CIS471: Network-based applications

Two Ways to Build the Internet in Space -- China, Inc. vs Starlink et al

2026-05-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

SpaceX has over 10,000 working Starlink Internet satellites in orbit today, and is far ahead of its Western and Chinese competitors, some of whom have not yet begun launching satellites. In my last post, I estimated the number of satellites each constellation would have in orbit at the end of the current Chinese five-year plan in 2030, and said one could think of the three Chinese constellations as divisions of a single enterprise, China, Inc.

The Western approach of self-contained competitors has clear advantages. It allows rapid deployment, tight control over performance, and independence from other systems. The deployment of Starlink in Ukraine illustrates this point. On February 26, 2022, Ukraine requested Starlink service, and by the end of the day, service was activated, and terminals were en route. By March 19th, there were over 5,000 terminals in the country, and there were 15,000 by June 9th.

That’s the good news, but the bad news is that each provider must build and operate its own full-stack constellation, leading to duplication and a lack of global awareness. The Chinese approach to the Internet in space reflects their practice of making decisions within the context of five-year plans; it is slower but allows for a degree of optimization.

Rather than building multiple competing full-stack systems, Chinese constellations implement a division of labor: Guowang (backbone and sensitive government applications), Qianfan (general Internet service), and Honghu-3 (direct-to-device, Earth observation, IoT, etc.). For example, in providing global airline or maritime connectivity, Qianfan or Honghu-3 would both use Guowang for long-distance traffic. In this emerging architecture, the Internet stack is distributed across constellations. Instead of duplication, there is specialization and coordination.

The architectural difference becomes most visible in routing. In the Western stand-alone systems, routing is internal in each. In the Chinese layered systems, routing may span constellations, enabling system-level coordination and optimization. This does not imply fragmentation of the Internet, but it changes how traffic is managed and controlled.

It also alters our interpretation of my estimates of how many satellites each constellation will have in orbit in 2030. My estimate was that Starlink would have 16,083 satellites in orbit in 2030, far more than Western and Chinese runners-up Amazon LEO with 2,729 and Qianfan with 5,217. However, if we consider the Chinese constellations part of a unified, optimized collective with 11,692 satellites, the gap is smaller.

Note that, given today’s international political differences, the potential markets for Western and Chinese connectivity differ, as shown in this Venn diagram of the number and GDP of nations with Starlink connectivity, Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, and both. The BRI projects tend to be in poorer nations, but there are more nations with BRI projects than with Starlink availability. The current success of Starlink suggests that the market is large enough to support it and the Chinese constellations.

Finally, in a study of the Internet in India and China in the late 1990s, my colleagues and I observed that “China has been able to execute plans effectively by allocating resources to competing, government-owned enterprises.” That pattern is evident here. China’s earlier, now-discontinued, LEO broadband initiatives—Hongyun, sponsored by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, and Hongyan, sponsored by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation—were initially conceived as competing systems.

The creation of the China Satellite Network Group and the subsequent prioritization of the Guowang constellation following its initial announcement and ITU filing in 2020 marked a turning point. Experience gained from Hongyun and Hongyan must have informed this transition, with technology, personnel, and spectrum filings absorbed or redirected. Subsequently, Qianfan and Honghu-3 have emerged in more differentiated roles. The result is not simply the replacement of earlier projects, but a progression from competing proposals to a more coordinated, multi-layered architecture—one that reflects both accumulated experience and the broader organization of China’s space and telecommunications sectors.

How many Internet-service satellites will be in orbit at the end of China's five-year plan?

2026-03-26T11:44:00.000-07:00

One could think of the Chinese constellations as a little like "divisions" of a single enterprise with the Chinese government being the "chairman of the board of directors" which meets every five years.

Chinese five-year plans outline strategic goals and initiatives to guide economic and social development. The first plan (1953-57) began the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and the 15th plan (2026-30), which was outlined this month, aims to achieve greater self-reliance and strength in science and technology, including coordinating the construction of satellite communication, navigation, and remote sensing systems, and accelerating the development of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite internet.

Estimated Chinese satellites in orbit, 2030

China is developing three LEO Internet service constellations, Guowang, Qianfan, and Honghu-3, with plans for eventually having 12,992, 15,000, and 10,000 satellites, respectively. How many of of these satellites will be in service by the end of the newly announced five-year plan in 2030? To answer that question, I "interviewed" six AI chatbots, and the results are shown here.

The chatbots disagree, which is to be expected because the estimates are based on assumptions about the rates of manufacturing of satellites and rockets, the development of high capacity reusable rockets, the availability of launch sites, progress so far, demand for service (Qianfan and Honghu-3 will be serving paying customers), available funding, etc.

Estimated Western satellites in orbit, 2030

China has competitors in the US and Europe, so I also asked the chatbots to estimate the number of satellites Starlink and the other Western competitors would have in orbit at the end of 2030. Starlink dominates this group, but by 2030 SpaceX will have been de-orbiting as well as launching satellites for several years and the others will be expanding their constellations.

The chatbots estimate that In 2030, Starlink will still have the largest number of satellites in orbit, but the three Chinese operators combined will have 72% of the number of satellites Starlink has. Since they will serve different markets -- government, enterprise, consumer, etc., one could think of the Chinese companies as a little like "divisions" of a single enterprise with the Chinese government being the "chairman of the board of directors" which meets every five years.

In this case, I just asked the chatbots the same, simple question: "How many LEO satellites will constellation x have in orbit by the end of 2030? I want your best estimate as a single number." One could get more insight into the causes of the variance by asking an open ended question, conversing with the chatbot, and reading and analyzing the transcripts of those conversations, but today's chatbots do not archive conversations.

A final note on the estimation approach. The variation among chatbots might be interpreted as invalidating this pooled-estimation approach, but I wonder if the same sort of variance might not be observed if six knowledgeable human experts were asked the same question, since they too might consider different factors, make different assumptions and refer to different sources.

A final note on the estimates. Together they predict 31,876 LEO Internet service satellites by the end of the five year plan. During that time there will also be many new launches of smaller LEO satellites that do not have the ability to maneuver, direct-to-device satellites with big antennas, and maybe huge data center satellites. If our estimate is even close to accurate, this sounds like a recipe for collisions and debris, so technology and policies for collision avoidance and debris removal better be in place before 2030. SpaceX has the most to lose from collisions, but there is strong pressure for all of these companies to cooperate to mitigate collision risk.

It will be interesting to see which chatbot prediction is closest to accurate at the end of 2030.

Starlink's role in last year's Los Angeles fires

2026-01-24T10:46:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles area fires, January 2025 (source)

As shown above, the largest and most costly were the Palisades fire by the ocean and the Eaton fire, roughly 25 or 30 miles apart -- separated by the city of Los Angeles and surrounded by many smaller Los Angeles County cities. Grok estimates that the fires covered around 57,529 acres.

As power outages and fire-related damage knocked out cell service and terrestrial internet in many areas, Starlink, in conjunction with Tesla and T-Mobile, provided an alternative means of connectivity for residents, journalists, firefighters, and other emergency personnel.

Elon Musk delivering Starlink kits (source)

SpaceX donated 1,350 standard and mini Starlink kits to public safety agencies, disaster relief non-profits, and frontline emergency personnel. The front-line personnel received portable, backpack-sized mini kits while the standard kits were installed at fixed locations. While these kits were donated, SpaceX received publicity and goodwill, and Elon Musk was very visible.

In addition to these kits, SpaceX provided one month of free service for customers in areas affected by the fires. (Note that the eligible region included areas like downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica, which were only indirectly affected by the fire).

Tesla lent eight Cybertrucks that acted as mobile Starlink Wi-Fi hotspots with Internet connectivity for both residents and emergency operations where terrestrial networks had failed. They also provided electrical power via their batteries for equipment at command posts and other locations suffering power loss. Some reportedly brought water, snacks, and supplies to support first responders and community members. Los Angeles Fire Department Captain Adam Van Gerpen said the trucks were “essential for our public information officers and our incident commanders, even for our strike teams who are out there trying to communicate. We have radio communications, but this will enable cell phone and wireless communication.”

T-Mobile offered temporary unlimited talk, text, and data to customers in affected areas and activated Starlink direct-to-cellular (DTC) service, which had not yet been beta tested. This enabled SMS messaging, emergency alert receipt, and texting to 911 on compatible phones when cell towers were offline or power was out.

"The only reason you are able to see us right now is
because of the Starlink connection we just got today." Source

Perhaps the most valuable role for Starlink was in providing news media connectivity, enabling journalists to report on the fire to the general public in and outside of threatened areas, was kept aware of the situation.

Satellite emergency response will improve

DTC has now rolled out, and it will improve. New Satellites will take advantage of the FCC allowing Starlink’s DTC service to operate at higher power, enabling faster, more reliable service. We can also look forward to low-speed mobile data and voice communication in the future. This service will be ubiquitous and will enable firefighters and others to access fire-status maps, weather information, equipment, and personnel inventory and location, etc. Next-generation satellites with more power will also perform better in areas with trees and atmospheric humidity.

Industry initiatives (3GPP NTN standards) are aligning satellite and cellular networks so that phones can seamlessly switch between terrestrial and satellite links — crucial for full voice and data over space networks.

The Ukraine war dramatically demonstrated the value of drones using Starlink to surveil a battlefield and attack enemies. One can imagine Starlink-connected drones playing a similar role in fighting fires, with drones continuously streaming fire location and spread data and the locations of firefighters and fire-fighting assets to command centers who direct operations.

The response of SpaceX and Tesla to last year's California fires was ad hoc. For example, the eight Cybertrucks mentioned above were temporarily diverted from planned deliveries to customers. Establishing systems and relationships within Starlink (and its competitors) and between them and emergency-response organizations will be even more important than new technology. Stable bureaucratic procedure will replace ad hoc improvisation. (SpaceX has taken steps in this direction.) Also expect to see new equipment standards. For example, all fire trucks will have Starlink (or Amazon LEO, Qianfan, etc.) dishes.

This may sound expensive, but Grok estimates the Los Angeles fires cost $250 million to fight and $28-53.8 billion in property damage, and a Helsinki University study concluded that the wildfires contributed to at least 440 deaths.

Starlink in Ukraine: What Three Years of Wartime Connectivity Taught Us

2026-01-05T10:43:00.000-08:00

Ukrainian soldier with a Starlink dish near Kreminna, eastern Ukraine. Photo: Clodagh Kilcoyne

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, few people thought of satellite Internet as strategic, but what began as an emergency request made on Twitter became one of the most consequential infrastructure decisions of the war.

At 4:04 a.m. on February 26, 2022, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, asked Elon Musk to activate SpaceX’s Starlink service over Ukraine. That same day, Musk replied that service was active, and within forty-eight hours, a truckload of terminals arrived. Minutes after their arrival, Ukrainian engineer Oleg Kutkov posted a speed test from Kyiv. Starlink was live.

At the time, this looked like a dramatic but limited response—an emergency patch to help a government under attack stay online. Over the next three years, it became something much more consequential: a privately owned satellite network evolved into a core layer of wartime infrastructure. Today, there may be as many as 200,000 terminals in Ukraine, making it the biggest Starlink user in Europe.

I have been writing about Starlink in Ukraine since those first days of the invasion, beginning with early observations on connectivity, coverage, and ground-station dependence, and following its rapid expansion into government, military, energy, healthcare, and civilian use. Those earlier pieces are collected here on CircleID (see links below). This post is not another update. It is a synthesis of what the Starlink experience in Ukraine tells us about Internet infrastructure in war and dependency.

From novelty to infrastructure

In the earliest phase, the number of Starlink terminals in Ukraine was small, but their value quickly became clear. A handful of portable terminals in the hands of senior officials, military commanders, communications staff, and journalists could preserve continuity of government if fiber lines were cut, cellular towers destroyed, or local networks surveilled or jammed.

By mid-March 2022, more than 5,000 Starlink terminals were operating in Ukraine. Terminals were used by the armed forces, energy companies, emergency services, hospitals, NGOs, journalists, and local governments. In some towns, a single terminal provided backhaul connectivity for thousands of civilians.

Political and Army leaders used Starlink for military planning and decision-making. Starlink also facilitated propaganda and foreign relations. We saw videos of President Zelensky at the front lines, meeting foreign leaders, and addressing foreign parliaments. We also saw daily evidence of Russian atrocities on Telegram and in the news.

Software-defined warfare

Early Starlink terminals depended upon ground stations in neighboring countries -- Poland, Lithuania, and Turkey. Coverage and availability varied by geography, but performance was consistently good enough for coordination and reporting. Reliability, not elegance, was the wartime requirement.

Then the Russian forces began jamming Starlink terminals. SpaceX responded not by shipping new hardware, but by pushing software updates. Roaming was enabled, allowing terminals to be used briefly, powered down, moved, and used again. Power consumption was reduced so terminals could operate from vehicle outlets. Jamming countermeasures were deployed over the air. (These changes occur without the delay of traditional military procurement cycles).

This was a glimpse of a new kind of infrastructure contest: electronic warfare meeting software-defined networks. Ukraine has given us a clear example of how modern Internet systems blur the boundary between civilian engineering and military operations, and shown us new skills that are needed.

Starlink and drones -- over land and on sea

Starlink’s military significance became clearest when paired with drones.

Ukrainian reconnaissance units used Starlink to relay imagery and targeting data from surveillance drones to artillery units, shortening sensor-to-shooter loops. Drones equipped with thermal cameras hunted at night. Others documented battlefield damage and war crimes. Starlink did not make this possible on its own—but it made it scalable.

At the same time, drone footage flooded social media and news outlets. Open-source intelligence groups analyzed videos and satellite imagery. Journalists verified claims. Governments responded. The Internet did not merely report the war; it became one of its primary theaters.

