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When my phone first suggested I send a satellite message, I was simply amazed. This is definitely the future, dude. This is, after all, the real space internet. So, no more people lost on remote islands or trails, no more unsafe airport Wi-Fi, no more intermittent and expensive Wi-Fi on planes, no more roaming charges. Imagine being able to travel and have internet from space anywhere. Uh, wait, wait. Come on, let's rewind a little. But airlines have been selling us this overpriced and terrible Wi-Fi for decades. So will 5G satellites be anything like that, or is this really the future?
Satellite 5G is expected to change the world. So can it actually outperform terrestrial 5G? I've been obsessed with space internet for the past few weeks, trying to figure out if I'm ready to give up terrestrial internet. And I discovered that for decades, space internet had a flaw that few people knew about - a flaw that explains the terrible internet on airplanes, why it was so expensive, and gives us a clue as to how a world with satellite internet might actually work. So let 's take a look at the space internet today. This is a bit unusual for me, because usually when I'm here, I avoid satellites rather than aim at them. But today things are a little different. You can't see it, but it's right here. There, somewhere over there,
is a satellite. This is not a Starlink satellite, this is the very first satellite that first provided real internet on board an aircraft. It's 2004, Boeing, they called this service "Connexion," and it was supposed to be a real bomb. So, it cost between $15 and $30 for unlimited access at a fixed price. That is, today it would be somewhere between 25 and 50 dollars. It operated via the same satellites that DirecTV and Dish Network used for old-school satellite TV. They simply rented space on the same satellites. So, to get internet from the Connexion network, the plane needed an antenna on the fuselage that could lock onto the satellite, but more importantly, track it. So to understand satellite internet, we first need to understand basic
mobile internet. Sure, the phone receives a signal from a tower, but the phone's signal is omnidirectional. This means that the phone is communicating with multiple towers at the same time. And then he chooses the one that is closest, and it is with her that he continues the connection. And this becomes a big problem on airplanes. I always thought that cell phones didn't work on airplanes because the antennas on the communication towers were pointed downwards. But that's only half the answer. The main reason is speed and switching between towers. So, if you don't listen to the instructions and leave airplane mode off, you'll notice that you can still catch a signal at low altitudes. Just like on land, your phone will "talk" to several towers
around you at the same time and choose one as the main one. But since the plane is traveling at 800 km/h, your phone will constantly try to switch between different towers over and over again. And if you multiply that by 200 phones on the plane, you'll get a flood of requests to switch simultaneously. This is the real reason why the FCC banned cell phones in flights back in the 90s. Not the fear that your phone will cause the plane to crash. This is the fear that you will " hit" every tower under the flight path. But this switching between towers will soon become very important. With the old satellite internet, airplane speed wasn't a problem because there's no need to switch towers, there aren't many satellites, just one, hanging at an altitude of
35,000 km. That is about 22,000 miles from Earth. To get internet, an antenna was installed on the roof of the plane, which tracked the position of the satellite in the sky and physically moved to always point to the satellite with which there was communication. So changing the plane's position meant that the antenna had to change its direction. The satellite then received the signal and transmitted it to ground stations connected to the real internet. And it worked. Up to 20 megabits per second for download for the plane, about 1 megabit per second for upload. This was a common connection for the entire plane. But it was still 2000, so there were no 4K movies back then. Lufthansa installed this on 80 long-haul aircraft in 2004.
They announced full-fledged browsers, email, and even video calls, but the entire system had one critical flaw. The distance, because you would think that the satellites that planes communicate with are somewhere here or here. But in reality they are somewhere like here. By the way, if there are any, this is the moment when we'll probably have to say goodbye. So, that's about 35,000 km or 22,000 miles from Earth. So your request to a website has to travel from the plane about 35,000 km to the satellite, and then 35,000 km back to Earth to a ground station. And then go the usual way on the Internet to whatever server you're trying to connect to, and back from the ground station to the satellite and back
to the plane again. These waves travel at the speed of light, but they need to travel those 140,000 km for each request, which, again, at the speed of light would take almost 500 ms, half a second, plus the delay on the ground. This is why the internet on airplanes from the 2000s and many modern airplanes is so slow, because it operates with this basic, required latency of at least 450 ms, which sometimes even reaches over 3000 ms. Imagine having to talk on Zoom with almost a second delay between each message. Somehow we have to have complex engineering- astrophysics conversations using only a still- image camera from 1996 By the way, no one should take calls on airplanes, but if there's anything worse than no internet, it's
slow internet. So, at least right now we don't have a way to bypass the speed of light, so why put these satellites so far away? Okay, now to continue this video, we need to go over some basics of how orbits and satellites work. If you looked at this satellite that we're talking about, if we looked at it to scale, this is of course not to scale, it would be about here, at this distance from Earth. This is very, very far away. But why can't we place this satellite closer? These satellites that are there are called geostationary, which means they are " tethered" to the Earth. As the Earth rotates, the satellite moves
around it at the same speed, always pointing in the same direction. Because this satellite communicates with a specific ground station, which has a fixed antenna pointed at a specific point in the sky. Therefore, for a ground station to remain visible to a satellite, it must constantly be in the same position relative to the Earth. In other words, the speed at which the satellite moves must be very precise to match this rotation. And this number is about 11,000 km/h. Okay, so why can't we bring this satellite closer? There is a very interesting, very " geeky" reason, and I will explain it. Sorry, it took me years to understand this, but now I can. And I promise, it's really cool.
