Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech. Starlink is almost 10 years old - conceptually even older. Iridium has been around for over 25 years.
If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech that is around the corner in the US.
AST SpaceMobile is close to starting commercial activity for satellite based 5G that is supposed to work with any smart phone. Starlink is working on something similar with T-Mobile. G-Sat already has minimal D2D capability working with the latest iPhone generation.
Also, I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from for launching hundreds of satellites. Russia? China?
What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks? Would you like to show us the reasoning here?
> it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech
If the current one works - why would they? For defence usage, reliable is better than next gen usually. (Something something next gen F35 still not usable)
> I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from
> Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech. Starlink is almost 10 years old..
If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in next gen
Thats not their job.
Their job is to build infrastructure for Europe, Tonnels, GPS, bridges, etc, like the massive tunnels they are building through the alps.
Now they decided thay just like modern military and government needs a GPS, they need satellite based internet.
I am sure war in Ukraine has helped sharpen minds there.
Their remit is not to invest in speculative projects ala hyperloop.
How is 5G mobiles connecting to sattelites relevant to EU?
Thats 100% commercial operation, if it is relevant, it's the job of European mobile operators to fund it, not for tax payers.
6 years ago the ESA and Arianespace were ridiculing reusable rockets, even as SpaceX was getting closer and closer to the non-RUD landing. Ariane 6 yet to launch, now trying to retrofit some level of reusability. Too slow, too stuck with their views...
From my perspective, the 40ms I get from Starlink is worlds better then the 900ms I got from my 128kb/s Iridium Pilot (now in the skip).
This direct to device tech is going to suck based on everything I’ve read so far. The radios in phones are so weak and undirected that getting 128kbps is going to be a challenge, let alone anything near what’s required to watch video.
Look at the gymnastics you have to do to use SOS on iPhone now.
Starlink is available to consumers. This is not and will not be. Flagged for being super misleading.
I would love some actual Starlink competition. My parents live a 15 min drive into the mountains and due to the topography there is no cell phone service nor incentive to provide it. Starlink is the only realistic option they have for usable internet. They had viasat before and the latency is so high it was garbage to use.
I don't like putting more junk into LEO than we absolutely have to because it disrupts our space telescopes (which the EU has also invested over 1 billion euro in). I much rather have the funding go to improving land based internet infrastructure.
Does it annoy anyone else that the title says "Musk's Starlink"?
Yes, it was his idea and he is the main driving force and owns half of the company, but any project like this is a collaborative effort between tens of thousands of people.
2.4 billions is not enough for such a project given the EU overhead in cost. Espacially since the deadline is 2027, so 2030 with delays really, that means 350 millions a year for paying satellite design, build them, send them to space.
There's many organizations that have proposed Starlink competitors, but it turns out this kind of thing is hard. Starlink isn't the first to try this either, but they're the first to succeed.
There's very little hope of this getting funded or even if funded, getting developed sufficiently.
So it seems that each group of nations needs/wants physical networks because it's not enough to use encrypted communication on others'. How many is enough, 3, 4, more?
Is this solvable with a single network? e.g. Is there a way of anonymizing users of a network preventing discrimination, analogous to cryptocurrency?
This is probably something that the US (or other major powers) should really think about doing too.
Military tactics and capabilities have generally been driven by communications capabilities. For example, radio communication technology was at least as important as the tank in for the German blitzkrieg. This becomes all the more important with drones, etc.
I just punched up some quick numbers to make sure I’m not talking out of my ass and it looks like getting to the 12,000 satellites Starlink initially stated is approx $3.6 billion in total over the years. This is in comparison to the nearly $2 trillion annual defense budget. Or in comparison, I believe the military spent $15 billion on a software defined radio project that I believe never produced a single product.
Sure, I get it that big government isn’t synonymous with innovation. But relying on the whims of these increasingly questionable billionaires for something like global internet prob isn’t a great idea.