Civilian support ecosystems

By 2023, tens of thousands of terminals were in Ukraine, and distribution channels, training, repair, and modification were needed. Ukraine built a distributed ecosystem of engineers, service centers, and informal supply chains capable of repairing damaged terminals, adapting them for mobile and battlefield use, and keeping them operational under harsh conditions. A consumer product had become military infrastructure, often acquired, modified, and maintained by civilians.

This civilian technical mobilization—much of it voluntary—was as important to Starlink’s effectiveness as the satellites themselves. Without it, the system would have degraded quickly under battlefield conditions.

This was possible because the digital transformation in Ukraine began years before the Russian invasion. A Harvard study reports that before the war, Ukraine was arguably the number one country in the world regarding the pace and speed of digital transformation. The mobilization of Ukraine's commercial and technical Internet community should be noted and serve as a warning to other nations that are not as well prepared.

Dependence

By 2024 and 2025, Starlink was no longer an emergency backup but a routine part of military and civilian operations. That dependence carried risks. Ukraine’s experience highlighted the strategic implications of relying on privately owned, globally operated infrastructure whose technical evolution, pricing, and policy decisions ultimately lie outside national control – with Elon Musk in this case.

The lesson is not that Starlink is unreliable or that commercial systems should be avoided. On the contrary, Ukraine’s experience demonstrates the extraordinary value of Starlink. The lesson is that connectivity has become a strategic asset that must be planned with redundancy, diversification, and governance in mind—long before a crisis begins.

Today, OneWeb is Starlink's only operational commercial low-Earth orbit (LEO) competitor, and it is not close to being able to provide the service Starlink does. I hope the war in Ukraine is over before others, such as Amazon, Telesat, and IRIS^2, are ready to offer meaningful competition to Starlink, and I worry that, if Starship proves to be economically viable, the gap will grow significantly.

Three years on, it is clear that LEO satellite connectivity is strategic, and when strategic infrastructure depends on privately owned networks, domestic competence, governance, redundancy, and accountability become matters of national security—not afterthoughts.

Earlier posts in this series include:

SpaceXStarlink Service in Ukraine Is an Important Government Asset

SpaceXStarlink in Ukraine—A Week Later

FiveThousand SpaceX Starlink Terminals for Ukraine

TheUnprecedented Role of the Internet in the War in Ukraine

CivilianTech Mobilization in Ukraine

Starlink Is Critical in Support of Ukraine, and It Will Continue

AI chatbot conversations should be archived

2025-12-20T15:48:00.000-08:00

To paraphrase Bill Clinton’s 1990 campaign slogan, “it’s the conversation, stupid”, and Alan Turing would agree.

ChatGPT shareable links are to the end of the conversation, implying that the purpose of the conversation is to find a conclusion, like an answer to a question or a link to a relevant document. That makes sense for a search engine, but with AI chatbots, the conversation itself is of interest. Much of the value lies in the dialogue, the back-and-forth in which assumptions are tested, errors corrected, alternatives explored, and ideas refined, not a final answer.

I subscribe to the ChatGPT service and find it well worth the monthly fee, but it treats our conversations as ephemeral interface entities rather than durable intellectual work products of interest in their own right. The user interface is misleading. It has a "history" feature, which I assumed meant that it permanently archived conversations, until a reader pointed out that a link to a conversation I had published was broken.

The history feature allows users to view and continue past conversations for an unspecified time, but provides no native way to permanently archive an individual conversation in a standard document format like Word or PDF. There is no per-conversation export, no versioning, and no user-controlled guarantee of long-term retention. The only built-in alternative is an “export all data” function that produces raw HTML and JSON files, requiring additional processing before the material becomes usable.

This is not a minor usability issue. It reflects a deeper assumption: that the conversation is a disposable means to an end, rather than a work product with independent value. That assumption may be reasonable for customer-support chatbots (which I hate), but it is not reasonable when AI systems are used for writing, learning, decision-making, policy formulation, etc. In those contexts, the dialogue itself documents reasoning, uncertainty, correction, and collaboration. Often, it is precisely the conversational path—not just the destination—that one wishes to preserve.

Other software categories recognise this distinction. Word processors save drafts. Version control systems preserve history. Collaborative tools maintain change logs. AI chat services, by contrast, still behave as though conversations are transient means to an end. As a result, users who care about their work are pushed into awkward workarounds: manual copy-and-paste, browser extensions, or, in the case of ChatGPT, "export all data," which mixes valuable conversations with trivial ones.

The solution does not require new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, just adding a new feature to existing chatbots. (ChatGPT shared links should also offer the option of linking to the beginning or end of the conversation).

AI systems are not mere search engines but tools for thinking and writing, and AI platforms should support per-conversation export in standard formats, user-controlled guarantees of retention or deletion, stable identifiers suitable for citation, and optional versioning to capture the evolution of a dialogue. I'd be happy to pay ChatGPT for storing my conversations or just adding a button that allowed me to save them on Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.

Finally, I asked ChatGPT if any of the well-known US and Chinese AI chatbots had an "archive-conversation" feature, and it said none did.

Alan Turing suggested a test for machine intelligence: a machine was intelligent if a human evaluator could not reliably tell whether the transcript of a conversation was with it or a person. In the early 1970s, I installed two public-access Teletypes with dial-up Internet access in the Venice, California Public Library, and, among other things, I saw users carry on lengthy conversations with Eliza, a simple BASIC program, that fed their statements back to them in the manner of a non-directive therapist. Eliza passed the Turing test with those users as evaluators, and chatbot conversations should be archived.

Starlink and the Seven Dwarfs

2025-11-18T11:00:00.000-08:00

In the 1960s, IBM dominated the computer market, which was often referred to as “IBM and the seven dwarfs.” IBM is prosperous today, but no longer dominant. The low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite Internet service market today is reminiscent of that time, but it’s "SpaceX Starlink and the seven dwarfs."

As was the case with IBM, Starlink has seven dwarfs, which I have described in two fairly recent posts. Three are Chinese: Guowang, Qianfan, and Honghu-3, and four are from the west -- the US, Canada, and Europe -- Amazon LEO, OneWeb, Telesat, and IRIS². (Russia may emerge as the eighth dwarf).

Today, Apple's market cap is approximately $3.95 trillion, and IBM's is approximately $278 billion. I do not expect Starlink to drop off that precipitously, but its lead will be significantly diminished. Five of IBM's dwarfs failed, and two merged to form Unisys. I expect Starlink and all the dwarfs will survive, and the gap between them to shrink, but not as dramatically as the gap between IBM and its dwarfs. Here are some of the factors that will shape the future LEO Internet market (in no particular order):

A divided world market

After World War II, the relatively unscathed U.S. became the world’s leading power, shaping a liberal international order through its economic and military strength and promotion of democracy and free markets. Subsequent US actions like the wars in Vietnam and Iraq diminished our global stature, and Trump has accelerated that trend with isolationist policies, while China has been opening.

This leaves us in a world where some nations will deal only with Starlink and the "western" dwarfs, others will deal only with the Chinese dwarfs, and others will be open to either. This shields the dwarfs and Starlink from total global competition.

Approximate GDP shares (source)

We can get a very rough idea of market opportunities by considering the GDPs of three groups: nations that are members of the G7 and/or the European Economic Area, those that are BRICS-plus nations and/or have Digital Silk Road projects, and the rest of the world. As we see here, the potential market for Chinese dwarfs is somewhat larger using GDP, and the difference would be even greater were we to consider global population percentages.

China is open to private investment

Landspace ownership, mid-2025, (ChatGPT)

The stereotype of China as a Communist nation with an inefficient, corrupt government controlling everything is outdated. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms transformed China from a centrally planned economy into a socialist market economy. During 1978–1992, GDP quadrupled, and productivity, trade, and foreign direct investment surged. Living standards rose sharply, though inequality and regional gaps widened. China transitioned from isolation to global integration, laying the groundwork for its rapid growth in the following decades.

The trends set by Deng continued, and in 2014, China’s State Council opened its space sector to private investment. In 2015, the launch company Landspace Technology, which owns 48% of the developer of the Honghu-3 constellation and is planning an IPO, was founded. As shown here, Landspace provides an example of the mixed ownership structure possible in China today, and many Chinese space companies already have publicly traded stocks. Two other Chinese launch firms are moving toward IPOs, and more are in the works. Many people and organizations, including national and local governments, have stakes in the game.

Government investment and planning

US and China capital formation (source)

It's not government versus private investment; it's the mix of the two. The United States government's planning and investment played a key role in advances in electronic data communication, from Morse's telegraph to Whirlwind, the SAGE early-warning system, the ARPAnet, CSnet, NSFnet, and the NSF Higher-Education and International Connection programs. However, government Internet ownership was phased out in the first half of the 1990s.

After 1978, Chinese policy favored foreign and domestic investment over consumption —for example, investing in infrastructure and (over) investing in housing —while enacting measures like the one-child policy. The Chinese government also plays an active role in planning and setting goals. The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) called for building an integrated communications, Earth observation, and satellite navigation system with global coverage.

China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) is expected to promote low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite Internet as part of its “new-type infrastructure” strategy. A Ministry of Industry and Information Technology directive calls for “accelerated development of low-orbit satellite Internet,” commercial trials, and global broadband coverage, targeting over 10 million users, including direct-to-mobile handset service, by 2030. The Communist Party recommendations include building “information-communication networks” and “aerospace and low-altitude economies” as strategic sectors. Together, these indicate that LEO satellite internet will be clearly encouraged within China’s 2026–2030 policy framework.

Note that the Landspace pie chart above refers to "State and Local Government Funds." Local governments play an important role in coordinating and financing space and other industries in China, and Landspace has several key facilities within the G60 Science and Technology Innovation Corridor. (This is reminiscent of Silicon Valley.)

Elon Musk and Donald Trump

Starlink will remain a major satellite ISP, but Elon Musk has tarnished the Starlink and Tesla brands, opening market space for the dwarfs. Many individuals and organizations view Musk's "chainsaw" cuts of federal regulators, watchdogs, experts, and agencies as detrimental and/or cruel. The most striking example of his political acts was dismantling USAID. A recent study published in The Lancet by researchers from Africa, South America, Europe, and the United States estimates that 91 million deaths were prevented by USAID between 2001 and 2021 and predicts more than 14 million additional deaths globally by 2030, including more than 4.5 million dead children under five. For a real-time update on deaths caused by our aid discontinuation, click here, and for a short documentary, click here.

Musk is reminiscent of Henry Ford. Both were manufacturing geniuses with strong political views that alienated many people. Ford was an antisemitic publisher of the Dearborn Independent, who was praised by Hitler and given the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime’s highest honor for foreigners in 1938. Hitler also had a portrait of Ford in his office.

The Trump presidency has diminished the United States' stature and soft power/influence in the world. In the first year of his second term, Trump withdrew from the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Agreement, OECD Global Tax Deal, UNESCO, and the United Nations Human Rights Council. His arbitrary, possibly illegal, tariffs have alienated allies, provoked retaliatory trade measures, and signaled to many nations that the U.S. is an unreliable ally and economic partner. Trump's (and to a lesser extent, Musk's) waffling on Ukraine, where Starlink and, to a small extent, OneWeb have been valuable assets, calls U.S. reliability as an ally into question, opening markets for the Chinese and European dwarfs.

Starlink has proven to be a valuable military asset in Ukraine, but at one point, there was speculation that Musk would stop the service. He denied that and indeed has not terminated the service, but no government, military, or other organization is comfortable with a sole supplier of a critical good or service, so Canada and European governments will not allow their dwarfs to fail, nor will the United States government, which has multi-billion dollar contracts for Starlink, Starshield, and NASA and DOD launch service. Amazon will compete for U.S. government contracts, and it is conceivable that in a post-Trump world, other western dwarfs might also. (Trump will favor Bezos now that he and Musk have had a falling out).

In the far-far future, one can even imagine global collaboration with China. In May 1961, President Kennedy initiated the "space race" in a joint presentation to Congress requesting funds to put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade, but by September 1963, he had changed to a call for collaboration in space with the Soviet Union in an address before the UN General Assembly:

Why, therefore, should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries--indeed of all the world--cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.

New technology, distribution channels, and regulations

IBM was dethroned by new technologies like time-sharing, networks, and personal computers. They knew about these technologies and tried new products, but those products failed. For example, Christopher Strachey's early paper on time-sharing was widely read, and IBM had early online projects like the SABRE airline reservation system, the SAGE early warning system, and later general-purpose time-sharing systems. (While working for IBM, I first encountered time-sharing on a QUICKTRAN terminal at IBM Research and later built my dissertation on the IBM AN/FSQ-32, a bespoke IBM time-sharing system.) They offered computer networking products like System Networking Architecture and Token Ring, but they failed because of open networking standards like TCP/IP and Ethernet.

IBM was also aware of personal computers from the time of the LINC at Lincoln Labs, and sold personal computers from the early IBM 610 Autopoint in 1957 through the desktop IBM 5100 in 1975, and finally the mass-market IBM PC in 1981.

The problem was not ignorance or engineering, but the company culture, overhead, and customer base. IBM salespeople were well-paid men wearing blue suits and wingtip shoes, spending months on a sale of a large, expensive computer. IBM was not ready for computer stores and Walmart. SpaceX does not face as extreme a culture mismatch as IBM did, but workers may be unwilling to work the long hours SpaceX is known for.

As the global space industry grows, new technologies and applications will be developed worldwide, and SpaceX and Starlink may be slow or struggle to adopt them, given their commitment to vertical integration, unlike, for example, OneWeb, which has worked with partners from the start. Furthermore, the battle between Trump and universities is hurting research in need of federal funding, while China is funding research and education.

We will also see increasing pressure for global regulation as incidents like the recent stranding of Chinese taikonauts due to a debris strike occur, the world becomes increasingly dependent on space, and LEO becomes increasingly crowded. Those regulations will constrain Starlink since it already has over 8,000 satellites in orbit and over 8 million customers in over 150 countries. In the US, Jeff Bezos may have more influence over regulatory decisions than Musk, who has fallen out of favor with Trump. (Regulators face a dilemma in trying to achieve national autonomy and space sustainability.)