There is currently a common misconception that there is no gravity in space, which is actually incorrect. Because if I just place the satellite here, stationary, it will fall. It will just fall straight down, into the huge mass of this planet, which will pull it in. To make an object revolve around a planet, you need to give it a certain speed. The Earth will still pull it down, but as the satellite's horizontal velocity increases, there will come a point when it stops falling down and starts falling " around". And this speed is very precise depending on the distance from Earth. Because if you move
too slowly, you will fall anyway. If you move too fast, the orbit will become elliptical. This is not suitable for the Internet. But remember, for these satellites we need them to be "tethered" to Earth. So, if we put the satellite closer to Earth, say, 2000 km away, I don't know where, maybe here. Then the satellite's speed to stay in orbit would have to be around 24,800 km/h, which would put it out of sync with the Earth's rotation. It will simply move faster than Earth. It would orbit the Earth 11 times a day, which isn't really suitable for the internet, at least not right now. So there's only one possible ideal place for this satellite to remain geostationary-it's up here, 35,786 km from Earth at a speed of 11,000
km/h. That's all. This is the only way. This is the only place. So remember this number: 35,786 km. That's why your phone couldn't do anything like this until recently. That's why there was just a patch of dark sky in that photo, because this satellite isn't moving relative to us. This is also the reason why airplanes need a moving antenna, because as you move over the Earth, the position of your satellite changes. So, as limited, slow, and imperfect as this system may have seemed with those satellites far away , it was revolutionary and really was all we had for 30 years. It covered almost the entire inhabited world, everything except the poles, thanks to just three-just three correctly positioned satellites. Our videos are now watched almost all over the world, and
this is partly because we are much better at dubbing them. After all, YouTube's auto-dubbing feature provides words in another language, but it sounds like machine translation, and most of my delivery is lost. But what we use is called Fish Audio, and this video is already dubbed in Spanish, German, and French if you want to hear what it sounds like. Fish Audio has just opened early access to its most emotional model yet, called Drama 3. And the idea is that you don't just translate, you direct. You explain to the voice what you want it to do in simple language, just as you would give instructions to a voice actor. And then there's the added layer of subtle control over emotions, intonation, and delivery. So far, everything we've done
has been on version 2.1, but now that Fish has released the new Drama 3, we can add more tags, and the model understands them much better than before. So we have this original line from the script with a few tags, like "accent" or "excited." Yes , let me run the German version and see what happens. Now let's try French. This is not bad at all. And that's how we dubbed the entire video. Now, if you're working with a dialogue between multiple speakers, you can generate an entire conversation where each voice retains its individuality. My favorite new feature is called " phoneme control," because now you can type in IPA to accurately capture the pronunciation, like Kaya or slight beam, because you don't want it to be translated into other languages like
the rest of the text. So, you want the pronunciation to always remain the same, whether it's Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Spanish. And if you are a developer, the model string is drama-3. The link is in the description, in the pinned comment, and in this QR code. Try the drama-3 model from Fish Audio. Thank you very much to Fish Audio for supporting our channel. But in any case, let's get back to sending cargo into space. Remember, putting one kilogram into orbit used to cost between $ 20,000 and $35,000. These satellites flew in high orbit. Each of them weighed from 3 to 4 thousand kilograms. So you couldn't afford to be wasteful in this matter. Each
launch cost between $60 million and $130 million. So, this technology worked. About. I mean, it laid the foundation for the space internet that we're going to get soon. But this technology would never be able to support mobile internet. Boeing projected $3.5 billion in revenue per year from this. This did not happen. So in 2006 they effectively closed the project. And then competitors appeared, trying to improve on this. For example, Viasat offered more power and wider bandwidth per aircraft. Theoretically, 12 megabits per second per connected passenger. And Panasonic Avionics tried to rent capacity from everyone in a row and build its own network of geostationary satellites. So if you paid for internet on a plane in the 2010s, chances are you
used one of these. But both had the same flaw. Geostationary satellites are too far away, too much delay. And yet, despite this, we built global live television. We could make transoceanic phone calls before Honey, I'm going into labor. You can't give birth now. Will you come home? No, I'm in the middle of nowhere. We had satellites that provided the bulk of calls between continents. Jess, where are you? Um, I'm on a boat. If you wanted any decent internet on a plane, or terrestrial satellite internet, we needed a better system. And it's not just that TikTok won't load.
