Internet of Things”.

It’s unclear whether all of these companies will successfully launch their networks or survive once they succeed, says Chris Quilty, a partner at Quilty Analytics, which tracks the space industry from a financial perspective. Starlink’s own viability analysis, for example, finds that its prospects for making money largely depend on reducing the cost of the sophisticated and expensive terrestrial antennas it sends to customers. The initial $ 499 fee to join Starlink does not cover $ 2,000 to $ 2,500, which Mr. Quilty and other analysts estimate is the real cost for each antenna.

That being said, the FCC announced in December its intention to grant Starlink $ 885 million to connect homes in the United States if the company meets certain requirements as part of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

Countless other headaches await Starlink and its competitors. These include the rights to use wireless spectrum satellites to transmit data to the earth. OneWeb, SpaceX and another satellite communications company claim that they should be given higher rights for a certain wireless band in the US. This could mean that satellites from one of these companies – or their future competitors – should change their transmissions when they detect possible interference, says Mr Quilty.

Then there is the dreaded Kessler syndrome, described in the movie “Gravity”, where the orbit of space debris leads to a fleeting space accumulation. Currently, there are recommendations, but few mandatory rules on how the Earth’s low Earth orbit is used.

Until the advent of space junk-pocalypse, Brian Jemes, a network manager at the University of Idaho, plans to continue to enjoy his Starlink system. At his home near Moscow, Idaho, the satellite service was 20 times faster than it was with his local ISP, which connected via long-range Wi-Fi.

Mr. Jemes, who has spent 18 years at Hewlett-Packard and has been building networks for 32 years, is happy to be part of the Starlink beta. However, he knows that if he continues to enjoy such fast internet speeds, it will depend on how many satellites Starlink puts in the sky and how popular the service becomes.

“That’s how wired internet was in the beginning,” he says, “until your whole neighborhood was on it.”

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Write to Christopher Mims to [email protected]