After searching for the mass of China's Guowang Internet-service satellites and finding nothing, I estimated it using ChatGPT. Since I knew the number of satellites (10) and the rocket used (Long March 5B) in two launches, the mass of a single satellite could be estimated if I knew the carrying capacity of the rocket.
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Estimating Guowang Internet service satellite mass with ChatGPT
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Monday, June 16, 2025
OneWeb can’t come close to replacing Starlink in Ukraine, but it could complement it.
Elon Musk assured us that he would not stop the Starlink service in Ukraine. But, given his feud with Trump, his criticism of President Zelensky, and his rash actions with DOGE, can he be trusted? (His termination of USAID is estimated to have resulted in 340,000 deaths so far.)
When asked about Musk’s influence, Josef Aschbacher, director general of the
European Space Agency, said he declined to comment on “the internal politics of
the United States and who should influence these decisions” but added “If
changes happen and if our US partners and friends are changing their plans, of
course we will be ready for plan B.”
The US has decided to reduce
aid to Ukraine, and Plan B is being considered. Eutelsat is
in talks with the EU about the possibility of replacing Starlink in Ukraine
Eutelsat OneWeb is currently the only low-earth orbit (LEO)
alternative to Starlink. Germany has paid for “fewer
than 1,000” OneWeb terminals in Ukraine, but Eutelsat CEO Eva
Berneke says the company aims to increase this to between 5,000 and 10,000
"relatively fast."
That is admirable, but I don’t see how OneWeb could come
close to replacing Starlink in Ukraine.
For a start, there are limitations of the OneWeb satellites and
terminals:
- Oleg Kutkov, a leading Ukrainian Starlink expert, estimates that there are around 130,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine.
- SpaceX has over 7,500 LEO satellites compared to OneWeb’s 630. (Eutelsat also has 35 geostationary (GEO) satellites).
- Kyivstar, the largest mobile operator in Ukraine, plansdirect-to-device Starlink connectivity later this year.
- Kyivstar has determined that OneWeb currently lacks sufficient capacity to move forward on their partnership MOU at this time.
- OneWeb satellites orbit at around 1,200 km, while Starlink satellites are between 336 and 570 km, which gives them a latency advantage for real-time battlefield applications.
- OneWeb’s fixed beams enable it to provide guaranteed service levels in specific locations, but Starlink’s dynamic-beam architecture makes better use of available capacity in densely populated areas and in tracking mobile users.
- OneWeb’s fixed terminals are more expensive than Starlink’s, and the portable terminals are heavier and more expensive.
- There are ten different Starlink terminal models/revisions – they have had time to iterate designs and mature and refine manufacturing processes for both terminals and satellites.
- Similarly, Starlink satellite designs have evolved – throughput has increased, intersatellite links were introduced, etc.
More importantly, Starlink is embedded in Ukraine. Systems, supply
chains, distribution channels, organizations, and applications have been
developed around it, and users, engineers, repair people, etc., have been
trained. The first Starlink terminals arrived
in Ukraine over three years ago. A week later, they
were in the field and providing nationwide connectivity through ground
stations in three nearby countries, and within a month, there were 5,000
Starlink terminals in Ukraine. Starlink has played
an unprecedented, critical role in the management of the war, international
relations, and on the battlefield field and it has enabled significant
civilian tech mobilization.
One more factor – Starlink is
financially stronger than Eutelsat. Eutelsat
stock was €28.06 per share in April 2015. When Trump berated Zelensky at the White House on February 28, 2025, it
was down to €1.20. As a result of that meeting, it jumped to €7.84 on March 3,
but it’s now back down to €2.31.
While OneWeb cannot replace Starlink in Ukraine, it can
complement it. For example, OneWeb could provide connectivity and resilient backup for
fixed locations like government offices and hospitals, and since Eutelsat operates
both GEO and LEO satellites, latency-tolerant applications like
streaming video could be offloaded onto their GEO satellites.
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Thursday, April 17, 2025
Remembering Dave Taht
![]() |
“Elon, let me inside this thing, and I can fix it for you” (Image
from this podcast) |
Dave Taht died on April 1st. I met him only recently, and never in person, but his passing saddens me. His technical work and evangelism have improved the Internet, and I will give some examples of his contributions to the Internet community and users, but I am sad because he was a good person — idealistic, unselfish, open, and funny. I'll miss him. First, his contributions, then his values.