With the war, Ukraine needed satellite telecommunications, but the EU didn’t have something to offer. Ukraine should not have to rely on the whims of Elon Musk to defend their people.
What a weird reason to undertake such a project. Ukraine isn’t an EU member.
There is always bashing if there is something about the EU and its national projects, not always deserved. However sometimes I wished HN showed more of local projects. For example: has there been a post about the European AI?
It's honestly got to the point where I barely open comments related to EU projects any more. While most of the time there's somewhat nuanced discussions in comments, once the EU gets mentioned for some reason most of the comments basically boil down to "EU bad, US better", and "Big government bad", completely ignoring the actual contents of what the post it about.
You're surprised a headline like "The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink" from "reneweuropegroup.eu" [1] stirs up nationalistic mud flinging?
It's silly to blame HN for this. This sort of headline is just asking for the conversation to be derailed. Which is exactly why your comment is #1 and the comments below it are quickly derailing into it's own version of EU vs US.
This article and your link reek of, "but Europe can do it too".
I don't know why the EU / Europe can't just do interesting things without coming across as so desperate to prove something – can we not just start a cool AI company without branding it a "European AI company", as if that's something so unlikely we should be proud of it?
An AI company started by kids would be something worth noting, an AI company started by the world's most prosperous and well educated continent is kinda cringy. I can't think of a single American company which does this.
This is a bit crazy to me since it seems like there is a constant, almost never ending praise for everything related to Europe here. But I totally get that it's probably a difference in what topic we browse and what comments we read, so your experience is just as valid. I guess it's just surprising to me!
Estonia has high-tech exports of 2.6 billion USD. Germany has high-tech exports of around 200 billion USD, which makes it world-wide number three, with the US being number four. Data from the World Bank.
The city I live in has roughly four times the GDP of Estonia. We have for example one of the largest civil airplane manufacturing sites here. 40000 people are employed in aerospace in the larger region -> more revenue than estonia has GDP.
There is literally two orders of magnitude of high-tech you are ignoring.
> Meh, the EU (where I live) is an ossified behemoth whose VIPs (Germany and France) don't really understand or appreciate tech and cannot innovate their way out of a paper bag.
It's telling that you're lumping France and Germany together that you don't know what you're talking about. France has come an extremely long way in the past few years, with pretty good mobile and fibre coverage (there are villages with hundreds of people with proud signs "Commune fibrée"), and vast government digital services. The last time i had to interact with a government office physically was to file the (online prepared) form for ID and passport, where it's purely done for verification purposes. There's a government SSO which gives access to all government services online, for free.
There's also a very healthy startup culture and scene (check the FrenchTech's Next40).
> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech
Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised health appointments, a single platform to book one, send your documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market, fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc. Real world companies solving actual problems and widely used in France and starting to export (Back Market have an EU wide presence, Ornikar are in a couple of Western EU markets, etc.).
> In practice, there will be a flow of taxpayer money into something highly subsidized that no one will ever use.
Given that despite the comparison to Starlink, the article focuses on defence and crisis response considerations after Ukraine, I don't think the people behind this proposal are really that concerned about widespread peace time use.
> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech
A small subset of well-funded companies started in Paris and immediate surroundings alone in the last 20 years (most of them much more recent). Most of these have raised between $100m-$500m, and several are unicorns:
Paris has similar levels of (some estimate more) tech startups than London, and overall France is at a similar level to the UK and Germany in terms of tech startups.
Europe ( haven't looked at numbers for just EU) is lagging in terms of VC funding relative to the US, sure - according to McKinsey, in 2019 Europe accounted for 36% of VC backed companies that raised funding in the preceding decade globally (vs. 45% for the US), and just 14% of unicorns (vs. 50% for the US), but from working in the VC field for the last 5 years, what we saw was also that capital inflows in Europe were growing rapidly as attitudes to risk have been changing, and more founders achieving exits are turning around and feeding capital back into VC funds.
