The space broadband race
Elon Musk is already beaming high-speed broadband from the sky, Amazon will be soon. Barry Collins explores where the space broadband race will lead
Elon Musk is already beaming high-speed broadband from the sky and Amazon will be following suit soon. Barry Collins explores the speed and cost of the accelerating space broadband race – and where it will lead.
Stuck out in the middle of nowhere with more chance of seeing Red Rum trot past than a van installing fibre broadband? Look up – the answer might be passing over your head.
Starlink, Elon Musk’s fledgling satellite broadband outfit, already has 1,700 satellites circling the planet, creating a giant mesh that delivers download speeds of 300Mbits/sec or faster to beta customers around the world. He’s only just got started. Sixty new satellites are pumped into low earth orbit roughly every fortnight and the ever-bombastic Musk is talking of reaching gigabit speeds in the not-too-distant future.
Musk won’t have space to himself for too much longer, though. Amazon is plotting a satellite broadband service of its own, with approval to launch more than 3,000 satellites. With permission to fly at an even lower altitude than Musk’s dishes,
Amazon is already talking of download speeds of 400Mbits/secplus when its service gets off the ground. And that’s not to mention the tranche of existing satellite providers, including the British governmentowned OneWeb.
A broadband battle is looming in the skies – and it’s unlikely that
Musk and Jeff Bezos are bankrolling a multi-billion space race purely to serve the slim minority in the West who can’t be reached by fibre lines. Could Starlink and Amazon become mainstream broadband providers that compete with companies such as BT and Virgin? You don’t have to look to the stars for the answers. The best alternative to fibre
While the ever-excitable analysts were confidently predicting that 5G would reach the parts of the country that fibre doesn’t, Starlink was
quietly building a network that genuinely can.
Starlink launched its private beta service in the US last August, when it only had a few hundred satellites in low earth orbit. In less than a year, the company is now rocketing towards 2,000 satellites being live by the end of this year and near-global coverage. It already has 500,000 paying customers, although many of those are still on the waiting list.
To those lucky enough to have reached the top of the list, such as Adrian Bantin from East Yorkshire, Starlink has proved transformational. Bantin’s house is “right at the end of the BT line”, making a fibre-to-thecabinet offering slow and unreliable. Previously he relied on a wireless access provider called Quickline to give his home a workable connection, but that “tops out at 30Mbits/sec” and will “crawl or disconnect completely from time to time”.
Then Starlink came along. With a receiver dish sat mounted on a tripod on top of his garage, Bantin was able to use the Starlink app to find a direct line of sight through the trees around his property and hit connection speeds that were five times or more faster than what he was receiving previously. “It’s pretty solid at around 150Mbits/sec,” Bantin told PC Pro, which is at the top end of the speed range that Starlink promises beta testers. However, recently testers have reported download speeds of 300Mbits/sec and beyond ( see “How fast is Starlink? on p39.)
Perhaps more impressive is the way that Starlink overcomes two of the traditional downsides of satellite broadband – upload speeds and latency. Its average upload speeds of around 20Mbits/sec rival those of a fibre-to-the-cabinet line, while latency is comparable to that of a fixed-line connection. “[Starlink] gives you a little stats app and the worst I’ve seen is 150 milliseconds, but that’s peaking,” said Bantin. “It’s pretty solid at around 20 to 30 milliseconds.”
Previous-generation satellite services, which are in higher orbit, generally measured latency in the hundreds of milliseconds, and that made services such as videoconferencing or online gaming largely impossible. Yet, we’ve spoken to Starlink beta testers who are perfectly capable of playing online 3D action games such as Call of Duty over the connection.
That’s not to say everything is
100% rock solid with Starlink. It’s still in beta, there are still missing patches in the mesh of satellites passing
Starlink is rocketing towards 2,000 satellites being live by the end of 2021
overhead and that means the occasional dropout. “It has suffered from disconnects,” said Bantin, “but it [Starlink] has been very upfront about it. As they make adjustments to their constellations and roll out new firmware – which they’re doing on a weekly basis, it seems – it will drop.”
Aside from the dropouts, the other big downside is the price. £400 for the motorised dish, not to mention the £90-per-month fee means this isn’t about to rival TalkTalk in broadband’s bargain basement anytime soon. “I’m privileged I can afford that, but that’s going to be a luxury for others,” admitted Bantin. “To be honest, if I ever got fibre-to-the-premises, I wouldn’t have any need for it. I wouldn’t even have considered it.”
A place in the market
Starlink clearly has appeal to people such as Bantin and his partner, who both work for home and need a connection faster than what either BT or other wireless solutions can offer. The shift to increased homeworking has come at a good time for Musk, according to broadband market watchers. Even with its steep monthly fee, “if that’s the difference between working from home and having to travel 45 minutes to work every day, I think people will pay that,” said Andrew Ferguson, editor-in-chief of Thinkbroadband.com.
