I'm nowhere near being an expert, but I have been dealing with a whole lot to do with things about Satellite - Geospatial Imagery and related data. We were intrigued and somewhat happy with all the cube-satellites and micro-satellites being launched. In-fact, we were contacted by many of these Satellite Startups and we are happy that we will have lots of options for our data sources. We could, however, never understood the cost though. We did know that the data is being commoditized more and more.
I cannot say much now but we are working on something super exciting and we might be able to turn, tune, tweak and bring some major change to the cost involvement with Satellite data.
Maybe this is crazy, but should we be thinking of satellite connectivity the same way we think about public utilities?
- For a lot of public utilities, the point is that building several parallel sets of infrastructure would be really wasteful. It makes sense to build it once, hopefully well, and let everyone use it.
- One might think this only is true of strictly terrestrial infrastructure like phone landlines or water districts. But of course, GPS is an example where we all benefit from a satellite constellation which is operated by the US military with an annual budget of roughly $1B -- and we can all use it for free. Had the US not provided for civilian access to GPS, and instead there were several competing private systems, they would all be worse and every application which is today based on GPS would have an additional monthly fee to access whichever private constellation that application had built around.
Admittedly, satellite connectivity comes with a bunch of complexities that GPS don't have. But still, if we were smart, would we be building one giant common-access constellation rather than multiple competing ones?
If we had, we definitely wouldn’t have gotten the low cost of the Starlink constellation. The industry experts, including Tim F, didn’t think such a thing was feasible. I’ve talked to a Guidance and Navigation expert (a civil servant working for the federal government for space systems) that didn’t think droneship landing (which SpaceX relies on for making reusable rockets—and thus Starlink—economical) was possible.
When you have one big system and no competition, you get status quo solutions. That is, an order of magnitude greater cost. (And this isn’t an exaggeration… compare space shuttle costs for commercial satellites to Falcon 9. STS roughly is 10 to 100 times as expensive per launch with comparable payload.)
But it’s important to keep in mind that the satellite networks are different from GPS and one important way: they are two way communication systems not broadcast. That means that you don’t get the same economies of scale for having just one system that you might for GPS. Having two communication systems that use two different spectrums means double the throughput that a single system would’ve provided.
> When you have one big system and no competition, you get status quo solutions.
GPS, moon landings, space stations, space shuttles, and most of the rest of the history of space are hardly status quo solutions! It's not like space has been stuck, waiting for Elon Musk to save the day.
I realize that in certain social circles, the idea that Elon has ever done anything useful is met with scorn and laughter, but that’s kind of precisely what happened. NASA and the aerospace primes (including in Europe) had abandoned reuse as impractical due to the lessons learned from Shuttle (and several abortive attempts at reusable launch, like X-33 and others). It took the non-status quo companies like SpaceX (and Masten Space, etc) to prove out reuse.
> the idea that Elon has ever done anything useful is met with scorn and laughter
Could you provide an example of someone saying that here? Elsewhere?
> in certain social circles
Is it possible that people have rational ideas that disagree with yours, which should not be dismissed as outcomes of social effects? At best, Musk's personal following seems like by far the strongest social phenomenon involved.
> It took the non-status quo companies like SpaceX (and Masten Space, etc) to prove out reuse.
That wasn't the prior point and therefore wasn't what I responded to. The prior point, as I understood it, was that government is unable to innovate and only business is. Also, SpaceX is now part of the status quo.
You said, and I quote:
“GPS, moon landings, space stations, space shuttles, and most of the rest of the history of space are hardly status quo solutions! It's not like space has been stuck, waiting for Elon Musk to save the day.”
But again, that’s precisely what happened. There was a decades-long, post-Cold-War stagnation in the government-led space industry (to the extent that NASA used a higher inflation rate to calculate aerospace project costs… ie aerospace technology was becoming MORE expensive over time for the same capability), particularly for launch technology (commercial launch was fleeing the US and going to cheaper foreign launchers like Russia), and it was SpaceX who ultimately broke the impasse and proved reusable launch was feasible. It is a huge impact, too. Consider SLS or, more to the point, the reference HLS lander versus Starship, which was selected for NASA’s commercial HLS bid. Starship is approximately 10 times larger in capability than the reference design or Apollo. NASA literally couldn’t afford any other option for Artemis to meet the 2024 landing goal.
SLS vs Starship is a very illustrative comparison of what a single, monolithic, government-led solution vs a more competitive, commercial led solution is.
(And government vs commercial ISN’T a good framing, here. NASA has been super important in commercialization of this stuff by fostering competition, serving as an anchor customer for new entrants, and providing valuable insight and consultation. And even in the Soviet era, there was competition between firms in the Soviet launch sector… single, monolithic solutions are just not a very efficient approach…).
