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I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP.
My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka band geostationary satellite services (hughesnet, viasat in the USA, xplornet in Canada), and any WISP that can't keep up with a 150 Mbps figure.
And eventually for really hard to reach places in the developing world, and much of the same offshore/aviation/maritime industry that right now pays tons of money to Inmarsat.
I expect a fair bit of interest from latency-sensitive markets (eg finance) here in Australia.
A few years ago when I was in the WAN optimisation space, IIRC Sydney/Singapore latency was ~150ms, partly raw distance, partly because the route was physically quite convoluted.
There's some expectation that once Starlink's mesh comms ramp up, it'll be significantly faster to go up to a bird, across through one or more at close-to-c, and then down into the local base station.
The fiber cable they ran from Perth up to Singapore a few years certainly won't be abandoned - it'll still be much cheaper / wider - but I can't imagine much appetite for any future under-sea cabling out of Australia (f.e.).
in terms of raw capacity, I do not think that the intersatellite laser links (if/when they do get that working, which is a long ways off, 10 out of the 1050+ satellites right now have them, and none in production use), will approach anywhere near the capacity of a 40 or 80 channel, coherent 100/200/400GbE DWDM submarine line terminal. it's a whole other order of magnitudes.
>> Why couldn’t intersatellite laser links have similar capacity to fiber? In principle, if not practice?
Because laser energies, signal paths, traveling through free space must literally share that space with each other. It is effectively one wire. An underground cable can have hundreds, thousands, even millions of wires lying beside each other without interference.
It is comparable to the difference between a wifi connection and bundle of ethernet cables. One can scale and one cannot.
No. The beams would overlap, which is fine of they are on different frequencies, but eventually you run out of frequencies to use. Fiber confines the beam to inside the fiber. No overlap between one fiber and another means you can run multiple down the same pipe.
Because a beam in an open medium always diverges due to wavefront errors and diffraction. A very good laser system might possibly have a divergence of only 1 microradians. For reference a typical laser pointer has a divergence angle of 1 to 2 milliradians. With the 2000km or so between satellites for Starlink the laser "spot" on the receiving satellite with the very good laser will be about 2 meter. Not enough to receive multiple beams on one satellite without overlapping.
Thanks for explaining. Would it work if they put receivers on a long pole, spaced 3m apart? Maybe they could mount them on the edge of the solar panel array, which is ~30m long [0].
The link estimates the surface of the panels to be 30m2. Since the panels are 3.1m wide the length would be 9.6 meters. But even at 30 meters it would be very very hard to engineer a system that can keep a laser beam aligned on a moving target with sub microradian precision. I'd guess Starlink laser are more divergent to make hitting the target easier. Keeps the exit pupil a manageable size too (narrower beams need bigger optics).
High end fibre routers use multi-spectral bandwith, effectively allowing for multiple data streams to be transmitted on one fibre cable, and re-broken out at the other end. This significantly increases bandwidth.
I doubt the laser links support this, and I wonder if any could, when in a non-encapsulated environment. EG, spectral pollution from sunlight/etc.
That and because the atmosphere is not clear (this is why 1Gbps free space laser network bridges have very limited range), the links from satellite to earth in any rf band will be very small in capacity as compared to a singlemode fiber cable. Space to space lasers, sure... Much clearer.
I’d guess that high speed data transfer competes with overnight shipping a hard drive in most current cases. In my day to day life, for most cases I’d rather has 10 Mbps with 10 ms latency than 1 Gbps with 250 ms latency. Generally speaking I’m looking for a snappy user experience and fast enough for Netflix streaming to a non-premium television. But high bandwidth and low latency would be super nice!
A lot of serious HFT has moved to HF radio bands with giant aimed yagi uda or dipole antennas, already... London, new york, chicago, tokyo. It's very low bit rate but lower latency.
I suspect Australian FinTech would be more interested in colocating near exchanges instead of trying to beam their orders through space, but I don't work in the sector so I can't say for sure.
If you want to observe events at one exchange and send orders to another, all that matters is total latency. For that use it doesn't matter whether your servers are in the same room as one of the exchanges or 200 miles away from either one.
It's true that total latency is what matters, and minimising latency by sitting near one of them and taking advantage of low-latency connections between exchanges sounds reasonable.
Does this have a name? Something like "a race to ridiculousness?" It's so bizarre that it matters that someone places an order a few ms before someone else. And it's probably ns now. No time to stop and think,... just be faster than someone else.
Is there any mechanism by which we (in general) or a client specifically could use an expensive low latency for say browsing and a high latency but wide/cheap pipeline for bulk transfer?
I can imagine being able to do this when you control both sides by letting one type of data flow over one IP and the other over a different one with different peerings. But I wonder whether this is generally available.
In 1998, I lived in Ghana and used the Africa Online ISP. They ran a transparent HTTP proxy that routed through a high-bandwidth high-latency satellite connection. All other traffic went through a very low-bandwidth low-latency fiber connection. I used to proxy my browser through SSH to a US server and enjoy very fast text-mode browsing.
I expect some ISPs will end up using differential routing over Starlink and fiber. They could have the routers on each end automatically switch large one-way TCP transfers from the Starlink connection to the fiber connection after the first 2MB.
They could even make the transition smooth, by buffering data transferred over Starlink and slowly adding delay to match the delay of the fiber connection. This would require some RAM, but only during the transition period for each TCP session. The client would see the throughput go down during the transition period.
If the remote server could increase the data rate, then the ISP could perform the transition with no drop in throughput seen by the client. The sending router would send fake ACKs to the server to get it to send data faster. The sending router would send the burst of data through the fiber link and also buffer it and send it through Starlink at the original rate. Once the receiving router is receiving the same data at the same time over both the fiber link and Starlink, the sending router can stop sending over Starlink. The client's TCP ACK packets would continue to flow over Starlink.
If either your ISP exposes that ability or if you maintain multiple outbound connections, then yes. But I don't think this is commonly implemented today, however.
You would probably have to configure your own routing table to direct traffic for each application through the appropriate link, but that's completely doable as long as you can write rules to distinguish the packets (for example based on destination).
Yes I can imagine using iptables to work but it was my understanding that this would only be able to determine the next hop and I couldn’t get it to force the decision higher up the chain. This would mean that every party along the chain has to play ball.
I can imagine that it would be beneficial for the internet experience if we could segregate low latency traffic (human/hft) traffic from hulk traffic such as video. Although this goes against net neutrality I suppose.
If you want it to be done externally without setting up a routing table then the next best option would be some kind of traffic tagging to indicate what you want to go over which line. That would start looking like a network with multiple VLAN:s.
If you use TOR browser, you're already doing this. Requests from TOR browser go over TOR, if you have a regular browser open in another window your internet-routable requests there go over the internet. Of course the first hop goes via your ISP in either case, but it's easy to imagine it doesn't.
You can do this with a Linux box that has multiple internet links and/or VPNs, using fwmark for routing decisions. You can also e.g. launch a browser in a network namespace that is routed as you please.
