It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming. It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill. Just a warning that for most of us we are still several hundred satellites short and some connection handoff updates away from this being a useful internet connection.
I have a property where Starlink would be perfect and I would pay triple the price to be able to do zoom calls over the connection.
Honestly when I first got the dish, and had it in an open field, that was the case—but now the momentary dropouts between satellites are less than 1-2 seconds.
They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites.
If you were doing some more real-time work or extremely latency-sensitive operations, then yes, you need to stick to a different type of connection. But it's really seamless now, compared to even a few months ago.
Most of the software I used either showed no sign of the dropout, or at worst would freeze a frame or show a loading indicator for a brief moment before getting back to normal.
Online multiplayer gaming and/or streaming are the main areas where I'd have to not recommend Starlink for now.
I'm thinking of using this for a backup connection if FIOS fails... we'd switch our office over to starlink... currently we switch to comcast and it's basicaly unsable... so wonder if starlink would be good for ssh connections etc...
I work from home on Starlink. My SSH sessions work just fine. When I first got the service, it was dropping quite a lot, but even then SSH worked pretty well. But these days, if there are any drops, I can't tell. The improvements in the last few months have been massive. I am even about to drop my land line, because WiFi calling on my cell phone has been nearly perfect. It works better than my cell phone does when I am in a good service area.
When I connect to remote servers over SSH, I usually start a screen (another alternative is tmux) session and then perform my administrative and diagnostics actions in that session. This way, even if I get disconnected, I can reconnect and join that running session. There are other benefits to a screen multiplexer - such as multiple remote users being able to attach to the same session, a joy when a distributed team needs to diagnose an issue or watch some actions together.
You may also want to look into mosh [1] as it will handle dropouts and continue where ssh would just fail on its own. Also has local echo for points of high latency.
Was a real life saver on some of the terrible sat connections of yesteryear.
Mosh is great, but if you don't need the predictive terminal emulation, then you can try Eternal Terminal, which is easier to get running due to not needed an UDP port open.
If you live somewhere with FiOS, Starlink is going to be a non-starter. FiOS requires high density. High density kills Starlink connections.
I suppose Starlink can support a small, negligible, percentage of customers in an urban (or even suburban) area. (Same total number as a rural area.) So, if you think they are going to cutoff registrations as oppose to oversubscribe when they hit that point you may want to sign up right away.
I'm not sure if you are using FiOS as a synonym for FTTH. If so, you might be interested to know I live somewhere with FTTH that is reasonably low-density (~25-30 people per sq km). I think Starlink will be a very serious consideration here.
When I say FiOS, I'm thinking gigabit+ FTTH/FTTD (I'm not 100% sure of the difference). Given that you quoted people per sq km (about 70-84 people per sq. mile), you're probably not in the US. In the US, it's hard to get fiber outside of areas with the high density I'm quoting (at least in my experience).
But yes, that density seems fine for Starlink (although maybe it isn't in the end, who knows yet.)
My understanding is that StarLink is aiming for 100M un-guaranteed in beta. So that's considerably below gigabit.
But I also know that most households with FTTH around here use considerably less than 50M.
So perhaps you meant that gigabit internet kills Starlink. FTTH has some advantages over Starlink. But Starlink also has advantages over FTTH. If you need more than 100M, Starlink is not in the game yet. But if you want some leverage with the local monopoly and have typical usage...
Or, if you snowbird (common case here) and want the same provider on the border of Canada and the border of Mexico...
The total aggregate bandwidth Starlink will have when their entire constellation of satellites is deployed and the number of satellites that will be visible at a given location at a given time place an upper limit on the number of customers they can have even with overselling bandwidth.
In the US their plans are to be able to support something like 5 million customers. That's less than 5% of the number of customers Comcast has.
It really is by design meant for people in areas that do not have terrestrial broadband.
I thought something like 20% of America did not have terrestrial broadband. At 5 million this is a giant change, but not as universal as I originally thought.
I wasn't referring to the speed (although obviously fiber has higher speed and reliability, and that will likely never change). I was referring to the fact that it seems like if you have the population density (in the US, at least in my knowledge) to justify a local ISP rolling out fiber to homes, you have a population density that will oversubscribe even the completed Starlink constellation (locally). Starlink just is never going to work in NYC or SF or areas with significantly less density there. Although it may work for a lucky few who manage to enroll before the area is full and locked down.
Sure, but it's some for a reason. It's a generality. So is "if you're shopping in Goodwill, you're not driving a Ferrari". Obviously, the recently broke, extremely thrifty, people looking for a collectable or to reclaim something accidentally donated are exceptions.
Maybe that program has covered more than enough people to make it worth talking about, but I didn't see anything like that.
Yeah we have mifi’s as backup as well but usually only a few people can be on those. But also thinking about dedicated fiber… but honestly none of these seem as cool to me right now as bunch of satellites
I have five different Wi-Fi APs on my property. The handoff between them results in roughly 40-60ms dropout. That still interrupts audio calls. 1-2 seconds is huge.
I’m a multiplayer developer and I’m waiting to get a Starlink to test on (I have tested a few times on my moms). I want to makes games tolerate of the latency and instability of Starlink. Mobile networks deal with similar issues so I think it’s possible to make games with Starlink in mind.
Most tools for simulating latency and packet loss locally are a pretty poor model of the kinds of behavior encountered on real networks. In particular, latency due to bufferbloat rather than speed of light delays is extremely important to simulate, but not well-supported by many tools.
I’m not sure if it’s an endeavour worth taking honestly..
Starlink is still in beta, and once they can use starship to launch the satellites (hopefully somewhere next year) the launch capability will increase to 400 satellites compared to 60 on falcon 9. At that point they will be limited just by the satellites build throughput, so they will reach the 11k coverage very quickly.
I’m already getting a Starlink and I have one available to test on at my parents house so I think it’s worth it. I’m also evaluating it as a way for me to move closer to my family. I’m stuck in Portland because I require really good internet as I’m a 100% remote game dev working on multiplayer games. And the only option in Albany is really bad and expensive Comcast service.
No, the connection seems to be paired up through the ground station, so I wouldn't get disconnected via SSH. Mosh may be a better option if you want to make it feel rock solid though.
> They had 1000 or so satellites when I first started testing, and there are now something like 1600 or so. Most of the time, I don't even notice when it switches satellites.
Enjoy the early adopter moment. Even if they keep increasing the numbers, they will probably move those new satellites in a much wider net to cover more subscribers the second they must show a profit.
They are planning to increase the number of satellites by an order of magnitude. They’re launching extremely fast with Falcon 9, and prepping Starship for launch as well, which has 5-10 times the payload. May see Starlink launches on Starship join Falcon9 within a year or so.
So the opposite is true. They’re likely to massively increase the number of satellites.
If you want to argue the per user bandwidth might be different than for early users, that’s somewhat more plausible. But the number of satellites will increase. They can’t actually significantly change the inclination of the satellites once launched as it takes an insane amount of propellant, and even for solar electric thrusters, so your concern about them moving the satellites to other orbits is very unlikely.
If they have 1600 satellites in orbit but are adding 40,000 more satellites (with more capability), then it’ll get better with 20x users, not worse. But anyway, the question was about satellite visibility, not bandwidth per user. The person I was replying to was claiming there will be fewer visible satellites as they’d be moving to different inclinations, which just isn’t feasible let alone likely.
> Even if they keep increasing the numbers, they will probably move those new satellites in a much wider net
The only way to make a wider net whilst simultaneously adding satellites would be to raise the altitude of the satellites, which I am fairly certain is not possible for the existing satellites.
>but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds
I don't see this at all. I have constant uptime monitoring, and connection drops are now a minute or two per week. We use it for VoIP, there is no cellular coverage at all where I have it deployed.
Edit: Also, I mentioned this in my fuller main comment but this is around the 45th parallel in New England, and around 1500' (500m) above sea level. This location is also within approximately 50-70 miles ground level of two separate Starlink ground station installations. The nature of Starlink is that there is much more of a geographic component than most people are used to in a WAN link, so it's probably important when talking experience to specify rough area of the world one is in. Once the network is completely built up that may not matter much anymore, but at this point there are definite coverage density differences, and with the current bent-pipe usage ground stations matter too more. Anyone interested in getting an idea of current planetary station and sat deployments might find this site interesting:
As a user of Starlink for more than 4 months - the quality has improved. While you say it is unusable for video calls, i think that is way overstated and it completely depends on where you are trying to connect.
Compared to the other options which were atrocious (10 MB down max, 3 MB Up max, weather changes everything) - the hiccup you get maybe every 10 minutes for 10 seconds - is annoying but not a deal breaker for VOIP calls. If you are doing client side calls maybe a deal breaker - team calls manageable but annoying. Also I do calls with our Australian team (and were North America based) and they are on cable internet and they get hiccuped in the same amount. So actually I would say that Starlink is on par if not better than their connection.
If you are comparing the internet to city quality cable then yeah not comparable - but thats not what they are targeting. They are bringing remote areas online.
To be honest, one-on-one Facetime calls and Zoom are almost perfect now, with few bits where it would pause and come back. Group calls were even less of a problem, because we're all used to one or two people having connection issues, and it's easy to work around that.
Yeah, different call quality requirements I think. I am mostly on client calls and I have a ready alternative to be on fiber. If I head out to my place in the country and have crappy call quality as a result, that does not go over so well.
That was the feeling a few months ago. But in the last 2 months, we have used zoom and other applications with very little drop outs. I have various TV stations running for hours at a time at high resolutions, and at the most there is a freeze frame for a split second once or twice every few hours.
Frankly, I have had more issues with all the other internet connections we still maintain, than with Starlink. (Zoom was always dropping out with the others.)
For example we have: (Slow) high speed DSL, (slow) high speed lte.
In all those the internet download speeds are very variable, start fast (5-12) dropping to 0.5-1 and going up and down over time.
Starlink maintains over 20 down, going up sometimes to over 30.
We are in the countryside in Canada, so true high speed doesn't exist. For now, Starlink is the most dependable high speed option. (What will happen when more subscribers will join all on the one satellite?)
Zoom handles intermittent dropouts better than anything else I have seen and I don't quite understand the whole mechanism.
When you lose a connection for a few seconds, maybe even 10 seconds, the video will pause, but when your connection reconnects, it continues where it paused. So you don't miss anything. I believe at some point when the speaker stops talking, like waiting for a response, it will jump cut their video to a more live feed again. So that you don't get too far behind.
I'm curious if anyone here knows about how this works and if it is common practice in live video chat?
As Geerling points out, he has substantial obstructions. I have no obstructions, and see a few seconds of downtime per day. My wife and I regularly have multi-hour zoom calls with no problems.
Obstructions are a problem, but users with no alternative are much more motivated to locate the dish appropriately.
Starlink is not for people who have gigabit wired connections. For those of us who were lucky to get a hotspot to work long enough to use our 15Gb cap, it is a godsend.
My mom has been using Starlink in Albany, OR for 2 months. It started spotty, but now works better than her other Comcast connection. The only issue is that every day at 7ish they lose connection for about 5 minutes. She’s said it’s not been a huge issue and plans to cancel her Comcast at the end of her contract. She works remote and Starlink has been great for video calls and video streaming. She’s getting 30-40 down and 20-30 ms latency; Comcast is 20 down and 25 ms latency.
I use it for zoom daily. Yesterday was the first day in awhile where I had difficulty completing a call. The handoffs now last only about a second or two. Previously they’d be 15 or so seconds but that hasn’t happened for over a month. It is my daily driver though I do have back up DSL just in case.
> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky, but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill.
If you go to https://satellitemap.space/# and enter in your GPS location in the settings (45, -90 for a rural northern Wisconsin as an example), and you can see the satellites that that location has visibility of.
And there are times when there's nothing in that area of the sky.
> "It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds."
He mentions that this is due to the Starlink dish's view of the sky being partially obscured by trees.
This will presumably improve as the number of Starlink satellites grows, as it will be more likely that there will be an unobstructed satellite in view at any moment, and less frequent switching between satellites.
And he also mentions that if this were his only Internet, he would trim the tree branches to get a better view of the sky. That's not what I'd do though; I'd put the satellite dish on a radio mast. Anyone who's ever done any kind of radio work knows that antenna height is everything, and in his specific case it's important for a different reason: avoiding line-of-sight obstructions.
Yeah holy shit. The dude has obstructions and then writes a review about it? It's like putting bad gas in your car, then writing a review about how bad it was... Admittedly getting rid of the obstructions was a TON of work. It took me a few weeks of moving my dish around, and fiddling around with different mounts and options. I even topped a tree. But once I got rid of the obstructions, the service improved dramatically. Now with the launches that we have had of new satellites and other updates, I don't see hardly any drops at all. The most common annoyance with mine right now is the router/dish crashing. This happens maybe once every two weeks. Not much worse than the shitty Comcast-supplied modem. My next step is to use my own router and I think that'll take care of a lot of it.
Dunno, I did a ~20min FaceTime call that was essentially flawless. That call ended with me being very impressed by the stability and bandwidth of the connection. Far better than the satellite service at the location previously. Maybe it was just pure luck? Not sure, but the consistent 90-100mbit downstream and 2-digit ping is pretty impressive.
> It's sort of mentioned, but not emphasized in this review that connection dropouts happen every few minutes for a few seconds. That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing, torrenting or video streaming, but unusable for video calls, stream hosting, voip, or online gaming
Yep, been our experience as well. We've got a few of us who wanted to trade from our cottages and its just unusable if you need a continuous signal for more than 10 minutes at a time.
That doesn't mean its useless, just that its not usable if you want to do voip, trading, video calls etc.
