China will be a formidable satellite Internet service competitor

In a study of the Internet in China in the late 1990s, my colleagues and I observed that "China has been able to execute plans effectively by allocating resources to competing, government-owned enterprises," and Kai-Fu Lee shows that they have pursued a similar strategy with respect to AI. Now they are doing the same with low-Earth orbit (LEO) broadband satellite constellations.

Characteristics of the Hongyun and Hongyan test satellites

Last December, state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) launched their first experimental Hongyun (rainbow cloud) Project satellite and a week later China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) launched their first experimental Hongyan (wild goose) Project satellite. (Both CASIC and CASC have Wikipeida pages and their Fortune Global 500 ranks are 322 and 323).

As shown here, Hongyun launched a test satellite in December 2018 and said they planned four more during 2019, but there is no record of those having been launched as of today. They have, however, completed tests of Web browsing, video chat, and high-resolution streaming and said users across China would be able to access the demonstration system. (I assume that refers to test users).

They initially planned to begin operating with 156 satellites by the middle of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), emphasizing service in China's remote regions. Late last year, they expanded the constellation plan from 156 to 864 satellites orbiting at 1,175 km with an 8 Terabytes per second capacity. They hope to serve 2 million 5G users through direct connections to base stations, 200,000 broadband users and 10 million Internet of things (IoT) users. The focus will be on China and Belt and Road nations.

CASIC has also established two satellite factories in Hubei and Hunan provinces. This may have been necessitated by the increase in the number of planned Hongyun satellites or it may be another application of the strategy of creating competing state-owned enterprises.

Hongyan applications (source)

CASC's Hongyan project plans a constellation of around 320 LEO satellites. They have launched one test satellite so far and had hoped to launch 8 more by 2020, but did not make that deadline. They expect to have 60 operating satellites "around" 2023 and to be able to provide global coverage with the full constellation by 2025.

As shown in this illustration, they plan to connect buildings, ships, trains, and planes and to provide mobile backhaul and, most interestingly, direct service to mobile phones. He Mu, Hongyan Application Director, promised the development of a "chip [that] can be integrated into the mobile phone so that everyone holding an ordinary mobile phone will have access to seamless satellite telecommunication with global coverage." That does not sound like a mobile connection to a base station with satellite backhaul, but neither does it sound possible.

Earlier this month a third competitor, GalaxySpace, launched Yinhe-1, which is expected to test Q/V and Ka-band communications at up to 10 Gbps. They refer to Yinhe-1 as a "5G satellite." I'm not sure what a "5G" satellite is, but note again that the above diagram shows a satellite communicating directly with a mobile phone, as opposed to a mobile tower. Check out this short video on the satellite and launch:

CASIC has four other "five clouds" projects underway in addition to Hongyun: Feiyun, using solar-powered drones, Kuaiyun, using near-space airships (dirigibles?), Tengyun, a project to develop a reusable space plane, and Xingyun, an 80-LEO narrowband IoT constellation using cubsats, the first of which is to be launched soon.

As noted above, Chinese state-owned enterprises often compete with each other, but they also cooperate. For example, CASIC's Hongun-1 was launched on a CASC rocket. (I wonder how they arrived at the launch price). Will Hongyun and Hongan exchange traffic at shared ground stations? Will their satellites one day intercommunicate in order to optimize a joint constellation with different orbits? Will they intercommunicate with China's geostationary satellites and other space assets?

It is often argued that government ownership and subsidy are unfair to competitors and lead to a suboptimal allocation of resources. I assume this sort of government-brokered "coordinated competition" is more common in China than in the US, but even here, the lines between government-sponsored research and development, government procurement and industrial subsidy are a bit vague as are the criteria for anti-trust enforcement. People and organizations will learn to game either system, so both must be dynamic.

Hongyun, Hongyan and GalaxySpace are late to the game. OneWeb, SpaceX, and Telesat are beginning to sign up customers and will launch a lot of satellites this year. Amazon is also a late-comer, but they have a lot of money and complementary infrastructure. Like Amazon, China has funds for the long run, domestic infrastructure which can be shared by the three LEO projects and they are working on reusability. Furthermore, they have a political advantage in the "Digital Silk Road" nations of our increasingly divided world and divided Internet. China will be a formidable satellite Internet service competitor.

Update 4/26/2020

The US military has tracked the Galaxy satellite launched in January in a 637 by 621-kilometer altitude orbit inclined at 86 degrees. On April 23, Galaxy engineers conducted a three-minute video call via a WiFi hotspot that used the satellite for backhaul.