You are right, though I’d add that the EU correctly reflects Europeans’ policy preferences here. European voters, more often than not, seem to believe they can have their cake and eat it too: free public services that remain competitive and cutting edge, somehow efficiently run by the government and delivered on time and on budget. Ask those same people about how <insert any existing government service> is run, and they’ll have a litany of complaints.
> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech, while small nations like Estonia and Finland punch well above their weight.
I'm still waiting for the Estonian space rockets and Finnish airplanes and high speed rail. Seriously your rant is a bit misplaced.
They still haven't finished Galileo yet; with the project seemingly going backwards ever since the British were forced out. How will they deliver yet another moonshot project like this? They don't even possess reusable rocket technology yet to make such a LEO project economically viable.
Galileo has been operational for a few years. Even customer mobile devices Support and use it.
Further more the British had a referendum and decided to leave on their own. Quite hard to call that force out. In fact it's impossible to expell a member state.
> going backwards ever since the British were forced out.
It was already going badly for years before UK left. Galileo was scheduled to be finished in 2021, shortly after Brexit and around the same time UK parted from the project.
Why this infatuation with low Earth orbit? Why not put just few satelites further out, like every other satellite internet provide does except starlink?
EDIT:
To people bringing up latency. Far away satellite has them far enough that they cover large area so the signal goes to satellite and back and that's it. Distance introduces latency.
But in case of constallation packet must bounce through multiple satellites and/or ground stations to arrive at the target so that introduces latency too. So it's usually not great either.
Starlink originally planned to put their first shell at 1100 km altitude. They changed to 550km for several reasons. First, because it offered slightly reduced latency. Second, so long as you launch enough satellites, the reduced coverage region for each satellite is offset by having more satellites and hence (other things being equal) more bandwidth per area of land. Third, satellites at 550 km will naturally deorbit in a few years if something fails. So although they plan to actively deorbit the first satellites after 6 or 7 years to replace them with newer ones, if they get something wrong and have a lot of satellite failures, they really won't cause a long term problem. At 1100 km the orbit won't decay for centuries. If you have satellites fail, the rest of the constellation will be doing avoidance maneouvers for a very long time. Thus if your launch costs are low enough and you can mass-produce satellites cheap enough, you want them as low as possible. Somewhere around 500 km is about as low as you want to go, before too much of the satellite mass ends up being fuel to maintain orbit.
The van Allen radiation belt [1] starts at 650 km (and ends at 58,000 km).
The satellites would probably have a shorter lifetime if they were higher.
Since the speed of light is 300,000 km/s, adding 300 km adds one millisecond of delay, or 2 milliseconds to a roundtrip. Doesn't seem a lot for satellite internet?
Geostationary orbit is at 36,000 km, then for lag that is indeed problematic as it's then 240 ms for a round trip. Still bearable.
[+] [-] fweimer|3 years ago|reply
https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/...
This means it's for government use, and is not really comparable to commercial end user services.
[+] [-] amm|3 years ago|reply
Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech. Starlink is almost 10 years old - conceptually even older. Iridium has been around for over 25 years.
If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech that is around the corner in the US.
AST SpaceMobile is close to starting commercial activity for satellite based 5G that is supposed to work with any smart phone. Starlink is working on something similar with T-Mobile. G-Sat already has minimal D2D capability working with the latest iPhone generation.
Also, I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from for launching hundreds of satellites. Russia? China?
[+] [-] viraptor|3 years ago|reply
What's your source for good cost of launching satellite communication networks? Would you like to show us the reasoning here?
> it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite direct to device tech
If the current one works - why would they? For defence usage, reliable is better than next gen usually. (Something something next gen F35 still not usable)
> I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to come from
French Guiana and other places like most previous launches? https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Pr...
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|3 years ago|reply
Thats not their job.