Hopefully they'll figure out what causes drop ever few minutes at some point. But currently given how expensive it and the hardware are its a very disappointing product.
I guess we're just spoiled now a days with the 1Gbps wired internet that most city homes have access to.
If you’re getting drops every few minutes your view is obstructed. That’s about the time it takes an LEO sat to cross the sky so your dish probably can’t see a critical region in the orbit.
Yes.
We have the drops also. But they are happening less, and for only a blink. In the worst case, we experience a freeze frame. Most of the time can barely see the freeze.
I think it's important to remember that "connections" in networking aren't actually connections. Everything is sent one packet at a time over networks that aren't presumed to be stable.
That means the entire system is resilient. A 2-second pause in connectivity usually won't mean the app dies. It means the application presumes it dropped a few packets, which it did.
Now, if you're playing a very fast-paced multi-player game, a 2-second lag at the wrong moment can spell disaster. But most video call programs can easily handle a 2-second blip in connectivity, annoying though it is for participants- I see those all the time on my non-Satellite based internet.
That's because he has huge sections of his sky blocked.
> It's implied that this is due to the trees obstructing a full view of the sky
It's not implied, it's explicitly the reason...
> but I have actually heard these connection dropouts are just about universal due to the constellation not having enough infill.
That used to be the problem. Most users now report (you can see them talking about it on the starlink subreddit all the time) that they're now going days to weeks without a single drop.
Obviously latency is important in synchronous use cases like video calls, however I wonder if a delay for slower one on one discussions would be all that jarring for users
For the remote areas this is intended for, it is already a 10x or more improvement. Great internet service is better than perfectly reliable slow internet.
It may be that anyone who is willing and able to do so has already thought of it, but on Linux you could multiplex the connection with LTE/3G/dialup and probably get pretty good results.
The outages have been getting better recently. They are supposed to go away entirely once the first constellation is fully complete. If you don't have obstructions, that is.
It certainly can be on a mast; I put mine on a (short) steel tube mast, and it's been a great improvement on service that was already a vast improvement over Hughesnet-provided satellite.
> That makes starlink fine for any kind of asynchronous content like web browsing
This sounds terrible for web browsing. Last thing I want is to know is to submit a form and then have my connection drop out in the middle. Imagine being in the middle of filling out an application or opening an account or verifying your identity or something like that.
If the connection drops for less than 5-10 seconds (this happens even on my Cable Internet sometimes), it's no problem. Most timeouts and TCP connections are okay with complete dropouts for 30 or 60 seconds (sometimes longer), as long as your local LAN doesn't drop your network connection.
Doesn't that depend on the nature of the "drop"? When it's just lack of signal then sure, but when I see connections break even momentarily (on cable...), there's often some sort of feedback (I think sometimes it's a connection reset?) that causes the browser to just error immediately, and then I have to reload the page... despite still being on the same network with the same IPs and such.
That is because of the way your connection is being dropped/what your router is doing. It’s sending reset messages back to your client telling it your connection is dead, instead of trying to resend your packets - which then succeed when the connection is back up.
That's a possibility in theory; I haven't root-caused this to know what's happening in every case (again: not every drop is the same). Regardless, I'm just talking about what the average end-user might see; I don't really care where the blame goes.
I've had Starlink for about 6 months and it is a massive improvement on upload speed at 10-25 Mb. Download speed is a mixed bag wildly oscillating from 5 to 100 Mb and back. It's okay for downloading things but it's terrible for any sort of video conferencing. There are brief dropouts on average every 6 minutes or so and my obstruction map is better than the author's. My neighbor up the street got slightly better service by mounting his dishy on a 20-ft antenna pole above his house.
Local ground service is 20 Mb download and 2 Mb upload. And that's just barely sufficient for watching streaming video and video conferencing. Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix and I don't think that political will exists right now nor will it in the near future. We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that. Now imagine that at a national level.
So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an epic win IMO and I will cancel ground service. And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried. But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.
> Gigabit service is but a mile and a half away but no one is going to pay to lay the fiber into our neighborhood. So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago. I think that's going to require political will to fix
I imagine once Starlink is an actual choice, the telecoms will install wireless at the end of the fiber and offer you faster, more reliable service than Starlink.
They don't do it now because they get your money without having to do anything at all.
Starlink isn't driving the telecoms to install wireless. The telecoms were already planning this before Starlink.
T-Mobile Home Internet is already available to 30M households in the US (out of around 130M households so around 20-25% of US households). T-Mobile is looking to have 7-8M subscribers within the next 5 years which would make them the 4th largest ISP (behind Xfinity, Spectrum, and AT&T). Verizon is looking to cover 50M households by the end of 2024 which is years away, but shows that 5G home internet is coming.
Wired home internet companies aren't avoiding installing a wireless link at the end of their fiber out of spite. It's a combination of who has wireless spectrum and the technology/capacity available. If you're talking about Xfinity or Spectrum, they don't have the wireless spectrum to offer that. If you're talking about Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile, they're working on it, but it takes time for the technology and spectrum to be there to provide the capacity people expect for a home internet connection. The recently concluded C-Band auction means that wireless carriers are going to have more spectrum available to provide more capacity (and they spent nearly $100B getting it). 5G NR provides more speed and capacity.
If it was just out of spite, Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile would have been offering wireless home internet for years in areas where they had no wired network. They weren't getting the money in places where they didn't own the local telco (which for T-Mobile is everywhere and for Verizon/AT&T is most places). Even when they owned the local telco, most people would be buying cable internet.
The problem is that home internet isn't easy. A wireless customer probably uses 10GB of data on average. Streaming HD Netflix is 2-3GB per hour. Home internet usage is usually an order of magnitude higher (and can be even higher than that). Basically, you need to increase your network capacity by at least 10x if you're going to be signing up home internet customers. With new technologies and spectrum, that's what wireless carriers are doing over the next 1-5 years.
I think that terrestrial wireless will be big in the future, but it's not because of Starlink putting pressure on telecoms. It's because their networks are going to be seeing massive capacity upgrades over the next few years that will enable it. Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile would have loved to offer wireless home internet years ago, but the technology and capacity simply wasn't there. I mean, they did offer home internet years ago, but it often cost hundreds of dollars a month and was only available in really rural areas (not just places that might hate 20Mbps service). But new tech and capacity gains are allowing them to offer new service. T-Mobile is first out of the gate because it got new spectrum earlier, but Verizon and AT&T will be following in the coming years.
I don't believe that TMobile home internet is available to 30 million households. The only numbers i can find say 30 million people. Some announcements from T-Mobile say 20 million households.
But it appears to only be available to people in mid sized cities. In other words, people that already have somewhat acceptable internet service options.
I personally don't hate 20 Mb service and I don't think it is the problem except for streaming video.
The problem is the metastasis of ridiculous dynamic content that is driving up bandwidth requirements and latency and delivering a reduced quality Internet experience in return, not because dynamic content is intrinsically bad, but because of how it's being utilized.
But in both situations I've lived through recently, the fiber has been just out of reach along main roads for some time now. And I know a bunch of people in similar situations on side streets where AT&T and XFinity declined to extend service after building the infrastructure along main roads to do exactly that.
Anecdote: during 2019's power shut offs because of high winds, my house lost power for 3 days, but my neighbor 25' from me did not lose power. Seems like a similar situation in some ways. Both of our houses were on hills served by separate power lines less than a quarter mile from a main road. The only qualitative difference I can think of is that the last 200 ft to my house is below ground.
I live in a community, where Verizon FIOS (later sold to Frontier) put down fiber in the ground, and then didn’t connect houses! So this fiber is there for 10 years now, unconnected…
I imagine the more immediate threat is 5G internet. But currently the reception in this neighborhood is terrible for T-Mobile (despite their coverage map insisting otherwise) yet one of my neighbors claims he can get 50 Mb download with an AT&T hotspot. I have approximately zero faith in our current ground-based providers. They are the PG&E of broadband IMO.
Upgrading to my first 5G phone recently made voice service work at my house but did nothing for data.
Yet unlike ground-based service in my experience, the situation is improving with time. It took 15 years for my old place to go from 2.4 Mb/300 kb to bidirectional Gb and that only happened because AT&T was feeling generous briefly in 2019 w/r to expanding service (in that case, 400' of fiber to my cluster of houses). They stopped expanding shortly thereafter because so many people were in exactly the same situation that they were swamped with requests.
Same latitude, lucky to get 2 Mb in either direction. But down in Roseburg, Oredgon I got 135 Mb/s download sitting in a parking lot so it's not my phone.
Edit: I just walked through the neighborhood repeatedly invoking speed test and I can get 50 megabits at various points. But I can't get it anywhere on my own property. There's no real rhyme or reason that I can see as to where it's good and to where it's bad.
> And if they don't someone else will so I'm not worried... I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.
I'm a little worried about it. Other than Amazon's Project Kuiper, I don't really see who else can compete.
Unlike EVs there's not an existing industry that's doing _mostly_ the same thing, that just needs to start offering a new line. Running a LEO megaconstellation is extremely different than putting up a handful of massive geostationary satellites. I just don't see the existing satellite internet players being able to compete.
Frankly, it's a massive investment of resources to get started (which is true for auto manufacturers as well), but doing it economically requires launch costs that only SpaceX is currently able to provide.
Nobody else wants to build a competitor to Starlink by paying SpaceX. Which is why I think Amazon's Kuiper is the best shot to compete—but it requires Blue Origin's New Glenn to come online to really get the economics working. I know Amazon has tapped ULA as a launch provider in the interim, so they'll be able to start getting satellites up and running soon, but the economics seem...painful if they're going to use expendable rockets for the bulk of the constellation.
It's definitely possible that we see a flourishing of offerings, but I could also see a world where in 5 years time there's really only still Starlink.
>Nobody else wants to build a competitor to Starlink by paying SpaceX
I'm not sure what you mean here. Outside of, say, military usage, every single telecom company is a competitor to Starlink. Internet is internet.
This commercial product is turning out to be what the "naysayers" thought it would be; brilliant if you're in a place with terrible internet, but noncompetitive in any kind of urban environment.
Again, imho, the huge thing here is the ability to get a quick internet set up anywhere in the world that can't easily be taken down (...military).
> I'm not sure what you mean here. Outside of, say, military usage, every single telecom company is a competitor to Starlink. Internet is internet.
With regard to satellite Internet mega-constellations, it is true thus far. The two other major constellations (OneWeb and Kuiper) have avoided SpaceX as a launch provider, choosing competitors instead – OneWeb has gone with Arianespace Soyuz and Virgin; Kuiper has chosen ULA (and is assumably going to choose Blue Origin too once they are ready). SpaceX has said they are happy to launch competitor constellations, but it makes sense that its competitors aren't happy to fund their competition. It is very unlikely that Arianespace or ULA can actually beat SpaceX on price, so avoiding funding your competition is the only logical explanation for OneWeb and Kuiper's decisions.
SpaceX is launching other satellite telecommunications systems, that obviously also compete with Starlink to some extent, but less head-on. For example, they are contracted to launch one of the ViaSat-3 satellites. ViaSat-3 is a satellite Internet constellation, so in that sense does compete, but it only has 3 satellites in geostationary orbit, so it isn't really going after the same direct market as Starlink. (ViaSat appears to be getting scared of Starlink, as evidenced by their anti-Starlink applications to FCC and threats of a lawsuit; given that, I wonder how much longer they'll be willing to buy launch services from SpaceX.)
Is OneWeb still in the game? I saw that they had been financial issues and were sold to the UK and I kind of assumed that they had ended their constellation goals.
It’d be great if they were still working on it, though
They are still in the game, but not quite the same game.
They have done 8 launches so far, including 4 this year, with another 5 scheduled this year and then more next year. At the moment they have 248 operational satellites in their constellation. Their goal is 648 satellites, which is gong to take them (approximately) 11 more launches.
But 648, is quite small in scale compared to Starlink's plan for an initial constellation of 12,000, with an additional 30,000 currently going through the approval process. Starlink already has more working satellites in orbit than OneWeb's planned full constellation size.
Given that, it is difficult for OneWeb to compete with Starlink head-on, so they are basically ceding to Starlink the B2C space and going after B2B instead. I think with UK government and UK military they are going to have some success, since the UK will likely prefer OneWeb given that it is a UK-headquartered company with partial UK government ownership.
> I'm not sure what you mean here. Outside of, say, military usage, every single telecom company is a competitor to Starlink. Internet is internet.
That’s certainly true, but there are real physical limitations that make it hard to compete with Starlink without a LEO constellation.
Sure, you could do ground based infrastructure build outs, but the population density means it’s not profitable or you have to charge really high rates to make up the fixed costs. Other satellite providers can compete in the rural areas, but Geo and LEO are have important differences. The first is latency (internet is internet but 60ms internet is not the same as 600ms internet).
When I made the statement I did, I was mostly referring to satellite internet providers, because land based providers have largely abandoned or drastically underserved this market segment.
I don’t see a GEO constellation being able to provide a similar internet offering to Starlink ever, due to light delay. I don’t think ground based solutions will pop up to start competing for these low density market, because they’ve already been written off as unprofitable even before there was serious competition for the market.
> This commercial product is turning out to be what the "naysayers" thought it would be; brilliant if you're in a place with terrible internet, but noncompetitive in any kind of urban environment.
Well that’s probably because the naysayers were predicting the exact same thing as the supporters. Spaced has described Starlink consistently as being designed to service rural and suburban areas that are underserved by existing providers. The goals never were to compete with providers in super high density urban markets.
I’ve been a huge supporter of Starlink since the first announcement, and it’s shaping up pretty much how I imagined which also lines up with your description.
If you want to build a competitor to Starlink that does the same thing and is ideal for terrible internet areas, you need to put up satellites, and SpaceX is the only company that you can pay to do so economically.
