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原文標題：

Elon Musk and Amazon Are Battling to Put Satellite Internet in Your Backyard.
伊隆· 馬斯克（Elon Musk）和亞馬遜（Amazon）爭相將衛星互聯網放入您的後院

原文連結：

https://reurl.cc/9ZWbAV

發布時間：

March 20, 2021 12:00 am ET
By Christopher Mims

原文內容：

For rural homesteaders and suburbanites alike, no matter where they live on
the globe, fast, reliable internet connectivity is on its way—from outer
space.


Cybersecurity specialist Luke McOmie lives entirely off-grid on the side of a
mountain in Colorado, where there’s no cell service or landline broadband
internet. Yet he recently gave a talk at a convention hosted in Japan on the
lethality of drones. He was live via satellite—his own personal satellite
internet connection, that is.

With a constellation of hundreds of satellites, and speeds comparable to U.S.
broadband, the Starlink service lets Mr. McOmie do his job despite being in
the middle of nowhere. He and his wife Melanie McOmie are living the sort of
lifestyle that pandemic-weary, deskbound urbanites might envy: raising
chickens, watching out for mountain lions, and taking in an expanse of
unsullied forest.

The McOmies are part of a beta testing program for a new kind of internet
service from Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX. Their experience has been
phenomenal so far, they say. They regularly get download speeds of 120
megabits per second, and because the antenna gives off a fair amount of heat,
they’ve been able to stay connected through most winter weather. They did
have to clear it after a recent blizzard, however.

It’s not clear what kind of speeds Starlink will offer to millions of
people, versus the more than 10,000 now testing in the U.S., Canada and the
U.K. Depending on how many people SpaceX signs up, future users could have
internet speeds that are only a fraction of what’s available during this
demo period. And even if Starlink and its soon-to-deploy competitors work as
advertised, there are many other potential challenges to their viability, let
alone profitability. They include the headaches of shared wireless spectrum,
and the threat of space debris.

But with at least three other serious, deep-pocketed contenders in the
internet-from-space race—including Amazon, OneWeb and longtime operator
Telesat—getting fast, reliable internet service from any place on earth with
a clear view of the sky could soon seem no more miraculous than a cell
signal. It also might not be much more expensive: Current pricing for
Starlink is $499 upfront and $99 a month for service.

Internet from space has obvious implications for potentially closing the
rural/urban digital divide, not only for Americans but also the rest of the
world. It could also encourage new ways of working and living, untethered
from cable and fiber-optic internet connections. And giving huge swaths of
homes a wider choice of internet service providers, irrespective of their
geography, could mean a shift in users, revenue and value away from
traditional telecom companies.

Nick Buraglio lives just outside Champaign, Ill. He has plenty of wired and
wireless broadband options. Yet, as a professional network engineer, he’s
testing Starlink out of curiosity.

Unlike established internet providers that handle installation, Starlink
requires you to do it yourself. But that was “mind-numbingly easy,” Mr.
Buraglio says. He connected the pizza-size Starlink antenna to the provided
router, and power, and then followed along in the Starlink smartphone app.
Since it needs an unobstructed view of the sky, free of overhanging trees, he
decided to mount it permanently on his roof. That, along with running the
antenna’s data-and-power cable into his home, was the hardest part. Still,
he says, it was no more complicated than installing a rooftop television
antenna back in the day.

Anyone wishing to reproduce this experience will have to get in line,
however: The waiting list for Starlink is now up to a year.

The experiences of Starlink beta users are enabled by the 1,000 or so
satellites that its parent company has launched. While that makes SpaceX
owner of about a third of all active satellites orbiting Earth, it’s only
the beginning: Starlink has received approval from the FCC to launch nearly
12,000 satellites.

So many satellites are required because each one passes overhead very
quickly, and is relatively close to Earth’s surface, up to about 1,200
miles, in what’s known as “low earth orbit.” The advantage of this orbit
is that signals can travel swiftly from earth to a satellite and back, which
is why Starlink is able to offer service with low “latency”—the time it
takes a signal to make a round trip. The McOmies say they are able to use
their Starlink service to blast opponents simultaneously on the demanding,
fast-twitch online first-person shooter “Apex Legends.”

Traditional telecom and earth-observing satellites generally hover much
farther from Earth, in what’s known as geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000
miles above the equator. This allows them to reach much more of the planet at
once, but the round-trip signal time is so long that applications like
internet telephony, video chatting and most types of gaming are virtually
impossible.

U.K.-based OneWeb, which was founded in 2012 and went bankrupt in 2020, has
recently been relaunched by a consortium including the British 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 any one time, says Chris
McLaughlin, OneWeb’s chief of government affairs. He projects that by the
end of this year, the company’s network will offer internet coverage to
northern latitudes, with full global coverage next year.