Isn’t the current latency between Sydney and Singapore 15ms or less by now? No one who is latency sensitive should be using Starlink unless they are in some incredibly remote location. (And they should move if they are 150ms is a cosmic age in low latency trading)
Sydney to Singapore is 6300km as the crow flies. At light speed completely directly best possible round trip time would be 42ms. Light moves more slowly in glass(fibre) and the submarine cables are definitely nowhere direct route, add also routing/switching overhead and the you end up in the hundreds.
Just looked it up. 94ms. Starlink has far more latency.
By your lightsped math, Starlink won’t ever be able to compete on latency except in the most rural of areas with poor connectivity since low earth orbit has far more travel distance than convoluted surface routing.
Yup, we might be down to 100ms now -- certainly still a long way from your initial 15ms guess.
Since I moved on from that last gig, I note that Telstra completed their Sydney-Perth re-cabling project, and the Vocus Perth-Singapore undersea link came online (2018-04).
(I believe east coast traffic routes through Perth to get to Singapore, which was/is/will continue to be part of the problem.)
"lightspeed math" means LEO may well offer performance improvements over terrestrial cabling in many non-obvious scenarios.
Redo your math, in space the speed of light is at it's max. On fiber or cable the speed is cut almost in half. Result, Starlink with lasers can be faster.
> My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services.
I think the key word here is properly. I put my pre-order in Feb 9th and I'm in the Perth hills in Western Australia. My wired link is ~35Mb down and ~11Mb up. Whilst StarLink will be more expensive I'm expecting a tripling of download speeds and a doubling of upload speeds for less than double the price. That math works for me, especially when you consider my link is as fast as it can go (I pay for a 50/25 service) due to my last hop being a twisted pair cable that was run half a century ago.
One of the big issues I’ve had with anything but wired ISPs is latency. They specifically talk about 20-40ms latency being expected in most locations, but don’t specify to where. I currently get about 20 +/- 4 ms from me to 8.8.8.8 consistently. Is their latency to my first hop?
Also, what is their IPv6 support like? Can I get a routable /60 or similar? Static IPv4/IPv6? And do you need to use their router or can you hook in anything you want? Bandwidth limits? Any other restrictions, either via their TOS or through some kind of firewall? Is this experience ever going to approach something like fiber or even cable?
a. absolute lowest latency I've seen to a major IX point in seattle is about 15.8ms. More often it's 22-23ms. On a longer term, averages between 20-30ms. That's for the combined total of four 550km paths through space plus terrestrial latency from their earth station to seattle.
Keep in mind that on something like a DOCSIS3 cable coax last mile segment can have a minimum latency of 12-16ms from just the cablemodem to the local CMTS in the neighborhood, so that's actually really good. It's not as good as fiber but it's significantly better than many other options. One has to account for the need for the antenna/modem to modulate and apply FEC on the Tx at both my CPE antenna and the spacex earth station on the other end (at least a few ms).
b. no ipv6 yet. They have people who know what they are doing for neteng so I am sure it is planned.
c. all IPs are in cgnat IP space right now. Nobody is getting a discrete dhcp-assigned public ipv4 /32 yet. You can hook up whatever router you want, anything you plug into the PoE injector that is an ordinary 1000BaseT 1500 mtu DHCP client will be given an address. The router they hand out is a very bare bones 802.11ac 2x2 MIMO thing that is based on openwrt.
restrictions, you can't move it from your designated service location. That's part of the beta TOS.
Using it, it is a real 150 Mbps down x 16.5 Mbps up. I have put non technical guest users on it doing various things and from their perspective it cannot be distinguished from the separate terrestrial connection at the same location.
> b. no ipv6 yet.
> c. all IPs are in cgnat IP space
Interesting, this is more like an internet proxy than connecting devices to the internet. Hope they fix it soon. Does the TOS forbid running eg ssh or remote desktop services? Or VPNs?
It is a consumer internet eyeball service. Having an assigned routable address is not a thing in many countries, and you really shouldn't expect it as a "feature" in the future.
Eventually the Comcasts of the world will sell off the majority of the IPv4 they hold to the AWSs of the world.
I's 50%, i would not call that "not a thing in many countries"
For mobile, it does not usually matter, you have a smartphone, where you would not host something.
For a huge percentage of the developing world the only internet connection people have is a smartphone, and dedicated residential internet at a fixed address is only for the upper middle class and the wealthy.
It matters for smartphones too (think video calls, IoT applications, and home/office networks that have mobile network as uplink) but fortunately IPv6 is common there.
People have torn it down and messed about with it, I believe I recall seeing some found the test pads on the pcb and were able to watch its bootloader through a serial connection.
> b. no ipv6 yet. They have people who know what they are doing for neteng so I am sure it is planned.
heh, my assumption when I hear that people who know what they're doing are involved is the opposite ;)
Thank you for the detailed report! I'm very excited for the tech, especially once the lasers are up and it doesn't rely on the base station (i.e. I can take my uplink on a road trip)
Lol, the fact that they just went with IPv4 supports the theory that they know what they're doing.
I've read multiple tutorials on IPv6 and it's so complicated that I still can't grasp how it all works in my head. For some context, I've personally written an Ethernet IPv4 network stack with DHCP from scratch. I also worked on Ethernet switch firmware, coincidentally for SpaceX...
I guess I don't have as much low level experience as you do, but in my eyes IPv6 is literally just IPv4 with more bits. Due to the increased number of possible addresses, IPv6 is used with some different (better) concepts than IPv4. For example having (very likely) unique local networks (ULAs) is amazing when you happen to merge previously independent networks together or do some VPN stuff. You pretty much never have to calculate subnets because you'll likely never run out of addresses. And even if you somehow manage to do the impossible and fill up a /48 ULA (at which point you would have died from NATing billions of entire IPv4 address spaces with multiple layers to somehow make it all one network on IPv4), it takes just two seconds to generate a new one.
Also getting an entire public prefix assigned instead of just a single address is amazing too. On my public servers I let my ssh service listen on a randomly generated static IPv6 address from my prefix, which is not used for anything else. On that same machine I can have dozens of other public services on their own IP each (they can even all run on the same port because they're using different addresses), and when someone then decides to scan the IP of my website for interesting ports, they won't find anything.
To be honest, if someone doesn't understand IPv6, I doubt they really understand IPv4 either. Many issues with IPv6 today come from the fact that everyone and everything is so used to V4 concepts, that most products focus on IPv4 first and then half-ass IPv6 support (if they implement it at all).
The thing about IP and therefore with IPv6 is it's not just an address format - it's a set of protocols and practices so a lot of it changes.
Address asignment in an IPv6 world is more complicated - you can do DHCPv6, or your can do stateless auto-config. Which should you choose and when? Many other aspects of the stack require more knowledge.
And THEN you ALSO need to understand how v4 and v6 interacts so you can provide suitable compatibility - the various different methods of tunnelling and negotiation.
Using SLAAC is the way to go in most cases. DHCPv6 should only really be used when you have a network that is for some reason smaller than a /64.
In my opinion you shouldn't really bother with compatibility. Just do dual stack and maybe NAT IPv4 if necessary.