Give it a few years for the technology to mature and for priceaggressive competitors such as Amazon to enter the market, and Ferguson thinks satellite broadband could well compete with the mainstream fixed-line broadband providers. “If the price can come down to an entry-level product, say £25 a month… and that’s delivering 35 or 40Mbits/sec, then yes, that could cannibalise the entry-level, partialfibre products,” he said. Satellite broadband could well compete with the mainstream fixed-line providers
Yet it’s not the heavily saturated domestic broadband market in the West that presents the real opportunity for companies such as Starlink, according to Ferguson. Countries with nascent broadband infrastructure are a huge potential market, especially in areas where laying fibre is hard and prohibitively expensive. Ferguson highlights places “where people are relying on the internet cafe in the town, which is actually a satellite dish on the roof and it’s shared and it’s horrendous,” as the perfect market for a product such as Starlink, calling it a “big opportunity”.
That’s not to say that there aren’t huge opportunities for Starlink in the West too, not least when it comes to
servicing Musk’s biggest cash cow: electric cars. As the market moves towards self-driving vehicles, high-speed internet connectivity will be a must. Once again, Starlink could steal a march on a market that was earmarked for 5G by having a receiver built into the roof of the vehicle. “That has big implications for the whole way cars are communicating with each other and getting updates,” said Ferguson, adding that “no matter where a car is in the country, you don’t have those gaps in mapping and stuff because the latest maps are always arriving at the car.” And because the Starlink receiver is phased array, it can be flattened out beneath the surface of the car’s roof so that you don’t even know that it’s there, according to Ferguson.
Enter Amazon
There’s no doubt Starlink has taken the lead in the satellite broadband market, outperforming existing satellite services and gaining at least an 18-month headstart on what’s likely to be its biggest rival: Amazon.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper had yet to put a satellite into space at the time of writing, although it recently signed a deal with United Launch Alliance (ULA) to deliver its first batch of satellites using the company’s Atlas V rockets. Amazon has permission to put 3,236 satellites into low-earth orbit, which is around double the number that Starlink has in the sky. And the clock is ticking: Amazon is obliged to deploy half of that number by 2026, under current obligations to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), or it risks losing the rights to its allocation.
Even though Amazon has yet to get off the ground, the rivalry between the two firms has spilled over into outright animosity. When Starlink lobbied the FCC to let it move a batch
of its satellites to a much lower orbit than originally planned, Amazon objected, claiming it would cause interference with its own planned satellites and increase the risk of collisions. That provoked a tweet from Musk, who stated that: “It does not serve the public to hamstring Starlink today for an Amazon satellite system that is at best several years away from operation.”
The FCC eventually sided with Starlink, allowing it to move 2,814 of its satellites from the planned altitude of between 1,000km and 1,200km to the much closer range of between 540km and 570km, not far from where its existing fleet is orbiting today. Amazon, which has permission to launch in the 590km to 630km range, has arguably lost a key advantage: latency. The closer you are to the ground, the less distance data has to travel and the faster the ping between satellite and receiver.
“Based on our review, we agree with SpaceX [Starlink’s parent company] that the modification will improve the experience for users of the SpaceX service, including in often-underserved polar regions,” the FCC said. “We conclude that the lower elevation angle of its earth station antennas and lower altitude of its satellites enables a better user experience by improving speeds and latency.”
Amazon attempted to put a positive spin on the FCC’s ruling, describing it as a “positive outcome that places clear conditions on SpaceX, including requirements that it remain below 580km and accept additional interference resulting from its redesign,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. But it’s going to make it even harder for Amazon to outperform its rival.
The one massive advantage Amazon does have over Starlink,
The one massive advantage Amazon has over Starlink is hundreds of millions of customers
however, is customers. Hundreds of millions of them. Amazon describes Project Kuiper as a mission to provide “lowlatency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world”. But what if it has ambitions beyond that? What if it planned to offer Amazon broadband as part of its Prime subscription, for example? Given that it has already invested massively in streaming content, having a means to deliver it to customers wouldn’t seem out of the realms of possibility, especially when Amazon has already committed $10 billion to Project Kuiper.
Although Jeff Bezos emphasised serving the “under-bandwidthed”
when he first spoke about Project Kuiper at Amazon’s re:MARS conference in 2019, he dropped more than a subtle hint that the company had bigger ambitions for its space broadband project. “The goal here is broadband everywhere, but the very nature of [having] thousands of satellites in low earth orbit is very different from geostationary satellites… You have equal broadband all over the surface of Earth.”
Bezos added that broadband was “also a very good business for Amazon because it’s a very highcapex [capital expenditure] undertaking. It’s multiple billions of dollars of capex. Amazon is a large enough company now that we need to do things that, if they work, can actually move the needle.”
If you’re beaming your broadband from Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites within the next few years, consider that needle moved.