Contributions
Taht was best known for his work on buffer bloat and its impact on Internet performance. As packets hop across the Internet, they are queued in buffers while waiting to be forwarded. Long queues, “buffer bloat,” means increased latency, transit time between a source and its destination, and jitter, transit time variance.
Internet service providers typically advertise and price based on service speed, but latency is critical to interactive applications like gaming, teleconferencing, and Web surfing. (For a deep dive on buffer bloat, see this post by Jim Gettys, who coined the term buffer bloat.)
With Jim Gettys, Taht co-founded the buffer bloat Project, where he implemented, tested, and integrated active queue management (AQM) algorithms CoDel, FQ-CoDel, and CAKE, and led the CeroWRT (Customer Edge Router Wireless Router) project that focused on home, office, and other edge networks.
Gettys shared Taht's focus on the edge, writing “Surprising to most, AQM is essential for broad band service, home routers, and even operating systems: it isn't just for big Internet routers” in 2011 and more recently he said “Buffer bloat can happen anywhere in a network, though by far the most common locations are before/after the WiFi hop in the router, and then the hop from the home router back to the ISP”
Given his interests in space and edge networks, Starlink was a natural focus for Taht, and he talked about Starlink in this 8-minute podcast excerpt. Taht had known Elon Musk since he had worked on an ill-fated satellite that was on a Falcon 1 rocket when it blew up, so he emailed Musk in 2013 and offered to help, but Musk was not interested. The plan for Starlink was announced in January 2015, and when it eventually entered beta in 2020, Taht learned of the latency problem and emailed Vint Cerf, who arranged a meeting with Starlink engineers on Taht’s boat, but he did no work for them.
In January 2024, Elon Musk announced that “the biggest single goal for Starlink from a technical standpoint is to get the mean latency below 20 ms." By March, they were delivering results and listing latency as well as upload and download speed on their availability map. Unfortunately, Musk and his engineers did not listen to Taht in 2013 and 2020.
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Starlink latency improvement after January 2024 (Source) |
Values
The National Science Foundation backbone network (NSFNET) was created in 1986
to serve research and education in the US. The network grew rapidly, and in 1988, access was expanded to include
international research and education organizations. By 1996, 28 nations were
connected. (Fun fact – Cuba’s
first link was to NSFNET.)
Taht was 30 years old when NSFNET was decommissioned and the
Internet transitioned to fully commercial operation, but his values were
established by then. With his skill and experience, he could have found
lucrative work or built a large company, but he was committed to open-source
software and universal connectivity.
Everything he wrote was open-source, including his songs. He
is surely the only composer/musician to write geeky songs about the Internet, for example, this little ditty about the GNU Public License, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond. He also spent years in Nicaragua, trying to find ways to bring the Internet (and power, lighting, food, medicine, and books) there as an
outgrowth of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child
project.
He understood J. C. R. Licklider’s conception of the Internet as a means
of creating communities of common interest rather than common location. He created a Starlink list, which
is where I met him. The caliber of
conversation on the list is an implicit tribute to Taht.
The photo of Taht at the top of this post was taken from the
podcast in which he offered to fix the Starlink router, which was in beta at the
time, for free (though he wouldn’t mind a thank-you tweet, a new motor for his
boat, or even a Christmas card). The photo illustrates his values. He could have
lived in a mansion, but he chose to live on a boat with a guitar nearby. To know Dave Taht better, watch
the entire video.