Starship and launch capability

SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 rocket gives Starlink a significant advantage, but others will master reusability. Blue Origin has recently landed a New Glen booster with significantly greater capacity than the Falcon 9 on a drone ship, China's LandSpace hopes to safely land a Zhuque-3 this year, and many other companies are working on Falcon 9-class reusable rockets.

While these companies will match SpaceX's current launch capability in a few years, catching up will take much longer if its next rocket, Starship, meets Elon Musk's projected cost, payload capacity, and launch cadence goals, but they have had several test launch failures and are behind schedule. Musk has done some amazing things, like achieving routine rocket reusability, but he has also failed to meet ambitious goals. For example, in 2016, he predicted Tesla would complete a coast-to-coast autonomous drive with no human intervention by the end of 2017.

Those are some reasons I expect Starlink's competitors, the dwarfs, to survive and cut into its immense lead. I'd welcome arguments pro and con on my belief that the gap between Starlink and the dwarfs will shrink significantly, but Starlink will continue to be an important player.

Update 11/21/2025

I stated above that no government, military, or other organization is comfortable with a sole supplier of a critical good or service, and that includes the U.S. Section 2273 of Title 12 of the US code calls on the President to act to ensure "the availability of at least two space launch vehicles (or families of space launch vehicles) capable of delivering into space any payload designated by the Secretary of Defense or the Director of National Intelligence as a national security payload". Amazon's New Glen rocket will become the second such vehicle.

Update 12/4/2025

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) recently formed the Commercial Space Department to serve as the specialized regulator for all commercial space activities. The CSNA also released a 22-point Action Plan for Promoting the High-Quality and Safe Development of Commercial Space (2025–27). This is the kind of integrated planning and action that brought China out of poverty, as mentioned above. (Note the emphasis on safe development, indicating concern for the future. (It's reminiscent of the Chinese investment in electric vehicles and charging infrastructure).

As shown above, state and local government funds 27.5% of Landspace, but that is just one example of Chinese provinces funding commercial space.

Update 12/9/2025

Spain and Poland pushed Europe's new priorities with record contributions to the European Space Agency (ESA).

Spain is now the fourth-largest ESA contributor and is focused on developing its own space industry. “Spain will continue to work with ESA to develop its own industry,” said Diana Morant, Spain’s Minister of Science, Innovation, and Universities. “The agency should be the architect of the European spatial infrastructure with industry policy that takes into account all of the stakeholders, particularly SMEs, startups and medium-sized businesses.”

Poland, which shares a border with Ukraine and was the first nation Germany invaded in 1939, has a more immediate motive.

Update 3/2/2026

LandSpace wants to reuse Zhuque-3 boosters by year's end. They hope to land a booster during the second quarter of 2026 and hope to refly the booster during the fourth quarter. If they succeed in doing so and can ramp up manufacturing and launch cadence, they will have a rocket comparable to the workhorse SpaceX Falcon 9 and be capable of launching satellites for the Chinese LEO satellite "dwarfs."

Western LEO Satellite Internet Update: OneWeb, Telesat, Amazon Project Kuiper and IRIS²

2025-10-14T16:52:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post, I updated the status of three Chinese low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite Internet constellations. This one looks at four western competitors: OneWeb, Telesat, Amazon Project Kuiper, and IRIS². While Starlink is far ahead of each of them and only OneWeb is in operation at this time, I expect each of these and the Chinese constellations to survive and eventually compete with Starlink (stay tuned for the next post).

OneWeb

Bill Gates and two partners founded Teledesic, a would-be LEO satellite Internet service provider, in 1990, but the technology was not yet ready, and Teledesic declared bankruptcy in 2002.

The next potential LEO Internet service provider, OneWeb, was founded by Greg Wyler, who had extensive experience with networking in developing nations, with the mission of “bridging the digital divide by 2027.” However, it entered bankruptcy in 2020. The company was reorganized and emerged from bankruptcy, and in 2023, it merged with the established geo-stationary satellite (GEO) operator Eutelsat, creating the "Eutelsat Group" company, with subsidiaries "Eutelsat" and "Eutelsat OneWeb.”

In spite of that rocky start, OneWeb is the only company other than Starlink that is offering LEO satellite Internet service today. OneWeb LEO revenue was 187 million euros ($216 million) for the 12 months ending June 30,2025, representing around 15% of total Eutelsat Group sales. Starlink revenue for 2024 was $2.7 billion. OneWeb’s market share, and more importantly, global capacity, are minuscule compared to those of Starlink.

That sounds grim, but given Elon Musk’s political activity, Trump’s MAGA/isolationist policy, and the military value of LEO Internet, Europe will not let OneWeb fail unless there are viable alternatives to Starlink. This is evidenced by European support of OneWeb in Ukraine, including German funding of OneWeb and a recent British investment.

Finally, note that the Eutelsat Group can offer multi-orbit service, switching seamlessly between Eutelsat GEO and OneWeb LEO satellites or offering OneWeb service to other GEO providers. They signed their first multi-orbit contract three years ago and have added others since.

While this gives them an in-house advantage, SES, which operates a middle-Earth orbit constellation, will partner with any LEO or GEO provider to provide multi-orbit service.

Telesat

Telesat, an established Canadian GEO satellite operator, was the next LEO Internet company. Telesat recognized the trend to LEO, but decided not to offer consumer connectivity.

Telesat has been beset by delays and has reduced its initially planned constellation size, but they have contracted (with SpaceX) to begin launching satellites next year. Trump’s immigration and tariff policies, along with talk of annexing Canada, assure us that the Canadian government, which, along with Quebec, has invested in Telesat, will not allow it to fail.

Its initial “Lightspeed” constellation will consist of 198 satellites with a mass of 750 kg, roughly that of Starlink V2 mini satellites. SpaceX is slated to deploy them over the course of a year, starting in mid-2026. Telesat has been booking customers, and their LEO backlog now exceeds their GEO backlog. They plan to provide global service with polar and inclined sub-constellations, are seeking a ground station partner, and have terrestrial deals with Vocus, Orange, and Space Norway.

While Telesat will not bundle its own LEO and GEO services, they have tested a hybrid deployment between LEO and GEO using the Telesat Lightspeed emulator, showing seamless integration without any issues. Software like the emulator is part of their strategic decision to use Aalyria Spacetime, a multi-layer, multi-orbit operating system for a temporospatial network, which they acquired from Google when the Loon project was abandoned.

Amazon Project Kuiper

Project Kuiper, which has launched 153 satellites, is far behind Starlink, which has over 8,000, but Amazon has many things going for it. From the time it was founded, Amazon was an infrastructure company, and Project Kuiper is an orbiting infrastructure that will be strategically paired with Amazon’s complementary terrestrial infrastructure, like fiber and datacenters. Amazon has vast experience in manufacturing and logistics that will stand them in good stead with the manufacturing of terminals as well as satellites.

Project Kuiper is a wholly-owned subsidiary and an initiative of Amazon, and Jeff Bezos is the founder of both Amazon and the Blue Origin launch company, which will launch some Project Kuiper satellites. Amazon itself will also be a significant Kuiper user, and Kuiper will use Amazon’s ground station service.

That’s the good news, but Amazon faces an FCC deadline to launch half the constellation by July 30, 2026, and the remainder by July 30, 2029. They say they will be able to receive, test, and pack 100+ Kuiper satellites per month into the appropriate fairing and claim to have secured 80 launches, but how fast can they manufacture them? They will apply for a waiver from the FCC if necessary, and, like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos has a lot of money and attended Trump’s inauguration. Earlier, Musk might have stopped an Amazon waiver, but now Trump is looking into deporting him, and Bezos has made editorial changes at the Washington Post, which he owns. A political contribution might solve the FCC deadline.

IRIS²

IRIS² (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite) is a €10.6bn project with 61 percent funded publicly and the balance coming from the SpaceRise industrial consortium, led by Eutelsat, Hispasat, and SES. SpaceRISE will design, deliver, and operate IRIS² for a period of 12 years.

They have contracted for 274 satellites in LEO and 18 in MEO, with first launches anticipated for 2029 and completion in 2030. Eutelsat will act as prime contractor leading the design of the LEO segment and co-leading the development of common system elements. SES will be responsible for procurement, integration, and operation of the MEO satellites, and Hispasat will lead the very-low orbital layer of the constellation and design, deliver, and operate the ground segment, manage operations, and interconnection with terrestrial networks. They also expect to eventually add a GEO sub-constellation.

This is a unique and complex organization that will have to manage suppliers like Airbus, Thales, OHB, Deutsche Telekom, and Orange. Bureaucracy might be a problem, but Europe can not rely on Starlink as Ukraine has during the war with Russia.

SES's unique three-orbit satellite Internet strategy

2025-09-17T16:21:00.000-07:00

SES's three-orbit offering is unique.

In 2021, OneWeb CEO Neil Masterson said, "Interoperability with GEO satellites must happen -- it's common sense ... Customers don't care whether it's a LEO satellite or a GEO satellite -- all they want is connectivity," and ten months later, OneWeb and Intelsat signed the first multi-orbit broadband agreement. SES, which was already a LEO-MEO operator in 2021, is now pursuing a three-orbit strategy, but they are not planning to launch a LEO constellation, but will blend multiple partners’ constellations into a unified three-orbit offering.

SES's first multi-orbit partnership was Cruise mPOWERED + Starlink, providing a managed blend of SES MEO and Starlink LEO service for maritime operators, and we can expect similar bundled services in aviation and enterprise markets.
SES and Lynk Global plan to provide direct-to-device (D2D) connectivity through Lynk's "cell towers in space" and SES's MEO backhaul and terrestrial infrastructure. (SES operates the largest fiber network among satellite providers, with global reach through 150 owned and partner teleports and 50 points of presence.) Might SES also offer AST SpaceMobile D2D service?
SES recently completed its acquisition of GEO operator Intelsat, giving it 120 LEO and MEO satellites, but it also inherited Intelsat's commitment to buy $250 million worth of LEO capacity from OneWeb over six years, giving it access to an operating LEO constellation.
SES and OndWeb's parent company Eutelsat are both members of the SpaceRISE consortium that is building the Iris^2 multi-orbit network.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper is ramping up launch campaigns and seeking distribution partners, and SES’s global ground infrastructure and government contracts make selective Kuiper integration plausible, especially for defense and enterprise deals. Project Kuiper expects to offer service in the US and four other countries by the end of March and approximately 26 countries by the end ot next year.
Telesat's LEO constellation Lightspeed targets enterprise and government -- markets SES knows well. If Lightspeed reaches orbit at scale, SES could combine its MEO and GEO coverage with Telesat’s polar-friendly LEO. Telesat also offers GEO connectivity, but instead of offering multi-orbit service, they will sell Lightspeed to other GEO providers. For example, they have an agreement to provide LEO service to Viasat.

These early and potential LEO partners are all US or European companies, and SES is in Luxembourg, which is now a member of NATO, but it was neutral before World War II and is relatively liberal. While it is inconceivable today, might SES collaborate with a Chinese LEO constellation one day? Perhaps starting with geo-fenced service in China or Belt and Road initiative nations.

This move makes SES unique. They will offer three-orbit service without the cost and delay of a new LEO constellation, and will be able to select the best LEO provider for a given application. They also plan to gradually grow their MEO constellation, adding a satellite every year.

That being said, they are facing stiff competition from Starlink today, and Amazon's Project Kuiper will be in service soon. They will be competing with their partners in some cases and sharing profits with them in all cases. It also remains to be seen how smoothly they can technically and operationally integrate heterogeneous LEO partners at a competitive cost. Stay tuned.

Chinese LEO satellite Internet update

2025-09-01T17:56:00.000-07:00

China has pursued a strategy of competition among government-owned organizations, and it initiated two government-owned constellation projects, Hongyun and Hongyan, in 2018. In April 2020, China’s National Development and Reform Commission included “satellite internet” on its “new infrastructures” list, and China applied to the ITU for a new constellation, called GW. Hongyun and Hongyan were dropped, and GW, also called China Satnet or Guowang, emerged as China’s global Internet service provider and it was followed by two others, Qianfan and Honghu-3. These are all far behind Starlink, but they will have protected markets and China is developing new launch vehicles and satellite manufacturing capacity.

Gwowang

China’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for National Economic and Social Development and Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035 called for building an integrated communications, Earth observation, and satellite navigation system with global coverage. Guowang is the constellation they called for.

Guowang consists of two sub-constellations, designated GW-A59 (6,080 satellites) and GW-2 (6,912 satellites). GW-2 will orbit at 1,145 km, and GW-A59 will orbit around half that. The ITU filing was in September of 2020, and after a long delay, the first ten GW-2 satellites were launched at the end of 2024, and they now have 81 in orbit. The cadence has picked up recently -- China just launched another batch of Guowang satellites. This was the ninth Guowang launch this year and the sixth in the last 30 days. Even at this cadence, it is unclear that they can manufacture and launch enough satellites to meet the ITU launch deadlines. Perhaps the Chinese have decided that, given launch and manufacturing resources, they would not be able to meet ITU deadlines for all of their constellations, so they are focusing on Guowang, which can be seen as most critical for the government.

Little technical information is available, but considering the capacities of the various rockets used to launch Guowang satellites and the number of satellites in each launch, it seems there are two sizes of satellite: large satellites of around 16,600 kg and smaller satellites of around 889 kg. While these are imprecise estimates, they indicate two classes of satellite with different capabilities and functions. (Note that the relatively high altitude GW-2 sub-constellation has both large and small satellites).

Several Guowang test satellites have also been launched, suggesting strategic government and military applications like Signals intelligence, positioning, navigation, and imaging applications in addition to Internet service.

Qianfan

Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST), a private company backed by the Shanghai municipal government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is developing the Qianfan constellation. The planned satellites will orbit at 1,160 km, which is higher than the other announced LEO satellite competitors except Telesat. While this will increase latency, collision risk, satellite lifespan, handoff frequency, and coverage footprint should improve.

