luxury- That is pretty frickin awesome.
I'm starting to think I won't have broadband until I retire and move.

You may be reading the situation properly now that Bacefook has designs on the Metaverse.

 Have a friend in a Dallas suburb who has been actively searching for a house in western PA. No city and doesn't want a subdivision or HOA. The big stumbling block has been his wife works from home and needs a good internet connection.
Hard to come by outside the cities. Bell Labs, or their successors, bought him out a couple years ago so he's retired but still freelances and needs a fast connection to do that.
 

Last edited by xoxoxoBruce (10/28/2021 11:06 pm)

Each satellite should be available for about 2.5 minutes.  Constant speed testing for about an hour should say more about how many satellites are consistently available at any minute.

Download speeds would probably say more about this consistency.  Too few birds serving too many customers would result in slower download speeds.

I'm guessing that only half the constellation has been launched.

 

Amazon’s Project Kuiper hopes to launch first two prototype satellites in late 2022

Amazon’s ambitious satellite-internet project, Project Kuiper, aims to launch its first two prototype satellites in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to an experimental launch license the company filed with the Federal Communications Commission today. Called KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2, the two prototypes are supposed to launch on an experimental new rocket called the RS1, currently being developed by startup ABL Space Systems based in El Segundo, California.

Kuiper’s goal is to launch a giant constellation of up to 3,236 satellites into low Earth orbit over the next decade in order to provide low-latency broadband internet coverage to the surface below. The plan is to serve rural communities and other areas where it’s difficult to provide infrastructure for traditional internet services. It’s a similar concept to that of Starlink, SpaceX’s broadband internet satellite constellation, which proposes sending nearly 12,000 into low orbit around Earth. But unlike Kuiper, Spacex has actually launched more than 1,700 of its satellites and even created a beta program for hundreds of users. Kuiper has yet to launch any satellites.

400 mbps, that's pretty good!

welcome aboard LWKale!

Flint wrote:

Interesting, how they're doing it

A massive transmitter is required for a satellite to receive your signal 22,500 miles away (GEO). 200 mile satellites (LEO) can receive a CB (5 watt) transmission.  Then it must get your signal to somewhere else where a ground station exists.  So a mesh network configuration might send your transmission to another satellite with a higher orbit (MEO).

Software, to do things on each satellite, must be extensive.  Previously, satellites were simply repeaters.  They simply received and retransmitted what was received.  Most computations work was done by computers on the ground.  Only recently have satellites contained computers.  First ones did not even have the computation abilities beyond a single chip computer inside a keyboard.

To put that into perspective, Martian Rovers only used 8086 processors - as found in the original IBM PC.  Putting that much computational power into a satellite is a major accomplishment.

 

Pretty cool. I wish Elon had had the ability to focus on forward thinking instead of getting caught up in terrible political ideas. We have St*r Link here which is contrary to our strict no funding billionaires rule.

The electric co-op here is finally stringing the fiber optic cable. Ezra Klein has been writing about Democrats getting wrecked by slow roll outs of good ideas. This is a classic case.

That’s not great.