Appendix
I met Dave recently and only knew him online, so I asked Perpleity, Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT to list memorials. They returned several broken links, and Claude and Deepspeak were not current. I found these:
Author: Doc SearlsTitle: Remembering Dave Taht
Link
Title: Dave Taht, Who Sped Up Networks More Than You’ll Ever Know, Has Died
link
Author: Tom Stricx
Title: Honoring Dave Täht and his contributions to a better Internet (video calls included)
Link
Authors: Robert, Herbert, and Frank LibreQoS
Title: In loving memory of Dave Taht
Link
Author: Hacker News Community
Title: Thread collecting memories, technical anecdotes, and condolences from the networking and open source community
Link
Author: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen
Title: Remembering Dave Taht, Link
Link
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Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Starlink is critical in support of Ukraine, and it will continue
![]() |
Ukrainian drone boat with two Starlink terminals (source Oleg Kutkov) |
On March 19th there
were 5,000 terminals in Ukraine and it was clear that Starlink would play
an unprecedented, critical role in the war. President Zelenskyy was using social
media and teleconferencing in his roles as Commander in Chief of the armed
forces, a global diplomat, and a leader of the Ukrainian people. Starlink was
being used to compensate for Russian destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure,
by civilians and on the battlefield, often in conjunction with drones. Starlink has also enabled important civilian volunteer contributions to the war effort, reminiscent
of the working women and the victory gardens
during World War 2 in the US.
Starlink’s value is now well established. Kutkov estimates that there are around 170,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine, which is constantly increasing. For example:
- The armed forces have around 100,000 terminals provided by various ministries.
- It is common for soldiers to purchase their own terminals. (One retailer has sold almost 2,000 terminals to soldiers so far this year).
- There are thousands of terminals on drone aircraft and boats built by local companies. (One local vendor bought 10,000 terminals for drones).
- Charity foundations like Serhiy Prytula contribute terminals. (The retail price of a roaming terminal in Ukraine is $613).
- Private donors (including Kutkov) contribute drones and terminals.
- One service center reported that 90% of the military terminals coming for repairs are privately owned.
Musk’s Grok AI chatbot estimates Starlink’s revenue for
Ukraine support is “likely in the
ballpark of $150-250 million per year as of now”, a relatively unimportant amount, and about $50 million
of that is paid by Poland, which shares a border with Ukraine, has expressed
a willingness to seek alternatives to Starlink if necessary and was invaded
by Hitler 1939.
Because of recent statements and actions by Donald
Trump and Elon Musk, Ukraine and its allies became concerned that Starlink
service might possibly be cut off.
As enumerated in this
timeline, Trump has upended the US approach to Ukraine and treated Moscow
more as an ally since he became President, culminating in his recent suspension
of military aid to and intelligence
sharing with Ukraine after he and Vice President Vance berated Zelenskyy in a
televised meeting, overstating the
amount of US support, falsely claiming that Ukraine had not thanked the US for it’s
support and insisting on a “deal” with no security guarantee.
(Recall that in September 1938, English, French, and Italian
leaders signed the Munich Agreement, giving Hitler control of Czechoslovakia in
exchange for his promise not to take more land in Europe, and Ukrainians are
dying in this war).
Elon Musk has also urged Ukraine to accept peace without a security guarantee to stop the bloodshed. His statement that without Starlink the entire front line would collapse caused concern that he might cut Starlink service off.
Thankfully, Musk has since clarified his position,
stating:
"To be extremely clear, no matter how much I disagree
with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals. Without
Starlink, the Ukrainian lines would collapse, as the Russians can jam all other
communications! We would never do such a thing or use it as a bargaining
chip."
Taking Musk at his word, Starlink service will remain
available.
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Saturday, January 04, 2025
Guowang finally launches ten large production satellites
In April 2020, The Chinese State Council's executive meeting declared information technology, including satellite Internet, an important part of the “new technology” and in October, China applied for Guowang, a 12,992-satellite Internet service constellation. Subsequently, a few Guowang test satellites were launched and two other large Chinese constellations were announced, and one, Thousand Sails, already has 54 satellites in orbit. (Thousand Sails launches have had problems with debris and orbit raising, which attests to the immaturity of the Chinese space industry). Finally, Guowang has launched its first production satellites.
As shown above, ten satellites were launched into orbits about 1,100 kilometers above the Earth, with an inclination of 86.5 degrees. The satellites were launched on a Long March 5B rocket which can carry 23,000 Kg to low-Earth orbit (LEO) and they were stacked in a manner that optimized “the use of vertical and radial space within the payload fairing.” If the rocket was fully loaded, they would be quite large – over 2,000 kg each.
For comparison, Starlink’s current V2-mini satellites are 750-800 kg, and the V3 satellites, which will not begin launching until SpaceX's Starship rockets are in service, are expected to be around 1,900 kg.