For my personal use cases IPv6 just proved to be much more versatile than IPv4. It did take some getting used to since it's approached differently, but learning it is very worth it and also helps using IPv4 better
Look at all the additional optional bits DCHP offers in terms of being able to communicate additional information to clients to configure themselves. Two big ones that stand out are timeservers and network booting parameters.
SLAAC is only a drop in replacement in the (typical) home.
That's just the addressing/subnetting though. Ipv6 and 4 for that matter also have a lot more going on in the packet handling and specification. and Ipv6's packet handling stuff is way more complicated than Ipv4. I was reading through just the ICMP parts and the difference is significant. I imagine the rest of it is the same.
> it's so complicated that I still can't grasp how it all works
I have seen too many people that have the same excuse. The advise I gave them is to forgot all the things learnt from IPv4 and study IPv6 as a totally new IP stack.
The problem is people look at it from IPv4 view, which is a currently a mess with IPv4 exhaustion.
Going through the trouble of implementing CGNAT and skipping IPv6 seems like a partially degraded service for the end user though. It's becoming common practice for ISPs to slap all the users between two layers of NAT and calling it a day. You can't run essentially anything on your network (not even an SSH server) without having to have a server on standby and reverse tunnels. I know there are not enough IPv4s but at least let me having the option to pay for one. Or, you know, give me an IPv6. Otherwise it's practically a networked content consumption service at this point. It's 2021, the "IPv6 is complicated" excuse must stop at some point.
IPv6 really isn't that complicated compared to CGNAT!
Of course, today IPv6 only can't be considered full internet access, so providers usually need both – and given that CGNAT gets consumers 99% of what they want/are willing to pay for, providers sometimes can't be bothered to also implement IPv6.
I used to have GCNAT + IPv6 on my provider, but the v6 part of their CPE was worse than useless – no option to open ports since "port forwarding is not needed on IPv6" (nevermind the mandatory firewall that doesn't allow inbound traffic unless completely disabled).
It can’t? I at one point messed up my firewall rules and didn’t notice that IPv4 wasn’t accessible for a few days. Nobody complained. I eventually noticed something was amiss and fixed it but really most places seems to be running dual stack. I am starting to run some IPV6 only services.
It would be great if offering public IPv6 only services was viable, but according to Google statistics (https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html) you're still cutting off about two thirds of potential users.
This will vary greatly depending on how loaded your particular cablemodem segment is, how the channel bonding is set up, how enthusiastic your neighbors are about downloading things like 65GB torrents of 2160p60 movies. If there is an 8.8.8.8 anycast node somewhere in your city, and you are kinda close to downtown, less than 1.5ms of that could be the fiber path from your ISP to their peering with google and back, and 10.5ms of it or so would be accounted for by the cablemodem part.
It will also vary greatly once starlink is loaded. The variation you're seeing is purely due to slant range. Those numbers will increase once the satellites are oversubscribed.
Very true. I'm seeing an average of 100ms to the first hop (and about the same to 8.8.8.8) during the day on mine, with lows of 50-60ms, and the occasional 10 second peaks.
I am on DOCSIS (TPG NBN) and www.google.com is 8ms, 8.8.8.8 8.5ms (actually seems long as the family is watching netflix).
Docsis modem bridged to a linux box.
22mS sounds more like mine + wifi.
I had to try my fiber connection. I get 0.6 - 0.8 ms within our town which is not that big, < 10 km from me.
To Stockholm, which is only 80 or so km away if you measure straight line, is 3.5 ms away.
Iv'e always been curious as to what adds so much latency and what I did read was that its the network equipment itself mostly. The inherent latency in the fiber should be on the order of much less than 1 ms as far as I understand. 3.33 us per km, and 3,33 * 104 (more realistic distance) is only 346 microseconds.
Its weird though, using mtr its very clear that its the "long" hop that most of the latency, or at least 2.8 ms. So is the figures for speed of light in fiber wrong, or is there something else that adds up to a lot of latency in fiber connections? Is it the optical components?
Signals in fiber do not travel at c. They travel at lightspeed in glass. Light speed in a material is c/(the refractive index of the material). For commercial glass fiber, 1.5 is a reasonable estimate for it's refractive index. So the actual time for 1 km is ~5 us.
Traceroute work by routers decrementing the ttl as the packet passes. If a router doesn’t decrement, or if your packet gets bundled into an mpls, the hops may be hidden.
Then you’ve got the buffers - you could feed 5x100M streams on 1G carriers into a 1G uplink port and have plenty of bandwidth, but if all the packets of those 100M streams arrive in 100ms, then have no packet for the next 900ms, your outbound traffic will have to either delay your packets upto 900ms, or drop them.
And of course everything depends on the implementation. On my home fiber, the minimum latency to anything IPv4 is 20ms since the PPPoE concentrators are all on the other side of the country. IPv6 on the same line (which uses IPoE instead of PPPoE) gives me 5ms to a friend in the same city.
What is the term of the contract? I have a family cabin in an area that is not served by cable, it's not a place I am going to spend 12 months or whatever and at $100/mo I am probably not going to pay for 12 months out of the goodness of my heart. But I would love the ability to go up for a couple weeks or a month and just work from up there. Could I sign up month by month, or for say a quarter at a time?
Or I guess more generally, as an existing user of the service who is seeing dashboards I'm not seeing, how do you think this would play out for "occasional" users.
Can Starlink travel with you? My wife and I are discussing purchasing a tiny home on a trailer and the ability to get a decent connection _anywhere_ would be an amazing amenity.
In principle, yes. They've demoed it on fighter jets.
But they don't seem to be selling that capability to consumers just yet - presumably to avoid issues with too many subscribers congregating in one place. See the faq answers on "Can I travel" and "Can I change my service address" https://www.starlink.com/faq
"Your Starlink is assigned to a single cell. If you move your Starlink outside of its assigned cell, a satellite will not be scheduled to serve your Starlink and you will not receive internet. This is constrained by geometry and is not arbitrary geofencing."
I like how technical they still are. Probably a matte of time before they have to dumb-down everything there.
"While satellite phones work essentially anywhere on earth, there are some physical and political limitations."
one limitation was not what I expected:
"Cuba restricts the use of satellite phones because they’re seen as tools for subversive purposes"
Back to starlink - I think distributed living is a wonderful if not the most wonderful application of this.
I can imagine in a number of years having a tesla pull a trailer with fold-out solar panels. Have a little self-sufficient base camp with power for climate, cooking, transportation. And now internet.
Who is responsible for a regional law like the Cuban one mentioned in this thread? Would Starlink be held responsible, or would it be the one moving a receiver across the border?
I'm considering a cabin deep in the mountains. What should I be aware of when it comes to limitations of Starlink? For a cabin that is likely to be off grid, where I'd like to have relatively stable, relatively usable internet, what should I expect?
Clear field of view of the sky is necessary, which may be a problem in the woods. The field of view will narrow with more sats; now it's quite large. Apparently they have an app to visualize it.
