Satellite Internet

Ikkitrix yesterday at 9:34 AM
Everyone's been having connection issues
But on the other hand, I'm able to play with my friend in the Philippines who has literal jungle internet relatively fine

Dan yesterday at 9:35 AM
"Jungle Internet" lmao

Ikkitrix yesterday at 9:35 AM
Somewhat better than expected tbh

Dan yesterday at 9:36 AM
oh I don't doubt it.  It's not "American Internet" at least
just that expression is hillarious imo

Ikkitrix yesterday at 9:36 AM
And in his new place he keeps track of power outages by the month instead of by the day
Oh, it's still not great internet, but probably better than most rural places in the us, lol
I really really want the low earth orbit satellite internet to work as well as it sounds
And just move somewhere remote af

Dan yesterday at 9:40 AM
huh not heard of "low earth orbit satellite internet", I'm assuming that's different/better than traditional satellite internet? (which doesn't even offer an upstream channel so it's still usually paired with dailup or dsl for upload)

Ikkitrix yesterday at 9:41 AM
Well, let's go through the differences
Current satellite internet is in geo stationary orbit
Which is something like 50k kilometers away
Resulting in 600ms or so in round trip latency because of the speed of light
Along with being very old because launching stuff was very expensive
Low earth orbit is about 2k kilometers away
(These are rough ballpark figures because i don't remember exactly)
But its about 20x closer
But to cover all that you need to cover, you need 900+ satellites instead of 1
Elon Musk has a plan that invokes launching 4000 some satellites for this purpose
But theres some other companies doing less

Dan yesterday at 9:47 AM
hmmm that sounded better until you mentioned Elon Musk doing it, now it sounds like an awful plan

Ikkitrix yesterday at 9:48 AM
Lol

levitas yesterday at 9:48 AM
As I understand it, and LEO solution would both be inherently global and also give the Pacific ocean significantly more internet capability than its had before

Ikkitrix yesterday at 9:48 AM
This is true
You could probably focus the constellation around certain points
By how you choose the orbits
But like, a theoretical 30ms round trip instead of 600ms limiting factor due to the laws of physics combined with massive redundancy and modern tech
Could be amazing

Dan yesterday at 9:51 AM
hmmm but doesn't the pacific ocean already have one (or more) of the strongest internet pipelines at its bottom? how're sattelites supposed to beat that?

Ikkitrix yesterday at 9:52 AM
Sadly, i doubt there's many switches out in the middle of the ocean
So the angler fish might have dank internet

Dan yesterday at 9:52 AM
pfft. I bet the NSA has something to say about that

Ikkitrix yesterday at 9:52 AM
But the surface fish are fucked

Dan yesterday at 9:53 AM
FUCK YEAH ANGLER FISH INTERNET

Ikkitrix yesterday at 9:54 AM
So there's this company
http://www.oneweb.world/
OneWeb
Shouldn’t everyone have access to the world's information? In 2018 OneWeb will launch a constellation of satellites to provide affordable high-speed Internet access for the world’s unconnected

And spacex's thing
Im not sure how you compete with spacex in this though, lol

levitas yesterday at 11:03 AM
Worth noting that LEO doesn't get the same advantage as geostationary for covering particular locations. You could do something through the poles and focus on a particular longitude, but that's probably as good as you could get, and if you're not the only one doing it there would be a higher probability of collision at the poles (not sure if that's a real problem though given that space is big)

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:05 AM
Yeah, space is way too big to be concerned about collisions
I thunk they plan on having them operate at several heights
So anything that would cross the same path would actually be miles apart still

levitas yesterday at 11:07 AM
Only mentioned it because there's actually convergence points for all different polar routes, whereas that problem doesn't exist at all on more standard orbits

Dan yesterday at 11:09 AM
don't they still track the orbits of everything larger than a few inches up there to avoid collisions? they wouldn't do that if there weren't a possibility of problem, right?

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:10 AM
Yes, space junk is an issue, but planned orbits when it's all stuff that you're putting up there isn't really a problem
Like, the problem of crashing your own satellites into each other shouldn't be an actual problem unless someone really fucks up

Dan yesterday at 11:11 AM
yeah, but if there's competing networks, like Dave said "if you're not the only one doing it"
then they're like space junk to each other, except with planned points of convergence

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:13 AM
You still should have many miles of separation to work with per satellite with intersecting paths
And i don't think either one can do anything without some approval from some regulating body, but i don't know how this works really(edited)
I think the fcc already approved the musknet
But i don't know what else there is
And whay happens if China feels like launching their own, etc
Im not really concerned if it's just these few us based companies
But space junk is a huge problem that seems way harder to fix than it is to cause and nobody really has enough incentive to address it right now

Dan yesterday at 11:21 AM
true
if we can't even handle junk on the planet, how're we gonna clean up the space junk? lol

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:24 AM
Especially when millimeter sized particles going orbital speeds can cause massive damage
At least in ocean cleanup you don't have to worry about your craft getting destroyed by a rouge flying plastic bag

Dan yesterday at 11:26 AM
but it's funnier if you do worry about that

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:26 AM
Makes it more interesting, for sure
So i just remembered that those latency figures from before were sone worst case latency napkin math
Because i was at my grandparents house and they have actual satellite internet
Speedtest.net was giving me actual 600ms ping
LEO is around 20x closer, so thats how i got to 30ms