Much of the internet we use today simply wouldn't be able to work with a 1-second delay. For example, TCP handshakes consisting of three exchanges require 900 ms of response time. HTTPS also requires a security handshake, and this requires at least one full round trip between the client and server. Both are delayed for a full second. A corporate VPN is impossible to use because it has to constantly check the connection every few seconds, and if a response doesn't arrive in time, it considers the connection broken and shuts down. So we just needed something better. The obvious answer is that the satellites need to be brought closer.
Truth? But this entails a lot of complications. For most of the 2000s, there was only one company trying to do something about it. It's a company called O3B Networks. You probably have n't heard of it, but this company deserves recognition for developing this technology before This swallow is worth more than you can earn in a month. So, O3B stands for "The Other 3 Billion". The mission of this company was to provide internet to people who didn't have a stable connection on Earth, which is very, very nice of them, at least from the company's perspective. So, O3B was working with satellites in medium Earth orbit, so they were no longer so far away, but much closer. By the end of 2014, they had 12 satellites orbiting Earth. Several antennas that could
move. Some of them were aimed at the land, some at their clients. These satellites were equatorial, they orbited the equator, which meant they only provided a good signal for these central low latitudes. So, Canada, Scandinavia, Russia, and the Falkland Islands were out of luck. You've probably never heard of O3B because, despite being built for those 3 billion people, it never actually sold services to end users. However, it proved that bringing satellites closer to Earth was possible and that it did help solve the signal delay problem. The system just never got small enough, cheap enough, or large enough to actually make the internet work on our phones, but they paved the way for billionaires to get into the game, and of course, this guy.
Starlink is space internet. We have a constellation of satellites, and I have over 1,500 active satellites. I'm sure you have thoughts about Elon. I became myself. Because in reality, if you look at history, if you study history broadly, everyone was a slave. Everyone. I have some thoughts too, and I'll share them with you at the end of the video. But let's look at the facts. Like it or not, SpaceX is the only reason satellite internet is even possible. There are other competitors in the space internet space
, but Starlink was the first, and it now has 12 million users in 160 countries. So mobile operators around the world are starting to offer satellite 5G. The main innovation of networks like Starlink and the upcoming Amazon Leo is that the satellites are no longer far out in space. They are now in low Earth orbit. About here. That is, it is 330 km instead of 35,000 km. Latency drops from 500ms to just 2ms in both directions. But if you listened carefully to my brief explanation of orbital mechanics, you know that this entails a lot of problems. Because, firstly, to stay in orbit at an altitude of 550 km, you need to move at a speed of
approximately 27,300 km per hour. For those newer satellites in a 330-kilometer orbit, the speed must be even higher, so they complete a full rotation around the Earth every 91 minutes. So, these satellites are close enough that you can see them with the naked eye if you are in a dark enough place. But the thing is, they are very close to Earth. I use an app called Starlink that allows you to find satellites to watch the sky. Very cool app, no ads. But the point is that they can be seen with the naked eye. They look like a small train of lights and cross the entire sky in about 3-5 minutes. They also always fly by at the exact moment I'm trying to take a photo of the stars. And at that speed, the antennas can't move fast enough to track them, as they did with
airplanes. Also, remember that a geostationary satellite saw the entire Earth. But because these things are so close to Earth, they only see a region about 1,300 km in diameter, because the curvature of the Earth blocks the signal. So, how many satellites will you need? A company called Iridium tried to do this. In the 90s, they had 66 satellites. This is the technology behind those satellite phones we saw in the movies. Oh, that might hurt It failed because the phone cost about $3,000 at the time, and calls cost about $7 per minute. Then OneWeb was going to launch 650 satellites, but during COVID they ran out of money.
