We Were Promised Skynet

Hey all, Ernie here with a refreshed piece on satellite internet access, a concept that has sucked for years, but may soon suck far less. Here’s a refresh to explain its history and the changing landscape.

Today in Tedium: Before Elon Musk got hacked to tweet out Bitcoin addresses to his audience earlier this week, the most interesting thing he might have done recently involved the announcement of an invite-only beta service by his company SpaceX. That company is in the midst of launching a satellite internet service called Starlink. The launch of a satellite internet service is not generally something people get excited about. Satellite internet has a reputation of sucking, badly. But Starlink, and services like that, have the potential to fix that. And the reason you can tell that is that because its primary competitors are trying to put up regulatory roadblocks. Today’s Tedium explains why satellites and internet services traditionally haven’t worked well together—and why that could soon change. — Ernie @ Tedium

A video simulation of the Teledesic constellation of satellites that would have given us fast worldwide satellite internet.

We haven’t actually seen the dream of satellite internet as it was originally intended

The internet wasn’t initially globally accessible, though it eventually worked its way up to that.

But some saw the global potential early—particularly in the world of satellites. For example, the company Teledesic wanted to create a whole network of hundreds of satellites that would provide high-speed internet access around the world. The company had a big name backer—a guy named Bill Gates—and ambitious plans.

At one point, Teledesic pitched the idea of building a $9 billion satellite system, complete with the support of Boeing. This system, which would have involved hundreds of individual satellites circling the globe, was built around a broad vision of turning satellite internet into a mainstream product.

(And it wasn’t alone: Motorola, at one point, backed the satellite firm Iridium Communications, which planned a $5 billion network of its own.)

Daniel Kohn, who helped operate the company, put forth an impressive vision of what the Teledesic network, once completed, would look like. In an essay for the Internet Society, he described a low-Earth-orbit satellite network, based on the Ka satellite band, that would provide internet speeds as fast as fiber-optic cables, no matter where you were globally.

“The promise of the information age is constrained by the lack of access to switched, broadband services in most of the developed and virtually all of the developing world,” Kohn explained in the essay. “The Teledesic Network will provide a means to help extend these switched, broadband connections on demand anywhere on Earth.”

There was a problem, however, and the passage of time highlighted how big a problem it was. In his essay, Kohn made a prediction about fiber-optic-driven internet access that turned out to be incredibly wrong:

While there is a lot of fiber out there in the world—and the number of places is growing—it is used primarily to connect countries and telephone company central offices. Even in a country like the United States, little of that fiber will be extended for local access to individual offices and homes, which represents 80 percent of the cost of a network. In most of the world, fiber deployment likely never will happen.

As any FIOS or Google Fiber subscriber will tell you, we do in fact have fiber optic cable that goes to many homes—not all, but far more than Kohn’s general prediction implied. The value of the internet was such that companies were actually willing to spend massive amounts of capital on those last-mile fiber-optic connections. Additionally, the success of coaxial cables in providing fast internet access to users around the world helped muffle some of the need for a massive satellite internet network.

That said, Kohn’s point remains valid. There are still lots of parts of the world that don’t have fast internet access. It just turned out that there were far fewer than the audacious plan anticipated.

And as a result, the market for satellite internet is immensely disappointing in comparison to Teledesic’s aspirations. It’s no wonder that the company eventually faded away. Despite talking a big game and having big-money backers, the company eventually stopped building its audacious idea in 2002, with little to show for it despite hundreds of millions of dollars in investments.

“We think there’s still demand in the market for these services,” Teledesic spokesman Todd Wolfenbarger told the Seattle Times at the time. “But absent of some other partner, it’s not going to happen.”

We did get satellite internet, but it didn’t look anything like the big idea Teledesic was trying to sell.

A HughesNet satellite dish. (Alan Levine/Flickr)

For years, the satellite internet we actually got was lame and frustrating

Ever see the movie The Aviator, about reclusive pilot and billionaire Howard Hughes?

Yes, the Hughes in HughesNet, the internet service, refers to Howard Hughes. No, he doesn’t really have a connection to the whole satellite-based internet firm—other than the fact that it’s a distant descendant of his aviation business.

Now owned by EchoStar, HughesNet carries its current name because it was at one point owned by the Hughes Aircraft Company, but the firm wasn’t acquired until about a decade after Howard Hughes had died. But the reclusive tycoon’s firm did have a legacy in satellites before that point.

A graphic explaining how DirecPC initially worked. (via SatelliteDish.com)

And that legacy, starting in 1996, was used to bring internet to homes. That year, Hughes—which owned DirecTV at the time—launched its DirecPC service, one of the earliest broadband services available in homes nationally. It was an awkward approach, letting users download via a speedy-at-the-time Hughes Network Systems Galaxy IV satellite, but managing the upload part of the equation through modems on the ground. (Considering the somewhat convoluted process, it’s understandable why it didn’t take off.)

The service slowly evolved from there, becoming DIRECWAY back in 2001, and eventually HughesNet in 2006 after DirecTV and Hughes were separated from one another.

Then and now, HughesNet follows the Arthur C. Clarke ideal—a single satellite that effectively stays in place 22,000 miles above the earth. This kind of distance is fine if you’re beaming television into your living room or loading a webpage, but if you’re trying to play a game, it’s not so hot. As a result of this distance factor, a whole lot of money has to be spent to modestly improve the quality of the internet connection you get via a satellite.

Fortunately, competition also helps: In 2011, the ViaSat-1 satellite got up in the air in 2011, allowing for the competing Exede internet service, later renamed ViaSat, to help slowly nudge HughesNet into the future.

Since then, EchoStar and ViaSat have been going back and forth upgrading their satellites to offer better connections to rural satellite users.

A few years ago, HughesNet announced a speedier internet service after launching a new satellite. But despite the massive investment, it’s only speedier compared to the previous version of HughesNet.

The upgrade only gets the network to 25 megabits per second, which pales in comparison to home internet offerings. For comparison’s sake: When cable internet technology first came on the scene in 1995, the technology was capable of transmitting data at 27 megabits per second.

Despite its technology being upgraded at a regular clip for two decades, satellite internet has only just now crept up to where cable internet was a quarter-century ago. Think about that.