Their job is to build infrastructure for Europe, Tonnels, GPS, bridges, etc, like the massive tunnels they are building through the alps.
https://youtu.be/30foJiPUrBA
Now they decided thay just like modern military and government needs a GPS, they need satellite based internet. I am sure war in Ukraine has helped sharpen minds there.
Their remit is not to invest in speculative projects ala hyperloop.
How is 5G mobiles connecting to sattelites relevant to EU?
Thats 100% commercial operation, if it is relevant, it's the job of European mobile operators to fund it, not for tax payers.
[+] [-] yesod|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kortilla|3 years ago|reply
Look at the gymnastics you have to do to use SOS on iPhone now.
[+] [-] sys42590|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
[+] [-] kortilla|3 years ago|reply
I would love some actual Starlink competition. My parents live a 15 min drive into the mountains and due to the topography there is no cell phone service nor incentive to provide it. Starlink is the only realistic option they have for usable internet. They had viasat before and the latency is so high it was garbage to use.
[+] [-] RedShift1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] concordDance|3 years ago|reply
Yes, it was his idea and he is the main driving force and owns half of the company, but any project like this is a collaborative effort between tens of thousands of people.
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlindner|3 years ago|reply
There's very little hope of this getting funded or even if funded, getting developed sufficiently.
[+] [-] KarlKemp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|3 years ago|reply
Curious what launch vehicles they're planning to use.
[+] [-] karmakaze|3 years ago|reply
Is this solvable with a single network? e.g. Is there a way of anonymizing users of a network preventing discrimination, analogous to cryptocurrency?
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runlaszlorun|3 years ago|reply
Military tactics and capabilities have generally been driven by communications capabilities. For example, radio communication technology was at least as important as the tank in for the German blitzkrieg. This becomes all the more important with drones, etc.
I just punched up some quick numbers to make sure I’m not talking out of my ass and it looks like getting to the 12,000 satellites Starlink initially stated is approx $3.6 billion in total over the years. This is in comparison to the nearly $2 trillion annual defense budget. Or in comparison, I believe the military spent $15 billion on a software defined radio project that I believe never produced a single product.
Sure, I get it that big government isn’t synonymous with innovation. But relying on the whims of these increasingly questionable billionaires for something like global internet prob isn’t a great idea.
[+] [-] Dowwie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adolph|3 years ago|reply
What a weird reason to undertake such a project. Ukraine isn’t an EU member.
[+] [-] GeertB|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kensai|3 years ago|reply
https://www.aleph-alpha.com/
[+] [-] Deukhoofd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|3 years ago|reply
It's silly to blame HN for this. This sort of headline is just asking for the conversation to be derailed. Which is exactly why your comment is #1 and the comments below it are quickly derailing into it's own version of EU vs US.
[1] which is apparently a political group's website https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renew_Europe
[+] [-] 0xDEF|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion
[+] [-] kypro|3 years ago|reply
I don't know why the EU / Europe can't just do interesting things without coming across as so desperate to prove something – can we not just start a cool AI company without branding it a "European AI company", as if that's something so unlikely we should be proud of it?
An AI company started by kids would be something worth noting, an AI company started by the world's most prosperous and well educated continent is kinda cringy. I can't think of a single American company which does this.
[+] [-] mardifoufs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js4ever|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mi_lk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] inglor_cz|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lispm|3 years ago|reply
you are trolling.
Estonia has high-tech exports of 2.6 billion USD. Germany has high-tech exports of around 200 billion USD, which makes it world-wide number three, with the US being number four. Data from the World Bank.
The city I live in has roughly four times the GDP of Estonia. We have for example one of the largest civil airplane manufacturing sites here. 40000 people are employed in aerospace in the larger region -> more revenue than estonia has GDP.
There is literally two orders of magnitude of high-tech you are ignoring.