They only launched 70. So to even think about space internet for the masses, like 5G on your phone, you need not hundreds, but thousands. So, at the time of this writing, there are about 11,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. This was only possible because SpaceX invented a way to reduce the cost of launching cargo into orbit from $30,000 per kilogram to $3,000. Each launch can carry up to 29 large satellites or about 60 smaller ones, and they, of course, return boosters, which usually makes everything much cheaper. medium- Earth orbit satellites, which were limited to low latitudes, systems like Starlink cover the entire planet because they use different envelopes. An envelope is a set of satellites that fly in approximately the same direction.
So the first shell has a slope of 53°. This covers everyone within 55 degrees latitude. Then there's another 70- degree shell, and the last one that was launched is a 97- degree one that flies almost vertically. And that means Canada, Scandinavia, and the northern regions can get Wi-Fi. There are currently eight shells in orbit, flying in different directions for better speed and so on. So the question is, how do you track hundreds of satellites flying above you at 25,000 km/ h? And how does a satellite connect to customers without falling into the same trap as an airplane antenna? Let's try to figure it out. This antenna consists of hundreds of tiny elements that can electronically direct the signal in the desired direction. So the antenna doesn't move,
it remains static. You have to point it in the general direction of the satellites, and the electronics can deflect the signal up to 50 degrees off center. And by the way, the antenna will switch between satellites every 15 seconds, because they move very quickly. It "knows" that it needs to switch from one satellite to another. By the way, in 5G networks it works differently. I'll get to that in a moment. From the satellite's side, everything looks very similar to a traditional dish. This is called a phased array antenna. It can send up to 48 simultaneous beams with a diameter of 25-50 km to Earth, each of which is a communication channel for clients in the coverage area. 98 megabits per second from space.
This is just madness. This is where the transfer speed limit comes from. Starlink claims download speeds of up to 400 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 40 Mbps. Theoretically, it could be higher if fewer people shared the same beam, but I couldn't find any data on the maximum beam capacity. When the signal is detected, the message goes to the satellite, is relayed to a ground station and connected to the Internet. This is a much shorter distance than geostationary satellites, and there are about 500 such stations in the world. But remember that the radius of action of satellites is actually very small. For example, imagine someone in Antarctica trying to
browse TikTok. They send a signal to a satellite, but there is no ground station within a radius of 1,300 km. In such cases, the satellite can use a laser to transmit a message to the next satellite in the network and continue transmitting until a satellite is found within range of the ground station. Interestingly, for some remote islands, such as Reunion in the Indian Ocean, the latency of satellite communication is lower than that of regular internet. Regular internet usually works through submarine cables. But because the signal travels through air and space, it actually travels in a straight line. The reason I wanted to make this video so much is because my carrier here in Costa Rica had been teasing me about it for months, and
as it turns out, they finally launched it just two days before our video was due out. See for yourself. So I was very skeptical that they would implement this, and it's not at all an iPhone 18 Pro-only feature. This, in theory, works with any phone. And the concept is simple. If you are outside the range of their cell towers, your phone connects to the Starlink network instead. There is a new type of satellite called "direct-to-cell" that has an antenna and a chip that compensates for being in space. Therefore, your phone may perceive this antenna as a regular cell tower. So, your phone is just doing what it normally does. It looks for the strongest signal around, and if a satellite turns out to be the strongest source, it connects to it using the
same system and antenna as on Earth. Of course, this approach has its limitations. You probably won't be able to stream movies in 4K, but, you know, it could save you if you're stranded on a deserted island in a pinch. The theoretical throughput of this technology is about 4 megabits per second, but there is a new technology called NRNTN, which has a theoretical speed of up to 100 megabits per second. So this new standard seems to allow the phone to determine its own position relative to the satellites, calculate data about their flight path, and compensate for signal delay and Doppler shift before transmission. So, just as antennas worked by tracking the expected movement of satellites, new phones with this technology could apparently do the same. I guess
we'll have to wait and see when Apple finally implements this, maybe in a few years. So, what kind of internet will replace the space internet? In practice, probably only internet in remote areas. It is much more efficient to lay fiber optic cables where the infrastructure already exists. And as much as I would like one operator to work on the phone everywhere, the reality is that there are antennas here, and satellites are not needed to use them. Phone companies just need to stop being so greedy with their rates. Here in Europe, most operators allow roaming in the rest of Europe without any extra charges.
Now it is more typical of the USA. So the fact that these phone companies have made roaming cheaper or are selling e-sims for travel at an affordable price has made satellite internet unnecessary. Space internet is expensive, and its upgrades still require sending cargo into space. Besides, it's a monopoly to some extent now. There's another billionaire trying to catch up to Elon with his Amazon Leo, but they're still a few thousand satellites short. By the way, I did n't forget to tell you what I think about Elon. The thing is, Elon is