I think the fixation should be less on the 'free to use' portion of GPS, and more on the fact that for many of us there's basically one satellite-based location system to which we have access, in the same way that there may only be one set of phone landlines in my neighborhood, and one municipal water supply. Phone service and water are not free to use, but we also didn't pay to build several competing overlapping systems.
I compare this to cell service, where multiple private networks covering the same area are built and maintained, and if you're on the wrong network, you might have worse coverage in a given neighborhood than your friend -- and you both have worse coverage than you would under a hypothetical network which was the union of both.
The original article was about a plethora of companies who had aspired to create their own constellations and are now seeing that actually that's really expensive. We're still going to end up with several competing ones. Would we be better off (i.e. pay less for connectivity from a constellation with more satellites and better coverage) if there was one larger one?
> for many of us there's basically one satellite-based location system to which we have access
This isn’t the case though. Most “GPS” (GNSS is the better acronym) chips these days support several.
American GPS, Russian GlONASS, European Galelio, and Chinese BeiDou all provide the same basic functionality, the first three are quite common in most chipsets (like the one in your phone)
> we also didn't pay to build several competing overlapping systems
I think you're missing the history of utilities but also most public granted monopolies: they did grow out of several competing businesses. In the case of electricity, water, subway systems, most of these institutions will trace back to a history of privatized providers competing to establish a market. These utilities having a monopoly from the jump in any new developments is only because we've inherited that history and know better. It's only in the aftermath of providers clashing to an annoying enough degree that granted monopolies get created.
What is seen is a generally workable GNSS solution, especially after the removal of selective availability (note: this is a good thing, but by no means necessary; BeiDou still suffers from intentional degradation).
What is not seen is a potentially better service that doesn't cost $1 billion a year which wasn't created. GPS radios are fairly power hungry, slow to sync without ephemeris, and accuracy can vary especially near buildings and terrain. But it works well enough and is entrenched enough that a private improvement would struggle to make financial sense.
A utility of this scale also creates a single point of failure, which came to bear during the Galileo outage a few years ago. What some call needless competition is seen by others as redundancy & robustness. The water provider in Flint, MI should have gone out of business and been replaced for pumping lead into peoples' homes, but instead the situation became a political football. The only cost to bad actors was the expenditure of political capital; all but one minor charge was dropped.
There are lots of trade offs, so the ways we'd be better off change depending on the way the system is defined. I do think the consideration of what might have been is interesting nonetheless.
> which is operated by the US military with an annual budget of roughly $1B -- and we can all use it for free.
Non-Americans, yes, but Americans pay taxes to use it. In fact, if you replaced tax-funded model with, say, a markup on each receiver, Americans would pay less than they already do, and only those that use it would pay for it. I find both of these things beneficial.
> Had the US not provided for civilian access to GPS, and instead there were several competing private systems, they would all be worse
Why, though? Why would they be worse? Typically, when you have even two competitors, the quality is improved.
> and every application which is today based on GPS would have an additional monthly fee to access whichever private constellation that application had built around.
You are lacking imagination. It’s like saying that if government stops providing internet connectivity for free, every application accessing the internet will charge monthly fee. Alas, government does not provide free internet, but nevertheless, apps don’t charge consumers for ingress/egress.
As it happens, businesses are pretty good at coming up with business models convenient to users. Google could, for example, easily cover the entire cost of GPS completely on its own, and offer free Google Maps, which would easily outcompete other map apps if they charged money for use. Considering how much they pay for being default search engine on Apple, $1B is a pittance.
>Typically, when you have even two competitors, the quality is improved.
It's hard to argue this is the case, especially for businesses that require a significant amount of upfront capital. The trivial example in utilities are ISPs. You can argue that ISPs are not a "free market" because of the government doing X, Y, Z, but if it's the case that government intervention is required anyways, then removing the profit motive and having the government just build seems preferable.
>Considering how much they pay for being default search engine on Apple, $1B is a pittance.
The $1B number is a red herring. It cost them $1B to maintain the system. The costs of acquiring rockets and designing satellites, as a private company, is likely far greater. Secondly in the case of Google Maps, that product doesn't exist as it's own standalone business, but as one that was largely subsidized by another, more grossly profitable business. The question you should ask would if a company like Waze (pre-acquisition of course) could have built the infrastructure for GPS. The answer is likely no.
Edit: Thinking about this more, there is a trivial counter-example to your point about being charged egress on the internet, and it's just Google Maps. Google did the work of mapping a huge amount of the US, and generally has the highest quality maps. If you wanted to use that data, much like a business uses GPS, Google charges an fee which has been often derided as exorbitant. Even in the face of new competitors like Apple Maps and OpenStreetMaps, Google has even increased prices. I feel we would be worse off if GPS was privatized like this as this would put companies like Uber, Flexport, and Waze at the mercy of a single profit driven "competitor". The "App Store" but for GPS doesn't sound like a better alternative.
