INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Main image: Could Elon Musk's space and electric car ventures be part of a grand plan to dominate global communications Credit: TeslaElon
Musk is one of the most intriguing people in the world today
They seem to have separate missions, with few synergies between them
But could Musk have a secret planLast year tech CEO Gavin Sheridan came up with a highly plausible piece of speculation, which he posted
that's even slower than your old dial-up modem
This might be fine if all you want to do is upload the GPS coordinates of a container ship as it crosses the oceans, but it's much less
useful for, well, pretty much everything.There are some faster services available from other companies, which offer speeds comparable to 3G,
but none are global, and instead use satellites that are specifically focused on limited geographic areas.Iridium operates an internet
satellite service, but it's painfully slow
But rather than being something that ordinary consumers can tap into, the service is being aimed at big corporate customer and governments,
How so By delivering high-speed internet connectivity directly from satellites, to millions of devices.So how does space-based internet
cost-effectively launch the 11,943 satellites Sheridan reckons would be required for a complete global network, and then the satellite
order to provide greater redundancy and lower latency, in a similar way to how there are more mobile phone masts in cities, to ensure that
production, which is under construction in Nevada and which is expected to be the biggest building in the world
And if Musk can use such a network to cut out all of the fixed line and mobile operators in the process, he reckons it would immediately
create a trillion-dollar company, and wipe out everyone from Comcast in the US to BT in the UK in the process.Science fiction or plausible
build such a satellite network.Three years on, the Starlink team is already making what appears to be significant progress
They are essentially being used to test the underlying technology: they connect to each other using V-band radio signals, and then use the
Ku/Ka bands to communicate with the Earth, just as a real life service would.According to Musk himself, the tests appear to be going well
use to play online games.SpaceX launched two test satellites for the proposed Starlink internet project in February
Perhaps the next most plausible company to eventually achieve this is OneWeb
It's pitching a constellation of 882 satellites in low Earth orbit, launched by Blue Origin, the rocket company owned by Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos.The one advantage it does have in this space is that the International Telecommunications Union, the global body that regulates
radio communications, has approved the company to offer services on this band
back to the end of this year.So could we be on the cusp of being able to play Fortnite deep within the Amazon rainforest Sadly, when I
contacted SpaceX to ask if I could have a chat to anyone working on Starlink, after initially being interested in what I was writing, they
Musk says the satellite design will undergo another revision before the company starts cranking out the thousands of units that would be
but, of course, we know what Musk is like with deadlines.TheIndianSubcontinent's Next Up series is brought to you in association with
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