> This commercial product is turning out to be what the "naysayers" thought it would be; brilliant if you're in a place with terrible internet, but noncompetitive in any kind of urban environment.
I mean that's what Elon Musk himself said of the service. He said they don't really have interest in competing with most cable/fiber providers and that their system would actually be complementary and they could provide network backhaul for those companies to say remote cellular antennas.
A bit of a tangent, but is there any information about how many constellations are physically possible? Obviously there's a lot of space in LEO, but it's still limited. Given that each provider would need their own very dense constellation of satellites in different orbits, things would eventually start getting crowded.
I don't think we'll get there any time soon (or ever), but kind of an interesting thought experiment.
I haven't done the math and I'm certainly not an expert, but my lay understanding is that the number of constellations is much more limited by spectrum frequency availability, rather than the space constraints in LEO.
That is, if we had an very large number of companies wanting to create satellite internet constellations, we would run out of useful EM spectrum before we would run out of LEO orbits.
Yeah, that occurred to me as well, though I don't know much about how the satellites communicate with eachother. I imagine each constellation would need its own band, but not sure how wide it needs to be? Intra-constellation communication could feasibly be done with lasers, in which case, all they may need to worry about is the Space-to-Ground leg. So maybe it's not too bad? I don't really know, but certainly interested in learning more...
You’re underestimating the amount of space in space (sorry, couldn’t resist). Volume increases exponentially as diameter increases.
I don’t think anyone would worry about 1800 or even 180000 things spread over the entire surface of the earth. We have billions of cars, and they mostly avoid running into each other. Even 100 miles up? Far, far more space - and a lot less ‘stuff’ to worry about too.
They could pack a million satellites up there and basic traffic management would be more than enough to avoid collisions.
But it's definitely don't comparable to cars. Say you want safety margin of mere 1 second, that means reserving 8 kilometers free corridor in front of every satellite. At all times. That isn't a small volume.
Why one second and 8km? Satellites are not manually maneuvered.
Airplanes are only required to keep 1,000 to 2,000 feet vertical separation. They travel at much slower speed than satellites (550 mph vs. 17,200 mph), but they are also much bigger. They tend to travel in narrow corridors, as opposed to being spread out like satellites.
NASA and SpaceX have started working together to address the collision issues with their fleet:
They are not manually maneuvered but there's still unpredictable inteplay of solar wind and tenuous atmosphere to correct. And some sats will fail, the environment is harsh. So I believe some safety separation will be a must, used 1 second as a rule of thumb and the orbital speed is 7.8 km/s at the altitude.
I suspect more safety time will be required. Say a micrometeoroid impact happens causing one satellite to go off track. Now the controller computer needs some time to recompute whole swarm trajectories to minimize debris impacts. Even sats that are currently on the other side of planet might need to start thrusters immediately, as it takes only 10 minutes on average to cover the distance.
Let’s do some math and see. If we assume the earth is a sphere (I know it isn’t, but it’s mostly close), and using 4(pi)r^2, it’s about 511 million km2 in area on the surface (counting oceans, etc). Double checking, it’s actually about 507 million km2, so decently close.
4 * 3.1459 * (6378^2)
Starlink is orbiting at 550km altitude (approx). At that altitude, we’re looking at…
4 * 3.1459 * (6928^2) = 603,977,365 km2
The thing to keep in mind about orbits is the defining factor is your eccentricity and velocity. Faster velocity == higher orbit, assuming it’s a round/circular orbit, that velocity will also be consistent.
As long as everyone is going
in the same direction and trying to maintain a circular orbit, you can stack orbits ‘on top’ of each other or put satellites quite close to each other just like planes do with flight levels. So even that number is misleading, as you could 10x that if you had decent traffic control.
Even without that, you’re talking a density of 1 satellite per 600 square kilometers of space with a million satellites for a given ‘flight level’.
The velocity matters a lot less than the relative velocity to other things you might be nearby - think of it like two cars going in lanes next to each other on the same ‘direction’ of a freeway, vs a free for all demolition derby with no traffic control, lanes, etc.
If everyone is co-ordinated you can have problem free high density. If random stuff is happening, including people potentially trying to hit you - it’s going to be a mess. If everyone just does whatever and never co-ordinates, yeah someone is eventually going to run into someone else - but unless there are a LOT of satellites, the odds are low.
With it being LEO, debris and dead satellites are also going to be a aerobraked pretty quickly.
If it's all so easy peasy and every satellite has zillions of square kilometers at disposal, why do we have collisions and required maneuvering already? And "dead satellites are also going to be a aerobraked pretty quickly" - at 550km this means months. That's definitely not quickly enough.
2) Many of these incidents are from people are also putting things in Lagrange points and Geosynchronous orbits, and similar 'crowded' areas of space - unlike these constellations. Think jostling for space in downtown Manhattan, vs being fine having a place in Kansas somewhere.
3) Right now it's mostly a demolition derby out there, with only minimal traffic handling/control and the occasional 'haha, I got you' intentional satellite explosion/missile test.
As noted, even with all those factors, it is still incredibly rare. Only a tiny handful of problems have been tracked to orbital collisions with anything man made, and that is with us putting all sorts of things (including 'off the books' military top secret satellites, nuclear reactors, random bits of micro satellites, etc.) up there since the 50's.
Months is pretty quick for this kind of thing - and remember, unless it gets energy from some kind of serious-delta-v impact (or other delta-V adding type of event like a high energy explosion), it will lose velocity and DROP in altitude if the orbit remains circular. If the orbit doesn't remain circular, especially at LEO, it will have to dip significantly into the atmosphere to get to a higher altitude at any point in it's orbit, meaning even faster degradation and burn-up.
The reality is that it's huge up there, and if we do even basic thinking and planning on this to not do something obviously dumb (like tangential, perpendicular, or opposite direction orbits all over the place at the same level), it isn't likely to be a significant problem; just like it hasn't been a real (as in significant probability event) problem so far.
Cosmic rays, high potential static build-up, magnetic storms, micrometeorites, etc. are just as big or more of a problem. They rarely cancel a mission or damage anything notable, but it isn't zero risk there either.
> Why one second and 8km? Satellites are not manually maneuvered.
Satellites are actually manually maneuvered generally. Only the large constellations have somewhat automated systems (SpaceX's system is especially automated because there's too many for humans to monitor).
The analogy with cars is a bit tricky though as we have well defined rules that help us pack them very closely together on the surface. For example: roads, lanes, controlled intersections. Those things aren't quite the same when talking about orbits because cars and satellites aren't spread out the same way.
The other commenter made the point about some safety margin, which obviously has to be a part of the equation. The speed and error of orbits would play into whatever that number comes out to be.
Regardless of there being lots of space, there's still some limit, even if it's 1,000 constellations.
Some variables I don't quite know:
1. Acceptable altitude range for constellations
2. Typical positioning error of a satellite
3. Average failure rate and failure mode of a satellite
- ex. does a dead satellite automatically deorbit itself or do we need to wait for the orbit to decay? I'd imagine decay at that altitude is fairly quick. Would a decaying satellite in a higher orbit need to be accounted for?
4. Required satellite density in orbit and the number of unique orbits, their arrangement, etc.
The limit is far more how tight you can beamform the signals and how much usable spectrum there is: this is the fundamental thing limiting the density and hence number of users starlink can have.
HughesNet and ViaSat have both been around for a while but their rates and their service are terrible. But unlike Starlink, their service is reliably and predictably crappy so there's that I guess. There's nothing stopping them from improving their own services.
> There's nothing stopping them from improving their own services.
Except the laws of physics I guess. Geosynchronous orbit is about 36,000 km out so best case scenario if you were going straight up to a satellite in such an orbit and back down even at the speed of light in a vacuum that’s a lower bound of a quarter of a second of latency. So unless these legacy satellite internet companies launch LEO constellations of their own, which there’s no indication they’re capable of doing, it seems pretty hopeless for them.
ViaSat-3 is a geostationary constellation of 3 satellites, which I don't really consider to be a competitor to Starlink due to its physical inability to ever reduce the latency lower than 500ms
> There's nothing stopping them from improving their own services.
Well, they can’t improve the latency of their service due to light delay. If they want to compete on that front, they need to move to a LEO constellation.
Neither HughesNet nor ViaSat has started working on LEO constellations (publicly anyway), and these things take years. If they want to get into LEO constellations, they’ve ceded a 5 year head start to SpaceX.
I’m not optimistic that either of them will be able to remain competitive with Starlink over the next decade.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see, although Viasat-3 will be 1/4th the cost of Starlink (on a $/Mbps/month) basis and Viasat-4 will be about 1/15th. Even launching for "free", it's gonna be pretty tough for SpaceX to meet those numbers. The GEO satellites also require simpler and cheaper ground infrastructure, both on the ISP and on the customer side.
Oh, interesting, I hadn’t seen those numbers. Where did you see the ViaSat 3/4 pricing? All I could find was the current offerings (which are more expensive), but I didn’t look hard.
I’d love to dig into the other offerings that the GEO players plan to provide. My dad was a Day 1 sign up for the Starlink beta, because it’s dramatically better than any offerings in his area (including existing Satellite), but I’d definitely like to share any better upcoming options with him.
I think latency might be a deal breaker for him, because they do a fair amount of video calling and don’t like the audio lag
Ah, those numbers are from the Viasat earnings calls and some rough estimates. Each Viasat-3 satellite will have about 1 Tbps capacity and have a lifetime of 15 years. I don't know about cost, but Viasat-2 was in the neighborhood of $300e6, so, I assumed the same for Viasat-3. Viasat-4 is claimed to have a capacity of 3-5 Tbps and I assume a similar lifetime.
Now, these numbers are all well and good, but they don't include the cost of the ground system and the terminals, and I don't know what those will be. But, I would expect them to be cheaper, most crucially because GEO gives you more flexibility in where you place ground stations (vs LEO) and once you aim the dish, you pretty much never have to move it (LEO dishes spend their whole life slewing to match the satellites; it turns out that requires some parts that aren't so cheap.)
Anyway, I don't know what Starlink or Viasat's pricing will be in a few years, but I think Viasat will have a competitive edge in terms of overall cost.
Latency is definitely an issue for some users and some applications. If you watch what Hughes has been saying for years, it's that the future is hybrid, where a terminal uses both LEO and GEO, for what they're best suited for (i.e., interactive traffic over LEO, big, cheap bulk bits over GEO.) If you Google a bit, you can see the Viasat press releases alluding to this same capability. I don't know if/when that tech will make it to residential service, but I would expect that if there's unmet market demand, they'll get it out there.
> But it took Teslas to spark the electric vehicle industry. Now there's a lot of choice. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens here.
I really hope not. There are enough satellites out there, there are already too many, space pollution is real. Maybe we can find a better solution to this particular problem.
I think these LEO constellations are actually the least concerning part of space pollution.
There are many more LEO satellites, true, but their orbital placement is such that the satellite's orbit naturally decays in a few years. Which means if a satellite becomes uncontrollable (or is destroyed in some way), the debris will clear in a relatively short period of time.
I'm actually much more concerned about the much smaller number of satellites in medium and geostationary orbits, where the decay time is decades or centuries.
Failed satellites or debris in these orbits will take a very long time to clear, and strikes me as a much larger concern than the larger number of LEO sats
This doesn't make much sense. MEO is huge and GEO is only "relatively" small because it's narrow along two of three dimensions we care about†, which has no influence on any debris from a collision and thus it would most likely leave GEO altogether.
Would a volcanic eruption in New York be very bad? Yeah, I guess it would, but, that's not going to happen. Whereas California has several volcanoes that - while we've no reason to expect them to erupt this year - certainly can't be ruled out for our lifetimes, so, makes sense to manage that risk not worry about New York.
† A Starlink, or a GPS bird, has a "ball of yarn" orbit, it doesn't really matter which part of the planet it's over at any particular time so long as we can predict where it'll be for the near future. But the whole point of a Geostationary satellite is its apparent fixed location in the sky from a point on the ground. To do that it needs to orbit at the same rate the Earth spins, limiting the orbital radius to a tight band - and it also needs to orbit over the equator, the result is all GEO birds are in more or less identical orbits, just offset in time.
We're looking at two different axes. You're considering "how much of the orbit is occupied". I'm looking at "how long does a dead or destroyed satellite continue to occupy space".
If we have a collision that causes a significant amount of debris in a medium earth orbit, that debris will continue to exist for a very long time, so a wide portion of that orbit will be unusable or dangerous.
> Would a volcanic eruption in New York be very bad? Yeah, I guess it would, but, that's not going to happen.
That's fair, but I think your analogy might fall down on the comparative risks of damaged or destroyed satellites in LEO/MEO compared to the comparative risks of volcanic activity in CA/NY.
Yes, it's true that there is a larger risk of collisions in LEO with the number of satellites operating there. And it's true with the larger number of satellites, there are more risks of a satellite losing control. But that doesn't mean GEO and MEO satellites are without risk. Just last year there was a significant risk that a GEO satellite had the potential to explode due to a failing battery (https://spacenews.com/directv-fears-explosion-risk-from-sate...).
I'm mostly interested in hedging against worst case scenarios, and the worst case scenario for a LEO constellation is much less problematic than the worst case scenarios for MEO constellations.
> So if they just deliver 100/100 within a year or two, this is an epic win
It's unlikely that they (Starlink or someone else) will offer symmetrical speeds. It's not that they're looking to be mean to you. It's that uplink is harder and people use a lot more downlink.