Dan yesterday at 11:34 AM
hmmm I'm not sure ping works like that though

levitas yesterday at 11:35 AM
Is it going to be better than that though? I'd expect the path to be something like home > GS sat > ISP on ground > GS > home
NVM I'm dumb, distance traveled would still be cut to 5% in that case too

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:36 AM
Right, so it's the same for both

Dan yesterday at 11:36 AM
with current real satellite internet, only 1/2 your trip is via satellite, if LEO internet is like a glorified LTE network with the antennae in space or something, you'd have both directions going through space

levitas yesterday at 11:37 AM
Right

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:37 AM
Except gso is 35000km or .117 light seconds
So even if both channels went through the satellite
Physics would limit round trip to 450ms
Not the actual 600ms that i got

Dan yesterday at 11:38 AM
ping is usually between 15-30% of the limit in my experience

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:38 AM
And leo is everything up to 2000km i guess?
I don't know the actual planned orbit height

Well, ok

Dan yesterday at 11:41 AM
also depends on where it's going, does it have to go sat to sat? or is it high enough to always get to a land ISP with a single sat bounce?

levitas yesterday at 11:41 AM
That lag spike when you switch satellites because one is hiding in the sun's glare though lol

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:43 AM
I imagine you'll constantly be switching satellites
And be in range of a couple at any given time

Dan yesterday at 11:43 AM
that doesn't make it better :v

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:44 AM
It will have to go sat to sat for longer distances

Dan yesterday at 11:44 AM
your latency would be all over the place lmao

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:45 AM
I mean, the switching problem is a technical issue that im not sure how much of which can be smoothed out

Dan yesterday at 11:45 AM
it's probably kinda like driving all day long on your LTE network

levitas yesterday at 11:46 AM
It'd be more predictable in theory, but yeah
Schedule online matches to occur when you know the other team will be switching sats

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:47 AM
I think there's a couple differences
I would imagine that the receivers are engineered with constantly switching in mind
And for it to not suck
I don't think it has to suck as long as there's no compete interruptions where no satellite is in range

Dan yesterday at 11:50 AM
so are LTEs, although you could use multiple at once which phones don't usually do, and just switch to closest with no spike, but I just meant that your latency would go up and down as the closest gets closer and farther

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:51 AM
Oh ok
But still
My upper limit for acceptable latency for most gaming things is more around 80ms
So proving to myself that leo satellite internet in theory could be well under that was interesting

Dan yesterday at 11:54 AM
I mean, 100+ is still decently playable, it's just having a consistent ping that matters the most, so the timing you're expecting is the same, so even if you're slowly up and down between 30-80ms it'd probably make for an unpleasent gaming experience, I would hypothesize

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:55 AM
Hm
Couldn't you easily solve that if you know the normal upper limit?

levitas yesterday at 11:56 AM
Sound some bad math, latency flux could be really fine
Wait, I have to do some better math

Ikkitrix yesterday at 11:56 AM
also i don't think the variance would be nearly that much due to satellite switching due to orbit paths
Depends on that actual orbit paths and how many satellites are in range at any given time

levitas yesterday at 11:59 AM
650 satellites evenly spread on a 1200 mile orbit would give roughly 200 miles from one sat to its nearest neighbor

levitas yesterday at 12:01 PM
That's under 10 degrees deviation from the ground, but a difference in up to 1.2x the distance from the nearest satellite to the next one
In practice they'll be packed closer because people don't really live /that/ far north and south, so even global coverage isn't necessary

Ikkitrix yesterday at 12:02 PM
Also, even oneweb plans for 900 now

levitas yesterday at 12:03 PM
Oh, 750 mile orbit, 1200 km, so it's even better

Ikkitrix yesterday at 12:03 PM
And musknet is 4000+ with planned clustering around high use areas
I wonder what theoretical ping to the other side of the world is(edited)
Hm.
A lot.
So fucking off to the Philippines would probably still suck
Unless you feel like playing on korean and jp servers
Some remote-ass continental us would still be sick though

levitas yesterday at 12:12 PM
Hahaha
Live the new age hermit dream

Ikkitrix yesterday at 12:13 PM
Yeeeaaah dude
I need like
Somewhere as remote as possible but still within 2 hours of an Amazon warehouse for Amazon now
Wherever that place is

Dan yesterday at 12:14 PM
oh wait, I forgot about what's probably the biggest killer of latency in a system like this, packet loss, it's the reason that wireless and even wifi is so much garbage compared to ethernet, and probably how you measured something like 10x the theoretical for satellite

Ikkitrix yesterday at 12:15 PM
This is possible

levitas yesterday at 12:16 PM
We could just melt away all those clouds
Call it the Martian approach

Ikkitrix yesterday at 12:20 PM
Just uh
Live at the top of a mountain
:thinkspin:

Dan yesterday at 12:22 PM
and stop all the other electromagnetic emissions from earth, and stop lightning storms from occurring, and block the sun for good measure.  Also figure out how to stop the cosmic rays from coming between you and the satellite
ok, so basically just run a fiber from you to the satellite

Ikkitrix yesterday at 12:23 PM
Sounds like a plan