Their plan called for 648 satellites providing regional service by the end of 2025 and global service with a second 648 satellites by the end of 2027. By 2030, they planned to have 15,000 satellites in orbit and offer direct-to-mobile service, but it does not look like they will make these goals.

It's been a year since the first Qianfan launch, but five months since the last on? Blae. Is the slowdown due to satellite or launch availability, or are they pausing for some redesign, or bothine Curcio reports that they are “having a very hard time" finding rockets to send full batches of 18 satellit to orbit, but they have also had operational problems. The upper stage of the first launches fragmented, creating over 300 pieces of trackable debris, and ninety satellites are in orbit, but fourteen have not reached their operational altitude. Furthermore, the satellites are interfering with astronomy, and some are tumbling. Regardless of the cause for delays, Qianfan is unlikely to meet its ITU launch deadlines.

Qianfan is a more direct competitor to Starlink than Guowang, which is primarily focused on domestic telecommunications and national security. SSST has been actively marketing wholesale service through foreign telecom companies under the Sailspace brand name. They had MOUs with several nations in six initial target markets, as shown below, and they have subsequently been actively marketing in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Honghu-3

Landspace Technology Corporation was founded in 2015, following a 2014 central government policy shift that opened the launch and small satellite sectors to private capital. Landscape owns 48% of Hongqing Technology, which is developing the 10,000-satellite Honghu-3 constellation. Honghu-3 satellites will be in six planes, ranging from 340-550 km.

Landspace has a pending IPO and is developing the Zhuque-3 rocket, which they plan to launch later this year. The Zhuque-3 will carry about 21,000 kg to LEO in an expendable configuration – less than an expendable Falcon 9, but more than a reusable Falcon 9. This connection to a rocket manufacturer is reminiscent of SpaceX's relationship with Starlink and Project Kuiper's with Blue Origin. (Several other Chinese companies are also working on reusable rockets).

Honghu-3 was announced after Guowang and Qianfan, and relatively little is known of their plans and technology, but Landspace has valuable experience as a private company. As you see in this conversation with ChatGPT, Landscape has a complex mix of private, state, and local government investors dating back to its founding, and it estimates the ownership breakdown as roughly 60% private, national government 15-20%, and provincial/municipal around 20%.

Update 9/14/2025

The Hong Kong Office of the Communications Authority has released a report on a Qianfan test using both the standard and high-performance terminals conducted on a cruise ship in Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong. The ship had an unobstructed view of eight satellites orbiting in a plane over Hong Kong. They tested Web page loading, HD video playback, WeChat video calls, and large online games.

The tester accessed the Baidu hot search page using a mobile browser, and images and text loaded quickly; video playback was also smooth.
There was no lag or abnormal playback when streaming 4K high-definition video from the CCTV website.
The WeChat video communication quality was comparable to that of terrestrial 4G/5G networks. The video remained stable during the test, with no noticeable lag.
The user experience while playing League of Legends was good, and the network delay was kept at 60 to 70 milliseconds.

The report also lists the technical specifications of both the standard and high-performance terminals, and speed tests for both terminals are shown below.

Update 10/23/2025

Quinfan resumed launches with a batch of 18 satellites after a six-month delay, presumably to correct for the problems of an exploding first stage, tumbling satellites, and interference with astronomy. They have now launched 108 satellites, and 14 have failed and are decaying, 94 are working, and 67 are in their operational orbit.

As mentioned above, Blaine Curcio noted that they were also “having a very hard time" finding rockets to send full batches of 18 satellites to orbit, but Andrew Jones reports that they have expanded launch procurement beyond state provider CASC, awarding $187 million in contracts to Landspace, Space Pioneer, and CAS Space. Still, there is no way they will meet the original goals of 648 satellites providing regional service by the end of 2025 and global service with a second 648 satellites by the end of 2027.

Update 1/9/2026

After the December 26 launch of nine satellites, there are now 136 Guowang spacecraft in space, functioning in and heading up to their operational orbit. They were launched by a Long March 8A rocket, so they were probably the smaller Guowang satellites. Guowang plans to launch 310 satellites in 2026, 900 in 2027, and 3,600 every year beginning in 2028.

A Chinese fisherman was able to retrieve the fairing from the launch -- a cool souvenir.

Update 3/7/2026

Zhuque-3’s next booster landing attempt is set for the second quarter of this year, and they hope to begin re-flying boosters during the fourth quarter. https://www.china-in-space.com/p/landspace-wants-to-reuse-zhuque-3

They have also successfully tested their version of a “Pez dispenser” for satellite stacking and release, so they may be ready for full-scale satellite deployment later this year, serving the Chinese LEO satellite Internet service providers.

Starlink and the seven dwarfs

2025-08-27T01:57:00.000-07:00

This post has been superseded, see:

https://cis471.blogspot.com/2025/11/starlink-and-seven-dwarfs.html

Source: ChatGPT

As of August 2025, Apple's market cap is approximately $3.363 trillion, while IBM's is around $223.03 billion. I do not expect Starlink to drop off that precipitously, but its lead will be significantly diminished. Five of IBM's dwarfs failed, and two merged to form Unisys, which has a market capitalization of $280.18 million; however, I expect all of Starlink's dwarfs to survive.

Let's look at today's dwarfs.

OneWeb

Bill Gates and two partners founded Teledesic, a would-be LEO satellite Internet service provider, in 1990, but the technology was not yet ready, and Teledesic declared bankruptcy in 2002.

The next would-be LEO Internet service provider, OneWeb, was founded by Greg Wyler, who had extensive experience with networking in developing nations, with the mission of “bridging the digital divide by 2027”, but it entered bankruptcy in 2020. The company was reorganized and emerged from bankruptcy, and in 2023 merged with established geo-stationary satellite (GEO) operator Eutelsat, creating the "Eutelsat Group" company, with subsidiaries "Eutelsat" and "Eutelsat OneWeb.”

Telesat

Telesat, an established Canadian GEO satellite operator, was the next LEO Internet company. Telesat recognized the trend to LEO, but decided not to offer consumer connectivity.

The initial “Lightspeed” constellation will consist of 198 satellites with a mass of 750 kg, roughly that of Starlink V2 mini satellites. SpaceX is slated to deploy them over the course of a year, starting in mid-2026. Telesat has been booking customers, and their LEO backlog now exceeds their GEO backlog. They plan to provide global service with polar and inclined sub-constellations, are seeking a ground station partner, and have terrestrial deals with Vocus, Orange, and Space Norway.

Amazon Project Kuiper

Project Kuiper, which has only 101 operational satellites in orbit today, is far behind Starlink, which has over 8,000, but Amazon has many things going for it. From the time it was founded, Amazonwas an infrastructure company, and Project Kuiper is an orbiting infrastructure that willbe strategically paired with Amazon’s complementary terrestrial infrastructure, like fiber and datacenters. Amazon hasvast experience in manufacturing and logistics that will stand them in good stead with the manufacturing of terminals as well as satellites.

That’s the good news, but Amazon faces an FCC deadline to launch half the constellation by July 30, 2026, and the remainder by July 30, 2029. They say they will be able to receive, test, and pack 100+ Kuiper satellites per month into the appropriate fairing and claim to have secured 80 launches, but how fast can they manufacture them? They will apply for a waiver from the FCC, if necessary, and. like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos has a lot of money and attended Trump’s inauguration. Earlier, Musk might have stopped an Amazon waiver, but now Trump is looking into deporting him, and Bezos has made editorial changes at the Washington Post, which he owns. A political contribution might solve the FCC deadline.

IRIS²

IRIS² (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite) is a €10.6bn project with 61 per cent funded publicly and the balance coming from the SpaceRise industrial consortium, led by Eutelsat, Hispasat, and SES. SpaceRISE will design, deliver, and operate IRIS² for a period of 12 years.

They have contracted for 274 satellites in LEO and 18 in MEO, with first launches anticipated for 2029 and completion in 2030. Eutelsat will act as prime contractor leading the design of the LEO segment and co-leading the development of common system elements. SES will be responsible for procurement, integration, and operation of the MEO satellites, and Hispasat will lead the very low orbital layer (Low LEO) of the constellation and design, deliver, and operate the ground segment, manage operations, and interconnection with terrestrial networks. They also expect to eventually add a GEO sub-constellation.

Three Chinese Dwarfs

China has pursued a strategy of competition among government-owned organizations, and it initiated two government-owned constellation projects, Hongyun and Hongyan, in 2016. In April 2020, China’s National Development and Reform Commission included “satellite internet” on its “new infrastructures” list, and China applied to the ITU for a new constellation, called GW. Hongyun and Hongyan were dropped, and GW, also called China Satnet or Guowang, emerged as China’s global Internet service provider and it was followed by two others, Qianfan and Honghu. These are all far behind Starlink, but they will have protected markets

Gwowang

Guowang consists of two sub-constellations, designated GW-A59 (6,080 satellites) and GW-2 (6,912 satellites). GW-2 will orbit at 1,145 km, and GW-A59 will orbit around half that. The ITU filing was in September of 2020, and after a long delay, the first ten GW-2 satellites were launched at the end of 2024, and they now have 81 in orbit. The cadence has picked up recently -- China has launched another batch of Guowang satellites. This was the ninth Guowang launch this year and the sixth in the last 30 days. Even at this cadence, it is unclear that they can manufacture and launch enough satellites to meet the ITU launch deadlines. Perhaps the Chinese have decided that, given launch and manufacturing resources, they would not be able to meet ITU deadlines for all of their constellations, so they are focusing on Guowang, which can be seen as most critical for the government

Qianfan

It's been a year since the first Qianfan launch, but five months since the last one. Is the slowdown due to satellite or launch availability, or are they pausing for some redesign, or both? Blaine Curcio reports that they are “having a very hard time finding rockets to send full batches of 18 satellites to orbit, but they have also had operational problems. The upper stage of the first launch fragmented, creating over 300 pieces of trackable debris, and ninety satellites are in orbit, but fourteen have not reached their operational altitude. Furthermore, the satellites are interfering with astronomy, and some are tumbling. Regardless of the cause for delays, Qianfan is unlikely to meet its ITU launch deadlines.

Honghu-3

Landspace has a pending IPO and is developing the Zhuque-3rocket, which they plan to launch later this year. The Zhuque-3 will carry about 21,000 kg to LEO in an expendable configuration – less than an expendable Falcon 9, but more than a reusable Falcon 9. This connection to a rocket manufacturer is reminiscent of SpaceX's relationship with Starlink and Project Kuiper's with Blue Origin.

Honghu-3 was announced after Guowang and Qianfan, and relatively little is known of their plans and technology, but Landspace has experience as a private company. (I asked the ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot chatbots how much state and private capital Landspace had received since it was founded, and the answers and explanations varied so much as to make them worthless, but they all agreed that the private investment was greater than the public.)

Estimating Guowang Internet service satellite mass with ChatGPT

2025-08-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

After searching for the mass of China's Guowang Internet-service larger satellites and finding nothing, I estimated it using ChatGPT. Since I knew the number of satellites (10) and the rocket used (Long March 5B) in two launches, the mass of a single satellite could be estimated if I knew the carrying capacity of the rocket.

I asked ChatGPT this question five times: How much mass could a Long March 5B rocket with a Yuanzheng-2 (YZ-2) upper stage carry to 1,100 kilometers with an inclination of 86.5 degrees? The average answer was 16.6 tonnes or 16,600 kg.

ChatGPT's five answers and the "reasoning" that led to them can be found here. Each is different -- ChatGPT does not remember prior submissions of the same question. I am not a rocket scientist and can only average the five results in estimating the satellite masses. I'd like to know what experts think of the results and the reasoning leading them.

There have been four launches of smaller satellites, and so far, 889 kg is a rough estimate of their average mass.

OneWeb can’t come close to replacing Starlink in Ukraine, but it could complement it.

2025-06-16T14:38:00.000-07:00

Elon Musk assured us that he would not stop the Starlink service in Ukraine. But, given his feud with Trump, his criticism of President Zelensky, and his rash actions with DOGE, can he be trusted? (His termination of USAID is estimated to have resulted in 340,000 deaths so far.)

When asked about Musk’s influence, Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, said he declined to comment on “the internal politics of the United States and who should influence these decisions” but added “If changes happen and if our US partners and friends are changing their plans, of course we will be ready for plan B.”

The US has decided to reduce aid to Ukraine, and Plan B is being considered. Eutelsat is in talks with the EU about the possibility of replacing Starlink in Ukraine

Eutelsat OneWeb is currently the only low-earth orbit (LEO) alternative to Starlink. Germany has paid for “fewer than 1,000” OneWeb terminals in Ukraine, but Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke says the company aims to increase this to between 5,000 and 10,000 "relatively fast."

That is admirable, but I don’t see how OneWeb could come close to replacing Starlink in Ukraine.

For a start, there are limitations of the OneWeb satellites and terminals:

Oleg Kutkov, a leading Ukrainian Starlink expert, estimates that there are around 130,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine.
SpaceX has over 7,500 LEO satellites compared to OneWeb’s 630. (Eutelsat also has 35 geostationary (GEO) satellites).
Kyivstar, the largest mobile operator in Ukraine, plansdirect-to-device Starlink connectivity later this year.
Kyivstar has determined that OneWeb currently lacks sufficient capacity to move forward on their partnership MOU at this time.
OneWeb satellites orbit at around 1,200 km, while Starlink satellites are between 336 and 570 km, which gives them a latency advantage for real-time battlefield applications.
OneWeb’s fixed beams enable it to provide guaranteed service levels in specific locations, but Starlink’s dynamic-beam architecture makes better use of available capacity in densely populated areas and in tracking mobile users.
OneWeb’s fixed terminals are more expensive than Starlink’s, and the portable terminals are heavier and more expensive.
There are ten different Starlink terminal models/revisions – they have had time to iterate designs and mature and refine manufacturing processes for both terminals and satellites.
Similarly, Starlink satellite designs have evolved – throughput has increased, intersatellite links were introduced, etc.

