Author | Jin Wang
Produced by | Zinc Industry (Public Number: xinchanye2021)
In 1987, with the support of the U.S. government, Motorola, which was still the hegemon of mobile communications at the time, proposed a bold plan - to build a new generation of mobile communication networks with satellites.
At that time, Motorola also gave this project a beautiful name, The Iridium Project.
After a decade of preparation and research and development, the Iridium program was ultimately too advanced in technology and business expectations to rewrite the history of human communications as desired.
However, the Iridium project has planted a seed for human exploration of the satellite Internet, and the research on the satellite Internet has not been interrupted since then.
On May 19, 2021, China North Industries Group revealed a message after the exhibition of "Beidou No. 3 short message communication integration into the public mobile phone stage" exhibition in Beijing:
The first batch of mobile phone products that support the Beidou short message communication function will be listed at the end of this year.
After many years, Motorola has lost its former aura, but the satellite Internet has reached the age of awakening.
However, when the satellite Internet is about to enter human life, most people have not yet realized what it really means.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="105" >01 communication problems that tens of million base stations cannot solve</h1>
In the past few years, the global smartphone market has rapidly shipped more than 1 billion units a year, and to solve the basic network communication problem of billions of smart phones, it is necessary to rely on another type of equipment - signal forwarding towers, commonly known as base stations.
Under the careful planning of operators, countless base stations have woven one terrestrial communication network after another. Two years ago, this network was called 4G, and now, this network is starting to be called 5G.
According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in 2020, the total number of mobile communication base stations nationwide was 9.31 million, of which 5.75 million were 4G base stations and more than 718,000 5G base stations had been opened.
Another latest data shows that as of August this year, the number of 5G base stations in China has exceeded 1 million.
As we all know, the 5G signal frequency is much higher than 4G, because the higher the frequency, the more serious the signal attenuation, to achieve full coverage of the network in the same area, it is necessary to build more base stations.
In a sense, million base stations are just the beginning of 5G base station construction.
Industrial Securities forecast data show that the current number of 5G base stations construction is about 1.2 to 1.5 times that of 4G base stations, and it is expected that by 2025, 5G base stations will reach 8 million, achieving full coverage of 5G networks nationwide.
In fact, due to the limited construction conditions of the base station, it is difficult to achieve full network coverage through the ground base station.
This reminds the zinc industry of a widely circulated story related to the Iridium Project below:
Barry Berdig, an engineer at Motorola, once complained about the communications network at the time when he and his wife were on vacation in the Caribbean when she couldn't connect with customers on her phone.
Such complaints were heard by Barry, and upon his return to the United States, Barry and Motorola's then-Arizona satellite communications team came up with a satellite communications system that allowed users to make phone calls from anywhere in the world.
It can be seen that the proposal of satellite Internet is not unrelated to the defects in the original ground network system.
In addition to the limitations of construction conditions, operating costs also limit the progress of global network coverage to a certain extent.
Today, even in developed countries in Europe and the United States, in some remote areas with low population density, there is likely to be no network coverage, because building and maintaining base stations in such areas is a money-losing transaction for operators.
One of the direct results of these two reasons is that although tens of millions of 4G and 5G ground base stations have been built in the world, the ground network only covers less than 30% of the area.
In fact, to truly achieve full coverage of the global network, 5G cannot do it, and the future 6G cannot do it.
The only thing that can really be done is the satellite Internet.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="106" >02 Motorola's advanced layout</h1>
This is the Iridium project mentioned earlier.
The iridium program differs essentially from today's mobile communications networks in that:
It can achieve global communication through the transmission of signals between satellites and satellites, which is equivalent to moving all the mobile communication systems built by ground base stations to space.
Through a 66-orbit satellite system consisting of 11 satellites in 6 orbits, a global satellite communication network was built.
In the years that followed, After several technical and commercial feasibility analyses and trials of the program, the Iridium program was officially launched in 1991.
The project was not directly initiated by Motorola, for which Motorola set up a subsidiary with the same name as the project, Iridium Corporation. With its own financial resources and influence at the time, Motorola raised $6 billion for the project.