Another competitor is Canadian satellite company Telesat. Unlike the others,
it has more than 50 years of experience operating satellites, says Chief
Executive Dan Goldberg. Telesat doesn’t want to give everyone an antenna,
like Starlink and OneWeb do. Instead, it would provide connections to ground
stations owned by telecom companies, which would then connect to end users in
conventional ways such as cellular or long-range Wi-Fi networks. Users wouldn
’t have to worry about how they got the internet connection they were
enjoying, and could use their phones and other mobile devices instead of
specialized equipment.

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

Amazon’s Project Kuiper, about which the company has remained relatively
tight-lipped, has announced that it is committing $10 billion to launch a
network which, by all appearances, is very much like Starlink’s. While the
company has not announced its satellite design or launch timetable, it will
have to launch half of its intended network, or approximately 1,600
satellites, by July 2026 to comply with its FCC license.

In the future, there are yet more potential entrants into the space-internet
race: China announced it intends to launch its own network of 10,000
low-earth-orbit satellites, and the EU is contemplating building one as well.
Hardly a month goes by in which yet another startup doesn’t announce an
attempt at some slice of the market, including more than a dozen startups
aiming to use small satellites to connect the “Internet of Things.”

It’s not clear that all of these companies will successfully launch their
networks, or survive once they do, says Chris Quilty, a partner at Quilty
Analytics, which tracks the space industry from a financial perspective. His
own analysis of the viability of Starlink, for example, finds that its
moneymaking prospects depend heavily on slashing the cost of the
sophisticated and expensive ground-based antennas that it sends to customers.
The $499 upfront fee to join Starlink doesn’t cover the $2,000 to $2,500
that Mr. Quilty and other analysts estimate is the actual cost for each
antenna.

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

Countless other headaches await Starlink and its competitors. Among them are
the rights to the wireless spectrum satellites use to beam data to earth.
OneWeb, SpaceX and another satellite communications company argue they should
be granted senior rights to a certain wireless band in the U.S. This might
mean satellites from one of these companies—or their future competitors—
would have to modify their transmissions when they detect possible
interference, says Mr. Quilty.

Then there is the dreaded Kessler syndrome, depicted in the movie “Gravity,”
 where orbiting space debris leads to a runaway space pileup. At present,
there are recommendations but few binding rules about how Earth’s low earth
orbit is used.

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

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

“It’s how cable internet was at first,” he says, “until your whole
neighborhood was on it.”

—For more WSJ Technology analysis, reviews, advice and headlines, sign up
for our weekly newsletter.

Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com

Copyright c 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the March 20, 2021, print edition as 'The New Space Race That Is
Landing in a Backyard Near You.'


機翻如下：

對於農村宅基地和郊區居民而言，無論他們生活在地球上的何處，都在快速，可靠地連接
互聯網—從外太空。



Starlink服務擁有數百顆衛星，其速度可與美國寬頻媲美，儘管身處茫茫荒地，還是讓


McOmies是埃隆‧馬斯克（Elon Musk）火箭公司SpaceX提供的一種新型Internet服務的




但是，與至少三個其他認真，財大氣粗的競爭者—包括亞馬遜，OneWeb和長期運營商
Telesat —展開激烈競爭，從地球上任何地方獲得清晰天空的快速，可靠的互聯網服務可
能很快就會到來 似乎沒有比細胞信號更神奇的了。 它的價格可能也不會便宜得多：
Starlink的當前價格為499美元的預付款，以及每月99美元的服務費用。







任何希望重現這種體驗的人都必須排隊，但是：Starlink的等待名單現在已經長達一年了
。

母公司已經發射了1,000顆左右的衛星，從而使Starlink Beta用戶的體驗得到了支持。儘
管這使SpaceX擁有圍繞地球運行的所有活動衛星的三分之一，但這僅僅是個開始：
Starlink已獲得FCC的批准，可以發射近12,000顆衛星。





總部位於英國的OneWeb成立於2012年，於2020年破產，最近由包括英國政府和Bharti
Global在內的財團重新啟動。 OneWeb政府事務主管克里斯‧麥克勞克林（Chris
















然後就是電影《重力》中描述的可怕的凱斯勒綜合症，在那兒繞行的太空碎片導致失控的
空間堆積。目前，有一些建議，但是關於如何使用地球近地軌道的約束性規則很少。





他說：“一開始就是有線互聯網，直到整個社區都在上面。”

—有關更多《華爾街日報》技術分析，評論，建議和頭條新聞，請註冊我們的每週新聞。
寫信給christopher.mims@wsj.com的克里斯托弗‧米姆斯（Christopher Mims）

版權所有c 2020道瓊斯公司。保留所有權利。




心得/評論：

馬斯克的忙碌程度真的超乎想像
這其實也是他可以一直享受到超乎常人的追捧的原因

嚴格來說，他不是唯一做過這些夢的人
但是他可能是唯一個去實現並且最接近實現的人

瘋狂的世紀初、
沉悶又暗流洶湧的世紀中、
糜爛奢華又幻滅的世紀末。

生在這個時間點真是太有趣了

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