More importantly, Starlink is embedded in Ukraine. Systems, supply chains, distribution channels, organizations, and applications have been developed around it, and users, engineers, repair people, etc., have been trained. The first Starlink terminals arrived in Ukraine over three years ago. A week later, they were in the field and providing nationwide connectivity through ground stations in three nearby countries, and within a month, there were 5,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine. Starlink has played an unprecedented, critical role in the management of the war, international relations, and on the battlefield field and it has enabled significant civilian tech mobilization.

One more factor – Starlink is financially stronger than Eutelsat. Eutelsat stock was €28.06 per share in April 2015. When Trump berated Zelensky at the White House on February 28, 2025, it was down to €1.20. As a result of that meeting, it jumped to €7.84 on March 3, but it’s now back down to €2.31.

While OneWeb cannot replace Starlink in Ukraine, it can complement it. For example, OneWeb could provide connectivity and resilient backup for fixed locations like government offices and hospitals, and since Eutelsat operates both GEO and LEO satellites, latency-tolerant applications like streaming video could be offloaded onto their GEO satellites.

Remembering Dave Taht

2025-04-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

“Elon, let me inside this thing, and I can fix it for you” (Image from this podcast)

In my own mind, I like to think of him as the person who added the most effective capacity to the Internet, Karl Auerbach

Dave Taht died on April 1st. I met him only recently, and never in person, but his passing saddens me. His technical work and evangelism have improved the Internet, and I will give some examples of his contributions to the Internet community and users, but I am sad because he was a good person — idealistic, unselfish, open, and funny. I'll miss him. First, his contributions, then his values.

Contributions

Taht was best known for his work on buffer bloat and its impact on Internet performance. As packets hop across the Internet, they are queued in buffers while waiting to be forwarded. Long queues, “buffer bloat,” means increased latency, transit time between a source and its destination, and jitter, transit time variance.

Internet service providers typically advertise and price based on service speed, but latency is critical to interactive applications like gaming, teleconferencing, and Web surfing. (For a deep dive on buffer bloat, see this post by Jim Gettys, who coined the term buffer bloat.)

With Jim Gettys, Taht co-founded the buffer bloat Project, where he implemented, tested, and integrated active queue management (AQM) algorithms CoDel, FQ-CoDel, and CAKE, and led the CeroWRT (Customer Edge Router Wireless Router) project that focused on home, office, and other edge networks.

Gettys shared Taht's focus on the edge, writing “Surprising to most, AQM is essential for broad band service, home routers, and even operating systems: it isn't just for big Internet routers” in 2011 and more recently he said “Buffer bloat can happen anywhere in a network, though by far the most common locations are before/after the WiFi hop in the router, and then the hop from the home router back to the ISP”

Given his interests in space and edge networks, Starlink was a natural focus for Taht, and he talked about Starlink in this 8-minute podcast excerpt. Taht had known Elon Musk since he had worked on an ill-fated satellite that was on a Falcon 1 rocket when it blew up, so he emailed Musk in 2013 and offered to help, but Musk was not interested. The plan for Starlink was announced in January 2015, and when it eventually entered beta in 2020, Taht learned of the latency problem and emailed Vint Cerf, who arranged a meeting with Starlink engineers on Taht’s boat, but he did no work for them.

In January 2024, Elon Musk announced that “the biggest single goal for Starlink from a technical standpoint is to get the mean latency below 20 ms." By March, they were delivering results and listing latency as well as upload and download speed on their availability map. Unfortunately, Musk and his engineers did not listen to Taht in 2013 and 2020.

Starlink latency improvement after January 2024 (Source)

Values

The National Science Foundation backbone network (NSFNET) was created in 1986 to serve research and education in the US. The network grew rapidly, and in 1988, access was expanded to include international research and education organizations. By 1996, 28 nations were connected. (Fun fact – Cuba’s first link was to NSFNET.)

Taht was 30 years old when NSFNET was decommissioned and the Internet transitioned to fully commercial operation, but his values were established by then. With his skill and experience, he could have found lucrative work or built a large company, but he was committed to open-source software and universal connectivity.

Everything he wrote was open-source, including his songs. He is surely the only composer/musician to write geeky songs about the Internet, for example, this little ditty about the GNU Public License, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond. He also spent years in Nicaragua, trying to find ways to bring the Internet (and power, lighting, food, medicine, and books) there as an outgrowth of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project.

He understood J. C. R. Licklider’s conception of the Internet as a means of creating communities of common interest rather than common location. He created a Starlink list, which is where I met him. The caliber of conversation on the list is an implicit tribute to Taht.

The photo of Taht at the top of this post was taken from the podcast in which he offered to fix the Starlink router, which was in beta at the time, for free (though he wouldn’t mind a thank-you tweet, a new motor for his boat, or even a Christmas card). The photo illustrates his values. He could have lived in a mansion, but he chose to live on a boat with a guitar nearby. To know Dave Taht better, watch the entire video.

Appendix

I met Dave recently and only knew him online, so I asked Perpleity, Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT to list memorials. They returned several broken links, and Claude and Deepspeak were not current. I found these:

Author: Doc Searls
Title: Remembering Dave Taht
Link

Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Title: Dave Taht, Who Sped Up Networks More Than You’ll Ever Know, Has Died
link

Author: Tom Stricx
Title: Honoring Dave Täht and his contributions to a better Internet (video calls included)
Link

Authors: Robert, Herbert, and Frank LibreQoS
Title: In loving memory of Dave Taht
Link

Author: Hacker News Community
Title: Thread collecting memories, technical anecdotes, and condolences from the networking and open source community
Link

Author: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen
Title: Remembering Dave Taht, Link
Link

Starlink is critical in support of Ukraine, and it will continue

2025-03-11T12:36:00.000-07:00

Ukrainian drone boat with two Starlink terminals (source Oleg Kutkov)

At 4:04 AM on February 26 Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, requested Starlink service from Elon Musk, and at 2:45 PM on the 26th, Elon Musk tweeted "Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route." On February 28 at 12:29 PM Fedorov posted a photo of a truckload of terminals. (Kyiv is 10 hours ahead of California) and an engineer, Oleg Kutkov, posted the first tweet from Ukraine, showing a download speed of 136.76 Mb/s and an upload speed of 23.93 Mb/s. (Kutkov was among the "people embodying the spirit of Ukraine," chosen by Time Magazine as Person of the Year for 2022).

On March 19^th there were 5,000 terminals in Ukraine and it was clear that Starlink would play an unprecedented, critical role in the war. President Zelenskyy was using social media and teleconferencing in his roles as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, a global diplomat, and a leader of the Ukrainian people. Starlink was being used to compensate for Russian destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure, by civilians and on the battlefield, often in conjunction with drones. Starlink has also enabled important civilian volunteer contributions to the war effort, reminiscent of the working women and the victory gardens during World War 2 in the US.

Starlink’s value is now well established. Kutkov estimates that there are around 170,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine, which is constantly increasing. For example:

The armed forces have around 100,000 terminals provided by various ministries.
It is common for soldiers to purchase their own terminals. (One retailer has sold almost 2,000 terminals to soldiers so far this year).
There are thousands of terminals on drone aircraft and boats built by local companies. (One local vendor bought 10,000 terminals for drones).
Charity foundations like Serhiy Prytula contribute terminals. (The retail price of a roaming terminal in Ukraine is $613).
Private donors (including Kutkov) contribute drones and terminals.
One service center reported that 90% of the military terminals coming for repairs are privately owned.

Musk’s Grok AI chatbot estimates Starlink’s revenue for Ukraine support is “likely in the ballpark of $150-250 million per year as of now”, a relatively unimportant amount, and about $50 million of that is paid by Poland, which shares a border with Ukraine, has expressed a willingness to seek alternatives to Starlink if necessary and was invaded by Hitler 1939.

Because of recent statements and actions by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Ukraine and its allies became concerned that Starlink service might possibly be cut off.

As enumerated in this timeline, Trump has upended the US approach to Ukraine and treated Moscow more as an ally since he became President, culminating in his recent suspension of military aid to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after he and Vice President Vance berated Zelenskyy in a televised meeting, overstating the amount of US support, falsely claiming that Ukraine had not thanked the US for it’s support and insisting on a “deal” with no security guarantee.

(Recall that in September 1938, English, French, and Italian leaders signed the Munich Agreement, giving Hitler control of Czechoslovakia in exchange for his promise not to take more land in Europe, and Ukrainians are dying in this war).

Elon Musk has also urged Ukraine to accept peace without a security guarantee to stop the bloodshed. His statement that without Starlink the entire front line would collapse caused concern that he might cut Starlink service off.

Thankfully, Musk has since clarified his position, stating:

"To be extremely clear, no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals. Without Starlink, the Ukrainian lines would collapse, as the Russians can jam all other communications! We would never do such a thing or use it as a bargaining chip."

Taking Musk at his word, Starlink service will remain available.

Update 2/5/2026

Russian forces have been increasingly using Starlink satellite systems to extend the range of BM-35 strike drones to conduct mid-range strikes against the Ukrainian rear:

https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/2016013301436526765

SpaceX has now compiled a white list of authorized Starlink terminals, and terminals used by Russian troops in Ukraine have been deactivated

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/starlink-used-by-russian-forces-deactivated-battlefield-ukraine-says-2026-02-05/

Guowang finally launches ten large production satellites

2025-01-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

The first ten Guowang production satellites (source)

In April 2020, The Chinese State Council's executive meeting declared information technology, including satellite Internet, an important part of the “new technology” and in October, China applied for Guowang, a 12,992-satellite Internet service constellation. Subsequently, a few Guowang test satellites were launched and two other large Chinese constellations were announced, and one, Thousand Sails, already has 54 satellites in orbit. (Thousand Sails launches have had problems with debris and orbit raising, which attests to the immaturity of the Chinese space industry). Finally, Guowang has launched its first production satellites.

As shown above, ten satellites were launched into orbits about 1,100 kilometers above the Earth, with an inclination of 86.5 degrees. The satellites were launched on a Long March 5B rocket which can carry 23,000 Kg to low-Earth orbit (LEO) and they were stacked in a manner that optimized “the use of vertical and radial space within the payload fairing.” If the rocket was fully loaded, they would be quite large – over 2,000 kg each.

For comparison, Starlink’s current V2-mini satellites are 750-800 kg, and the V3 satellites, which will not begin launching until SpaceX's Starship rockets are in service, are expected to be around 1,900 kg.

Thousand Sail's satellites are smaller than either. They recently launched 18 satellites using a Long March 6A rocket which can carry 4,000 kg to sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). I could not find a mass to LEO for the Long March 6A so I asked four AI services to estimate what a rocket capable of launching 4,000 kg to SSO would be able to launch to LEO. The average estimate was 5,700 kg total or only 317 kg per satellite.

Assuming capability is a function of mass, Guowang satellites will be significantly more powerful than Thousand Sails or Starlink's current satellites. I don't know what those functional differences will be – greater capacity, faster data rates, more power, improved inter-satellite capability, connectivity to 6G devices, etc. For speculation on the features of Starlink's forthcoming V3 satellites see slide 62 in this presentation and this article).

The Guowang constellation will also orbit at a relatively high altitude. The first ten are at 1,100 km and over half the planned constellation will be roughly the same altitude. Similarly, Thousand Sails' initial 1.296 satellites are orbiting at 1,160 km. While Starlink initially applied to have some 1,100 km satellites, they later lowered their planned orbits. Guowang's relatively high altitude will help compensate for a lack of ground stations.

In an earlier post, I asked whether Guowang could manufacture and launch satellites fast enough to meet Its ITU commitment of launching 10% of the constellation within two years after the bring-into-use (BIU) date 50% by year 5 and all by year 7. Now that production satellites are in orbit and working, I assume the BIU clock has started or will start soon. Given the mass and orbit altitudes of the satellites and Chinese satellite manufacturing and launch capability, they will have a difficult time meeting the ITU deadlines despite new rockets, but in our politically divided world, some nations may ignore those deadlines or Guowang might simply reapply. (It’s even conceivable that Starlink could launch some Guowang satellites since Elon Musk has to please the Chinese government to protect Tesla’s sales and manufacturing in China).

Guowang is late, but the government is committed and the satellites may be comparable to Starlink's V3 satellites. If they can launch the constellation, there will still be a market in serving BRICS and other politically-allied or neutral nations as well as sensitive government and military organizations that are increasingly concerned with Elon Musk’s political ties and mercurial nature. The large mass of their satellites may also result in features that increase their appeal in some applications like backhaul from remote locations that are not reached by fiber. It will be interesting to see what happens when Guowang ITU deadlines expire.

Update 3/8/2025

GuoWang has launched another batch of satellites on a Long March 8A rocket. Space Force cataloged nine objects in orbit, suggesting eight payloads in 862 by 870-kilometer orbits inclined by 50.0 degrees. While I could not find any definitive data online, Grok estimates that a Long March 8A could likely launch 7,200 kg to that orbit, which would imply about 800 kg per satellite, around the mass of the current V2 Starlink satellites and more than double the mass of the Thousand Sails satellites.

Update 5/5/2025

Guowang has launched another batch of satellites on a high-capacity Long March 5B rocket, implying that these are the larger GW2 satellites.

Guowang Launches
Date	Rocket	Satellites
12/16/2024	LM 5B	10
2/11/2025	LM 8A	9?
4/28/2025	LM 5B	10?

Update 6/18/2925

Five more Guowang satellites were launched on a Long March 6, with a capacity to orbit of 8,500 kg, implying a very large mass or a lot of empty space.

Guowang launches

Update 7/14/2025

In a speech on June 6, Yuan Jungan, chief designer of internet satellites, said more than 400 Guowang satellites will be deployed to form the network by 2027, and "China plans to deploy more than 20,000 satellites, expand more industry-enabled application scenarios, and actively explore the international cooperation market" by 2035.