With the help of capital, the Iridium program is progressing rapidly.
In 1996, the first Iridium star was launched; in May 1998, after all the missions were completed, the entire system was officially put into commercial operation on November 1.
It is worth mentioning that Iridium also completed the listing of the company in the process of launching the satellite.
In June 1997, Iridium went public with a share price of $20 per share raising $225 million.
In the year that followed, Iridium's stock price soared fourfold.
So much so that John Richardson, then CEO of Iridium, said proudly in an interview with The Washington Post: "We have provided a classic case for MBA without introducing a product to go public." ”
If the Iridium program had gone smoothly at that time, there would have been nothing for Musk to do.
However, this is not the case, and Iridium, which was in the limelight in the capital market at that time, actually had another side - it was struggling on the road to commercialization.
As a function phone era around 2000, iridium system did not solve the problem of voice call quality well, at the same time, iridium mobile phone priced as high as 3,000 US dollars (at the then exchange rate of about 25,000 yuan), the cost of 3 calls per minute.
It should be known that Nokia launched a 7110 mobile phone that supports WAP technology in the same year, and the price is only more than 4,000 yuan, which is less than a fraction of the Iridium mobile phone.
Apparently, Iridium mobile phones became the toys of the rich people of that era, such as Albert Gore, the first user of Iridium mobile phones at that time.
On August 13, 1999, Iridium filed for bankruptcy protection with the U.S. government, just three months after Richardson made those bold remarks.
Another data shows that at the time of filing for bankruptcy, Iridium system only accumulated 55,000 users, while the conservative estimate given by investment institutions at that time was that Iridium system would have at least 650,000 users to achieve profitability.
On March 18, 2000, Iridium went bankrupt, and the Iridium program was finally confirmed to be a precursor to Motorola.
However, iridium plans to epoch-making satellite Internet, a hard-core money-burning game, and Iridium was revived in the rapidly changing business wars that followed.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="107" >03 Cosmic Madman Musk</h1>
In the two decades after the Iridium program, the satellite Internet began to be valued by countries, and many satellite Internet systems such as Globalstar, Orbcomm, Starlink, And Oneweb appeared (also known as satellite Internet constellations), of which the most famous was Musk's starlink - Starlink.
In terms of scale, Musk SpaceX's Starlink program is a higher cost, longer cycle, and larger number of satellites, and is expected to launch 42,000 satellites in ten years.
It's a megaproject that 99.9% of tech companies wouldn't dare to imagine.
In January 2015, Musk proposed the Starlink plan to invest $10 billion in the future to build a satellite Internet covering the whole world.
In September of the same year, Musk applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch 4,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit to form a satellite Internet.
What is the concept of 4,000 satellites?
An intuitive contrast is that this number already far exceeds the number of other satellites in orbit around the world combined.
Later, as the full picture of this plan gradually surfaced, it was found that musk was actually preparing to launch an even more staggering number of 42,000 satellites - the first phase of the plan (expected to be completed in 2024) launched 12,000 satellites, and the second phase (expected to be completed in 2027) launched 30,000 satellites.
The main reason why Musk dared to propose such a grand plan is that as satellite production shifts to an assembly line and batch mode, spaceX's single satellite cost has been diluted to $1-2 million.
Previously, the cost of a synchronous satellite was generally in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
In February 2018, Musk SpaceX's Falcon 9 was successfully launched in California, and the two test satellites it carried were the two small communication satellites Microsat-2A and Microsat-2B that applied to the FCC for launch in 2016, which marked the official opening of the Starlink program.
In the years that followed, the pace of the Starlink program accelerated, and in March 2020 alone, SpaceX launched four Falcon IX rockets, each carrying 60 satellites.
In this way, SpaceX alone launched 240 satellites into space in a month, and the cosmic madman Musk was once again confirmed.
The latest data shows that as of September 13, 2021, after the completion of the 30th batch of Starlink launches, Musk Starlink plans to have more than 1700 satellites in orbit.
After Musk hit so many satellites into space, how is the actual operation of the Starlink Satellite Internet?
