[Onkel Neal]

FCC approves SpaceX to deploy up to 1 million small antennas for Starlink internet network

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/20/fcc-...-internet.html

SpaceX got a key government license last week, federal filings reveal, as the company clears a regulatory hurdle that moves it closer to offering a new high-speed internet service from space.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has authorized SpaceX to begin rolling out as many as 1 million of the ground antenna the company will need to connect users to its Starlink satellite internet network. Starlink is SpaceX’s plan to build an interconnected network, or “constellation,” of about 12,000 small satellites, to provide high-speed internet to anywhere in the world. The company has launched 360 Starlink satellites in the past year.

The license details that each ground antenna is 0.48 meters in diameter, or just under 19 inches across.

“It looks like a UFO on a stick,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in an interview earlier this month. “It’s very important that you don’t need a specialist to install. The goal is for ... just two instructions and they can be done in either order: Point at sky, plug in.”

Starlink is intended for about the 3% “hardest to reach customers” for telecommunications companies, in rural areas where “5G is really not well-suited,” Musk said. SpaceX intends Starlink to have a high-speed connection for any users, with latency below 20 milliseconds.