Even if they dedicated as much wireless spectrum to downlink and uplink, uplink would likely be slower. We see this on traditional cell networks. They dedicate as much spectrum to uplink as downlink, but their cell tower is able to better transmit than your equipment and so the downlink becomes faster. Even with so many more users downloading than uploading (and causing congestion), the downlink is usually faster.
Newer wireless networks aren't going to dedicate equal spectrum to downlink and uplink (using time-division instead of frequency division to separate downlink and uplink). Again, this isn't to be mean to you. It's just a reality that people use a lot more downlink bandwidth than uplink. Starlink isn't immune from that reality.
Elon Musk has already said that they should be able to hit 500,000 customers, but that scaling to millions of customers will be difficult. They're going to have to cap how many people get service in an area and/or put in network management to make sure that some users don't use up all the bandwidth from others nearby.
They're also going to need to focus on downlink capacity to serve what users need. That doesn't mean unusable uplink. As you noted, 10-25Mbps uplink is an important improvement. But wireless internet options (including Starlink) will need to balance that with the downlink capacity users need.
> We could have paid $5,000 per house to lay it ourself but our own neighborhood couldn't come to consensus on that
Over 10 years, that's $42/mo. Over 20 years, $21/mo. That's non-trivial if the solution to your internet woes might just be a couple years away. It's probably one of the big reasons why wired companies won't want to be spending money expanding networks in suburban/rural areas. Let's say that you invest in a network expansion and you expect to make it back over the next 20 years. Then 3 years into your investment, Starlink, T-Mobile, and Verizon are all offering home internet service to your customers. Sure, your fiber network might be "better", but that will only attract some users. Others might get a package deal from their wireless carrier giving them a better price. Now you go from having 90% of households to 50% of households and the investment that you made probably won't work out. For most people, 100Mbps is plenty. Sure, some people love the low-ping times of fiber and love gigabit speeds. People like us here on HN. For most people, they want to be able to use Netflix/YouTube/Facebook/etc. and there's going to be a lot of competition for that market.
> Now imagine that at a national level
Realistically, this already exists on the national level in that we spend billions subsidizing rural connections. Starlink is receiving lots of government money to provide rural internet. I think a big question is whether Starlink is looking to grow well beyond what the government will subsidize and whether government subsidies will flow to other companies more. I'm sure that AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon are all looking at what rural internet subsidies might come their way as they launch rural home internet.
We do have some political will to fix the situation, but it's a very expensive situation to fix for a lot of rural areas in a wired way. Should people in cities subsidize suburban/rural lifestyles? As a country, we pour money into roads, low fuel prices (even as climate change ravages the planet), rural telecommunications, etc. If every home in your area is on 2 acres of land, it's going to cost more to wire up the place, it's going to cost more to get roads everywhere, it's going to use more fuel to get from place to place.
We do spend a lot making rural internet happen. It's just an expensive proposition. Heck, Starlink is very expensive at a $550 startup cost + $100/mo. That isn't cheap competition to wired internet - and that's after large government subsidies that might end up being $2,000 per user. Starlink has received $900M in federal money and Elon Musk is hoping to serve 500,000 users so that would be $1,800 per user from the government. That's not the $5,000 your service provider wanted to extend fiber, but it's still a lot of money. Plus, Starlink is likely to be getting more federal money in the future (and they might end up serving a couple million users).
There is political will and we've spent incredible amounts of money over many decades and continue to spend even more. It's just hard to serve many rural areas. If one is in an area with 5 people per square mile, that's a lot of wire for very few users. Wireless/satellite might make the most sense since installing one thing could serve hundreds or thousands of users. Even 20-50 people per square mile can be a lot of work to wire up.
While wireless home internet is in its infancy right now, I'd expect it to get a lot better over the next 5 years. As you noted, your neighbor installed a 20-foot mount to get better reception. T-Mobile Home Internet customers are rigging up directional antennas mounted on the outside of their homes to get better speeds. Given that people install satellite dishes for TV, it seems very reasonable that we'll see wireless antennas installed to offer internet service. Again, when something is in its infancy, there are less options and it's less fully realized. But that will change over time.
I think the next 5 years will be an exciting time for home internet. I don't think that Starlink is going to be doing most of the exciting stuff and I don't think we'll see symmetrical connections, but I think we'll see great stuff that will bring better connections to people who need it and will bring competition to the marketplace to prevent monopoly providers from taking advantage of their customers.
My new neighbors are increasingly tech TLAs as the former generation sells their homes off for 2-3x what they paid 20+ years ago. Median house price in my neighborhood is ~$1.1M ATM.
> Applying this strategy to a micro data set from England between 1995 and 2010 we find a significantly positive effect, but diminishing returns to speed.
I think it is difficult to overestimate how much other rural internet providers have over-promised for their federal $$. I know that in my area (northwestern Montana), a variety of ISP's have received rural internet funds, and it seems like a fair bit of money has been spent on very little additional high-speed coverage. There are many towns from 350 - 2000 population that are under-served, even with a lot of federal subsidy (I'm told the local telco removed internet capacity from our town of 400 to provide it to a nearby school system. I know that if I pay $5K to get a telephone wire to my house, I can have dial-tone, but not internet, not because of distance, but because of capacity limits.) Perhaps when those ISP's applied for their grants, they simply underestimated the costs.
Regardless, we do have Starlink, and it is transformative.
Southwest Montana here: your situation sounds much worse than ours. I did have to build my own Wisp to get service to my home but in town there is decent HFC and fiber loop if you can afford it. I'm curious if you know for sure that you have regional backhaul capacity limits. I ask because I hear stories from local people here, including folks who should be better informed because they work in city planning, about limited connectivity. Their picture of the connectivity situation is wildly innacurate, in part because providers don't disclose the details of their installed plant.
My understanding is that the local telco (centurylink) would just as soon not be here. It certainly seems unwilling to make the investment necessary to provide more connectivity. Some smaller communities have limited fiber (Babb, St Mary) but there is none in East Glacier and Browning.
I see. So those towns are still microwave-fed? Around here I don't think we have any towns left that are microwave-fed. Gardiner had backhaul fiber installed a few years back. That was the last connectivity hole I'm aware of in this area.
> So the last mile and a half is copper from 20 years ago
In the UK, BTs 'fibre' rollout is almost exclusively FTTC and then copper phone lines after that. My parents have a phone line from 35 years ago, and the cabinet is maybe half a mile away, but they can get 50 Mbit down (I can't remember upload, maybe around 15 Mbit). The provider rolled this out a lot quicker than ADSL (we never got ADSL2), so I assume it's technically not that complicated.
The New Zealand government invested ~ £750 million into fibre to the premises infrastructure, in partnership with other companies. About 80% of NZ homes have access, with say half of those actually using it, but percentage is growing. Usable plans are about £40 per month. In my city you can’t sign up to a cable connection, even if the house is already wired up for it. I belive you even have trouble signing up for copper, because the infrastructure companies just don’t want to support it. The main competitor left is mobile, although I would love to see StarLink be available here.
Yup, I used to have 1Gbps in Auckland with fiber right up into the house, moved to central London and I could get...a 10Mbps plan...that only delivered 4. Fortunately out in the suburbs now I can get up to 330.
There are a lot more people in the UK though, housing is much denser and people are very resistant to change; it's easier to rip up the ground in NZ bc our country has only existed for 150 years, in the UK it's a lot harder with all sorts of caveats/consents.
Same as covid: Jacinda did an excellent job, but at the same time as a realistic kiwi, it's very true that NZ has a very small, spread out population and the benefit of being small and extremely southerly, international travel just isn't as prevalent there as say, Europe.
About 15% of that Openreach rollout is Fibre to the Premises. Overall about a quarter of UK homes can get FTTP/FTTH either from Openreach or another provider. A lot more in Northern Ireland, somewhat less in Scotland.
However actual usage is quite different. If your Internet seems fine, why would you buy a more expensive service that claims to be "faster"? In my city Toob are trying to aggressively acquire customers for FTTP with a price they're presumably losing money on, but I don't expect that to last.
The technology for a setup like your parents is either VDSL or G.fast. Near to their old (perhaps slightly battered) green BT cabinet is a newer one, the newer one has fibre to it, and a DSLAM, the DSLAM ties to the old cabinet with copper, and so only that "maybe half a mile away" distance is covered by the DSL technology, from there it's fibre.
I think nearly 100% chance we'll get at least ~1T in infra spending on the 'hard' stuff which includes broadband. But that cost makes me wonder is it worth it when we could instead support efforts like Starlink?
Or build a government run version. though while lots of good reasons to - e.g. low rates, free access for kids etc - letting Gov own even more of our internet is probably not great.
I'm typing this message from Starlink. For me it's absolutely transformative; 10x the bandwidth I can get from any other source and very reliable.
Except for outages related to obstructions. That's a real problem and the author's situation is not good. There's ways to work around it on your property; a taller mount, a tree install, cutting some trees. But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it.
I have some smaller obstructions for my install and it was a little annoying but fine. But in the past week or two it's gotten way better: my packet loss went from 2% to 0.6%. Details here: https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improve...
huh. perhaps I'm exhibiting my total ignorance here, but why do they have to point North?
I know that our Satellite TV dish when I was a kid had to point to a specific angle southwards, to match the geostationary position, but I'd not expect that with Starlink, unless you were in the Falklands or Antarctica, or something?
It's a purposeful choice to avoid interfering with radio bandwidth allocations to existing geostationary satellites. As I understand it, Starlink dishes aren't allowed to send signals to a portion of the sky around the equator where the geostationary satellites are located.
Starlink would probably work even better if they didn't have to deal with this restriction, but Starlink might not have been allowed to exist if they didn't design it to work this way.
First to clarify; Starlink points north in the northern hemisphere.
Your satellite TV dish is talking to something 36,000km up in geosynchronous orbit, around the equator. That's to the south of you.
Starlink are in 550km orbits moving very fast around the planet in a fairly inclined orbit. As another commenter has said, the apparent effect is the cluster tends to "hang out" in the north. It's complicated, a good visualization should help explain it. I don't have one at my fingertips.
Mm, i appreciate the basics there, but if you look at the spread of satellites against latitude (eg https://satellitemap.space/ ), it's pretty consistent so without any outside reason, I'd expect the Starlink dish to simply point up across most of the world, away from the poles.
coder543's answer elsewhere here seems to furnish the remainder of my confusion.
The radius at a northern latitude is smaller than at the equator, so the satellites are more tightly clustered.
I think coder543's answer is wrong, or at least has the causality backwards. Those geosync orbits are very, very far away from the LEO orbits of Starlink.
I'm assuming that at 550 miles up, the beneath-the-horizon range will be quite broad, but as equally, I'd assume further-off satellites to be slower and more conflicted, given the density and interference presumably increases.
I just don't see how - sans external requirement - pointing up isn't more efficient.
- ed. Ok, sorry, I get it. Aim in any direction and you have access to more satellites, even if further away. Pointing up isn't 180º access. Reception is probably less than 90º, I guess? My bad, I'm dumb.
> But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it.
I don't know much about radio or Starlink's signals, but is this a situation where a strategically-placed radio reflector would help? Assuming those are a thing. So like, a reflector mounted on both sides of a large tree. Are the signal beams too narrow for this to matter?
My Starlink experience has gotten a lot better recently. In the past few months.
I'm in rural Arkansas, near the southern edge of the rollout still I believe. I have maintained 3 ISPs this whole time. I have an EM160R LTE modem that will do 5x carrier aggregation and pulls around 240-250 mbit from my local AT&T tower. I also have T-Mobile's 4g home internet (5g works here on my phone, but they won't give me the home internet for whatever reason) which pulls 100-115 mbit. Starlink itself is somewhere between 180 and 240 down, but only 15 up. On the ATT line I can get 40-60 mbit upload, and that's one of the main reasons I keep things set up this way.
I'm about to try disabling the wan port for T-Mobile to see what it's like without that ISP. I don't do any connection bonding - straight up round robin load balancing with no stickyness, and with the amount of servers and services that use multiple TCP streams I can see 300+mbit downloads often. Pings range from 30 (when using Starlink) to 90. (when using one of the LTE connections)
I no longer game enough to comment on it. My kids play Roblox and PS4 online games and don't whine about it, so I think it's sufficient.
I don't really do Zoom meetings. MS Teams is what we use. I don't use the camera very often, but the calls will pause and drop and the people I work with have coined this as, "being Starlinked". Usually a few seconds and rarely does it take an actual redial to reconnect anymore. Just a dead period.
I'm in Ontario, Canada, 46.5 degrees latitude and typing this on Starlink.
Even with the occasional dropouts Starlink is 10-100x better than any other option that we have here (the only options are LTE, or other satellites, like xplornet).
Even though we're only a few minutes drive from a municipality of 160,000 people and on a major highway, there, is no wired connection, and doesn't really seem likely that a wired connection will ever happen. Since moving here 7 years ago the pricing/data rates for the LTE data packages available have doubled in price. Literally doubled.
With Covid we had two adults working from home, and two kids home schooling, on a slow LTE connection with a total bandwidth of 100GB up/down. Even things like windows updates required planning and rationing of the internet.
The state of connectivity in Canada is so abysmal. At this point I hope Starlink matures enough to add a voice service.
This adds some color perhaps to the argument that this is for underserviced regions -- they don't mean third-world or impoverished even though it sounds like that, at least when I heard people defending Starlink.
It's a little less than a modern efficient fridge (2-3 kWh/day). I used to have 100W light bulbs in the house, so it's not a crazy amount of power, but it's most significant to anyone planning on using Starlink 'off-grid', since it's a lot more than just a little 4G or 5G hotspot, or a standard DSL or Cable modem and router.
I should be more specific: an efficient 'USA-megahome-sized' fridge. Our typical fridge is often 25-35 cubic feet (850 litre)... that's about double the size of the small fridges used in many parts of the world.