As noted above, Galaxy has referred to this as a "5G" satellite constellation and we speculated that they may have been implying direct connections from cell phones to orbiting 5G base stations, but these test results confirm and @Megaconstelai points out, they are using the satellite for backhaul from terrestrial 5G cells.

Update 5/26/2020

A few Hongyun test results are in. The brief note speaks of spectral thermometer tests and image data. There was no mention of broadband Internet tests.

Update 9/8/2020

A Galaxy Space test achieved 1 gigabit per second for each of its 16 Ka-band user beams and Blaine Curcio says 2020 is a turning point for Chinese commercial space. SpaceX and others are racing ahead and China has a strategic -- military, political, and commercial -- interest in keeping up with the West/US in space. The Digital Silk Road runs through space.

Update 9/20/2020 

GalaxySpace is building a factory to mass-produce low-cost satellites in East China. They will manufacture "more than one" satellite per day, joining SpaceX (four per day) and OneWeb (three per day) as mass-production LEO broadband satellite manufacturers.

Their current test satellite has verified high-frequency Q/V/Ka and other frequency band communications and they have achieved 10 Gps speed within a 300,000 Km^2 footprint. They also succeeded in a 5G wireless test, which I assume means they communicated through a 5G base station.

In a related development, China's National Development and Reform Commission added satellite broadband, 5G, and the Internet of Things to it's “New Infrastructures” list. That means more money will be invested in these technologies.

Consultant Blaine Curcio speculates that the Chinese government assumes increased importance of the Internet in a post-COVID world and rather than limiting the investment effort to the state-owned enterprises, the government has opened the doors to the private sector as well.

Update 1/19/2021

Construction of China's first smart manufacturing plant for satellites has been completed. Production will begin in March and the first product will be Hongyun broadband Internet satellites. The factory will be capable of making 240 small satellites a year and it sounds like it can be repurposed to build satellites for other constellations. SpaceX and OneWeb both claim to be able to produce satellites faster, but their factories may not be as easily reconfigured. Regardless, the Chinese space industry is progressing rapidly.

The digital divide has persisted over the life of the Internet.

National Bandwidth Potential, a novel Internet diffusion metric indicating application feasibility, shows a persistent digital access divide.

People have been trying to measure the global diffusion of the Internet and the digital divide between rich and poor nation for twenty five years. The first to do so was Larry Landweber, who noted whether or not a nation had an Internet (or other) connection. It was a binary metric -- yes or no -- and it was suitable to its time because there were only a handful of users who were restricted to teaching and research, using a few applications like email, file transfer, news groups and remote login.

1991 Internet diffusion (purple)

Five years later, the Internet had many more users and applications in commerce, government, entertainment, etc., so my colleagues and I developed a multidimensional Internet diffusion framework. One of our dimensions was pervasiveness, based on the number of users of the Internet per capita.

That made sense in 1995 since there were relatively few applications available for the slow dial-up connections of the time. A few people had faster ISDN or DSL connections and an organization might connect over a faster digital link, but most users were running the same few applications over analog phone lines.

Today, users per capita is pretty well meaningless. A Cuban who accesses email using a 2G cell phone and a Google Fiber user who has symmetric gigabit access to multiple computers and devices on a home LAN are clearly not equal.

To some degree, we anticipated this sort of thing via the connectivity infrastructure dimension in our framework. It considered international and intranational backbone bandwidth, Internet exchange points and last-mile access methods, but it was an imprecise measure -- mapping a nation into five levels -- and data was not readily available. (Our case studies typically required two weeks of in-country interviews).

Skipping ahead twenty years, a paper by Martin Hilbert uses an interesting diffusion metric -- nationally installed bandwidth potential (BP), which is a function of the number of telecommunication subscriptions (fixed and mobile), the kind of access technology per subscription (cable, DSL, GSM, etc) and the corresponding bandwidth per access technology. Their estimation of the latter is quite complex, taking factors like data type, upload/download speed, compression, etc. into consideration. The methodology is described in a ten page supplement to the paper. (It is behind a paywall -- let me know if you would like a copy).

