Internet companies flock to launch satellites: Most are just gimmicks and it’s hard to find “Musk”｜Guanchao

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China was a little slower in opening up commercial space, but it has finally received favorable policies. In recent years, a number of private start-up companies in the fields of rockets and satellites have begun to emerge, but this field still lacks leading figures.

In April this year, satellite Internet was officially included in the scope of new infrastructure, which once again attracted widespread attention from the public to this relatively cutting-edge and niche field.

In fact, technology companies have been exploring satellite communications for a long time, from Motorola's Iridium project in the 1980s to the Starlink project proposed by SpaceX, founded by "technology madman" Musk. All of them are ambitious.

China was a little slower in opening up commercial space, but it has finally received favorable policies. In recent years, a number of private start-up companies in the fields of rockets and satellites have begun to emerge, but this field still lacks leading figures.

Earlier, Internet companies including ofo, Alibaba, Douyu, and Bilibili had launched satellites, but it seemed that the marketing significance was greater than the actual use. China's satellite Internet construction still needs a "Musk-like" figure.

Marketing gimmick?

Mobile communication technology has undergone several upgrades and iterations, and 2020 is also the year when 5G will be widely popularized. However, according to UN data, more than 50% of the world's population, or 4 billion people, still have no access to the Internet.

Internet access is highly unbalanced. Internet penetration in developed countries has reached saturation, but in many developing countries, the Internet access situation is not optimistic because it is very expensive to extend network infrastructure to rural or remote areas. Data shows that in the world's poorest 48 countries, 90% of the population has no access to the Internet.

This is considered to be a huge market demand and business opportunity. By building satellite Internet, it is expected to seamlessly cover all countries in the world. At the same time, satellite Internet also has application space in some specific scenarios, such as outdoor search and rescue, and scientific research in the Arctic and Antarctic.

However, compared with SpaceX's Starlink project, most domestic large and medium-sized Internet companies are still at the "marketing" stage of launching a single satellite.

As early as 2017, ofo, which was at the height of its popularity at the time, launched the X Plan and announced the launch of a satellite. According to ofo's plan, it initially carried out satellite positioning monitoring and information feedback experiments on ofo bicycles, and realized the collection and feedback of direct positioning monitoring data of the yellow bikes through low-power, miniaturized bicycle communication modules.

But in fact, the positioning of this satellite is actually an "entertainment satellite" with functions such as VR panoramic camera and selfie camera. Dai Wei, the founder of ofo, thought that these interactive gameplays would be implemented in the ofo App in the future to make the App more fun. As ofo got into trouble in the past two years, this X plan also came to an end.

In 2018, Alibaba's "Candy Jar" mini unmanned space station and Douyu's "666 Star" were launched into space one after another; on June 1 this year, Bilibili also announced plans to launch a remote sensing satellite called "Bilibili Video Satellite" in late June this year. The remote sensing video and image data obtained by the satellite will be used for popular science at Bilibili.

Overall, the layout of China's large and medium-sized Internet companies in the satellite field is mainly for the purpose of naming and marketing, and very few of them involve actual business. The companies that are truly involved in the technical fields of commercial rockets and satellites are still mainly small and medium-sized startups.

Lei Jun, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, previously talked about this phenomenon to Sina Technology and said that on the one hand, China opened up to the commercial aerospace field relatively late, which also led to American companies such as SpaceX gaining a first-mover advantage and leading domestic companies by at least 5 years; on the other hand, the technology in the commercial aerospace field is still relatively cross-border for Chinese Internet companies and has a high technical threshold.

Lei Jun admitted that although Xiaomi is very interested in satellite Internet, it will not directly get involved in this business. In fact, Lei Jun invested in Galaxy Aerospace, a satellite startup, through Shunwei Capital.

Technical Difficulties

A commercial aerospace practitioner said that if we talk about the application of satellite Internet without considering the construction of infrastructure, it is undoubtedly missing the point. China's layout in the upstream of satellite Internet is still imperfect, and the downstream Internet companies are exploring some application directions, which lacks substantive significance at present.

Hu Yanping, an expert in cutting-edge innovation in network information technology, believes that China "started late and arrived late" in satellite Internet. He said that although domestic satellite Internet has been developing and changing in the past few years, there are still many misunderstandings that need to be re-examined. The first thing is to solve the cognitive problem. From policies to industries to the public, everyone should pay attention to the construction of satellite Internet, because it will be the next generation of network new infrastructure in ten years.

