They need to send thousands of ships to colonize Mars. This global sat internet service will require them to deploy tens of thousands of micro-sats to provide global internet. The revenue generated by said service will provide them the funding to build the said ships for Mars.
Oh and of course, the eventual solar system internet.
What exactly are you picturing here? Because of light-speed considerations you'd have semi-isolated networks at each major body, and bodies connected with special high-power high-latency links. And those links might as well be direct, only needing a handful of dishes.
Is there a reason to scatter little relay satellites all over the middle of nowhere? Or do anything else that needs many many rocket launches?
Late 21st century FidoNet. Late 21st century USENET?
It's even steeper than that. SpaceX could arrange to send up some payloads piggybacked on their commercial payloads. Their competitors could effectively be paying to put part of their fleet up.
A friend of mine in the telecom business claimed that's how Level3 grew. They were laying fiber for others, but the largest cost of that is in logistics, permitting, digging, etc... So they just laid down their own fiber along with their customers at a fraction of the cost.
I'm very curious to see a real-world use of their system when it's fully up and running.
[2] https://twitter.com/SpaceTechAsia/status/959300225394339841
[3] https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/01/22/testbed-for-canadian-d...
It's even worse than that. SpaceX is using micro satellites for its network; they can launch them for "free" (just the cost of extra fuel) as a secondary payload on any of their launches where there is excess cargo capacity.
EDIT: grammar fix
They say it's due to lower orbits. Iridium is fewer satellites so they have to be higher. More w/ lower orbits means lower latency. Do you know if this is too good to be true?
40000 / pi / 2 = 6366 40000 / 2 * 3 = 60000 60000 / pi / 2 = 9550 9550 - 6366 = 3184
Per the above, any satellite Internet system below about 3000 km above the earth will have latency that's competitive with fiber optics on earth (note that I haven't done the simultaneous solution to account for the uplink/downlink distance so it's actually a bit less). For the SpaceX system, there should be better latency than the terrestrial Internet. Please ignore the rounding ... this is a back-of-the-envelope exercise.
Fiber optics are great and far less susceptible to interference than radio - but if you Google articles on how high-frequency trading companies are installing line-of-sight microwave for their networks you'll see that fiber isn't our fastest technology.
- SpaceX, the company building the network, is the same company who can deliver the payloads.
- SpaceX is the only company who has re-usable rockets.
It's hard to argue that from an economics perspective this isn't an insane leapfrog type of event, assuming they can gather the necessary in-house chops to deliver good telecom service. Talk about an economic moat -- to compete on margin you'd first have to become a rocket company. And not just a rocket company but one who has technology to re-use rockets, which likely is a ways away from becoming replicated, nevermind commoditized to the point where it evaporates from costs.
And of course, presumably running a satellite network that is an order of magnitude larger than the nearest competitor in space right now is going to throw off a ton of opportunities to develop the know-how and technology to do so, that will further deepen the moat. It may turn out that the rocket program itself needs to develop specific capabilities to support the needs of the telecom network, which would further cement payload delivery to space as a necessary in-house service for a telecom network.
An an analogy, once Amazon starts delivering your packages and owns the entire delivery chain, I think we'll see a similar dynamic. Their service will be optimized off of the general case and holistically integrated into the entire supply chain, and to compete with Amazon on margin will mean you have to create UPS first.