Sources vary, but there are at least 10 full BRICS members and 10 BRICS Partner Countries, and others have attended international meetings. China is pursuing international cooperation while the US seeks to cut it.

H/T Twitter

@insomniacai163

Update 8/3/2025

China launched two more batches of Guowang satellites in three days, bringing the total number in orbit to 48. The cadence has sped up, and the goal of 400 satellites by 2027 appears to be feasible.

Note that the Long March 5B had a Yuanzheng-2 orbit-transfer stage enabling it to carry satellites to precise orbits. (The mass of the Yuanzheng-2 rocket and its fuel would have reduced the overall carrying capacity somewhat.)

ChatGPT reports that the orbit altitudes range from 1,067 to 1,149 km. If correct, that would put them in the high-altitude GW-2 sub-constellation even though their masses, and therefore capabilities, vary considerably.

Update 8/13/2025

China launched yet another batch of satellites on a Long March 5B rocket with a Yuanzheng-2 upper stage, indicating that these are probably large satellites, although, as far as I know, no details have been released.

I have also revised the estimated mass per satellite shown above based on the average of five ChatGPT queries that take the upper stage mass and fuel into account. The new estimate is 16,600 kg, and you can see the ChatGPT "reasoning" and conclusions here.

Regardless of this reduced estimate, they are definitely larger than the satellites launched on less powerful rockets and must have more capacity or other features and function as a "backbone" in some sense.

Update 8/26/2025

China has launched another batch of Guowang satellites. This was the ninth Guowang launch this year but the sixth in the last 30 days. It was the third flight of the Long March 8A, bringing the total number of satellites in orbit to 81.

I wonder why the cadence has suddenly picked up. Might the Chinese have decided that, given launch and manufacturing resources, they would not be able to meet ITU deadlines for all of their constellations, so they are focusing on Guowang, which can be seen as most critical for the government?

Update 9/27/2025

A batch of five GuoWang satellites was launched on a Long March 6A rocket. This, their eleventh launch, brings them up to 86 satellites in orbit, nearly as many as Qianfan, which has 90, but has slowed its launch cadence in order to correct problems with previous launches. These are the smaller GuoWang satellites, and they are in the GW-2 sub-constellation, which orbits at a relatively high 1,150 km. The satellites probably have electric propulsion systems since they would be the most efficient means of deorbiting them at 1,100 km at the end of their operational lives.

Starlink connectivity for rural communities

2024-11-25T08:40:00.018-08:00

WELCOME community WiFi service is now available in Kenya and it might be a game changer like public access telecenters and WiFi hotspots were in the past.

Starlink launched maritime service in July 2022, and by January 2023 Elcome International LLC, a maritime technology solution provider since 1970, had installed multi-antenna Starlink Maritime arrays on two super yachts with more than 100 passengers and crew. Elcome launched its Starlink maritime service in May 2024 and now has over 3,000 terminals under management,

In May, I had a positive experience using Starlink on a cruise ship off the Northwest coast of Africa. The ship had 264 passengers and a crew of 120. We were a small, floating community. Elcomm is now transferring its experience with maritime communities to communities on land.

Elcome Managing Director Jimmy Grewal set a goal of "creating a Wi-Fi hotspot service that I would be happy to use daily, and be proud to show my friends" and is “very passionate” about their WELCOME Community WiFi service for rural areas. WELCOME in Kenya is offered as Karibu Connect. (Karibu means welcome in Swahili).

WELCOME community gateway (source)

The solar-powered gateway shown here provides over 400 Mbps to roughly a square kilometer. They offer two configurations:

WELCOME PRO

Up to 50 users
Starlink Enterprise Terminal
8-Port Switch
Two Wi-Fi Access Points
Ksh,106,999 ($826.31)

WELCOME MAX

More than 50 users
Starlink Flat High-Performance Terminal
8-Port Switch
Four Wi-Fi Access Points
Ksh.377,000 377,000 ($2,911.42)

They offer several data plans and say some customers will qualify for free hardware. They do not specify the requirements for free hardware, but it may be a function of the data plan or other factors like whether or not it is a non-profit organization. This is the pricing model pioneered by Gillette—give them the razors and sell them the blades and whatever the price of the "razors" is, the prices of the "blades" will decline as competition comes online and constellation capacities increase

Starlink has a huge first-mover advantage over its would-be LEO ISP competitors, but OneWeb offers service-level agreements (SLAs) that will be attractive for organizations like schools, clinics, government offices, and businesses as well as public access telecenters and WiFi hotspots. It has been reported that Starlink plans to offer SLAs to maritime customers and perhaps other markets in early 2025. This makes sense since there is relatively little contention for capacity at sea. The same is true for rural areas in developing nations, so they may also offer SLAs in Kenya and elsewhere. (Note that Intelsat has strengthened its maritime partnership with OneWeb).

OneWeb may also have a political advantage in India due to the influence of the Bharti family and concern over Elon Musk's political activity Political concerns may deter reliance on Starlink in other nations as well. Might WELCOME offer a OneWeb-based terminal or even a Chinese Qianfan-based terminal one day?

The first cabina de Internet in Lima Perú.

Public-access telecenters and later WiFi hotspots played a significant role in the early diffusion of the Internet in developing nations. The first telecenters I knew of were the public-access Internet "cabins" established by Jose Soriano of the Scientific Network of Peru, starting in 1994, and Andy Carvin documented many other early telecenters.

By 2002, there were 6,446 telecenters in Latin America and commitments for another 4,187 and they still play a role. For example, ChatGPT says Cuba has over 600 public "navigation" rooms and 2,000 public WiFi hotspots as of 2024. (I could not access the websites of Cuba’s government-run ISP or the National Statistics Office to verify that claim).

Starlink and other LEO satellite Internet service providers may bring connectivity to many rural communities that can not be reached economically with terrestrial infrastructure.

Update 12/14/2024

It is too soon to tell whether Welcome community wifi will catch on at today's Starlink speed and price, but we can be sure that price-performance will improve in the future. SpaceX recently requested a modification of the Starlink V2 constellation lowering orbits and elevation angles slightly and claiming they would provide "gigabit speeds," Elon Musk predicted a 10X speed increase and SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell predicts 2 Gbps speed. Speeds will vary depending on your location, but the next-generation satellites will offer a substantial improvement, making the case for satellite vs terrestrial backhaul from rural locations stronger.

Update 1/16/2025

Karibu Connect reports that the Kenyan Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) has funded connectivity for four rural TVET schools to the Internet. They report that enrollment rates increased by over 70% at some institutions demonstrating how access to technology has sparked renewed interest in education. For example, Nachu TVC launched the Jitume Program, a youth-focused initiative offering access to digital services, skills, and job creation opportunities through technology.

Karibu Connect is just getting underway and is looking for support from nonprofits, government organizations, or philanthropists, so it is too soon to draw conclusions about its impact on rural education, but it certainly bears watching.

Affordable Starlink Prices Coming to Low and Middle-Income Countries

2024-09-12T10:38:00.001-07:00

SpaceX first departed from its uniform Starlink pricing policy when it offered a reduced price for throttled service in France two years ago. Since then, many new, higher-capacity satellites have been launched, enabling SpaceX to reduce prices in low and middle-income countries, like Kenya.

Starlink (≥ 100 Mbps) satellite Internet growth (source)

Kenya had 405 geostationary satellite internet subscribers when Starlink became available in July 2023. By March 2024 there were 4,808 satellite Internet users, according to data from Kenya’s Communications Authority.

The price and offering have changed. Initially, the hardware, including shipping and handling, was KES92,100 ($715) and the monthly service was KES6,500 ($50).

Today, the service price is the same for uncapped access today, but the hardware cost is down to KES45,500 ($353) and they offer a hardware rental plan for KES1,950 ($15)/month.

Starlink's unlimited data plan will appeal to affluent consumers and organizations like schools and businesses. It might also appeal to people who live close enough to each other to share a single account although that must be a violation of Starlink's contract.

Starlink also has a new affordable plan with 50GB of data for KES1,300 ($10) plus KES20/GB ($0.16) for overage data. The affordable plan is a strong competitor for Airtel and Safaricom, which combined have 95.2 % of the Kenyan mobile broadband market and offer fixed connectivity in limited areas. (I wonder how much "mobile" data is consumed by users on computers connected to mobile hotspots at home).

Starlink has a speed advantage over Airtel and Safaricom and serves areas with low population density they do not reach. (As of this writing, Starlink is at full capacity in Nairobi). Despite reduced prices, Starlink's equipment cost is too high for many Kenyans, hence the hardware rental plan.

Poa! Internet is another competitor. Poa! offers unlimited 5 Mb/s fixed connectivity for only KES1,575 ($12) /month with an installation fee of KES2,500 ($19.40). At 5 Mb/s it is slower than the others, but fast enough for most Internet applications. For example, Netflix says it is sufficient to stream 1080p HD video. (For many applications, latency is more important than speed).

Poa! Internet customers average about 200 GB/month but unlimited Starlink customers consume much more than that since they can support multiple users online simultaneously. (I have streamed four Netflix videos simultaneously on a ship off the coast of North Africa). A Starlink user in Kenya told me he had been using "multiple terabytes a month" and market tests at a large Kenyan ISP estimated the Starlink consumption would be over 2 TB/month.

Steve Song has pointed out ways Starlink contributes to inequality in Africa. Still, it is also bringing the Internet to users and organizations that did not have access previously and putting pressure on legacy ISPs to compete. (Starlink is partially responsible for recent expansion by existing companies like Airtel and Safaricom).

Starlink has demonstrated a willingness to adapt in Kenya as they did in France two years ago and we can look forward to ongoing improvement as new, higher capacity satellites are launched on improved rockets and the African ground infrastructure improves. We can also look forward to competition from other satellite ISPs like Amazon and Quianfan. It will be interesting to see the Kenyan Internet in ten years.

Update 9/16/2024

Suspected Kenyan Starlink gateways (source)

I've been told that Starlink latency from Nairobi to a Netflix node in Lagos is about 50ms because there is a gateway in Nigeria, but latency to a Kenyan banking site is 400ms or more because it requires transit over Africa's terrestrial infrastructure.

Since Starlink's only African gateway is in Nigeria, my guess is that latency to Europe or even the US is somewhere between those two because undersea cables land in Nigeria.

A gateway in Nairobi would improve latency in Kenya and the East in general.

Update 10/23/2024

In the three months between March and June, the number of Starlink subscriptions in Kenya grew from 4,808 to 8,324 (73%). While the number of subscribers is still small, there is certainly a market for LEO satellite connectivity in Kenya.

Starlink is growing rapidly but only accounts for only .5% of the market; but as Peter Ndegwa, CEO of Kenya's largest phone company has said “From a satellite perspective, we have to partner with Starlink or other satellite providers to ensure that technology plays right through” and they are in talks with Starlink and other satellite providers on potential future partnerships,

Russian Internet pioneer sentenced to two years in prison

2024-08-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

Relcom machine room. Kremvax, the micro-VAX shown here, linked Relcom to Finland and the outside world and the modems communicated within
The Soviet Union.

Last month, Russian Internet pioneer Alexey Soldatov was sentenced to two years in a labor colony on charges of “abuse of power.”

Soldatov, the co-founder of Russia's first Internet service provider, Relcom, was convicted for his role as a co-founder and director of the Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks (RIPN). RIPN was founded in 1992 to support research and education networking. One of its functions was the “registration of IP numbers for the customers from the blocks delegated RIPN by the Europe coordination body RIPE".

As Russia’s first local Internet registry (LIR), RIPN was allocated a block of IP addresses to distribute to customers for a fee. By early 2019, RIPN had assigned about 490,000 IPv4 addresses to more than 700 clients, mostly scientific and educational organizations.

In December 2018, the RIPN board decided to dissolve the organization since it was no longer commercially sustainable and its role as an operator of scientific and educational networks was no longer necessary. In April 2019, RIPN informed its clients that it was terminating its work as an LIR and re-registering their IP addresses in the RIPE database under a Czech company called Reliable Communications, which Alexey Soldatov and Alexey Shkittin owned. Shkittin was also a director of RIPN at the time. When the government learned of the dissolution plan, they stopped it and RIPN reclaimed the IP addresses. (Today there are over 20,000 RIPE LIRs in 76 countries).

Defenders of the aborted transfer say the addresses had to go somewhere if RIPN was being dissolved and they were neither property nor worth the 500 million rubles ($8.1 million) as charged. They also point out that the charges were initiated by Andrey Lipov, a prominent figure in the Russian Presidential Administration and the head of Roskomnadzor. the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media.

Still, the transfer to a Czech company owned by Soldatov and Shkittin when they were RIPN directors looks fishy. Was this a case of embezzlement or political retribution by a government that wants to surveil and censor the Internet?

I don't know the facts in this case, Russian law, or, with certainty, what motivated Soldatov to attempt to transfer those IP addresses, but I do know something about the character of the people involved.

I have first-hand knowledge of Alexey Soldatov. Relcom was launched on August 1, 1990, in the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Research in collaboration with the DEMOS cooperative. (Soldatov is a physicist). DEMOS was a UNIX-like operating system derived from BSD Unix which Relcom developed and distributed to research and education organizations.

They used UUCP links to communicate with their Russian customers and soon connected to Europe (EUnet) through Tampere University of Technology in Finland. The ability to make regular, long international calls needed for data transfer was unheard of at that time in Russia -- The Kurchatov Institute was an important research center.

My colleague Juri Gornostaev and I used that UUCP link to organize the First East-West International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in Moscow. After the conference, I stayed in Moscow to meet and hang out with the Relcom staff. They were friendly, smart, idealistic, and anti-communist. They were members of the international Internet community as imagined by visionaries like Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider.

Relcom sent Boris Yeltsin's speech on a tank to The West.