[+] [-] sofixa|3 years ago|reply
It's telling that you're lumping France and Germany together that you don't know what you're talking about. France has come an extremely long way in the past few years, with pretty good mobile and fibre coverage (there are villages with hundreds of people with proud signs "Commune fibrée"), and vast government digital services. The last time i had to interact with a government office physically was to file the (online prepared) form for ID and passport, where it's purely done for verification purposes. There's a government SSO which gives access to all government services online, for free.
There's also a very healthy startup culture and scene (check the FrenchTech's Next40).
> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech
Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised health appointments, a single platform to book one, send your documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market, fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc. Real world companies solving actual problems and widely used in France and starting to export (Back Market have an EU wide presence, Ornikar are in a couple of Western EU markets, etc.).
[+] [-] vidarh|3 years ago|reply
Given that despite the comparison to Starlink, the article focuses on defence and crisis response considerations after Ukraine, I don't think the people behind this proposal are really that concerned about widespread peace time use.
> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech
A small subset of well-funded companies started in Paris and immediate surroundings alone in the last 20 years (most of them much more recent). Most of these have raised between $100m-$500m, and several are unicorns:
Ledger, Deezer, Shift Solutions, Malt, Agicap, Back Market, Ankorstore, Vesitaire Collective, Virtuo, Sendinblue, HiFiBio, Aircall, Mirakl, EcoVadis, Criteo, DoctoLib, Voodoo, Qonto, BlaBlaCar, LumApps, Lydia, OpenClassrooms, Shift Technology, PayFit, Meero, Ynsect, Scality, Ornicar, Wynd, HR Path
Paris has similar levels of (some estimate more) tech startups than London, and overall France is at a similar level to the UK and Germany in terms of tech startups.
Europe ( haven't looked at numbers for just EU) is lagging in terms of VC funding relative to the US, sure - according to McKinsey, in 2019 Europe accounted for 36% of VC backed companies that raised funding in the preceding decade globally (vs. 45% for the US), and just 14% of unicorns (vs. 50% for the US), but from working in the VC field for the last 5 years, what we saw was also that capital inflows in Europe were growing rapidly as attitudes to risk have been changing, and more founders achieving exits are turning around and feeding capital back into VC funds.
[+] [-] troad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seszett|3 years ago|reply
I'm still waiting for the Estonian space rockets and Finnish airplanes and high speed rail. Seriously your rant is a bit misplaced.
[+] [-] nbevans|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vespasian|3 years ago|reply
Further more the British had a referendum and decided to leave on their own. Quite hard to call that force out. In fact it's impossible to expell a member state.
[+] [-] bionade24|3 years ago|reply
It was already going badly for years before UK left. Galileo was scheduled to be finished in 2021, shortly after Brexit and around the same time UK parted from the project.
[+] [-] microtonal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|3 years ago|reply
ESA has plenty of experience in delivering projects like this e.g. Copernicus, Sentinel, EDRS.
[+] [-] boudin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|3 years ago|reply
EDIT:
To people bringing up latency. Far away satellite has them far enough that they cover large area so the signal goes to satellite and back and that's it. Distance introduces latency.
But in case of constallation packet must bounce through multiple satellites and/or ground stations to arrive at the target so that introduces latency too. So it's usually not great either.
EDIT 2:
Never mind. Apparently Starlink manages to get pretty decent latency so far: https://blinqblinq.com/starlink-latency-and-ping-times/
The question reamins, if the goal is for the Europe to have a backup system for disasters such as armed conflict is the ping really key factor?
[+] [-] mhandley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewg123|3 years ago|reply
I think this is why starlink is so much more usable than traditional satellite internet.
[+] [-] Gravityloss|3 years ago|reply
Since the speed of light is 300,000 km/s, adding 300 km adds one millisecond of delay, or 2 milliseconds to a roundtrip. Doesn't seem a lot for satellite internet?
Geostationary orbit is at 36,000 km, then for lag that is indeed problematic as it's then 240 ms for a round trip. Still bearable.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt
[+] [-] 58028641|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elif|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewedrebecca|3 years ago|reply