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Hu Yanping pointed out that the available resources in low-Earth orbit are about 40,000 satellites, and SpaceX's Starlink plan has increased the number of satellites planned to be launched from 12,000 to 40,000. If China starts too late, it will face the situation of no spectrum resources and no orbital resources available. "2020-2030 is China's window period. We can't just join in the fun. Capital alone is far from enough. We also need to solve cognitive and technical problems. We have fallen behind in satellite Internet and need to catch up quickly."

In the field of technology, the challenges facing China's satellite Internet industry are also enormous.

The satellite Internet industry chain can be roughly divided into satellite design and manufacturing, launch, operation and service. In terms of satellite design and manufacturing, Chinese private enterprises are still insufficient in terms of technical capabilities and production capacity. The satellite that ofo planned to launch was developed by a startup called Jiutian Microstar. Jiutian Microstar CEO Xie Tao once said in an interview with the media that Jiutian Microstar launched 8 satellites in 2018, and these satellites were "alive" after entering orbit, which is pretty good in China, but he admitted that "compared with Starlink's 60 satellites in one launch, there is still a big gap."

In terms of launch technology and cost, Hu Yanping pointed out that the cost of Chinese companies is 4-10 times that of the most advanced foreign companies. The launch cost of Chinese companies is between $5,000 and $10,000 per kilogram, while SpaceX's launch cost is only $2,000 per kilogram.

In fact, the reason behind SpaceX's cost leadership is its technological leadership. The company has mastered the technology of launching multiple satellites with one rocket and the technology of rocket reuse, which greatly reduces the launch cost of a single satellite and greatly speeds up the progress of satellite networking. On June 3 and 13, SpaceX successfully launched the eighth batch of 60 Starlink satellites and the ninth batch of 58 Starlink satellites in succession using the Falcon 9 rocket. The cumulative number of Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX has reached 540.

How far is it from large-scale commercial use?

Lei Jun believes that if future communications are covered by satellite, the construction cost will be much lower than 5G base stations. It is expected that satellite Internet will be mature and commercialized in China within 5-10 years.

He also pointed out that currently 99% of the domestic commercial aerospace sector is owned by state-owned enterprises, and it is necessary to encourage private enterprises to enter the commercial aerospace market and shift from the original scientific research model to a scientific research + large-scale industrial manufacturing model.

In the field of satellite internet, both private and state-owned enterprises have ambitious plans.

In 2018, WiFi Master Key's parent company LianShang Network proposed an investment of 3 billion yuan to launch 272 satellites to provide free global satellite network coverage, which is expected to be fully completed in 2026.

In addition to private enterprises, state-owned enterprises are also making great efforts. For example, the Hongyan constellation project of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation plans to launch 300 low-orbit small satellites, complete the narrowband system around 2023, and complete the broadband system in 2025; the Hongyun project of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation plans to launch 156 satellites to build a satellite-borne broadband global mobile Internet network, and the constellation deployment is expected to be completed by the end of 2022.

However, some industry analysts pointed out that if there is no coordination among the many domestic satellite Internet operators and multiple launches occur, it will cause a certain amount of duplication of construction and waste of resources.

In addition, after the satellite Internet infrastructure is built, it still faces problems in application scenarios and profit models, which Motorola has learned from its Iridium project. Taking the application scenarios demonstrated by Galaxy Aerospace as an example, it can be used as a supplement to ground communications to provide network access services for remote areas; it can also be used in emergency dynamic communications, scientific exploration and exploration, Internet of Things monitoring, and smart transportation interconnection for cars, airplanes, and navigation.

But Professor Lv Tingjie of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications gave a different view. He believes that if satellite Internet is used as a supplement to 5G or 6G to achieve the connection and coverage of objects or even people, it must be for those businesses that are not sensitive to time delays or places with poor signals. Because even though it is a low orbit, a set of signals takes at least 8 milliseconds to go back and forth from more than 1,200 kilometers in the sky, while the latency of the 5G ground network is only 1 millisecond. The 8 millisecond latency of satellite Internet cannot be used in scenarios such as the control of self-driving cars, industrial Internet, VR/AR, etc.

He also said that based on the current applications, it is difficult for satellite Internet solutions to be economically profitable. Musk's Starlink plan is also unlikely to be profitable for civilian use, and the ultimate economic benefits may come from the military. But whether it is for civilian or military use, he called on China to pay attention to the development and application of satellite Internet.