Walrus01, from a user POV, do you have consistent, reliable service for streaming, large file transfer, virtual meetings etc? Is it akin to having, say, a 100 mb/s connection through a cable service company? Is there anything that particularly irritates you about the service? Thanks for being willing to share your experience. I am in the mountains in Colorado and some neighbors envy my 10 Mbps down/0.5 Mbps up connection. Seems like a nobrainer that this will be better, but at least my DSL doesn't cut out very often.
theoretically, great, and I would be shocked if they did not release a product functionally equivalent to the iridium and inmarsat aviation and maritime terminals, because of how much potential revenue is there. it will also be much better and faster than a multi-axis motorized tracking geostationary maritime terminal ($40,000+ things you can find in radomes on large ships, operating in various ku and ka band networks). there has been no official announcement on that sort of thing yet.
the current terminal has motion sensors in it and is not designed for a moving vehicle, it will turn itself off. the same 6-axis sensors that are used to orient and tilt it to the proper angle can also tell it when it's being moved.
Except then this thing were they assign you to a single cell and the vessel may pass the boundaries of said cell? Do you expect some sort of protocol for automatic handoff to the next cell in the future?
The service has been demonstrated on fighter jets so a boat at anchor should be no problem. Of course the $500 antenna they currently sell probably isn't quite as capable as the one they used on that fighter jet...
Mentioned in the FAQs [1] you cannot take it with you if you move area, you are assigned a "cell" and it won't work for you outside of that. I spoke to someone who has it and he said he it is quite a big area maybe up to 100 mile radius.
Mine is averaging about 0.5% packet loss over a 3 hour period. There will be very brief periods of slightly higher loss. I don't play a lot of fps but most realtime lag, loss and jitter sensitive applications work just fine.
It tries to give itself an optimal angle but it doesn't move while operating and the satellites are zipping in and out of its beamforming cone all the time anyway. The technology is capable of running with a flat mount.
Right now a terminal even at 48.9 latitude angles itself somewhat north, because the greatest simultaneous density of satellites at any moment in time is around 52.5 to 53 degrees north. If you mount it flat and don't allow it to move, who knows what starlink will change in the future architecture. They included the servo motor geared pan and tilt mechanism for a reason. Maybe later it will reorient itself differently as network density and satellite population changes. I'm not saying they won't ever release a flat non motorized cpe, but that is very much not the configuration now.
The ability to align itself allows for mildly to moderately improved reception. It's more cost-effective than improving the beamforming, and easier for the user. It's a good feature. But the terminal doesn't need it to work. (On a hardware level. Any possible software lockout is a separate issue.)
Seems like once its found the optimal pointing it stays there, the rest is done with phased array steering, so very rapid tracking / switching possible.
the patent for the antenna shows dual simultaneous beamforming. some form of make-before-break. how exactly they're doing it is quite opaque to the end user, and part of their secret recipe.
The latter. You can initiate whatever connection you want from inside the cgnat, but there's nothing externally accessible yet. Mine has a few different openvpn tunnels (clients at the starlink side, servers in datacenters elsewhere) going different places.
Traceroutes are all going out to the world through this google AS right now. Using the hurricane tool as a convenient GUI presentation of what it is: https://bgp.he.net/AS36492
nothing obviously satellite related shows up at layer 3. There's a few hops of stuff with no rDNS, and then the edge of the AS36492 network and whatever transits or peers your traffic is going to.
You can clearly discern from pinging your first hop (15.9 to 30ms away) that it's something on the other side of the up-and-back satellite link.
topology at present is logically a bent pipe. satellites need to be simultaneously in view of your terminal and a spacex earth station. The ten satellites they launched into a polar orbit last month are the first with inter-satellite laser links.
Correct. The intersattelite laser link is still vaporware at this point, and I’d wager always will be. It turned out to be a much more difficult problem than they originally anticipated, and so they’re basically not doing it. I will be very surprised if it ever happens.
That they had a successful “test” of it a year and a half ago does not mean it’s in use now. Current starlink is just receiver -> satellite -> ground station, there is no lasers in use.
While some of the satellites do have point to point laser links for communicating directly with other satellites in the constellation, it's not widely utilized yet, and all communications are ground station to satellite and back to base station.
It's unlikely that anyone's traffic is passing through multiple satellite links at this time, but that may change with higher elevation orbits serving states like Alaska.
Musk said that Starlink won't work in dense areas. This is a broader business question, but do you think there are there enough remote villagers and oil rig workers that can subscribe and eventually give Musk enough money to fund a trip to Mars? He has said that is the endgame for creating Starlink.
But i think that they would have to become ISP and comply with local law with most jurisdictions if they want to have local ground stations. Not sure how that will go.
Who do you imagine will buy it on a global scale? Rural NA areas, rural Australian areas and a few places in Europe. At the price point offered it is insanely expensive unless your only other option is satelite or a very crappy DSL.
Maybe a few people in Asia, Africa, South America can afford it, but it is very few, and in the places where people can they are likely to already have better service.
> Who do you imagine will buy it on a global scale?
About 3.5 billion people don't have reliable access to the internet[1]. That's a large market.
The satellites are orbiting anyway.
For household customers in OECD countries, Starlink will charge OECD retail prices.
Customers in developing countries represent extra revenue for negligible extra cost, so Starlink can practise geographic price discrimination to maximise net revenue.
Or Starlink could permit "village WISP" bandwidth reselling arrangements in specific geographic areas. A video call needs no more than 2 Mbps down and up, so you can probably serve up to 50 undemanding households plus a one-room school and a medical clinic on one connection (with appropriate rate limiting and local caching).
Starlink can also price-discriminate by latency tier for high-frequency traders and arbitrageurs. They can price-discriminate by QoS for organisations that demand a guaranteed minimum bandwith (e.g. militaries). And then there are shipping lines and air lines.
I work with an animal rescue. They're out in a somewhat rural part of TX, just beyond a major metro. Only available network is LTE or bad p2p microwave that's crazy expensive. This is 1/3 the price of the microwave and about the same as the LTE plan. I signed them up and I'll pay for it. The resident who lives on site has never had a decent network. Then I can finally setup the wireless perimeter cameras too.
You do realize you could have tried the same argument about cell phones when they first came out. No-one in those poorer countries would buy the same cell phone my dad (real estate agent) had in his car, the cost would run up to $1000 a month, but he made good commission selling factory properties.
Today every where in the poorest parts of the world are connected with cell phones.
If you split between 5 houses, you still get decent bandwidth (you wont be watching 4k, but then again if you can afford 4k screens ...), and the price is 100 USD + 20 per month.
If you don't have any other option this might be decent alternative
Netflix says you need 25 Mbps for "Ultra HD Quality"[1], so yes, you could watch a different 4K stream in every house simultaneously. And have 25 Mbps left over for other traffic.
Edit to add: Netflix is right.
If you can't get reliable 4K with a 25 Mbps connection, the most likely reasons are:
- First by a wide margin, is that you are using Wi-Fi to connect your display device. Don't do that. Use ethernet (at least until you have 802.11ax everywhere).
- Second, you have a flaky connection to your ISP. Misconfigured, marginal (e.g. DSL more than 2.5 kilometres from the cabinet) or in poor electrical condition.
- Third, you have neighbours regularly operating very large electric motors or electric arc welders.
- Fourth, your ISP doesn't know what it's doing, or is deliberately monkeying with your service to try to upsell you.