> It's hard to argue this is the case, especially for businesses that require a significant amount of upfront capital.
There is plenty of capital to be had these days, and a lot of competition in many capital-intensive industries. For example, we have multiple competitors in cloud computing space, despite it requiring ten of billions of dollars in capital to enter.
The ISPs, and utilities in general are different not because they are simply capital intensive, but rather because they have low marginal return for marginal unit of capital spent, and because competition damages these return even higher. Launching a few satellites to provide service globally is a different sort of capital expense than painstakingly building out utilities every street and every block.
> The $1B number is a red herring. It cost them $1B to maintain the system. The costs of acquiring rockets and designing satellites, as a private company, is likely far greater.
Sure, which is why there has been no competition to GPS so far. However, SpaceX, now that it already has rocket and satellite expertise, could provide competition to Government GPS relatively easily.
> The question you should ask would if a company like Waze (pre-acquisition of course) could have built the infrastructure for GPS. The answer is likely no.
No, but they would simply buy license to use GPS, just like they bought license to use maps. No reason to pass these costs to users directly as a line item in a bill. That’s my point: there is no reason to believe that privately owned GPS would diminish the user experience. As I already mentioned, instead of subscription fees that people lacking business imagination keep bringing up, you could for example charge royalties per GPS receiver sold, you know, the way Android phones already pay dozens of dollars in royalties.
> Why, though? Why would they be worse? Typically, when you have even two competitors, the quality is improved.
I think the key points are:
- because there would be fragmentation, we might have several smaller private services, each with crappier coverage because of fewer satellites in each, different variance in clocks, etc
- because GPS _doesn't_ need to worry about collecting revenue from users, you don't have to prove you're a subscriber to use it. Every GPS device you have doesn't have to be linked to your account. And you don't have to worry that e.g. your phone and your car partnered with different satnav services and so now you need two subscriptions _and_ they don't play together, etc.
I think it's not that hard to imagine casual consumer applications where the product benefit of incorporating satellite-based location services would become swamped by the overhead of connecting to your preferred location service.
> In fact, if you replaced tax-funded model with, say, a markup on each receiver,
GPS isn't technically designed to do that, the open signal is open. And if you did it, the cost of a receiver would go up because it would have to be more sophisticated.
Galileo tried to do this business model and failed.
> Why, though? Why would they be worse? Typically, when you have even two competitors, the quality is improved.
> Typically, when you have even two competitors, the quality is improved.
If those state services weren't available for the public they would exist anyway, they are primarily for military purpose.
Imagine the US didn't offer free GPS and civilian competition would arise. Wouldn't it just mean the US users would have to pay for two satellite services? Once for the military one, once for the civilian. Since cost does not increase with users, the military (tax supported) one wouldn't be cheaper to run either.
Apart from that there are competitors even today. My smartphone does connect to Galileo, Glonass and GPS.
In that world, military would just contract with commercial providers and use commercial GPS, same way they already spend hundreds of billions of dollars on products and services provided by private companies.
I can't imagine how one would think that's better than the current situation. Military contracts with commercial providers are an absolute nightmare. Is this not what even libertarians denounce as "crony capitalism?"
Most of technology procurement that military does is through commercial providers. This means that if there is a nightmare project, it will most likely be a done with a commercial partner, because most projects are done with commercial partners. On the other hand, there are plenty military contracts with commercial businesses which aren’t nightmares. For example, US military has a contract with Samsung for mobile devices. It is most definitely not a nightmare.
Government buying from private businesses is no what “crony capitalism” means.
If competition makes stuff better, and a large company like Google can make one at "a pittance", it's worth asking -- why isn't there a privately created global satellite navigation system yet? GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO were created and are operated by state institutions.
Because there is one already, and it’s free to use. If government hadn’t paid for it, you’d see much more competition in the space. For comparison, ask why no company has built a cheap, fast satellite internet yet? Apparently, some are building them right now.
> Non-Americans, yes, but Americans pay taxes to use it.
Yes, but non-Americans also pay, by living in a world with America, in particular the US military, in it. So the cost is spread fairly evenly, I’d say.
There is, practically, no model in which GPS subscriptions make sense without enabling bidirectional communications with the satellite. GPS modules (ground side) do not need transmitters, only receivers and, potentially, a decryption module (soft or hardware).
A subscription GPS system with bidirectional communication (to authenticate users) would have grossly inefficient devices (transmitting to space is not cheap, plus the incurred latency on the communication). But that's the only way to enforce a subscription.