A few days after I returned home, a group of Russian officials attempted a coup against the relatively progressive Gorbachev government. Mass media were shut down or broadcast old movies and operas, but Relcom stayed online, relaying news within Russia and between Russia and the rest of the world. As Relcom staff member Polina Anatova said at the time, "Thank Heaven, these cretins don't consider us mass media!"

I also know the character of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. Russia commits daily war crimes in Ukraine and political opponents who are not imprisoned tend to fall from the windows of tall buildings. Furthermore, Freedom House assessed Internet freedom in 70 nations last year and the only nations judged to have less Internet freedom than Russia were China, Myanmar, Iran, and Cuba.

Given the uncertainties mentioned above, the government's track record, Soldatov's contributions to society, and the fact that the IP address transfer never took place, he has been under house arrest awaiting trial and is in ill health, this prison sentence is politically motivated and morally unjustified.

For more on Relcom's early days and the role it played at the time of the Soviet coup attempt, see:

Update 8/29/2024

MK reported that Alexey Soldatov spent his first night in pretrial detention center No. 4 in terrible conditions -- sleeping on the floor without a mattress in a cell for 40 people. The article also points out that he was sentenced to two years in prison even though the prosecutor’s office requested a more lenient sentence.

The Board of the Internet Society (ISOC) of Bulgaria has called upon Russia to release Soldatov. They cite his critical medical condition. In recent years he has had two cancer-related surgeries and has chronic cardiovascular and other health-related issues. A news article published on August 26 reported that he has a fever, problems breathing and his left lung is practically not working.

ISOC Bulgaria points out that suspended sentences are not unusual for people who have not committed crimes before and calls for Soldatov's immediate release while his conviction is being appealed. Other organizations should do the same.

Update 10/10/2025

Alexey Soldatov was released from prison. His son Andrei posted:

Good personal news: My father, Alexey Soldatov, has been released from jail, his prison sentence was replaced with a fine. He’s already home and doing well, all things considered. Thank you all for your support during this difficult year!

https://x.com/AndreiSoldatov/status/1956409900177006776

Is the "father or the Russian Internet" a criminal?

2024-08-12T22:43:00.000-07:00

Post revised -- see https://circleid.com/posts/20240821-russian-internet-pioneer-sentenced-to-two-years-in-prison.

Geely Geespace update -- global centimeter-level positioning services

2024-07-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

Potential Geesat applications (source)

Chinese automobile conglomerate Geely has made significant strides since I last wrote about their Geesat LEO constellation for mobile vehicle connectivity, They launched the first nine satellites in June 2022 and a second batch of eleven satellites in February 2024. The mass of the first nine satellites was 100 kg and the mass of the second eleven was 130 kg so they are not identical.

Today, they have twenty satellites orbiting at 600 km with a 50-degree inclination, and the recently launched eleven are equipped with "artificial intelligence" remote sensing capabilities, allowing them to capture clear high-resolution images with a resolution ranging from 3.2 ft to 16.4 ft. These satellites can provide data and imagery for multiple applications, including surveillance, urban planning, and infrastructure management.

These satellites are the first of a 72-satellite first-phase constellation. The company plans to provide “global real-time data communication services” once the 72-satellite first-phase constellation is completed next year and “global centimeter-level positioning services” when the 168 second-phase satellites are in orbit at an unspecified time.

RTK-PPP (source)

Centimeter-level positioning would be impossible using only GPS (or BeiDou) satellites that orbit at around 20,000 kilometers, but Geely is planning to use RTK-PPP (Real-Time Kinematic and Precise Point Positioning) to provide centimeter-level positioning accuracy for GPS satellites.

As shown here, RTK-PPP augments location data from multiple satellites with the rover's position relative to a terrestrial base station. (The rover could be an autonomous car, truck, crop harvester, etc.).

One can imagine base stations along highways, freeways, and even in cities, but that would require investments by governments at all levels, auto producers, and other private companies. It would also need standards that are compatible with all GNSS systems. This will not happen overnight, but I am not surprised to see Geely leading the way because:

Geely founder and Chairman Li Shufu is a risk taker in the mold of Elon Musk and Geespace was initiated about six years ago when he “floated his idea of using hundreds of proprietary mini, low-orbit satellites as a more accurate global positioning system for self-driving cars.”
China has built the world's biggest EV charging network, in stark contrast to US failure. This indicates a will to invest in mobility infrastructure.
Geely is aware of and perhaps collaborating with Chinese GNSS operator BeiDou which is working toward global centimeter-accurate positioning utilizing LEO, MEO, and GEO satellites augmented by terrestrial ground stations.
Geely brands sold 2.79 million units in 2023 and China space expert Blaine Curcio concludes that "Within 5-10 years, Geespace could conceivably have a constellation of satellites connecting all Geely cars in a very interesting example of vertical integration (actual use cases pending)."
ChatGPT reports that BeiDou currently offers a Ground-Based Augmentation System (GBAS) coverage in much of China and plans to cover the entire nation, which is true, but mistakenly claimed there were GBAS instances outside of China at this time. (However, BeiDou's standard satellite navigation service is used in many nations, which must have confused ChatGPT).

A final note -- several of the references in this post are to Blaine Curcio's China Space Monitor. Check it out if you are interested in what China is doing in space. I also used but took with a grain of salt, conversations with ChanGPT: chat1 and chat2.

Two New Chinese Internet Service Constellations and Their Market

2024-06-04T14:16:00.012-07:00

China's G60 Science and Technology Innovation Corridor, the home of two new Internet-service mega-constellations

Chinese plans for low-Earth orbit Internet service constellations began with two projects, Hongyun (156 satellites) and Hongyan (864 satellites). These were eventually sidelined for Guowang, an ambitious, 12,992 satellite constellation that is expected to begin launching satellites this year. But, that is old news.

China's five-year plan designates satellite Internet as a strategic emerging industry and two new constellations have emerged, G60 (12,000 satellites) and Honghu-3 (10,000 satellites).

Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST), aka Yuanxin Satellite, located in Shanghai's Songjiang district, was founded in 2018 and launched two test satellites in 2019. SSST recently raised 6.7 billion yuan ($943 million) from several sources for its 12,000-satellite G60 (aka Qianfan) low Earth orbit (LEO) Internet service constellation. (Also see this excellent context video).

Their first phase constellation, called Spacesail, will consist of 1,296 satellites. Regional service will be provided by 648 satellites by the end of 2025, and global service will be provided by 648 additional satellites by the end of 2027. By 2030, they hope to have 15,000 satellites in orbit and offer direct-to-mobile service. Shanghai Gesi Aerospace has begun production of the G60 satellites and expects to produce 300/year. (Also see). I've not heard any news about Guowang lately -- it feels like G60 has taken the lead. (Also see).

The satellites will orbit at 1,160 km, which is higher than all the other announced LEO satellite competitors except Telesat. While this will increase latency, collision risk, satellite lifespan, handoff frequency, and coverage footprint should improve.

Like SSST, Shanghai Landspace Hongqing Technology Co, Ltd. (aka Hongqing Technology) is located in the Songjian District and is planning a third Internet service constellation. The May 24th ITU filing lists the satellite name as "HONGHU-3," but specifies a constellation of 10,000 satellites in 160 orbital planes. Since they have launched two satellites previously, the constellation may simply be called "Honghu." They are constructing a satellite manufacturing facility in Wuxi City near Shanghai. The Chinese launch company Landspace owns 48%, so, like SpaceX, they may launch their own satellites.

It is not a coincidence that both Honghu and G60 are being developed in the G60 Science and Technology Innovation Corridor between Highway G60 and a high-speed railway line in the Yangtze River Delta (Also see). Local governments play a major role in funding and developing Chinese industry. Shanghai has published "The Shanghai Action Plan to Promote Commercial Space Development and Create a Space Information Industry Highland (2023-2025)".

Can China support three Internet service constellations?

Planned Starships (source)

These companies are commonly touted as China's answer to Starlink, but they are far behind Starlink in launch cost and rate, rocket and engine manufacturing, international licensing, marketing, etc. The gap will widen when SpaceX's Starship is in production, increasing the ability to launch full and mini v2 satellites and whatever comes after that.

However, the success of these companies will not depend solely on catching or competing with Starlink because of global politics. The Chinese companies will not compete with Starlink or any of its Western competitors for Chinese government and military business. (The Ukraine war has demonstrated both the military value of satellite Internet and the drawback of being dependent on a private company).

Starlink will not offer service in countries like China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, or Iran. Similarly, the Chinese companies will be prohibited from operating in countries like the US and European nations, which currently ban or restrict Huawei equipment. Whether motivated by a desire to encourage domestic industry, promote security, or achieve and maintain technological self-reliance, market separation is increasing,

Belt and Road participant nations (source)

However, there are many nations where these Chinese companies will compete with Starlink and its Western competitors. The Chinese companies will have an advantage in nations participating in the Belt and Road Initiative -- home to about 70% of the world population and 40% of global GDP. The Chinese advantage is even greater in the 26 Digital Silk Road nations.

Update 6/27/2024

China is expected to launch the first 18 G60 satellites in early August. The launch vehicle was not specified, but "the Long March 6A would be the most capable option from Taiyuan in terms of capacity to low Earth orbit and payload fairing."

The Long March 6A has a carrying capacity to orbit of 4,500 kg, which could accommodate 18 250 kg satellites, around the mass of the first-generation SpaceX Starlink satellites, but significantly less than the V2-mini satellites Starlink is currently launching. SpaceX is currently testing its forthcoming Starship rocket, which will launch full V2 satellites.

While China lags far behind SpaceX, G60 seems to be moving faster than Honghu and Gwowang and will launch satellites sooner than Project Kuiper or Telesat.

Update 8/5/2024

China has launched the first 18 Qianfan (aka G60) Internet service satellites:

The satellites launched were produced by Shanghai Gesi Aerospace Technology (Genesat) in Shanghai and In an interview with the Shanghai Securities News in June, an executive from GeneSat revealed plans to “explore launching configurations of 36 and 54 satellites per rocket to accelerate the pace of launches”.

What launch vehicles are they considering? Non-Chinese perhaps?

Update 8/29/2024

CGSTL satellite factory

Ace China space watcher Blaine Curcio has spotted a possible dark-horse Chinese communication satellite provider. CGSTL, China’s leading remote sensing satellite manufacturer, has built and launched ~100 satellites in 2 years and has been working on space-ground optical communication since 2022.

CGSTL aims to have 1,200 employees and a manufacturing capacity of 1,000 satellites per year by the end of 2025. They plan to launch 28 remote-sensing satellites in 2025 and 100 in 2026. How will they use the 1,000 satellites per year manufacturing capacity? Will they launch their own communication satellite constellation or perhaps manufacture satellites for one of the service providers mentioned above? Something else?

Update 10/31/2024

The second batch of 18 G60 satellites was launched into polar orbit on a Long March 6A rocket. (They plan to have 108 in orbit by the end of the year, 648 by 2025, 1,296 by 2027, and 15,000 by 2030.). This image shows workers racing to protect a Long March 8 fairing at Hainan commercial spaceport from an approaching typhoon. The lettering says "Spacesail," another name for the G60 constellation.

This is noteworthy because the Long March 8's carrying capacity is greater than that of the Long March 6A, and Starlink's launch capacity and cadence are much greater than those of the Chinese. (While the Long March 8 is not reusable, several Chinese companies are working toward reusability).

G60 and the Long March 6A have also had other problems. The upper stage of the rocket that carried the first 18 satellites to orbit broke up, creating a cloud of roughly 700 pieces of debris, and astronomers are concerned by the brightness of the first 18 satellites.

Update 12/5/2024

Thousand Sails constellation operator SpaceSail has signed an MoU with Brazil's TELEBRAS for its Internet service starting in 2026. This is their first commercial agreement, and they have initiated business negotiations with more than 30 countries. Brazil is one of the nine BRICS countries, which are economically tied to China.

Update 12/9/2024

Source

Eighteen Thousand Sails satellites, weighing about 267 kg, have been launched, bringing the constellation up to 54 satellites. While they have had problems with debris, no issues were reported with this launch.

The dark blue nations on this map are targeted for marketing in 2025, and the light blue for 2026. As reported above, they already have a memorandum of understanding with Brazil.

Update 1/8/2025

In his 2024 Year in Review, Blaine Curcio reports that Chinese "commercial space continues to grow by leaps and bounds, buffetted by government support and renewed investor interest in the sector" and as major constellations like GeeSpace and Thousand Sails pick up momentum they "create real demand for launchers, satellite systems manufacturers, and other suppliers."

The biggest 2024 funding round "by far" was for Sailspace's Thousand Sails constellation. The ¥6.7B funding round mentioned above ended up being "the world’s largest" and, in December, Sailspace's manufacturer, Gensat, announced a ¥1B funding round to ramp up production. Curcio did not report the exact amount of GeeSpace financing. I queried four AI chatbots, and none knew of any 2024 financing -- Geely is probably able to fund satellite manufacturing and launch on its own.

Update 3/12/2025

Long March 8 with 18 Quinfan satellites (source)

SpaceSail has launched 18 new satellites, bringing the Qianfan Constellation's total to 90 in orbit. They are in near-Polar orbits ranging in altitude from 800 to 1,070 kilometers.

The launch was at China's first commercial launch site, the Hainan International Commercial Aerospace Launch Center. This launch went smoothly, without the kinds of problems they have had in previous launches. It was also streamed on the Internet, and you can see a portion of the video and some still photos here.

Update 6/9/2025

Thousand Sails manufacturer Genesat (aka CGSTL) plans to invest 1.2 billion yuan in its second factory project. It will have a pulsation production line capacity of 150 ton-level satellites per year or a batch production capacity of 300 satellites under 500 kg per year. Note that both are larger than the 267 kg first-generation satellites, and their production capacities are consistent with Blaine Curcio's mass estimates of 400-500 kg and 1.5 tons for the second and third generation satellites.