Anyone know if Starlink is happy turning off and on again throughout the day?
I know we are all used to 24 hour internet, but if I were energy-conscious or off-grid, I might want to turn it on for 3-4 half-hour sessions during the day.
I tested it a few times (putting in stow mode, turning off while I was rebuilding network rack, etc.), and it always picked back up within 2-4 minutes.
I know a few people who have Starlink on an outlet timer or WiFi switched outlet, and only have it run during the day. It seems to be okay with that.
Yes, 2.4kw in a day is a lot. I was hoping to switch to it from tethered cell service for my off-grid cabin. (I need 24/7 for security cameras), but it looks like I won't be able to without a substantial solar and battery addition.
Is this power requirement just because the hardware hasn't had a chance for years of iteration or is it a "hard" requirement that no amount of product iteration can fix?
In other words is it 100W all the time because of physics or is it just "sub optimal" hardware that in theory can be mitigated through smarter protocols and fancier hardware?
The "all the time"-part is of course something that can be worked on even without changing the hardware. A simple switch on the outlet to turn it off during the night or if everybody is at work/school and thus doesn't need it would reduce power consumption a lot already.
"Fancier hardware" could also mean a timer for the outlet switch or a "smart home"-solution. This could mitigate connection time by turning the router back on before you arrive at home/wake-up.
There's a lot of potential for not having to use 100W all the time without hardware changes.
Presuming that a large part of those 100 W go to the power amps for uplink transmissions, it seems that it should be possible to make at least that part scale with how much outgoing data the terminal is actually sending. But that may require new hardware, and it may conflict with the ambition of reducing cost per unit.
Talking to a satellite in space through the atmosphere has a lot of attenuation. That's for the physics.
For comparison, wifi is 0.03W for 100 meters, mobile phones are 2W for 35km range. A satellite using 100W is not out of the ordinary.
There's a balance to decide on, power vs bandwidth, noting that doubling power has little effect on signal (log2). They could probably half the power for little difference in operation, but a notable difference on the bill.
It's exactly the sort of thing that should be adjustable, there could be a setting to adjust power/bandwidth/quality. Both for customers and for support.
edit: the video mentions up to 300 Mbps and up to 200W power consumption during snow (extra power to melt the snow). They have a lot of margin to reduce power while still being able to watch YouTube 4k.
It would cost me about £11/month to run. For context, I currently pay ~£80/month for electricity (UK average is ~£60[1]). Not prohibitive, but it's a pretty sizeable increase. When you consider I can get 4G connectivity[2] for £22/month, with significantly less power consumption,, it doesn't seem that attractive unless you have no other options.
100W is a couple of light bulbs. It's not nothing, but it's not all that much. It'd be challenging off-grid, but not a concern anywhere with electrical infrastructure.
No, it’s ONE incandescent bulb.
And much less than the bulbs that were needed to light a fairly large room.
We used to have a lot of 100W lights until not many years ago, honestly I don’t see the problem in spending that amount of energy if you have no other means to access a fast internet connection.
A more durable reference comparison: 100W is similar to a human. An adult human, not exercising heavily, but not asleep, maybe reading a book, or talking to a friend, something in that ballpark.
Also, if you aren't off-grid, you're apparently not so far from civilisation that previous utility suppliers couldn't be bothered to provide service to you. Maybe if this generation's utility suppliers got their act together you wouldn't need Starlink anyway.
To be clear, electrical rates are much different in different parts of the country. At my house in the suburbs outside St. Louis, MO, the cost is about $9/month. Not nothing, but not too significant compared to the total cost of the service.
Many places are tiered, so if you go above a certain kW/h the rate doubles or triples. Cali and parts of NY state are like that (never lived anywhere else tho).
It totally can make sense in third world improved regions, just not in homes (and/or possibly not on all the time). You could pretty easily run a small business off of 100 mb down, 50 up, and in that setting, you can probably power it with a small solar panel and just turn it off at night.
A "small" solar panel? A 100W solar panel is 2 x 3 ft (.60m x .90m). You'd need multiple panels even if you run it only during the day, because fixed solar doesn't just go from 0% to 100% once the sun rises.
Solar technology, including the footprint is advancing rapidly. I believe there are panels that can do much higher wattage around that size. Your point stands though. “Small” is a relative term.
> Solar technology, including the footprint is advancing rapidly.
Is it, though? The price drops have been significant, yes, but the efficiency of COTS panels hasn't seen any dramatic improvements in the past 20 years. Silicon panels have a theoretical limit of 29% efficiency and current models are close to 20%. There's not much room for improvement left there.
You would need 1 standard 400 watt solar panel ($250) plus batteries and inverter ($???) to power starlink 24 hours a day in this mythical zero power area that you all seem to be worried about.
A 400Wp panel won't be able to provide 400W most of the time to begin with. Unless you're in the middle of a desert near the equator and have a sun-tracking installation, weather and varying daylight hours are a thing.
Under realistic conditions, a single 400W panel gets you between half and two thirds of the required power (e.g. up to ~1.5kWh/day, depending on location).
Just a quick reminder: 400Wp means the panel produces 400W of electricity when brand new (it'll degrade over time), at 23°C ambient temperature and an incident angle of 0° (i.e. sun directly over it). None of that is generally the case 8h a day on average, which is why your estimation won't work.
Depending on where you live, optimal sun hours vary between 3.5h/day and 6.5/day (continental US) or 2.9/h/day to 5.9h/day (most of Europe) [0].
You'd also need to plan for big batteries, since seasonal differences may be huge depending on latitude.
A reliable 100W solar installation is indeed non-trivial especially at higher latitudes. Source: typing this on a packets routed via a solar powered relay site on a mountain. Our site only needs ~20W.
My office has 5kW of panel hung, 10kWh of battery, and my Starlink terminal is on the house system (grid tied) because an extra 2.4kWh/day isn't workable with my system in the winter, short of a LOT of generator time - I'm severely power limited during inversions, and the Starlink dish more than doubles my office's "idle power draw" (it's the property network hub, one of our internet connections, inverter idle, sleeping computers, etc).
Yesterday, the 15.9kWh system on the house produced 78kWh for a "sun factor" of about 4.9, so a 400W panel would produce about 2 kWh. Whoops. That's not 2.4.
In the dead of winter, the same system can produce 2.5 kWh - yes, 2.5 kWh on a 15.9kW nameplate system. A 400W panel won't even power on the charge controller in those conditions.
To reliably power a 100W load, 24/7, in most areas, requires probably 1500-2000W of panel and 20+kWh of battery - or someone willing to light a generator, which is the far cheaper option. But "a 400W panel and batteries" (implied as a trivial thing to set up) definitely won't. It won't even run it 24/7 in peak sun most of the year.
... and that's before it tries to melt the snow off. From the blog post:
> During the heavy snowfall, Dishy quickly spiked up to 125W, peaking at 175W towards the end of the snowstorm.
Solar panels don't produce much covered in snow, either.
You are probably technically correct, but most people don't need 24hr internet access, so that one 400 watt panel would provide high speed internet for let's say 12 hours a day and that's plenty for this odd scenario of living in a place with no power but still needing high speed internet.
The claim was 24/7 powering with "a 400W panel and some batteries" - which is simply false.
I deal with the realities of off-grid power in my office on a daily basis, and a vast majority of what's written about solar and batteries by people who don't have experience with them is simply wrong. I try to correct it where I can.
With a 400W panel and a few kWh of batteries, you could reasonably accomplish 14-16 hours of access during peak sun in the summer, 8-12 hours in spring and fall, and 0-3 hours in winter, except for 5-6 hours on sunny winter days.
Although I've heard that the newer Dishys use somewhat less power (50-70W), which does improve things.
Ah the joys of hiking 1000ft up a mountain in subzero temps through 4' drifts to clear ice off the panels. Although, for the most part I've found that provided you pitch the panels at 50 degrees or so, snow tends to slide off. The battery system has to be able to carry the load through 48h of zero panel output at least to let snow clear. In 20 years I've only had to physically clear ice off the panels three times.
It will depend somewhat on the area, and you can trade panel area for battery pack capacity to a reasonable extent - but you either need a lot of panel area to power you on dark days, or you need a lot of battery to ride through those periods. Out here, at least, we'll have a week where my 5kW of panel on my office produces less than 1kWh/day, often rather significantly less.
The problem is that after 48h, then... what do you have? You need to have either enough panel area to both run loads and charge the batteries, often in dim conditions, or you need a lot more battery.
Doing reliable off grid power takes a lot more than most people who haven't dealt with it assume, especially if you're dealing with serious winters and don't want to light a generator.
I'm basing my estimates off what it would require for me to run 2.4kWh/day, year round, without generator, on my office system - and it takes a LOT. I have 5kW of panel, 10kWh of battery, a typical winter day load of around 3kWh (base loads + minimal compute loads for a work day), and I still require a couple gallons a year of gas to run this reliably. Depending on the winter, I go through 3-5 gallons of propane for heat as well, though I've been trying to move to kerosene - more efficient, as I can run a lantern as a combined heat/light plant on my desk, and heat my hands, which are the only real constraint on cold temperature work in there.
I know those numbers sound somewhat nonsensical for a 100W load, but I literally make a living in an off-grid office...
How on Earth you would need 20+kWh of batteries for a system that even run 24/7 uses 2.4 kWh? And absolutely doesn’t make sense to run it 24/7, even when no one is using it, if you are running it off grid.
Gotta remember the double whammy here. Starlink is mostly rolled out at higher latitudes where solar power is less effective. Still, solar is cheaper than utility power most of the time. Might need 1.5 of those panels. Maybe I'm crazy, but I wouldn't consider off-grid unless I had like a 5KWh array at a minimum. Probably with wood burning stove as primary heating source if I really couldn't expand that solar for electric heating due to cost.
With heat inverter pump tech. taking over fridges, water heaters, AC, etc. and making them so much more efficient, it can give a lot of headroom on energy requirements.
Only if you live in the Sahara. Panels are rated for power they produce at 1,000W/m2 irradiance, in UK average is 100W, that panel will produce 40W on average.
I think they're averaging throughout the year, using the number of "Mean Annual Sunshine Hours" * "Percent Possible Sunshine", which would account for average cloud cover and such.
I'm sure that for a few hours during the summer, the solar irradiance in London is probably 90% of what it is at the equator. That doesn't help most of the year.
That's interesting to see with knowing that just a fraction of the planned constellation is there. That's a lot of dots already. I'm guessing that the few visible string of dots are more recent launches that haven't quite reached their final positions yet. That's also interesting to see how long it takes the train to not be a train any longer, while at the same time showing how frequently new launches have been occurring.
I believe the constellation is about 90-95% complete now. The first shell at least. There's plans for more shells but that's for redundancy, not coverage.
I think the laser interlinks are proving more difficult than SpaceX anticipated. I had expected them much earlier in the deployment than now, and it seems they are currently only planning them for polar orbits.
I think they need quite a lot of satellites in polar orbits to get coverage at the poles, and they have barely launched any yet. They are close to 100% coverage of the rest of the world already though.
Well, 9/10 is still a fraction, just not as small as I thought it was. ;-) I must have fallen behind on launches, not realizing they were this far along.
At least for the short lines, they're launched in batches from one point, so they take some time to spread out to their final orbits. These are neat to view after a launch.
Some of the comments here are kind of ridiculous. They are complaining (or just pointing out) issues that are EXPECTED at this stage of the beta.
Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit now. Of course there are going to be temporarily blips in service plus the random longer dropouts during system upgrades.
Even with the current issues, the service is revolutionary in the remote areas that it's intended to service. Why Geerling thinks it's appropriate to compare beta starlink to his home cable/fiber service is beyond me. It's totally fair to review the current state of starlink, but to then conclude that "I don't love it" because it's not as good as his cable service is just plain dumb.
Why did you even begin the review with the expectation that it could be better than your land service in it's current beta form? You're not even supposed to be on the starlink service if you have great landline bandwidth and starlink should block you from their service as you're stealing bandwidth from people who don't have access to high speed internet.
One person even said "I hope they can figure out why it drops occasionally" as if some of the smartest people on the earth don't know exactly why it drops out. It drops because the satellite mesh network is only 4% complete!
I mean, Starlink is available as a closed beta commercial product. There's nothing wrong with comparing it in its current form to cable service in its current form, especially if you're going to pay $$$ for it.
The point is for the reader to figure out if they should try Starlink right now (if eligible) or if they should wait for some of these issues to be resolved.
To put it another way: would you complain that reviewers were judging Google Glass unfairly, because Google had grandiose plans for it in the future (that ultimately never happened)? Or would you recognize that Google made the decision to sell Google Glass in its current form, and thus accepted that it would be judged against its competitors?
It's totally fair to review the current state of a beta service. It could be informative for people who are unsure if they want to try the beta-service.
But to compare it as an equal, in it's beta form, against a service that it's not even built to compete against is just plain dumb. If you already have access to high speed internet, starlink it not intended for you.
His final comment about "Liking, but not loving starlink" implies that he's comparing starlink to cable internet as equal competitors. They are not and they are not intended to be and that's even considering the fact that starlink is in beta.
This guy should not even be allowed on starlink (in the long run) because he already has access to high speed internet.