Hilbert computed the BP of 172 countries from 1986 to 2014 and observed that the digital access divide is persistent. It is true that wireless connectivity is relatively inexpensive and mobile Internet use is growing rapidly in developing nations, but it is just as clear that many applications are precluded by the speed and form factor of mobile devices. A WhatsApp chat with a friend is not the equivalent of watching a high-resolution movie on a large screen TV and I am confident that Hilbert did not conduct his research or write the paper I read on a mobile phone. Even reading this blog post, following its links to other documents and taking notes on it would be tedious on a phone.

I expect this imbalance to persist because improved technology is costly and it enables ever more complex, demanding applications. The only trend I see that may in part reduce this feasible-application gap is the move to server-side processing for big data and AI applications, but even then interaction and the display of results will require bandwidth.

Hilbert's data also shows global shifts in application feasibility. As shown below, BP dominance has shifted from the US in the early, NSFNET days to China today. Korea has joined the top ten and the shares of Japan and Western Europe have dropped. The share of the bottom 162 countries rose slightly in 2001, but had fallen below the 1986 level by 2014.

Ten countries with most installed bandwidth potential

Income differences explain much of the persistence of the digital divide, but policies regarding Internet infrastructure ownership and regulation are also important. For example Estonia ranks 40th in the world in GDP per capita, but is ranked 20th on the International Telecommunication Union ICT Development Index.

Policy choices may play an even larger role among the top ten nations. The US ranks 9th in GDP per capita and Korea is 30th, but my son, who lives in Korea, pays $22 per month for symmetric, 100 mbps connectivity and has a choice of several competing Internet service providers. I live in the US and pay considerably more than he does for considerably slower service and have no ISP choice -- I am stuck with Time Warner Cable.

While we are waiting for enlightened policies, we can hope for technical change like the OneWeb and Spacex satellite Internet projects.

Are poor students excluded from online education?

Can peer-peer support compensate for disadvantages?

Corey Davis, director of online learning at Our Lady of the Lake University, was interviewed recently on the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tech Therapy podcast. Davis says the discussion of MOOCs and other online courses often fails to consider minority (poor) students and the obstacles they face.

Davis addresses two general issues -- lack of access to technology and poor preparation in terms of both technical proficiency and conception of education.

He has addressed the technology access problem by developing an online course for Latino oil workers, who only have access to mobile phones, not computers with broadband connections. Presumably those workers also have poor computer/Internet skills and do not have an academically-oriented background.

The problems he addresses are very real, and his effort valuable, but there are a couple of problems with the mobile, low tech approach.

Let's imagine the same course, developed twice -- once for delivery on a broadband-connected computer and once for delivery on a 4G cell phone. Which will be the most frustrating and confusing? Taking the course using the computer will be simpler, faster and less frustrating than using the phone. If we restrict this to a 3G phone, the gap will be wider and if we restrict it to a 2G phone (most common among poor people world wide) it will be impossible to deliver the same course.

The people Davis wishes to support need and deserve the broadband/computer version.

The second problem has to do with attitudes toward and expectations about education. Someone raised in a family that values education and has learned to learn effectively has an advantage regardless of technology access or skill.

One solution to this problem would be monitoring and mentoring students who are doing poorly, but that is expensive and does not scale to MOOC proportions. Might a course on how to take a course help?

Explicit support of student peer groups might also be helpful -- formally tying the success of each group member to the performance of the group as a whole. The efficacy of peer tutoring is well documented. (This is reminiscent of both executive bonuses on Wall Street and the five-member groups of Bangladeshi village women who receive Grameen micro-loans -- quite a range).

I don't have a lot of solutions, but, as Davis says, these are important problems. If they are not addressed, online education may be part of the inequality problem, not part of the solution.

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Update 5/29/2013

I just finished this post saying we would be short-changing poor students if we only gave them material on cell phones, but, I do a lot of work in developing nations and there are things we can do now -- even with 2G phones.

FrontLineSMS has an SMS server that has been used for many applications in developing nations.  I just learned that they have an education-oriented version in beta.  Check it out.

I've got to throw in a photo that I show my classes -- motivated students studying under street lamps because they have no electricity at home:

The access and bandwidth divide in online education

What if online classes and MOOCs really do take over the world? Will that exacerbate the "digital divide?" Will poor and rural US students have to seek out public libraries and other public access spots? An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education focuses on that question.

What about students in developing nations? Good luck taking a Coursera course in, say, Myanmar or Cuba. In much of the world, Internet access is too expensive for the average person and, even if they can get online, too slow to effectively use a modern Web site.

As online courses increase in sophistication, bandwidth will become an even greater impediment to participation.