Update 8/17/2025

It's been a year since the first Qianfan launch, but five months since the last one. Is the slowdown due to satellite or launch availability, or are they pausing for some redesign, or both? The upper stage of the first launch fragmented, creating over 300 pieces of trackable debris. Ninety satellites are in orbit, but fourteen have not reached their operational altitude. Furthermore, the satellites are interfering with astronomy and some are tumbling. Regardless of the cause for delays, Qianfan is unlikely to meet its ITU launch deadlines.

Update 4/27/2026

The potential markets for Western and Chinese connectivity differ, as shown in this Venn diagram, which shows the number and GDP of nations with Starlink connectivity, Chinese BRI projects, or both. The BRI projects tend to be in poorer nations, but there are more nations with BRI projects than with Starlink availability. The current success of Starlink suggests that the market is large enough to support it and the Chinese constellations.

How to submit a "complaint of judicial misconduct" on Judge Cannon’s handling of Trump’s classified documents case

2024-05-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

You must submit a simple form and a brief "statement of facts" supporting your complaint.

The Form

Click here to download the editable submission form.
The form asks six questions -- complete it with the answer shown in red below.

Judicial Council of the Eleventh Circuit
Name of Judge: Aileen Cannon
Does this complaint concern the behavior of the judge(s) in a particular lawsuit or lawsuits? Yes
Court: U. S. District Court for the District of Florida
Case number: 23-80101-CR-Cannon
Are (were) you a party or lawyer in the lawsuit? Neither

The form also requires your name, address, and phone number.

The statement of facts

You should state the facts as you see them., but as an example, you can see the statement of facts I submitted here.

You can also use ChatGPT or other "AI" programs for ideas. For example, I asked ChatGPT to "give me reasons for filing a complaint of judicial misconduct in Judge Cannon's handling of the Trump documents trial." It generated this answer.

Mail the form and statement of facts

Print the submission form and your statement and mail them in an envelope marked "COMPLAINT OF MISCONDUCT" to:

Office of the Clerk
Elbert P. Tuttle courthouse
56 Forsyth Street N.W,
Atlanta, GA 30303

(Do not put the judge's name on the envelope).

For a talk on why you should do this, see this presentation by Glen Kirshner.

Starlink service is great on (some) cruise ships.

2024-04-26T17:14:00.000-07:00

The Seabourn Venture has six Starlink terminals with three antennas on each side of the top deck.

I recently used Starlink on a cruise along the coast of Northwest Africa and I'll summarize my experience below, but first let me explain why I put some in the title of this post. I posted the following request on the Reddit Cruise group: "What has been your experience of Starlink Internet service on Seabourn or other cruise lines? How was latency? Do video chats work smoothly? Games? etc." Here are some of the replies:

It was amazing. Streamed video on two devices at once, I was able to log in through my VPN and work remotely across the world, and WiFi calling was seamless. I had no idea cruise Internet could be that great.
The Internet was great, even in Antarctica.
It was FAST.
Zoom was fine. WhatsApp calls crystal clear too.
Latency was a bit high for something like live multiplayer gaming, but good enough for video chats or video streaming.
Very good mb/s. Variable latency.
It's usually still on the slower side of things.
It's better than without Starlink, but still pretty terrible.
It still Sucks.
It's slow hot garbage.

My experience was positive. I was on the Seabourn Venture for a two-week cruise which went as far south as The Gambia in northwest Africa then followed the coast north to the Mediterranean finally stopping in Málaga, Spain. The ship had six Starlink antennas and two geostationary (GEO) satellite antennas. The GEO satellites were used for ship navigation, weather tracking, etc. The crew on the bridge said their work was not affected by Starlink.

Seabourn offers two Internet packages, surfing and streaming. The surfing package is free for passengers and the faster streaming package is free for the crew. Passengers pay about $20 per day for the streaming package. As the name implies, streaming sites like YouTube and Netflix were blocked for surfing accounts.

According to the ship's Computer Systems Officer (CSO), streaming users always had Starlink access and surfing passengers used the GEO satellites unless there was excess Starlink capacity. He could not say what the criteria for excess capacity were, but their goal is to always keep the streaming customers happy. (Company policy prohibits crew members from playing games).

My Starlink experience was positive. I tested streaming in my cabin by watching four Netflix videos simultaneously on Android and Apple phones, an iPad, and a laptop. The screens were small and Netflix would have reduced video quality, but it worked smoothly. Video chats using WhatsApp and Zoom also worked well despite latency being consistently over 100 ms unloaded and considerably higher while up and downloading files.

Latency on the ship was much higher than Elon Musk's stated goal of 20 ms -- what are the sources of that latency?

First is the WiFi network configuration and your location within the ship. Demand also varies during the day and between port and sea days. The size of the ship and the provisioned Starlink capacity are also factors in determining latency.

Carnival Corporation owns Seabourn and 8 other cruise lines. I was on Carnival's smallest ship, which has six Starlink terminals and can accommodate up to 264 passengers with a crew of 120. Carnival's largest ship, the Mardi Gras, can accommodate approximately 6,500 passengers with approximately 1,745 crew members. I wonder how many Starlink terminals the Mardi Gras has and how satisfied the users are. (I got these passenger and crew counts from ChatGPT-4, but it doesn't know how many terminals the Mardi Gras has).

Since the only ground stations in Africa are in Nigeria, our traffic traversed inter-satellite links for most of the trip. Once on the ground, traffic was tunneled through the Carnival VPN to a public Internet point of presence (POP) in an English-speaking location like London, Sydney, or Miami.

When Starlink was first installed, traffic sometimes went through Hong Kong and users got Chinese replies. The POP location can also affect copyright restrictions. When Max.com became unavailable during the cruise, the CSO explained that they had been switching back and forth between the London and Miami POPs for maintenance purposes and that Max.com was not available in the UK.

This complexity explains the varied results I reported at the start of this post and no doubt Carnival and other cruise lines monitor and tune their networks constantly. If they are doing well they should advertise performance statistics and customer-satisfaction survey results.

Starlink has begun delivering promised latency cuts

2024-03-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

In his January 12th SpaceX update, Elon Musk said the biggest goal for Starlink from a technical standpoint is to get the mean latency below 20 ms. He expanded by saying that given the speed of light, 8 ms is the absolute minimum latency for a satellite at 550 km. He believes they can optimize terrestrial and inter-satellite links, and minimize queueing delays and dropped packets, to recude the the rest of the time to below 10 ms. He predicted that eventually"Starlink will be more responsive than ground Intenet in most cases."

A month later, we saw early results of the latency-reduction effort. On February 12, Oleg Kutkov tested Starlink's Rev 3 and Rev 4 terminals and, as shown here, he found no latency inflation as background upload and download speeds increased simultaneously when using the Rev 3 terminal. He compared the Rev 3 and 4 terminals and found that Rev 4 upload and download speeds were about 50% faster than Rev3. Average ping times were somewhat improved for Rev 4 (88 vs 93 ms), but jitter was significantly lower (9.2 vs 111.9 ms).

You should also check out Dave Taht's take on Oleg's results. He concedes that Starlink has improved dramatically, and outlines steps they could take to further reduce latency.

Last week, SpaceX released news of progress toward the 20 ms latency goal. They have worked to reduce latency throughout the Starlink system. Since the begining of the year, they have deployed and tested 193 different satellite software builds, 75 gateway software builds, 222 Starlink software builds, and 57 WiFi software builds.

This is the latency view of the interactive map.

For a month preceding March 7, SpaceX collected data every 15 seconds from millions of Starlink routers. In analyzing the data, they defined worst-case latency is the point at which 99% of times are shorter and peak hours as 6-9 PM local time.

In the United States, they found that median latency was reduced by more than 30%, from 48.5ms to 33ms during peak usage hours, and worst-case peak hour latency had dropped by over 60%, from over 150ms to less than 65ms. Outside the United States median latency was reduced by up to 25% and worst-case latencies by up to 35%. The map shown here is interactive and shows availability and upload and download speeds in addition to latency.

SpaceX says it has “tuned our algorithms to prefer paths with lower latency, no matter how small the difference, and to remove any and all sources of unnecessary and non-physical latency." Dave Taht and his colleagues at LibreQoS might disagree, but latency will improve over time regardless.

Latency will improve as SpaceX launches more satellites with more capacity and inter-satellite laser links and the launch rate will increase when Starship becomes available. Adding ground stations will also improve latency. (Note that the only African light-colored areas in the above latency map are within reach of the only ground stations on the continent).

I hope Musk achieves the 20 ms goal for Starlink. Doing so would not only benefit Starlink customers, it would call the attention of the FCC and terrestrial Internet service providers to the importance of latency as a performance and marketing metric.

Civilian Tech Mobilization in Ukraine

2024-02-22T14:22:00.000-08:00

Rosie the Riveter, US World War II poster (source)

As was the case in the US during World War II, civilian volunteers are making important contributions to the Ukrainian war effort.

On February 8, 2022, the first truck load load of Starlink terminals arrived in Kyiv. A week later they were being used. By April 2022, there were 5,000 terminals in Ukraine, and 42,000 as of April 2023. (At this point, SpaceX and Ukraine have gone silent. Neither ChatGPT4, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, nor I could not find a current terminal count).

Whatever the number of terminals in the country, they require support. They were purchased, delivered, and set up. Users were trained and they require real-time access for troubleshooting and assistance. Broken terminals have to be repaired and some terminals have been modified. Civilian tech volunteers are doing much of this work.

There are several Starlink support centers throughout Ukraine. For obvious reasons, they are secretive about their work, but one large one is Nebogray in Lviv. Neborgray has repaired 5,976 Starlink terminals and converted 516 for portable use mounted on vehicle roofs. In addition to the service centers, there are many individual craftsmen and small services throughout the country.

The work at Nebogry is performed by highly qualified volunteers. For example, Oleg Kutkov. is a senior engineer at Ubiquiti, and he devotes his spare time to Starlink research. He bought what may have been the first Starlink terminal in Ukraine on eBay before the war and does teardowns and research studies like this recent unboxing and review of the Version 4 Starlink terminal on his blog. Oleg is an active participant in the Starlink mailing list and the 15,700-member People's Starlink Facebook group.

The Facebook group was created by The People's Starlink project, which is involved in refurbishing, adapting, repairing, and providing technical support, as well as procuring and upgrading satellite communication terminals from SpaceX's Starlink for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and other defenders of Ukraine.

With the help of many contributors, including Oleg, People's Starlink founder Vladimir Stepanets has written a 246-page Starlink Handbook for Military Users, which begins with a message from the author “Greetings defenders of Ukraine!”

Starlink Handbook for Military Users

The handbook is divided into eight, richly illustrated modules:

What is Starlink?
Starlink Terminals
Powering Starlink terminals
Expanding and collapsing Starlink terminals
Terminal management and settings
Safety of using Starlink terminals
Diagnostics and problem-solving
Starlink in network infrastructures

This is the second (and first public) edition of the handbook and it will continue evolving. It is currently available in Ukrainian, but Stepanets is discussing translations into several other languages and plans to publish it as a book.

Point of invincibility in Bucha, Ukraine

In response to Russian attacks on critical infrastructure, Ukraine has established thousands of Points of Invincibility, tent structures equipped with generators. The government is working to provide a Starlink terminal for each of them in addition to heat, water, lighting, and more.

The IT Army of Ukraine is an international, loosely connected organization of Ukrainian and foreign ethical hackers. They have created an online service that Ukrainian allies can use to generate denial-of-service attacks. Of course, one man's "ethical hacker" is another man's "terrorist," and Ukraine has petitioned The International Criminal Court to investigate Russian cyberattacks as war crimes. The International Committee of the Red Cross has published rules of engagement for civilian hackers involved in conflicts and the IT Army will make a best effort to follow the rules.

It was obvious from the early days of the war that two technologies -- Starlink and drones -- were going to play major roles. Model airplane hobbyists created an air reconnaissance unit within the army when fighting began in 2014 and Starlink enabled surveillance drones to relay target coordinates to artillery units.

Today, non-technical people like Violetta Oliynyk, an artist and jeweler, are assembling drones in their spare time. She learned drone assembly by taking an online course from Prometheus, a nine-year-old education site with over 400 courses online. (The course was developed for the Victory Drones project). Social Drones UA is another volunteer drone assembly project. They vet then train and support potential assemblers with a how-to video and online support.

Ukrainians are also assembling battery packs from batteries in discarded vapes, which is reminiscent of Americans saving and turning in excess cooking fat to be used in explosives during World War II.

Civilian volunteers and Ukrainian tech companies have pivoted to military innovation and production. Ukraine was technologically advanced before the war and has been forced to innovate and improvise. If Ukraine survives, the tech sector will thrive when peace comes.

I've presented a few examples of civilian tech support for the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. There are many others, and if you are so inclined, the Internet makes it possible for you to contribute to them. Many project Websites have contribution links and you can also consult Reddit's list of vetted Ukrainen charities.

Update 3/8/2024

I believe Oleg is by Volodymyr Zelenskyy's ear.

Oleg Kutkov was among the "people embodying the spirit of Ukraine," chosen by Time Magazine as Person of the Year for 2022. Time wrote:

Ukraine first came back online when Elon Musk activated his low-altitude Starlink satellite internet, as he would later do in Iran. The net was crucial to Ukrainian forces, who were issued the compact, portable Starlink antennas. But in Kyiv, self-described “tech and space nerd” Oleg Kutkov reconstructed a Starlink dish from eBay, and after contacting SpaceX support, caught a signal. “I was the first civilian user of Starlink here in Ukraine,” says Kutkov, 34, who began a Facebook group that has grown to 8,700 people. “They read about me in the news, and they were all worrying about connectivity because the internet is really important here to get all the news, to get notifications and so on.”

Update 2/6/2025

Oleg Kutkov reports that there are now dozens of Starlink service centers in Ukraine. He says his friend runs the first and biggest service center specializing in Starlink in Ukraine (and most likely worldwide). They are currently doing nearly 100 Starlink repairs per week. They also modify and produce automotive versions of REV3, REV4, and Mini terminals for military use.