This whole comment section is full of stupidity like:
"isn't 100watts a lot of power?" <-- typed from gaming computer with a 1000watt power supply
"what about space garbage, isn't space garbage bad" <-- as if LEO garbage won't just decay back to earth
"will starlink be like FSD and maybe never get delivered" <-- as if they are related issues, they are not
"I don't like Elon" <- because reasons, but also irrelevant
"starlink bad because worky less good when obstructed" <-- too dumb for words
"i'm worried about the starlink monopoly" <-- you should be banned from the internet
> "isn't 100watts a lot of power?" <-- typed from gaming computer with a 1000watt power supply
This feels like a bit of an unfair dismissal. I'm using a laptop that rarely goes above 30W (and is off half off the time), so I'm not sure you can make that assumption. A 1000W power supply also doesn't mean it's using that continually - a GPU can consume >300W under load, but drop to around 10W when it's idle. Further, 100W 24/7 would add around 12-13% to my power bill (which is already above average) - it is a noticeable amount of power.
> This guy should not even be allowed on starlink (in the long run) because he already has access to high speed internet.
I don't plan on owning it in the long run—I'm going to be giving the dish to my cousin who's on a farm with slow rural DSL once Starlink is available in her area.
Unfortunately right now Starlink's available in suburban St. Louis but not in most of the rural communities around it :P
> "isn't 100watts a lot of power?" <-- typed from gaming computer with a 1000watt power supply
A gaming computer with a 1000 watt power supply will reastically have a 50W idle load. It's only if the CPU and GPU are fully utilized (like in a gaming scenario) that it might draw several hundreds of Watts.
> Starlink has like 1700 of the planned 42,000 satellites in orbit now.
I'm not sure if anyone believes that 42k number. They are launching ~60 satellites at a time - that would mean ~700 launches. There is no way that will be economical for the relative handful of people (500k? 1-2M?) who could realistically be interested in this.
Not to mention, the lifespan of these satellites in orbit is tiny, just a few years. They would have to be constantly launching new satellites to keep up.
The current state is probably more or less the best Starlink will ever offer - as more people will join the network, coming closer to Musk's 500k number, bandwidth will significantly diminish, even if the number of satellites is maybe doubled.
And if federal funds dry up, I expect the whole venture will quickly go bankrupt, or remain alive with a handful of satellites and a huge price spike.
Hold onto your hat then: in the US alone there are at least 20M people without high-speed internet access [1]. Around 45% of the entire world's population [2] still doesn't have internet access - at all, not just broadband.
They've said starship, when operational, will be able to deliver 400 starlink satellites to orbit at a time. The plan doesn't sound far fetched.
The vast majority of these people will not be able to afford a 1500$ satellite dish (that's how much it costs to build the thing, even though they sell it for 500$ for now) + 100$/month internet.
And why should one assume the cost once deployed in the millions will equal the cost while in beta with 60k users? There's another comment here already mentioning their prediction of a $300 cost for the dish in the future, you can only expect the subscription to go down as well.
Plus, the places where Starlink is the most useful - rural areas - already have sky high costs. I just looked up what service looks like in Brazil: ~R$400/month (US$76) for 20mbps, with a 80GB data cap. When you have to buy the dish it costs over R$10k (~US$2000). This is the best you can get.
According to them, the satellites have a maximum life span in orbit of 5 years. They can launch 60 satellites at a time, at a cost of 50M$ per launch. So they need to spend ~1.4 billion dollars every five years just to keep the constellation at its current size, ignoring the cost of the satellites, ground stations etc. If they have 500k customers, that means that each customer must pay ~50$/month just to pay for the cost of keeping the satellites in orbit.
Add ground station costs, internet bandwidth, satellite production, dish production, customer service, personnel costs, R&D and you'll quickly see that the current prices are much below what is required to be profitable. Even if they have 5M customers (very hard to do in 5 years time), I wouldn't be hopeful for their prospects of not going under.
Of course, they may well survive on government handouts.
Edit to add: the bottom 45% who don't currently have access to high speed internet are unlikely to afford even a 300$ dish and an expensive data plan. The price of current plans is one of the main reasons why they don't have access in the first place.
$50M is the launch cost for SpaceX customers. Musk has said in an interview that the marginal cost of a reused Falcon 9 launch is $15 million. That means even the tiny subscriber base they have at the moment is already paying a significant chunk of the launches.
That would make your numbers $420m every five years, or $84 million a year - slighly more than your average telecom CEO compensation.
But the goal for starship is $2m per launch. Let's assume that is bullshit and go for $10M instead, and only 300 satellites per launch. That's already down to ~$10M/year to maintain the entire constellation. Now you have room for all the other costs you mention. If they reach the stated goals, it will cost peanuts... you can see where this is going. Starship will be a ridiculous leap in launch costs if it comes to fruition.
The max capacity for the network, once at 42k satellites, is estimated to be around 50M people worldwide. Plus, you could have a downlink shared, say, among 50 people and spread the cost - 1-10mbps is still miles beyond 'no internet access'.
You might think the plan is crazy, but the math checks out.
If this whole thing works, they could charge $10/month and be in the green - the satellites themselves will be the cheapest part of the whole system. No rent, no right of way, no construction, no maintenance work, free energy and extremely low material costs.
> Musk has said in an interview that the marginal cost of a reused Falcon 9 launch is $15 million.
Musk has said many things in interviews that have little to do with reality. Even if that number is true launch costs are more than the rocket itself. Even if we accepted the number, to make economic sense, they would have to get more value from 60 satellites than the $35M of profit they would make on each launch if they were launching commercialy.
> But the goal for starship is $2m per launch. Let's assume that is bullshit and go for $10M instead, and only 300 satellites per launch.
Prices for rockets similar to Starship are in the $150-200M range, so that is more the ballpark I expect from Starship, if it does fly. Perhaps it can go down to as low as 75-100M range, half the current cost of similar rockets! $10M is fantasy.
Not to mention, they are already being accused of breaking environmental regulations and other problems, so it wouldn't be surprising if launch costs actually go up if they are to maintain compliance.
> Prices for rockets similar to Starship are in the $150-200M range, so that is more the ballpark I expect from Starship
Why would they even develop this new vehicle if it turns out more expensive than Falcon 9, or Falcon 9 Heavy? That would not make any sense. Plus those rockets are not reusable.
$2M is the fantasy, I already added 400% to account for skepticism. Starship is not a conventional launch vehicle, it's designed for full reusability with a turnaround time measured in hours (vs the current 14-50 days for a Falcon 9 refurb), like an airplane. Land, refuel, safety checks, fly again.
> Why would they even develop this new vehicle if it turns out more expensive than Falcon 9, or Falcon 9 Heavy? That would not make any sense. Plus those rockets are not reusable.
They are making a bigger rocket and making it reusable. The bigger the rocket, the more expensive the launch. For Starship the price per ton should be smaller than for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, but that doesn't mean it should be expected to be cheaper in absolute terms than much smaller rockets.
> $2M is the fantasy, I already added 400% to account for skepticism.
You're still talking about a price that would be a hundred times better per ton than any other rocket in history. Allow me to be extremely skeptical, please. Musk's arbitrary promises do not set a benchmark for me - he has been known to lie through his teeth about things like hyperloop, FSD, Neuralink, Starship earth to earth, and timelines in general.
And on the same note, what Starship is theoretically designed to do and what it will actually do when it is actually deployed may be significantly different things.
There is no other fully reusable rocket similar to starship (or even different, it doesn’t simply exist). Please stop inventing numbers and lying.
And for your information starship already fled and landed and there is an orbital launch attempt likely in the next 2-4 months.
I'm talking about the costs for launching a rocket of similar size. And note that for Falcon 9, the difference in price for new rockets VS reused boosters is 62M -> 50M, not an almost hundred fold decrease.
Reply, because I can't edit: so far, only the second stage stage of Starship has been flown. The SuperHeavy booster has not yet been flown at all,nevermind successfully landing, and ditto for the two-stage system.
To add on the costs (yeah I have nothing better to do)
- ground station: must be negligible compared to everything else. They are literally planting giant routers out in a farm, need to pay rent, power and cabling to an exchange. Zero other infrastructure costs
- internet bandwidth: despite Netflix's attempts, ISPs have peering agreements that are usually free, as does Starlink
- satellite production: nobody knows, but they have said the payload is cheaper than the launch, so somewhere between $250-500k each at start
- customer service: online only, seems like the dish is self-diagnosing, will likely end up being much lower than traditional broadband
> - ground station: must be negligible compared to everything else. They are literally planting giant routers out in a farm, need to pay rent, power and cabling to an exchange. Zero other infrastructure costs
Fair enough, though you're neglecting the costs for building this all over the world, if they want to get access to any size of market.
> - internet bandwidth: despite Netflix's attempts, ISPs have peering agreements that are usually free, as does Starlink
Actually, according to Cloudlflare[0], you still need to buy a significant amount of traffic through transit agreements - cloud flare pays for 40% of its traffic in Europe (at a price they don't disclose), 60% in the USA (same price as in Europe), 40% in Asia (at 7 times the European price), 10% in Africa (at 14 times European price), 40% in South America (at 17 times European price), and 50% in Oceania (at 17 times European price). Only the Middle East region is 100% peered for them.
So the cost to actually deliver internet is definitely not going to be 0.
> - satellite production: nobody knows, but they have said the payload is cheaper than the launch, so somewhere between $250-500k each at start
So that is another 15M$ per launch at their declared aspirational cost (or an extra 100M$ per launch if you believe the Starship numbers). Just maintaing the entire constellation today would cost ~100M$/year, assuming almost all satellites reach their 5 year life span (current failure rate is 6% after one year).
> - customer service: online only, seems like the dish is self-diagnosing, will likely end up being much lower than traditional broadband
You can't sell online only customer support for access to the Internet if you want to reach any kind of realistic market. Furthermore, customer service more broadly includes delivery, sales, marketing, training materials; and this will be required all over the world, since they must target customers in remote places with little or no acces to the internet today.
Fair points. Though I’m not sure cloudflare is a good reference - they are a content provider and will pay for a competitive advantage (latency). The post mentions 50% of their costs come from 6% of traffic, they could simply choose to not pay for transit and let these be rerouted elsewhere.
Once Starlink has the satellite “mesh” operational they would probably become a tier-1 ISP and have zero transit costs. Maybe even sell traffic to other ISPs.
Sure, that's a good point, and the Cloudflare article is from 2016, so the market may have advanced as well.
On the other hand, unless they somehow get the laser communication working, which is still a research problem despite their optimism, they have way too high latency to act as a tier 1 ISP - all traffic currently goes consumer - 1 satellite - ground station - Internet.
Your math is way off. 50M subs with the coverage over land and total bandwidth will put their provisioning rate (Bps/sub) way below even the Geo satellite providers. They need to charge a lot more or provide slower service by having more people.
And that’s assuming next generations will not improve downlink speeds. It does assume satellites would be fully utilized which is wrong unless we populate the oceans, but that’s the theoretical max.
That's the entire point. They're mostly over the ocean/areas without high-paying customers 70-90% of the time. Because of that, it would be more like (in the best case):
42k sats@20G * 0.2 * 5 million subs target = 33Mbps/sub. However, that's not even close to realistic either because the high-paying subs are in the US and parts of Europe only, and you can't keep piling 42k satellites in the same plane. So in reality, that will be cut significantly from that.
No, there are so many wrong statements in your comment that I don’t even know from where to start.
The current cost for 60 satellites on falcon 9 is around 10M$ if I remember correctly.
From next year they will likely be able to send 400 satellites for the same price with starship and the aspirational goal is to have a cost of 2M$ per launch.
It implies a cost of ~55M$ to send 11000 satellites.
Even if they will never reach that aspirational goal it would probably cost them ~300M$ for 11k satellites and ~1B$ for 42k satellites at 10M$ per launch.
It’s perfectly feasible, you just can’t understand how starship is such a game changer.
> The current cost for 60 satellites on falcon 9 is around 10M$ if I remember correctly.
Apparently Musk is claiming 15M$. The public numbers for a launch are 3.3 times that, so even if that is pure profit, it's awfully good profit compared to what Starlink is bringing in.
> From next year they will likely be able to send 400 satellites for the same price with starship and the aspirational goal is to have a cost of 2M$ per launch.
This is based on Musk time - the likelihood of that happening in this time-line is not particularly good, given the track record of his promises. Time will tell.
The claimed 2M$ price is laughably 'aspirational'. Until I see it, I don't believe a word of it.
> It’s perfectly feasible, you just can’t understand how starship is such a game changer.
Let's wait for it to actually fly to space and back until we declare it such a game changer, ok? Musk's promises have a habit of never happening, or happening much later than claimed.
If they are able to get Strarship and the Super Heavy Booster working, which at this point in time I think is very probable, those economics will change a good bit as the cost of launch will come down a lot.
No but their community or local government can and will. Internet access has monumental positive impacts for an economy and $1500/$100month is such a small amount of money for a city or communtiy resource for the expected return. No, it's not going to be on every mud hut in the world. But starlink will definitely provide internet to millions who didn't have it before, and do a great deal of service for lifting some of those people out of poverty.
The current approved proposal is 11k satellites, the 42k satellites still doesn’t have approval if I remember correctly.
Likely from next year they will be able to send 400 satellites with a single launch using starship, that will make the 42k constellation perfectly feasible.
Starship is still in a research phase, so any clear capacity or timeline are impossible to give. The economics of 42k satellites re-launched every 5 years don't work anyway, not for the size of market they can realistically capture (remember that their main market are remote, population sparse regions - which tend to be poor).
I can bet you anything you want that they will not have anywhere near 42k satellites in orbit in the next 10 years. Perhaps in time, over a few decades, as they spend time building up a customer base, they could reach that, assuming Starship delivers on its many promises and if the service proves popular.
Yeah, they will never get to 42k, it's just marketing hype. Once they have one shell with sufficient coverage, adding new shells just tanks the economics of the constellation because of the uneven distribution of demand.
I’m in a rural area in Montana and luckily I have access to a 5G tower. My impression is if you are close to one, it’s better and cheaper than going with Starlink even if you have to pay extra money to set up an external MIMO antenna to improve your signal.