The Guinean students shown here are studying under street lights (click to enlarge). Will they have access to global online education?
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Update 3/6/2013

A followup article talks about the impact of data caps for online students in the US. Again, the situation is much worse in developing nations.
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Update 12/8/2013

A University of Pennsylvania study of a million users who signed up for one of 17 courses they offered through Coursera showed that few were from developing nations.

The OLPC XO, a LAN machine in the Internet era

We have talked about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) computer called the XO. Sales have been slower than hoped and Intel has left the OLPC coalition because they were unwilling to stop selling their low cost Classmate PC in developing nations. An Intel sales person tried to unhook the OLPC sale to the government of Peru, and OLPC head Nicholas Negroponte compared that to McDonald's competing with the World Food Program.

But, the Classmate is proving a strong competitor to the XO in spite of its higher price. Is Intel selling it below cost to eliminate a competitor or is the Classmate a better product in the eyes of the education ministers and other government officials who are the target market. (Both are being marketed, appropriately, as ubiquitous educational infrastructure).

I've not seen the Classmate, but have an XO, which I find disappointing. The hardware is innovative and appropriate for kids and rural areas in developing nations, the environment for which it was designed, but, it is a pre-Internet machine. We have outlined the evolution of application development and delivery platforms from batch processing to the Internet, and the XO is still primarily a LAN machine in the Internet era.

It can connect to the Internet via WiFi (if you have an open access point), but the browser cannot handle mp3 and Flash files, foregoing tons of kid-oriented material. Such shortcomings may be overcome with software upgrades, but that will make a more fundamental problem apparent -- XO desktop applications like image, audio and video processing will seem lame compared to their Internet-based counterparts. You can't keep them down on the farm once they've seen PBS Kids or Jumpcut.

One can argue that most XO users will be on XO LANs in locations without Internet connectivity so they won't know what they are missing. That is true, but sad -- second rate technology for the third world.

Mr. Negroponte discussed Internet connectivity in a presentation at the MIT Emerging Technologies Conference in 2005, stating that

It is not a solved problem, but there are many people and many systems working on it. Wifi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G, 4G, fiber, on and on and on. ... (Connectivity) is happening. It doesn't need me, it doesn't need MIT, it doesn't need the media lab.

Negroponte believed that local interest, competition and regulatory reform would take care of the connectivity issue. Unfortunately, as I have argued elsewhere, global competitiveness and regulatory change is not leading us to connectivity, but to a growing gap between developed and developing nations.

Uruguay, an OLPC customer, recognizes the need for connectivity. They will be providing connectivity to OLPC schools. I hope the XO is a better Internet access device by the time those Uruguayan children get theirs.

Where the Internet is not available, the XO seems appropriate. It is designed for the LAN. The concept of connecting to and sharing with local XOs and a local server is "baked in." The only flaw there may be speed, which I was not able to test. (A mesh network with single radios in each machine could be mighty slow).

Connectivity is beyond the control of OLPC, but I was also disappointed with aspects of the user interface. Kids who are forming a mental model of the machine and network need immediate feedback. When a kid is exploring, every click and gesture is an experiment. The cursor must always change shape when over a hot spot, every click has to be executed immediately or, if that is not possible, an "hourglass" or explanation of what is happening needs to appear, etc.

If the target market is the LAN, the XO is a reasonable alpha-test in need of rapid software upgrades. The only way to achieve that in a timely manner is for a strong open source development community to form around the machine. OLPC would do well to encourage the formation of a social network of developers and support them with Windows and Mac-based development tools.

In the (slightly) longer run, it needs to make the transition from a LAN machine to an Internet machine, and, as in Uruguay, the rollout needs to be coupled with connectivity.

The Internet and urban migration in developing nations

We have discussed the digital divide between rich and poor nations and proposals for closing it. We have argued that closing the digital divide would improve the quality of rural life in developing nations, thereby reducing the impetus for migration from rural areas to urban slums.

A recent estimate holds that half of the world population now lives in urban areas, and the UN predicts that will grow to 59.9 % by 2030.



This will lead to increased crowding and the growth of megacities. For a description of one such megacity, Bombay, see this book by Suketu Mehta, or listen to this interview.

Do you believe the Internet could improve life in rural areas of developing nations? Do you believe that would cut migration to cities?

$100 portables for children in developing nations

Andy Carvin blogged a talk by Nicholas Negroponte on the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project to build $100 laptops for children in developing nations. The entry includes a link to a podcast of the talk.