That remains to be seen. As it stands, these regions don't have the ability to pay for the service (no matter the price - they simply don't have access to bank accounts and credit cards).
This is something to keep in mind and not obvious to people living in 1st world countries.
I can't speak for globally, but a quick search online says that around 43 million people in the USA don't have broadband. "Broadband" meaning 25/3 service. I'm willing to bet the true numbers are significantly higher than that, and I don't really count severely data-capped wireless service as being broadband like the FCC does.
Anyway, even that number alone is a sizable market, and even Comcast would be happy with a fraction of it. I know some parts of the world are better off than the USA, but I also know many parts are worse off.
Yes and even more so if you have the past viewpoint and perspective of having previously lived on geostationary satellite for months at a time, and could imagine using starlink in a really remote area.
Do you think it is practical for the rapidly growing recreational vehicle/boondocking/overlanding crowd due to the hardware and installation requirements? If your camper moves every couple days or so, seems it might be problematic.
£439 for hardware, £89/month service, £54 delivery in the UK. The equivalent of US$611, $124 and $75 respectively at today's rates. Our prices include sales tax (VAT) though.
Is it though? Perhaps it's because it's not available in Croatia, but there is nothing on the front page that mentions price, and it's not in the FAQ either.
Ah, that explains it, the button says "Order Now", which scared me off as I wasn't interested in actually ordering but was curious about the price.
I really dislike this kind of (almost dark) pattern. TIDAL also is not showing you the cost until you start down the sign up process, it's quite frustrating if what you really want to do is compare service costs.
Since they use regional pricing, doesn't it make sense that it would require a service address before they can show you the price?
Besides, it's not like if you click that Order Now button that it instantly places an order and a SpaceX kit drops from space in your front yard seconds later. There's a few more steps before that happens, like payment info.
Valid points. I do think something like "Enquire" would be better though.
With regards TIDAL they knew enough to tell me that I can't get it in Croatia based on IP (so I signed up using a UK debit card via a VPN to circumvent that nonsense).
I don't have any insider info but there is absolutely no chance that the dish is costing them even <2x what they are charging for it. I don't really see how their business model pencils out even assuming massive oversubscription, perfectly geographically distributed customers, and the new laser links. It's just hard to make it work when your satellites fall out of the sky and need replacing. The technology certainly works and is really cool to see as an engineer, don't get me wrong, but even Musk businesses will eventually need to make money. For Tesla, their path to profit was steep, but feasible; here I just don't see it at all.
Why? It will take less than two years, maybe one year subscription to pay for the dish, and calculation show $10 a month pays for the satellites. It looks like pure profit for any customer who uses their service for three or more years, and there are a lot of customers out there.
It's not pure profit because, a) you can only oversubscribe 20GB/s so much without data caps and speed limits b) a small fraction of the constellation will be over inhabited land and wealthy enough countries at any moment c) I am assuming they lose money the first ~1.5 years to recoup the dish cost and R&D, d) ground link opex e) sats fall out of the sky and need replacing f) subsidized launches via rideshare only work if there is enough demand into inclined LEO, otherwise its $30M per launch at per sat costs go way up g) Customers are not uniformly distributed over earth's landmasses
I was able to place an actual order just last week in St. Louis, MO.
I will be using it and doing some tests in an area that actually has cable Internet (though spotty, and until very recently was limited to less than 20 Mbps up, no matter how much you paid).
But you have to realize, when you look at the $600 initial cost and $100 monthly fee—this will bring 100+ Mbps down and 15+ Mbps up to so many places (even in suburbs) where people couldn't get more than 10/2 or so for any price.
I already know a few people who don't even live in rural parts who would happily pay triple just to get off their junk DSL or flaky Cable connection, even with Starlink in beta. They are already used to spotty Internet, so Starlink is a massive improvement even if it's spotty (which it hasn't been, according to these users).
Let's see how well it copes with more users. My guess is it won't cope well. There is only 20gig/sec of capacity per satelite, and I believe that is raw speed, which will get hammered in poor weather conditions and more FEC or less efficient QAM is required.
20gig/sec is not a lot of capacity for many thousands of square kms. It's 1-2k users at peak times watching Netflix for example on 1080p or 4K streams, nevermind everything else. It is probably not far off many DOCSIS CMTS allocations, which get horrendously overloaded being only a few city blocks.
My guess is after beta they will get rid of the unlimited aspect pretty sharpish, and probably introduce aggressive traffic shaping.
It is likely to work very well in very rural areas with no major cities or towns in line of sight of the satelite. However, for suburbs/exurbs close to cities and towns which have poor internet I think the experience will be pretty poor once it has more customers (especially in Europe. There are basically no truly remote areas).
That's mostly OK though. It makes no sense financially in cities anyway.
I would love to get Starlink just because it's awesome, but I'm in a city and can get 350gbps broadband for £50 a month so it would be kinda pointless.
Could they add more satellites to increase bandwidth? I can imagine a continuous stream that passes over multiple cities. Urban ground stations would have a choice of 5-10 satellites visible at any time.
Source? I'm not from US but I googled around and Viasat offer 30/3 mbps with a soft speed cap after 100GB for 150usd/month [1]
Hughes offers 25/3 mbps priced per data cap 50GB is 140 usd + equipment lease of 15usd /month.[2]
Neither of which is even remotely close to Starlink's offering.
OP said "where people couldn't get more than 10/2 or so for any price."
Your response directly refutes that, so I don't know why you are asking for a source. I didn't say either of those are competitive with a non-existent service offering from starlink. Wait until they have a real service that is oversubscribed, then we can discuss what plans they'll offer.
400+ms pings make the connection useless for anything resembling interactive use, which is pertinent.
If my internet provider had 100mbs symmetric but I got that kind of ping I wouldn't even consider it a functioning internet connection, let alone 100 mbs, even if in some theoretical tuned workload I could actually move data that fast (UUCP with tuned TCP window sizes? UDP with some sort of custom packet loss recovery algo?)
I'm not sure why you keep going down this rabbit hole, but OP was talking about bandwidth, not latency. Bandwidth on current generation satellites is just as high, or higher than Starlink. Satellite does not use TCP over the air. They have technologies for higher-latency links that make latency appear lower by controlling the window at the gateway side.
The real limitation of rural satellite services are the data caps. When I was looking at options that was a serious limiting factor. All the bandwidth in the world doesn't matter when you hit your data cap after 2 netflix kids' shows.
Starlink will have data caps as well. All models show that when loaded with the amount of subscribers they're targeting you will either get very low speeds (no throttling), or they will need to cap/throttle the heavy users. I'm not sure why people keep misunderstanding that the beta performance/price/rules are exactly what will be there for the real service launch. It's simply not feasible.
Serious Question: So are the early adopters subsidizing the masses down the line?
i.e. so at $100/mo + $600 start-up/set-up fee -- thats for early adopters ... so the "african farmer who can pay <$1/mo for the service can afford it... and corporate subscriptions are obv going to be big bulk data contacts?
And the encryption policy? The Privacy policy? The data-mining-of-location-history policy?
Yeah, it's a Nope from me dawg...