In August 2020, the Starlink Satellite Internet officially opened the public beta, and the test results showed that the user's upstream bandwidth has reached 18Mbps, the downlink bandwidth has reached 60Mbps, and the transmission delay can reach about 30ms.
Such an indicator, although there is still a certain gap with 5G, is already equivalent to the level of 4G network.
In addition, according to the zinc industry, the terminal price of StarLink is 499 US dollars (about 3200 yuan), and the monthly rent is 99 US dollars, which is basically similar to the price system of smart phones.
However, according to the data released by Musk in June this year, the number of StarLink test users has only reached 70,000.
For this total investment is expected to increase to 20 billion to 30 billion US dollars in satellite programs, it is only a dime.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="77" >04 short messages are just the beginning</h1>
What is short message communication?
In fact, short message communication is similar to mobile phone SMS, the difference is that it can be sent two-way information directly through the Beidou satellite in a network-free environment.
At present, the Beidou-3 satellite system can already support the information length of 1,000 Chinese characters at a time, which was often used in special scenarios such as emergency rescue and disaster relief.
It is worth mentioning here that everyone knows that there are four major operators in China (mobile, linkage, telecommunications, radio and television), in fact, in addition to the four major operators, there is also a rather low-key operator in China - China Satcom, which once merged the basic telecommunications business into China Telecom in the third telecom restructuring, and then once faded out of the public vision.
Ten years later, China's Satcom re-emerged.
On March 7, 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a basic telecommunications business license to China Satcom, approving China Satcom to operate satellite mobile communication services and satellite fixed communication services nationwide. At that time, China Satcom had 15 commercial satellites in orbit.
The domestic commercial satellite market was also ignited.
Speaking of Beidou satellites, Beidou satellites are different from the satellites in the aforementioned Iridium plan and the Starlink program, and the Beidou-3 satellite system is a medium- and high-orbit satellite system composed of 30 satellites, and the latter two are low-orbit satellite systems.
Satellites can be basically divided into three categories according to their orbital altitude (distance to ground): high-orbit satellites (GEO), medium-orbit satellites (MEOs), and low-orbit satellites (LEO).
The orbital altitude of high-orbit satellites is 36,000 km, and the theoretical delay of signal transmission is 300-800ms; the orbital altitude of medium-orbit satellites is 2000-36,000 km, and the theoretical delay of signal transmission is 125-250ms; the orbital altitude of low-orbit satellites is 300-2000 km, and the theoretical delay of signal transmission is 30-50ms.
The 30 satellites in the Beidou-3 satellite system include 24 medium-orbit satellites, 3 high-orbit satellites and 3 inclined geosynchronous orbit satellites, which belong to the representative constellations of medium- and high-orbit satellites.
In fact, China has far more satellite systems than Beidou.
According to incomplete statistics, China has released more than 20 satellite constellation plans, and it is expected that by 2025, China will launch more than 3,000 commercial satellites.
When the satellite Internet began to flourish, some people may ask, why didn't satellites be used directly to build communication networks in the first place?
If only from the technical principle, the first thing that human beings think of should indeed be to build a communication network directly through satellites, but due to the limitations of early technology, building a cellular network through a ground base station has become an inevitable choice, so there has been the rapid development of cellular networks represented by 3G, 4G, and 5G in recent years.
After many years, from the current level of technological development, the higher-cost satellite network is still stuck at the level of 4G network.
However, due to its global coverage capabilities and deeper strategic significance, the satellite Internet has become a must for a new round of mobile communication technology.
Recently, foreign media reported that SpaceX is negotiating with mobile operator Vodafone, hoping to use Vodafone's BRITISH spectrum license to allow Starlink Satellite Internet to provide better broadband services in the UK. In this regard, a Vodafone spokesperson revealed in its response that it is currently in talks with a number of (satellite network) operators.
Judging from the current development of the domestic satellite Internet, on the one hand, the Beidou-3 satellite can not only transmit short messages, but also transmit voice and pictures; on the other hand, the constellations of low-orbit satellites such as Hongyan, Hongyun, Apocalypse, and Jiutian have also begun to continue to exert force.
The application of short messages on mobile phones is only a starting point for this mobile communication revolution.