I think Starlink is useful in many areas and industries, but 5G home internet is reliable for many cases at least in the US. Starlink will do great in the South hemisphere where providers struggle even in metropolitan areas. I see that as a huge win for many as long as the prices go down as the current prices could be a barrier for not so wealthy countries.
I don't know much about Starlink, but isn't one point of Starlink that eventually it could even beat wired connections for distance latency? Ie it's a shorter and more direct trip to use Starlink to get from US West to US East, for example.
Though this is quite a ways out i imagine.
Best of all this idea works in current tech, and can get even better with future tech when Starlink starts going Satellite <-> Satellite, avoiding unnecessary land hops.
I'm interested in Starlink for all use cases, once they get more satellites up.
My understanding is that in addition to distance latency there is some non-trival amount of latency due to the use of TDMA. Unlike CDMA where everybody piles on the same spectrum at the same time, TDMA gives a timeslot to every station and you gotta wait your turn before TX/RX (this is a gross oversimplification of course).
While it doesn't add that much latency it is more than CDMA.
Not just TDMA - lasers in vacuum travel at the speed of light, but signals in optical fiber and coax copper are both 2/3 of that. This means that if (and that's still an if, not yet a when) starlink does laser between satellites it can beat terrestrial speeds.
I could see the end result being that we still do bent-pipe signaling over land and only laser interlinks for crossing oceans and for customers that pay for low ping to financial markets.
Having the lowest latency is only useful to commodity traders. There's no way Starlink can ever compete with terrestrial service on QoS in general (due to Shannon theorem). Their USP is universal availability.
5G speeds are decent but the main issue for me is caps. I’m waiting on StarLink — early signup to beta, never got in, purchased day it was available, no sign of order being fulfilled - and what I’m counting on is being able to upload large files, etc, without a cap.
Starlink will most definitely add caps, IMHO. If you have tens of millions of subscribers trying to download terabytes of video per month... yeah, that's gonna be a problem.
I'm one of the few client here in France for a few days. I moved from Paris to a quite isolated area (Vercors mountains) with only ADSL (no mobile coverage), and it's night and day, I now get between 100 Mbps and 200 mbps with 30/40 ms latency...
I don't have a lot of time with the service to give an exhaustive feedback, but for the moment I'm able to do video conferencing and call perfectly. And the setup experience is great!
No mention of this in the article, but I know someone with starlink and the router received a dhcp lease with a /10 subnet (100.64.0.0/10). I’ve got no problem with the CGNAT IP given, but found it odd the mask was a /10 and not a /31 normally seen in single device assignments like normally with PPP.
That is honestly a lot better than I expected. I think it is a game-changer for remote areas. You could build a house anywhere and still have energy (solar panels) and internet (Starlink).
This is an exceptionally good review, and (well small in the grand scheme of the worlds problems) a beautiful example of how a passionate happiest can sure goodness with the world. Thank you this is an exceptionally good review, and (while small in the grand scheme of the worlds problems) a beautiful example of how a passionate hobbiest can sure goodness with the world. Thank you!
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As a former wireless ISP architect/engineer, it's wonderful to see the leadership that Starlink is providing in LEO satellite connectivity (due to the low latency compared to geostationary). I hope the "block the sky with satellites" visual/astronomy concerns won't play out as an actual issue, because this seems like a great platform to address connectivity needs in harder-to-reach areas.
Technology is pretty solid (no comparison to FSD), order of magnitude better than previous iterations of satellite internet. The solution is still getting our collective heads out of our asses and running fiber everywhere though
@geerlingguy: Consider checking out some global latency comparisons between StarLink and cable. I believe their long-term plan is to have the satellites route traffic between themselves using space lasers rather than hit a ground station and traverse undersea cables and the like.
Not sure if they have that fully implemented yet, but might be interesting looking at the path and latency traffic to .au or Asia or Africa takes on Starlink vs cable. A couple factors may come into play: "as the crow flies" and light speed in vacuum vs glass.
The lasers are more a nice idea than a plan. It's entirely possible they are not doable with realistic technology, given the speeds and other constraints of space, even in LEO. They are certainly not going to be there in the near future, anyway.
Not just an idea anymore. They've started experimenting with it since last year. Gwynne Shotwell said in April that third generation, yes third generation, of laser intersatellite links would be launched in "the next few months":
If Dishy can do beamforming to have a radio signal hit a fast moving satellite several hundred kilometers away, in space -- then couldn't two or more Dishies be repurposed/reprogrammed -- to create point-to-point line-of-sight terrestrial Internet links -- a wireless mesh network -- on the ground -- covering long distances?
You know, if there's ever a Zombie Apocalypse -- and Starlink for whatever reason, becomes unavailable...
Of course, we hope it never happens... but it seems like two or more repurposed Dishies -- would make a great Internet bridge (or wireless mesh segment) over long line-of-sight distances -- on the ground...
Also, multiple dishies in space, at different distances from the Earth, acting as repeaters -- might make a great future way to get Internet (and other space-related communications) to the Moon or Mars or beyond...
> Most well-known apps like Netflix, FaceTime, and Zoom, handled things well without any incident. It was really the apps and services that are obviously outsourced.
Not sure why he threw in outsourced there, but ok. I know this could be as simple as using the right library for your video chat app, but at a low level how is something like this achieved? If I establish a tcp connection with a handshake and everything and my internet connection drops or IP is changed the tcp connection gets terminated. Other than using udp is there a way to keep the tcp connection going when the IP address changes without having to establish a new connection, which takes non-trivial amount of time?
The reason I threw that in is because I've personally worked on a few of these apps, and also some of the backing APIs the apps consumed.
I know first-hand that many of the ones that suffer from weird and annoying quirks would be a thousand times better if they had any reliable QA process (most don't), and were run by teams that were invested in the company's success.
Outsourced doesn't only mean 'to other countries', but in many cases to consultancies, since for some strange reason many media companies don't see their apps as being a core competency, so they farm it out, and the results are always 2nd-tier at best.
I have Starlink at my home located in a rural area where the only alternative is DSL at ~1.0MBPS average downlink. Using Starlink made it possible to actually do interactive work from the house without tethering to my spotty LTE service or traveling to a better location. My own experience is that the service has been quite reliable (often 12 hour stretches without an outage), but I do have unobstructed views of the sky. I do find that streaming audio/video can be glitchy and I usually have some kind of audio issues.
I've had Starlink deployed for a client since mid-January or so up around the 45th parallel (near the US/Canadian border). Installed it in a brisk -20 windchill too, good times. That was kind of a best place replacement scenario even early beta, as their previous solution was a 10/2 connection that cost >$200/month, so Starlink didn't have to be stellar to beat the competition there. I was able to place it with zero obstructions. This was never used with the native router which just stayed unopened in the box, it was right into a OPNsense gateway. We left the old landline connection up for a few months with Starlink as primary and the old one as a failover. For the first month and a half or so, there were regular dropouts every day, though only for a minute or two. That noticeably dropped over the course of March, and we dumped the previous service by mid-April. Overall experience has been excellent for wireless, as good as a high quality WISP despite the much greater technical challenges. And it's continued to improve: as well as latency and uptime, bandwidth u/d has increased from around 100-130/10-30 to nearly always 220-250/30-45. At no extra price. Tell me the last time you got that from an ISP ;).
Overall experience is similar to this review, a few observations following along the review:
>Hard cable
This is annoying, but my perspective is coming from someone who does a lot of network termination and has thousands of dollars in fluke testing gear, rolls of cat8 cable and certified jacks and so on which is obviously absolutely not the norm. I needed it to go farther, but I ended up just plugging the 802.3bt injector it comes with into fiber optic anyway which thus also gave me guaranteed isolation from the rest of the network without having to worry about grounding. I suspect once it's in full service and they start to branch out they'll do a "Business Class" version or something aimed at more advanced deployments.
>Your own router
This does work fine. In order to get statistics though you'll need to static route 192.168.100.1. It's not needed for it to operate, but probably still a good idea. Lots of instructions around on the net for that. When I first set it up, IPv6 was still wonky whether you had your own router or not. Easily worked around with a permanent WireGuard tunnel for a VLAN to a cheap VPS with a static IP. Anything that needs a static IP can just get put there.
>Power consumption
Real, but as the article said in the context of rural internet pricing it's frankly fairly meaningless. Effectively means it's $105-115/month which is still so much frigging better than most options available at the speed that it's plenty competitive. If we had fiber we'd use it, but we don't.
>Latency
Where that will REALLY get interesting is once intersat optical links go live constellation-wide (can't remember the timeline on that, v0.9 for polar went up last year, I think they're now on new ones going forward). Most latency tests are local hops only, which is relevant of course and Starlink will always be at a disadvantage for. But once you start cross continents or oceans, Starlink definitely has the potential to easily beat many people's fiber connections (particularly rural ones its aimed at). CDNs are a lot, but not everything. It'll be cool to see how that affects the market.
>it's potential to increase the risk of the Kessler syndrome
This is a meme, not reality. I wish it would stop coming up. Starlink sats are in quite Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and the majority of the constellation yet to be launched will be V-band ones in V(ery)LEO. At those altitudes, natural orbital decay will eliminate debris or sats even if they fail, and if they don't they deorbit themselves. SpaceX has thought this through, part of the delay on optics was specifically figuring out how to make sure they'd all burn up.
Other planned megaconstellations higher up do indeed represent more concern, but Starlink does not. SpaceX is leveraging its overwhelming and soon to grow more-so advantage in launch capability and economics in a host of self-reinforcing ways, and this is one of them. They get to lean on higher numbers and faster replacement to get more performance and stop Kessler risk.
>Astronomy
They've been working on shading them to reduce apparent magnitude, but that only fully works when sats are fully deployed and the trains going up are there. Even reduced magnitude will still affect some instruments and observations. I'm afraid though astronomy is just going to have to deal with that for a decade, looking forward to major development of cheap space based industry allowing lunar/space telescopes like never before eventually supplanting ground-based entirely. Cold comfort to a few who really will be messed up at a point in their careers that will be awkward for that, but this is frankly more important.
>Other
This will be MIND BLOWING FOR MARINE/AEROSPACE. If you think your rural connection is bad go look at merchant marine pricing. Aircraft too obviously, but one area I think many people haven't thought about yet is the potential for other satellites themselves. SpaceX is really setting themselves up as a major space infrastructure company.
>> it's potential to increase the risk of the Kessler syndrome
> This is a meme, not reality. I wish it would stop coming up.
I do too, but since that's probably the first or second most prevalent thing that people mention in response to anything not completely negative on Starlink, I figured I'd give it a mention.
> This is a meme, not reality. I wish it would stop coming up.
Kessler syndrome has begun decades ago. The question is not whether it happens, but whether mega-constellations have the potential to make it significantly worse.
So it's not a meme at all, but a question whether it's a relevant concern in the context of Starlink. At a failure rate of ~3% [0] this would be relevant, but as the failure rate has dropped significantly since and the company aims for 1%, it probably isn't.
>but a question whether it's a relevant concern in the context of Starlink
I kind of thought it was pretty obvious that my statement was specifically in the context of Starlink, given that I explicitly acknowledged that higher up megaconstellations are a much bigger concern. But it's not at all to a significant degree for Starlink due to orbital decay by atmospheric drag. Have to get above 550-600km or so for unpowered lifetimes to really start to stretch out. You might find this Gabbard diagram animation very interesting as a visualization:
It shows all the altitudes against period of all tracked space debris since 1959. Watch what happens around the 550-600km mark in terms of decay acceleration. Starlink, particularly the VLEO ones that are planned to form the majority of the constellation when completed, is essentially passive failsafe. Planned deorbit is still much better than a 1-5 year lifetime of course, but neither will it ever just block us off or render an orbit unusable because they're just plain too low. Anything below those marks (like ISS) requires regular active reboosts to maintain their orbits. When ISS wants to get rid of trash, they can literally just let it go in a big brick.
Kessler absolutely is worth worrying about very much at altitude. But a lot of the coverage and stuff getting shared around about it are 100% backwards. They focus purely on raw numbers of sats. But the absolute best way to avoid Kessler is to go low for as many things as possible, which by definition requires more, cheaper sats that get replaced much more regularly. Massive VLEO constellations are a good thing for space debris not a bad one, because they require both active boosting and even aerodynamics to stay up, and even a worst case direct collision of two sats at ~300km say would result in complete elimination of all debris within at most a month. Starship will make lower altitudes and more safety systems economically feasible.
Can these satellites provide service to higher orbit satellites? I don't know anything about this tech but I would assume switching from a concave blanket over the orb to a convex lens shooting out into space is very different.
These ones cannot. But with intersat optical links, it'd be perfectly feasible to have some percentage of sats as part of the constellation in the future that talked up rather than down, using either radio or optical links themselves (no atmosphere to worry about obviously). No need to have any single satellite do it all. If commercial satellites could simply plug into Starlink in a standard fashion and then it's normal internet from there, no groundstations or any other infra to worry about, that itself would be a big deal in terms of further removing obstacles to wider spread commercialization of space. It's something I haven't seen considered much but I think is another really exciting example of how many things SpaceX is shifting in concert and finding self-reinforcing effects for. Scary thing to be up against though for competitors.
I'm afraid though astronomy is just going to have to deal with that for a decade...this is frankly more important
At least you are honest in your dismissal.
A counter point of view is that an unelected private individual/organisation visibly polluting the night sky of the whole world represents extraordinary arrogance.
>A counter point of view is that an unelected private individual/organisation visibly polluting the night sky of the whole world represents extraordinary arrogance.