And I folow Elon closely, and I like a lot of what he says and stands for - but he is at the behest of the USG - Starlink must not be trusted.
> So are the early adopters subsidizing the masses down the line?
"Subsidizing"? No, they're paying for a service. It may or may not get cheaper over time... but that's rather irrelevant. SpaceX isn't a charity, they are in this to make money. It's also not like SpaceX is making a ton of money off of the early adopters. The satellite dish almost certainly costs the vast majority of those 600 dollars to produce, and the $100/mo service fees from the small set of early adopters aren't going to pay for the satellites and launches any time soon.
> the encryption policy
They don't prevent you from encrypting your traffic... just like any other ISP. What more do you want?
I don't know if they further encrypt traffic inside their network, but I rather assume not because that would be rather pointless. The traffic you send out should be considered more or less public because the internet will send it to malicious third parties regardless of what SpaceX does to it, see all the BGP highjacking attacks that have taken place for instance. SpaceX is obviously unable to encrypt things once they're out of their network into the internet at large... that's just not how the internet works.
Dead industry projects incompetence onto disruptive newcomer, news at 10.
More seriously, the phased array antennas seem to be a big part of Starlink’s innovation. Launching tons of satellites cheaply by itself isn’t a super protected moat because if they block competitors from using the launch platform at a reasonable price, they risk antitrust action.
I don't see antitrust legislation being a real factor to anyone. Several companies have gone trillion dollar market valuation and several decades without such action. Even if Microsoft had a crystal ball of the future legislation when they were starting up they probably wouldn't have changed a thing. Antitrust in modern history is a thing without teeth when used and almost never used.
(I say this as someone who 100% wants market regulation that actually reinforces the natural market efficiencies - including sane, forceful antitrust legislation.)
Your average African farmer may not get their own dish but I bet there are charities and NGO's who would be willing to pay for the dish and subsidize a local school's Starlink service. Throw a WiFi hotspot on the side of the building and now the village has access. This is a game changer that will open up the remote corners of the globe.
I used to work with an NGO that funded schools and orphanages in some particularly under-serviced parts of SEA. The retail prices of this would be affordable for a lot of institutions as it stands (places where the school fees were typically between $100-$200 USD/year). It doesn’t solve the problem of having reliable electricity, or any actual computing equipment. But I can certainly see some rather cool use cases for it.
Super annoying. FYI every ISP I’ve had that does this has some setting buried somewhere that lets you turn this off.
If not that, you can usually bypass this by setting your router (or computer directly) to use 8.8.8.8 (Google dns) or 1.1.1.1 (cloud flare dns) as a resolver.
I’ve only heard of a couple of cases where ISPs sniff all dns and rewrite NXDOMAIN responses, and the answer for those is some kind of unpleasant tunneling.
I wonder if you could block unknown DoH endpoints via traffic analysis. They probably have pretty unique signatures, with every request/response being approximately the same size.
I haven't looked closely at DoH, but based on my knowledge of plugable transports and website fingerprinting attacks, the answer is: probably, but with just a little effort on the client side, detection could be made pretty expensive -- probably expensive enough that ads on unresolved domains wouldn't justify it. Basically, if live classification of network traffic on (obfuscated) metadata were easy, China would have deployed it by now.
Can you share more info on 'the encryption policy' you're worried about? I'd not heard any cause for concern regarding encryption on starlink and was debating potentially signing up for their service.
It's an ordinary DIA link, except right now it's in cgnat IP space. There are no restrictions on crypto. You can run whatever VPN or crypto through it you want. I'm doing so right now.
Nothing about their privacy policy looks intrusive, at all. [1]
The data they collect is either necessary for them to keep (your name, address, payment information, etc.), diagnostic (IP address, HTTP headers, etc. ONLY on their own websites, plus quality of starlink connection e.g. latency and throughput), or optional (survey responses). They don't sell the data or share it with anyone unless necessary for legal or business reasons (payment info shared with payment processor and such).
I don't understand. Starlink is a narrowly tailored cool tech solution for internet access in remote or rural areas, not world hunger, inequality or evil.
"Can I travel with Starlink, or move it to a different address?
Starlink satellites are scheduled to send internet down to all users within a designated area on the ground. This designated area is referred to as a cell.
Your Starlink is assigned to a single cell. If you move your Starlink outside of its assigned cell, a satellite will not be scheduled to serve your Starlink and you will not receive internet. This is constrained by geometry and is not arbitrary geofencing."
Although, whether this is a technical limitation of the bandwidth/footprint, or an operational strategy is someone more knowledgeable's guess.
Does it have to do with how many beams they choose to / can create from the satellite antenna array? And only certain cells with concentrated users are "enabled" for service? Until more satellites come?
Do they actually lock your subscriber ID (?) to the particular cell and would deny it if it appeared an an incorrect cell, or is it as they say literally, as long as a cell is served, you could be one of the "all users" within the cell?
One thing they don’t mention is the size of the cells. If it is anything like what I’ve seems in some satellite visualization sites, they could be huge. I think there is a difference between moving this from a home in the city to a vacation house in the woods and traveling the country in an RV.
That kind of sucks, maybe in the future they will allow you to move about. I don't see why you couldn't travel with the array. I can understand if the dish were moving but if you just have your RV parked it seems like you should just be able to just jump online.
There are almost certainly always going to be restrictions, because the bandwidth density on the ground is going to be limited.
For example, a lot of recreational boaters are likely to get a terminal, which will work well over the open ocean. However, when all of those boaters tie their boat at the LA marina, there is absolutely no hope that the system can provide anything even approximating good service to them. So mobile starlink connections will almost certainly come with some language about how they work so long as you stay away from other people.
Exactly. I know Iridium has this problem, e.g. it's very popular to use their satellite modems to track cargo containers while they're being shipped: when a big container ship pulls into port and they all wake up and report their position at once, the network suffers a fair amount (and this is with far lower bandwidth).
Not sure that the LA marina would be the bottleneck, but it totally makes sense to limit customers to one cell in the early phases of the software. On the one side there are capacity concerns, which will lessen as they have more satellites up. On the other side, it can be quite simple software limitations, like implementing the hand-over between cells. By limiting the system to fixed cells initially, a lot of complexity is removed.
I’d be really interested to know how much motion the current terminal can tolerate? Does it lock at the slightest vibration or only if moving at vehicle speed?
I’m thinking about putting it on a boat at anchor or at a dock.
> For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.
History tells us it is far better to let Martians govern themselves. The colonies would eventually rebel regardless; might as well embrace it and let them dictate their own laws.
That being said. Guns on mars! GUNS ON MARS!!! They have a rIGHt to hunt space deer!
I agree that any Mars colony should very quickly become independent.
However, I think we should wait until there are enough people on Mars that there can be a small representative government (or other form of government that they would choose).
Mars shouldn't be independent when the first 10 people land on the surface of the planet.
This tos item has always been my biggest complaint about Starlink. I shouldn't be forced to take a position on premature Martian independence just because I hate Comcast.
This is someone semantics anyway since there will be no enforcement mechanism in the beginning from Earth to Mars. People on Mars will just do whatever they want.
Let's say you're in the _first_ colony ship that lands on Mars. 12 people disembark from the vessel.