Subscription GPS systems with unidirectional communications (down only) would be cracked in about 5 minutes. Every authorized device would have to share the same key for it to be practical, which means even with key rotation schemes (sucks to be in the wilderness without internet connectivity for an extended period in this case) the keys would be on every device and trivially recovered.
The only way a unidirectional communication scheme works is if the GPS devices are already internet connected on the ground side, which largely defeats the purpose of GPS in many situations (at least historically, before widespread cellular data networks). You certainly couldn't use this effectively at sea or when hiking through the backcountry.
Little known fact, if you do have the GPS decryption module, you get way better sensitivity and spoofing protection. But you have to be the US military[1].
Electric power from the grid comes in only a couple of ways, but there are a ton of different kinds of satellite communications: broadband in several bands, narrowband in a billion bands, satellites that talk to low power devices, satellite phones in either S or L band, etc.
I have two specific needs for remote data connections (uploads in both cases). In one, satellite connectivity makes a ton of sense, and I think we are on the cutting edge of it being viable. This need is fairly tolerant of low bandwidths & high latencies.
The other need requires low power, high bandwidth and low latencies. Satellite is completely nonviable as of now. We might need an upgrade in the physical laws of reality to make it viable.
I imagine 90% of most people's usage would be closer to the latter case than the former. Denser constellations might make the former more palatable in the long run.
Which is a fair assumption. GPS going civilian in the 1980s was an incredible thing, so was the lifting of selective availability two decades ago. Without American govt spoiling the market there'd be little incentive.
And people forget, the Reagan administration only made a point of ensuring future civilian access to GPS after Soviet air forces shot down a commercial airliner (KAL 007) that mistakenly wandered into their airspace. Had such an incident not occurred, it might have been kept for only military use.
I checked the Hiber [1] IoT Solutions (mentioned in the article) that are mostly focused on Asset/Vehicle/Machinery tracking. Even tho their message focuses (among other things) on how cheap they are - I have to disagree. Maybe if they find someone that truly needs global connectivity where 2G/NB-IoT/LTE-M can get pricey, but then someone needing that probably has quite a big purchasing power. Also their claims of easy install and productivity/uptime gains (without a CAN module, as they don't offer it currently) are very much PR speak and don't work like that in reality (I run a tiny asset/vehicle tracking business). Really not seeing how they are even close to being competitive in this space - or able to provide value added solutions later on. There are niche tracking solutions which are a lot better fit than what they are currently offering/focusing on. Something like yacht tracking, you know, where satellite connectivity is actually needed. But what do I know, maybe I'm wrong.
Also looks like you have to sign a 5 year contract, very optimistic from them.
Generally thinking the IoT and satellite connectivity (at affordable, non Iridium level, pricing) have it's uses. But for general vehicle/machine tracking where you usually have power, need to extract data from the machine anyway (for real insights), a plain old (or even better new NB-IoT/LTE-M) cellular connectivity will (generally) be plenty.
It's all the same mistake made during the Dot Com era: "It's all free".
But it's NOT free. The fixed or variable costs might be lower than typically seen before but "smaller" ≠ "zero" just like "large" ≠ "infinite".
It's confusing these that causes most of these types of "entrepreneurship Epic Fails".
You still have to have an infrastructure which has non-zero fixed and variable cost.
When it comes to space (I used to be employed as a rocket scientist at a government Think Tank), the infrastructure costs are absolutely enormous even compared to more modest terrestrial systems. Like many orders of magnitude higher than, say, the entire interstate highway system. And it's because the risks and capital costs are that much higher.
There seems to be a ‘cloud’ play in the satellite space that someone might launch… ie. a provider will run your firmware on their devices in exchange for usage fees. It seems like a good fit for a well-capitalized firm that would allow for a lot of innovation to happen. Amazon already offers satellite management systems via AWS- how long until they start renting out hardware too?
Trying to think what useful things can be done onboard a satellite in only software? If the customer is speccing HW, it would make more sense for AWS to again just sell the resultant data products (assuming sensors) or managed 'satelliteless' services for i.e. comms
The economic advantages of Apple to delay any satellite functionality of their devices until these IoT providers are desperate is the script playing out. It requires no coordination between the larger technology and tech service providers for them to realize the significant value they will realize by being slow to implement satellite related options to their devices and services.
This seems like a particularly cynical take. It seems more likely that Apple is, as they usually are, cautious about introducing an external dependency until they're confident about its reliability, quality, and battery life impact, plus how to make the integration easy for users.
I cannot say much now but we are working on something super exciting and we might be able to turn, tune, tweak and bring some major change to the cost involvement with Satellite data.