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A comment on SpaceX's Valuation Climbs to $25B with New Funding Round. Parent comment

Re:SpaceX's Valuation Climbs to $25B with New Funding Round by tbabb on Friday April 13, 2018 @02:25AM (#16827526)
If I were them, I would do both with the same stone: Customers get terrestrial repeaters with their satellite antennas, and provide service to the local neighborhood. If you are in the vicinity of someone with a roof box, you connect to/buy from them. If not, you invest in a roof box and sell internet back to "the grid", rather analogous to roof solar.

Basically like treating the satellite as backhaul for small cells, and also having the customer BE the small cell. No fiber laying or city government permits or telephone pole work or anything.

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Re:SpaceX's Valuation Climbs to $25B with New Funding Round by elihu on Friday April 13, 2018 @02:48AM (#16827636)
That might be a pretty good option just from a protocol overhead standpoint.

Maybe there are good technical solutions to this that I don't know about, but I'm inclined to believe that a satellite could communicate more efficiently with a handful of high-throughput ground stations at once than it could hundreds or thousands of smaller ground stations that are continually connecting and disconnecting as they gain or lose line-of-sight. That's a lot of control messages to deal with.

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