Who elected astronomers? Who decides what's "pollution" vs "beautiful"? It's just as arguably "extraordinary arrogance" to argue that a handful of rarified specialists should get a permanent veto on Earth's orbitals, particularly when it's about valuable planetary infrastructure for potentially hundreds of millions and we can see a clear path towards giving astronomers vastly superior capabilities to anything that will ever be possible on Earth.
Note that I 100% support mitigation efforts like are being undertaken. Magnitude reduction efforts, even if they add some cost, are entirely reasonable and appear to help solve much of the problem. But I do think it's important to acknowledge that no, mitigation isn't going to solve the entire problem for Earth-based astronomy, it is a compromise, and that the incredible capabilities of vastly better space telescope options will not be realized, even in the best case, within the remaining careers of some astronomers. That stinks. But Starlink will still be life changing for orders of magnitudes more and they deserve a say too.
And you say "unelected" but all these companies are regulated by a variety of organizations that are elected which is close enough. If a majority didn't want this, it could be banned. And if it did come down to a direct democratic referendum vote on Starlink vs a subsection of Earth-based astronomy, frankly I don't think the result is particularly hard to guess so I'm not sure that's a particularly productive angle to pursue.
> A counter point of view is that an unelected private individual/organisation visibly polluting the night sky of the whole world represents extraordinary arrogance.
That's an emotionally charged argument. I could say that denying affordable Internet access to a vast population just for the sake of astronomy is equally arrogant. But that'd be wrong, and so is your statement. Everything is a trade off and we need to live with both.
SpaceX just didn't launch Starlink satellites. They got approval from the US regulation agencies, which in turn operate in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty that most countries are signatories.
One thing that caught me as interesting about the article was the obstruction map and what could be achieved with that kind of data if it was gathered and correlated with millions of other users. I am no expert but it seems that traditional observation from space has always been limited by the resolution from up on high. Flip the problem and have ground-based observers in densely populated areas track shadows in a rotating grid of point sources in the sky, and you can build a 3d map outwards instead, the only problem being how to increase the density, consistency, and spread of the ground-based sensor array.
Starlink is supposed to operate 30k satellites, and it currently has something around 1,5k (correct me if I am wrong).
What this means is we can expect that in future obstructions will be much less of a problem, because there will be much better chance that at any point in time there will be a satellite on visible part of the sky.
Also, I think, main reason of Starlink is to have access anywhere, even in extremely remote areas. I think some inconvenience is expected and fair. I don't expect Starlink is going to replace a traditional broadband -- for that it will never have the bandwidth necessary.
That 30k / 42k number is mostly Musk lies. It's very unlikely to ever happen given the size of the market, the cost of launches, and the short lifetime of satellites in LEO.
Basically, they would have to constantly launch significantly more satellites than they do today to ever maintain a 30-40k satellite network in LEO. And even Musk estimates like 500k customers - this would basically mean 1 satellite for every 10-20 customers, once every few years. There is no way for that to make economic sense.
My prediction is that they will stop somewhere around the current number of satellites, in fact. At the very most, they might triple the current number.
My email Feb 24: "Starlink now available to order"
So I put an order in right away.
It's now July 22nd, and I haven't heard anything, despite the original email saying "mid-2021" for order shipment. So I go to check: "Starlink is currently at capacity in your area through 2021, your order might not be fulfilled until late 2022."
Despite having taken my money for deposit they never sent an email at any point to let me know this. I think that's a rather dubious customer service practice.
I recall reading that Starlink orbits below the usual level that other satellites are at, so they shouldn't be too much of a threat for Kessler syndrome.
They still are. The lower orbit only means that the satellites themselves deorbit within a few decades at most.
Debris from a collision, however, goes every which way including higher orbits and can still damage other spacecraft.
The satellites in geostationary orbits will stay up there for millions of years, but there's much more room between them and there's orders of magnitude fewer of them.
I'm waiting for my turn (I had a beta offer last year but declined to proceed at the time, now I get to wait like everyone else). Hoping that real soon it gets opened up for mobile use. I have a campsite about 50 miles away that I'd spend a lot more time at if I could work from there. Trees would be a little bit of an issue, but not a deal killer for me.
I am not sure if this is a helpful comment, or possible, you might want to try attaching the dish to the top of tallest tree if you can though. I have had to do this with satellite dishes in the past while working in remote locations. When I say remote, I am talking surrounded by mountains, deep inside the boreal forests of British Columbia.
I am so excited for this to become available to more people. Especially during the pandemic, a lot of people realized how crucial fast internet is to modern life. One relative didn't have internet the entire time - would have cost thousands to install - and had to break quarantine in order to use internet that he needed to work.
It's been a very long time since I worked with directional radios, but it feels very weird to learn that a tree counts as a sky obstruction significant enough to kill the signal. It's just a tree, not a giant steel building or a mountain. Leaves are barely there, relatively speaking.
For RF absorption, the rule of thumb is that the higher the frequency, the more the signal is attenuated. Once you get into the gigahertz range, things like leaves block (actually: absorb) a huge amount of the energy.
This is why if you have a wifi router with both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, the 2.4 GHz band usually has much better range.
Visible light is in the THz spectrum which is blocked by anything solid that isn't clear or translucent.
I think that your observation of water is probably spot-on. When it comes which RF frequencies get absorbed, with water the answer is pretty much "yes". Combined with what I'd imagine is some really fun scattering math tossed in, tree cover is a pretty good bet for reducing signal quality, especially if it's more than one.
I had a digital TV antenna in Oshawa pointed direct at the CN Tower in Toronto, there was only one tree in my direct line of sight, come summer when the leaves were fully developed I lost a number of channels because the signals was not strong enough. The tree was not on my property so I could not cut it.
Just curious what is the security implications of using carrier grade NAT? If I start DDoS'ing a bunch of websites and get blocked, does that mean effectively I also block all my neighbors sharing the same IP4? This seems like a lot of power over their internet usage.
Yes, it has all of the pitfalls of other kinds of NAT.
However, in 2021, blocking all traffic from entire subnets or NATted IPs is an extremely blunt defense and doesn't even work for certain kinds of attacks like UDP floods. "Websites" do not typically do their own traffic filtering or attack mitigation for this reason and many others. They leave that up to their upstream provider. And any provider worth their salt is paying big bucks for a system that can recognize and mitigate attacks based on traffic patterns and deep packet inspection while letting most of the "good" traffic through.
Source: I work for a company that makes these products.
You're basically saying it's magic and trust me because I work on this stuff. That's fair, but how can you tell if I send you 1MM curl commands to download large_ugly_cow{i}.bmp from your server or if it's my neighbor doing that if we both share the same IP address?
> your server or if it's my neighbor doing that if we both share the same IP address?
It depends on how sloppy you are running your attack. Most of the time the attacker will be sloppy and hit the system using the same useragent with the same cookies. Or maybe they'll go the other way and every single request will have some random BS for a useragent and random cookies. Plus they will only hit that exact single URL and won't bother loading the rest of the page.
So if you look at your logs, you'll see a million requests for "large_ugly_cow.bmp" coming from the same IP with a useragent that doesn't bother loading anything else.
In short, to a human such an attack usually stands out like a sore thumb. Writing the filter rules to block them... that is a different beast. With the right tools and a smart tech, it is totally possible though.
Good question! The fact you've got a thousand users on the same IP doesn't really change much honestly. Like I said, when you see this kind of attack happening it usually stands out in your monitoring. The trick is writing the filter rules to target it.
Using IP addresses as filter / block criteria isn't very effective so most don't do it. Any attacker even a slight clue is hopping all over IP blocks to route around IP blocks so effective filtering rules use things other than IP addresses.
In short, the fact that your "signal" (attacker) is using the exact same IP address as the "noise" (everybody else using the IP address) shouldn't be a problem.
Commonly on CGNAT your connection will be assigned a range of source ports. The web server can see that all your connections have a source port number between 10,000 and 20,000, for instance, so they block new connections in that range. This would not directly target you (unless there's only 6 customers per NATted IP) but it does reduce the blast radius.
A lot of talk about drops and latentcy here. It may be that once/if they get the optical links between satellites working, along with just more satellites, most these issues may fade into the paat. Say two to five years.
Starlink currently wants a 100° view of the sky (pretty broad), and you can actually download the Starlink App on your phone (even without service) and use the obstruction finder to view specifically how much of the sky it needs.
But in my case, that tree is pretty close to the back of my house (and there are 75-100' trees pretty much everywhere on my property).
how much available bandwidth can starlink support? I thought the primary users would be remote users, or mobile users or sailboats but apparently people here are considering it an alternative to cables
Each satellite supports 20GBPS, from what I've read. So if you have an exclusive lock on one satellite, and that has a direct/exclusive route to a ground station, that's probably a theoretical max.
I dislike Elon Musk as much as anyone but I think it's becoming clear that starlink could turn out to be a very good idea.
What I haven't seen anyone do and something I'd be very interested to see is a comparison of the relative environmental costs of so many starlink launches in contrast to the building and upkeep of last mile connections to the backbone.
idk. It could turn out to be a very bad idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome). And it still hasn’t proven it self to be better then traditional infrastructure. The last mile connection problem can much easier be solved with a 5G tower then a constellation of satellites.
Additionally, I'm not sure how great it will be for air quality if we have thousands and thousands of satellites burning up in the atmosphere over the next few decades. I certainly don't want to be breathing in vaporized satellite ash. Your point about 5G is well made.
It's probably not zero, but I imagine the effect on air quality is completely miniscule compared to things like millions of ICE cars driving around or the wildfires on the west coast. Additionally I think they burn up in the upper atmosphere, which makes it less likely for the particles to end up in your breathing air (compared to cars which emit their waste at ankle level right outside your doorstep)
25 million meteors enter the atmosphere every day! Almost all of them are burnt up. You're certainly breathing "vaporized space object" ash constantly. The danger of satellites burning up to air quality is negligible.
If the claim is that an increase in rocket launches will be detrimental to the environment and air quality I would agree.
The claim however that satellites re-entering the atmosphere will have a real impact on this is almost certainly false and isn't backed up by the article you linked.
This is why I'm cancelling my subscription (though I have the privilege of multiple terrestrial providers in my area). For what Starlink charges, they shouldn't be using CGNAT. It's not an Internet connection if I can't get anything inbound.
I am curious how long Startlink will remain in beta. Looking at FSD at Tesla it has always been in beta and will probably never leave beta. The next question is if it is acceptable to sell a product to customers that will never be what it was promised to be. So in essence I sell a promise of a product but never really deliver since you know, it's still beta.
StarLink hasn’t even filled enough of their constellation for global coverage so calling it beta is quite reasonable. Many major features are still missing such as the ability to use StarLink with RV’s. If they still call it beta in 5 years then sure, but for now customers should realize it’s not ready to be their only form of internet access.
FSD isn’t ready either. I don’t know if it will ever be but as much as people harp on their marking of self driving, calling it beta is more realistic.
Even if it never advanced beyond its current state, Starlink would still be a massive improvement over what I have now. My internet looks like the "farm" example in the article, and I'm only a 1:15 drive to downtown SF. I'll take it, beta or not.
Tesla and Starlink / SpaceX are two entirely different businesses. FSD is a feature of a car, where Starlink is an entire business — it’s not just an “experimental feature”, it’s an entire business out of itself.
Secondly, FSD having bugs could cause actual deaths, which is not the case for Starlink.
I would be surprised if Starlink would still be in beta in 2023.
> Secondly, FSD having bugs could cause actual deaths, which is not the case for Starlink.
One of the issues reported with Starlink in its current state seems to be overheating receivers. If those where buggy you would have a few burned down houses instead of complaints about unreliable internet in the summer due to automatic shutdown.
That’s fair enough, but I still don’t consider it as problematic as autonomous driving; it’s more the equivalent of a microwave overheating, and it’s fairly easy to build in a fail safe for this. As a matter of fact, as far as I understand, the receivers actually shut down when they overheat.
This problem is not nearly as big as solving autonomous driving, in terms of “how to prevent deaths”.
Starlink in beta does exactly what it is supposed to do: you get internet, and possibly with a better connection than in the final version, because of the limited number of users.
With FSD beta, the car doesn't fully drives itself.
I have absolutely no problem with the first scenario. It is not available to everyone, but for those who do, they get what they pay for. The second is more dubious, you don't get what you paid for, but promise, later, you will.
In specific to Tesla: they have found that this exact business model works astonishingly well with their customer base, so I can't imagine they'll have any reason to stop without some kind of backlash to their bottom line.
RE: the problem in general, I don't have any specific answer, but this also relates directly to the "Early Access" program that Steam and games in general have, along with the whole "Day 1 DLC" that may or may not be there for you. It's becoming pretty endemic to our society and I do think it's just because _it works incredibly well_ on us.
It's a great funding strategy: sell the MVP to get the funds to develop the full product (either directly or by showing the product is worth dedicating resources to). It also enables the most important element from agile development: early and frequent feedback from all stakeholders.
Imagine an alternative world SpaceX had launched a fleet of rockets to bring the constellation up in a couple days while shipping receivers to customers; only to then find out that the satellites reflect too much light and the receivers are too temperate sensitive. The slow beta program is just the better development approach
Day 1 DLC is a consequence of spinning shiny discs is it not? They have to finalize a version to send to disc manufacturing months in advance of actual release date just like any typical physical goods manufacturing/distribution. There's clearly lots of work that can and is done on the code during that shiny disc making period. So it stands to reason that what ever the code is on the shiny disc once released is so antiquated it is not even worth the plastic is stamped in.
Do digital release only games suffer from Day 1 DLC like this? I'm not a gamer, so I have no experience with this.
I have a property where Starlink would be perfect and I would pay triple the price to be able to do zoom calls over the connection.