There are resources available for 5 years on the planet from prior cargo runs.
All future cargo will be launched from Earth, and very likely from territory controlled by large and powerful governments. All those flights require mission approval to launch and resupply.
Are you _sure_ there's no enforcement mechanism that Earthbound authorities can apply to the Martian people?
I actually think independence for Mars quickly (but not immediately) is important exactly _because_ the Martian people will be able to be so easily held hostage by the whims of a few Earthbound governments.
> Wouldn't it be better for them to be Earth dependent?
Mars very likely would be dependent on the Earth for trade and resources for a long time. It will be a long, long time before it becomes totally self-sustaining.
But, in terms of their government, I generally believe broadly in the principle of local self-determination. I think that will and should apply to Mars, once the population is sufficient.
Mars will be independent until they discover vast deposits of space oil, at which point George W Bush's son will continue his family's war mongering and invade
I mean, I'm pretty sure that Elon added this to potentially establish his own governance over Mars(or his descendants) but yeah, I think good luck with that.
However if this is not suppped to be a joke then this is absolutely insane. There is no way humans, other then maybe a few austranouts will make it to mars in the next 20 years by which this service will be obsolete or no longer exist.
Edit: If HN is still around in 20 years I will be asking you to reconsider your down votes.
> However if this is not suppped to be a joke then this is absolutely insane.
I'm not sure how to interpret it as anything other than a joke. Humans might make it to Mars in the next 20 years, but the idea that we will have established a colony there along with an array of Starlink satellites to provide internet service and, presumably, a means of connecting the Martian internet back to Earth's... well, that's over-ambitious even by Musk's standards.
Applicability aside, how else could it even work, other than colony self-governance? Otherwise what's to stop one country from just claiming the whole planet when they get there? You could still have colonies ruled by certain countries, the way I read the sentence.
It's basically a joke because the Outer Space Treaty has already defined rules for planetary colonization and they don't allow Mars to be a "free planet".
A lot of people seem to think that Starlink will compete with Comcast/Cox/Spectrum/etc in suburban areas. But it won't.
Starlink is great, and people are right to be excited about it as an option for signal in truly rural areas. But it simply won't have the capacity necessary to serve a meaningful number of users in any kind of semi-dense application.
Starlink is like a 4G/5G cellular network except there's no way to increase capacity in a specific area. That makes it great at covering areas with very low population density, but absolutely terrible for even medium-density zones.
If you're stuck in a suburban or exurban area with terrible options for broadband, your best option is likely a 4G or 5G router. There a number of different truly unlimited plans out there (e.g. Calyx). If signal isn't good enough indoors, you can purchase outdoor MIMO antennas to get better results.
Starlink is great if you're in area with very low population density. That's a lot of the US, but not a lot of the US population.
This is great. I'm glad this project is coming along fast.
I'm hoping some time soon that the fixed location requirement is lifted, or at the very least they allow users to sign up to it as a sort of mobile service. I know it isn't handheld, but for people who move around a lot and especially who work in remote outdoor situations, the ability to move around with this service would be amazing.
I'm sure at some point, when they do have the satellite to satellite links in the sky and there aren't ground station bottlenecks they will. High speed internet on the oceans or for travelers in rural areas is an untouched market.
Wouldn't surprised me if this is offered as a premium service in the future. Maybe first for enterprise customers like airlines or shipping and then later for consumers.
If part of the reason for the current location restriction is managerial overhead then I suppose SpaceX could justify an extra charge for this feature.
Edit to add: It may also be that supporting moving terminals is much easier to implement when the terminal is traveling along a known route vs on something like an RV that can pop up on the network anywhere.
My understanding is that limitation is mostly technical and managerial at this point, to help manage things in the early stages. I would too imagine this being eliminated later on.
They intentionally need to populate a certain number of terminals into specific geographic areas to test, measure and refine how time-sharing contention and the equivalent of TDMA is being setup. Each terminal has a GPS receiver in it and reports home with its location.
Do you think it's TDMA? I just assumed it would be whatever the latest CDMA technology is. The download probably doesn't really matter much one way or another since there's so much space between receivers that there's no practical chance of collisions. The satellite certainly must be able to receive multiple uplinks simultaneously, even in order to maintain a modest 15Mbps for multiple customers.
There's no reason to assume starlink works like a typical satellite, though. Digital video broadcast in particular is in one direction from geostationary orbit. Latency is on the order of several seconds due to all the forward error correction that's necessary to tolerate bit errors in reception. There's not really any need for a "multiple access" scheme because "channels" are statically allocated frequency bands.
I would think the radio technology in starlink should more closely resemble modern LTE and 5G cell networks, whether you want to call that CDMA, OFDM, or whatever the specific techniques these days are called.
Satellites are interference limited and power limited. Dbv is not just for broadcasting, despite its name. It's used for pretty much all non-proprietary satellite waveforms.
no, quite literally, if you move a beta terminal from your designated service location, it won't work. I know at least 4 people who also have beta terminals who have tried it. It depends on the size of your 'cell' - some people have been able to go a few km away, some people report it doesn't work even a few hundred meters away from their house. When you sign up for the beta you have to specify your street address and also click on an aerial map where you intend to install it.
And of course a GPS receiver is useful for timing.
I have heard speculation that the issue is actually satellite signal steering. They’re using phased array antennas on both sides so the satellites need to know where to be listening
They haven't released any real info on it. But there's been teardown videos of the CPE showing the phased array design. And the patent for the terminals, which is public, shows a dual beamforming phased array. It clearly needs to be in order to maintain a seamless make-before-break with rising and descending satellites that are illuminating specific areas on the ground with spot beams.
If it was just knowing where to focus, the terminal could send a low bitrate signal with that information. And/or they could let you punch in new coordinates before you go somewhere.
That's why it would break if you leave the active cells entirely. It's not why it would break if you move from one active cell into a different active cell.
And they don't have that many satellites. Each one needs to have a pretty large active area.
Taat makes sense, with a small number of users they are not likely to spend CPU time doing fast Fourier transforms and whatnot for areas with zero subscribers
Are you sure about that? I see there's an article from a couple years ago talking about quad-core A53 CPUs with FPGAs. That's most likely used for the satellite avionics, rather than for the starlink radios. While it's possible the avionics and the radios are tightly coupled, I would be surprised if they were. They're probably mostly separate for fault tolerance reasons.
I suspect FPGAs wouldn't be fast enough to do the RF magic. I figure they likely partnered with a company like Qualcomm to develop some custom silicon, or adapted some existing cell tower silicon, since those chipsets are largely "software defined" these days anyway.
FPGAs are extremely commonly used in the RF telecomm space. You don't implement a multiplier in the free-form FPGA fabric, instead such FPGAs have banks of 'DSP blocks' which essentially give you hard silicon ALUs which you can then hook up however you want. This gives you extremely flexible and potentially massive parallelism with very tight latency guarantees, and you don't lose a huge amount of performance because most of the heavy lifting is in hard silicon anyway. Also FPGAs excel at high bandwidth I/O, which is usually extremely important in these use-cases. A DSP or even a GPU might give you more FLOPs per W or $, but they'll usually struggle with latency.