Thousand Sail's satellites are smaller than either. They recently launched 18 satellites using a Long March 6A rocket which can carry 4,000 kg to sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). I could not find a mass to LEO for the Long March 6A so I asked four AI services to estimate what a rocket capable of launching 4,000 kg to SSO would be able to launch to LEO. The average estimate was 5,700 kg total or only 317 kg per satellite.
Assuming capability is a function of mass, Guowang satellites will be significantly more powerful than Thousand Sails or Starlink's current satellites. I don't know what those functional differences will be – greater capacity, faster data rates, more power, improved inter-satellite capability, connectivity to 6G devices, etc. For speculation on the features of Starlink's forthcoming V3 satellites see slide 62 in this presentation and this article).
The Guowang constellation will also orbit at a relatively high altitude. The first ten are at 1,100 km and over half the planned constellation will be roughly the same altitude. Similarly, Thousand Sails' initial 1.296 satellites are orbiting at 1,160 km. While Starlink initially applied to have some 1,100 km satellites, they later lowered their planned orbits. Guowang's relatively high altitude will help compensate for a lack of ground stations.
In an earlier post, I asked whether Guowang could manufacture and launch satellites fast enough to meet Its ITU commitment of launching 10% of the constellation within two years after the bring-into-use (BIU) date 50% by year 5 and all by year 7. Now that production satellites are in orbit and working, I assume the BIU clock has started or will start soon. Given the mass and orbit altitudes of the satellites and Chinese satellite manufacturing and launch capability, they will have a difficult time meeting the ITU deadlines despite new rockets, but in our politically divided world, some nations may ignore those deadlines or Guowang might simply reapply. (It’s even conceivable that Starlink could launch some Guowang satellites since Elon Musk has to please the Chinese government to protect Tesla’s sales and manufacturing in China).
Guowang is late, but the government is committed and the satellites may be comparable to Starlink's V3 satellites. If they can launch the constellation, there will still be a market in serving BRICS and other politically-allied or neutral nations as well as sensitive government and military organizations that are increasingly concerned with Elon Musk’s political ties and mercurial nature. The large mass of their satellites may also result in features that increase their appeal in some applications like backhaul from remote locations that are not reached by fiber. It will be interesting to see what happens when Guowang ITU deadlines expire.
Update 3/8/2025
GuoWang has launched another batch of satellites on a Long March 8A rocket. Space Force cataloged nine objects in orbit, suggesting eight payloads in 862 by 870-kilometer orbits inclined by 50.0 degrees. While I could not find any definitive data online, Grok estimates that a Long March 8A could likely launch 7,200 kg to that orbit, which would imply about 800 kg per satellite, around the mass of the current V2 Starlink satellites and more than double the mass of the Thousand Sails satellites.
Update 5/5/2025
Guowang has launched another batch of satellites on a high-capacity Long March 5B rocket, implying that these are the larger GW2 satellites.
Guowang Launches |
||
Date |
Rocket |
Satellites |
LM 5B |
10 |
|
LM 8A |
9? |
|
LM 5B |
10? |
Update 6/18/2925
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Monday, November 25, 2024
Starlink connectivity for rural communities
WELCOME community WiFi service is now available in Kenya and it might be a game changer like public access telecenters and WiFi hotspots were in the past.
Starlink launched maritime service in July 2022, and by January 2023 Elcome International LLC, a maritime technology solution provider since 1970, had installed multi-antenna Starlink Maritime arrays on two super yachts with more than 100 passengers and crew. Elcome launched its Starlink maritime service in May 2024 and now has over 3,000 terminals under management,
In May, I had a positive experience using Starlink on a cruise ship off the Northwest coast of Africa. The ship had 264 passengers and a crew of 120. We were a small, floating community. Elcomm is now transferring its experience with maritime communities to communities on land.
Elcome Managing Director Jimmy Grewal set a goal of "creating a Wi-Fi hotspot service that I would be happy to use daily, and be proud to show my friends" and is “very passionate” about their WELCOME Community WiFi service for rural areas. WELCOME in Kenya is offered as Karibu Connect. (Karibu means welcome in Swahili).
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WELCOME community gateway (source) |
The solar-powered gateway shown here provides over 400 Mbps to roughly a square kilometer. They offer two configurations:
- Up to 50 users
- Starlink Enterprise Terminal
- 8-Port Switch
- Two Wi-Fi Access Points
- Ksh,106,999 ($826.31)
- More than 50 users
- Starlink Flat High-Performance Terminal
- 8-Port Switch
- Four Wi-Fi Access Points
- Ksh.377,000 377,000 ($2,911.42)
![]() |
The first cabina de Internet in Lima Perú. |
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Thursday, September 12, 2024
Affordable Starlink Prices Coming to Low and Middle-Income Countries
![]() |
Starlink (≥ 100 Mbps) satellite Internet growth (source) |
![]() |
Suspected Kenyan Starlink gateways (source) |
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Wednesday, August 21, 2024
Russian Internet pioneer sentenced to two years in prison
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They used UUCP links to communicate with their Russian customers and soon connected to Europe (EUnet) through Tampere University of Technology in Finland. The ability to make regular, long international calls needed for data transfer was unheard of at that time in Russia -- The Kurchatov Institute was an important research center.
My colleague Juri Gornostaev and I used that UUCP link to organize the First East-West International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in Moscow. After the conference, I stayed in Moscow to meet and hang out with the Relcom staff. They were friendly, smart, idealistic, and anti-communist. They were members of the international Internet community as imagined by visionaries like Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider.
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Relcom sent Boris Yeltsin's speech on a tank to The West. |
I also know the character of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. Russia commits daily war crimes in Ukraine and political opponents who are not imprisoned tend to fall from the windows of tall buildings. Furthermore, Freedom House assessed Internet freedom in 70 nations last year and the only nations judged to have less Internet freedom than Russia were China, Myanmar, Iran, and Cuba.
Given the uncertainties mentioned above, the government's track record, Soldatov's contributions to society, and the fact that the IP address transfer never took place, he has been under house arrest awaiting trial and is in ill health, this prison sentence is politically motivated and morally unjustified.
For more on Relcom's early days and the role it played at the time of the Soviet coup attempt, see:
- Relom, an appropriate technology network
- Before the Twitter revolution, there was the Usenet revolution
- Wide Area Collaboration
- History is written and revised by the winners -- can the Internet Archive change that?
- Soviet Coup Archive, including Usenet traffic
- The Internet as an information resource
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Monday, August 12, 2024
Saturday, July 13, 2024
Geely Geespace update -- global centimeter-level positioning services
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Potential Geesat applications (source) |
![]() |
RTK-PPP (source) |
As shown here, RTK-PPP augments location data from multiple satellites with the rover's position relative to a terrestrial base station. (The rover could be an autonomous car, truck, crop harvester, etc.).
One can imagine base stations along highways, freeways, and even in cities, but that would require investments by governments at all levels, auto producers, and other private companies. It would also need standards that are compatible with all GNSS systems. This will not happen overnight, but I am not surprised to see Geely leading the way because:
- Geely founder and Chairman Li Shufu is a risk taker in the mold of Elon Musk and Geespace was initiated about six years ago when he “floated his idea of using hundreds of proprietary mini, low-orbit satellites as a more accurate global positioning system for self-driving cars.”
- China has built the world's biggest EV charging network, in stark contrast to US failure. This indicates a will to invest in mobility infrastructure.
- Geely is aware of and perhaps collaborating with Chinese GNSS operator BeiDou which is working toward global centimeter-accurate positioning utilizing LEO, MEO, and GEO satellites augmented by terrestrial ground stations.
- Geely brands sold 2.79 million units in 2023 and China space expert Blaine Curcio concludes that "Within 5-10 years, Geespace could conceivably have a constellation of satellites connecting all Geely cars in a very interesting example of vertical integration (actual use cases pending)."
- ChatGPT reports that BeiDou currently offers a Ground-Based Augmentation System (GBAS) coverage in much of China and plans to cover the entire nation, which is true, but mistakenly claimed there were GBAS instances outside of China at this time. (However, BeiDou's standard satellite navigation service is used in many nations, which must have confused ChatGPT).
A final note -- several of the references in this post are to Blaine Curcio's China Space Monitor. Check it out if you are interested in what China is doing in space. I also used but took with a grain of salt, conversations with ChanGPT: chat1 and chat2.
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