The quad-code A53 CPUs with FPGAs sounds like Xilinx's RFSoCs, which are explicitly designed to basically give you a custom high-performance base station on a chip (though they can't directly convert to the frequency range Starlink is using).
Not sure what your comment on the frequency range is implying. All signals are converted to baseband before processing. Nobody processes signals on the ground at Ku/Ka frequencies.
The response below mine goes into great deal, but yes, it's going to be fpgas, or an FPGA with a management cpu core in there. They had many reqs open for fpga developers early on.
tl;dr; Yes, this is happening - as soon as there are enough satellites in orbit and terminals are certified to be used on the move.
1. Officially confirmed that moving to a different location is currently locked due to sparse coverage. As soon as this improves to a point it makes sense and starlink has logistics of this figured out it will be allowed
2. Officially confirmed that putting terminal on a car (or even a plane) will be possible, but this only makes sense with much denser coverage and requires separate, stricter (vs fixed terminal) certification from FCC.
I put a pre-order in a week ago, after the status changed a couple of days earlier (from 'please give us your email address so we can advise you' to 'we have a limited offering per region' - which is what's showing now).
I'm about 250km north-west of Sydney, Australia, currently limited to a 25/5Mbps satellite circuit, with 600+ms RTT. I'm paying AUD$80 pcm, and have a data cap of 80 / 150 GB (peak/off-peak).
Between 17:00 and 23:00 the effective service drops down to about 5Mbps down.
Starlink in AU will cost ~ AUD$140 pcm, 30ms RTT, and likely give me 100 / 20 Mbps, with no cap (at least until the heavy-feeders come in and ruin that arrangement for the rest of us). (EDIT - plus AUD $700 once the order is processed later this year, for the equipment.)
I believe some regions - eg, Norfolk Island - have already max'd out their pre-order quotas though.
I am not sure if this is wishful thinking but can Starlink lead to growth of smaller communities that are self-sustaining (produce their own renewable electricity, food, etc) that cannot simply exist due to connectivity constraints? I have a dream of the world where we live in 1-10k population small towns littered around the globe, connected through starlink and public ways, and the idea of cities would become obsolete. No more traffic jams and NIMBYs and other nonsense. Better policies suited to those neighborhoods and better politicians. Unique culture would flourish in each community based on its dynamics. Utopia in my imaginary mind, what are the downsides?
Not sure how any of that magically creates better politicians, and it's worth mentioning that some people really enjoy large cities and the idea of a megalopolis.
However, I do agree that Starlink could be the answer to impoverished areas not having readily available internet. This is something I hope to see change as a result, as it would really reinforce some of the early sentiments Elon put out a long while ago.
Speculation - it could create better politicians through two means:
(1) More competition for local immigration, which creates selection effects whereby the better run locales attract the largest populations and survive
(2) Small local elections aren't subject to partisan MSM outrage coverage or social media virality. Local politicians more likely to emerge organically through legitimate community relationships and reputation, instead of how effectively they're able to stoke the national outrage. Local journalism is also more healthy and fact based, so perhaps more likely to get an informed outcome instead of an outcome driven by partisan tribalism.
That's true, I also like some aspects of large cities, especially on the East coast (NYC).
I was thinking that better politicians because of conciousness of the community towards its own governance, we already do that but very poorly. I don't even know who the politicians are in my own county. No idea what they do and I don't know if we have a local newspaper in our county. May be I should engage in town halls and local politics.
I find that the smaller areas tend to have worse politicians as there are less to choose from. I can see it being both ways.
Plus, not many politicians in the US at least really seem to care about the thoughts or even the well-being of their constituents.
If anything, it's the access to information that would result in better education which would thus (hopefully) result in more informed voters. That would be the real win, in my opinion.
I think this is a romantic view. Small towns are, if anything, more corrupt as there are less people and less options. It’s a lot easier to get away with being blatantly corrupt in small town America, at least in my experience growing up in a southern adjacent smallish (~15k people) town.
A downside is that a lot of someones have to make the satellite dishes and solar panels. Sure, if you work white collar and can do everything remotely it’s no big deal, but the world runs on hundreds of millions of people working in factories and logistics. Those get more efficient in more densely populated areas. The more people who work in densely populated areas, the more total wealth there is in society, the more people can live in their utopia villages.
The biggest downside is you live in bum fucking nowhere. You’re stuck in a social circle you can’t escape from and the only escape is to get on Starlink and talk to people about the good old days when we used to sit in traffic and huff exhaust fumes, but at least we had options. There’s only 2 grocery stores in town and they’re full of the lowest denominator crap because nobody in your town has any good taste. The kids your kid grows up with have stupid parents and are stupid themselves, so your smart kid grows up feeling isolated and like there’s something wrong with them because they’re different. Maybe your kid pulls through it all or maybe tries to numb out with drugs and ODs. Maybe you develop a bad reputation around town for your differences (maybe your an atheist in a town of Christians, I don’t know) and get blackballed from social events. Maybe you go to the bar and everyone’s in a relationship except for you. Or maybe you’re gay but there’s nowhere to be out. The movie theater only has 2 screens and only runs G and PG movies. The biggest music act you saw this year was a cover of “My heart will go on” played by an 8 year old on the Clarinet at the Little Miss Chokecherry Festival. You tried to expose the town to the culture you’re into but everyone just thinks you’re weird. The traveling salesman problem gets a million times harder.
Basically unless everyone is plugged into the net all the time in some massively fulfilling way or rearranges perfectly every generation to avoid cultural bubbles, small towns suck and people leave them for a reason. They head to cities and those cities become thriving multicultural hubs of new ideas that slowly make their way back to the smaller towns.
I have the same dream. We just need the connectivity: internet/communications (like via Starlink), and transportation (safe VTOL aircraft for everyone.) Without those things the decentralization of civilization will not be possible.
Urban population density is the only thing that is keeping our(US) carbon footprint from going through the roof imo. I'd much rather have people live in high density buildings within walking distance to most things. Sewers, electricity lines, gas, roads, water is all shared.
I'm not sure this is ends up as utopian as you make it sound. I imagine a lot of people moving out of big cities will bring the big cities with them.
First you need your Starbucks. Then your brew pubs. Better roads and sanitary services. Amazon Prime two-day delivery.
Suddenly these rural small towns start looking a lot like exurbs in large metros. Not a total negative. A lot of small towns are in desperate need of economic infusion, but I don't believe you can transplant wealthy city dwellers into rural American without irrevocably changing the way of life in those places.
The smaller communities in you describe in the US often have better internet than larger cities.
The trick is to be somewhere AT&T refused to build out to back in their heyday. Those places sometimes have local telephone cooperatives.
Fiber optic cable has been dirt cheap for decades (cheaper than a dirt road, in fact). Gigabit to the home in tiny communities is basically free these days. You don’t even need to dig a trench, since there are inexpensive machines that bore tunnels as they lay fiber behind themselves.
Starlink would make no sense if we simply broke up the ISP duopolies.
Alternatively, people could organize enough candidates to take over their city and county governments, and have those people force right-of-way for local ISPs to be approved.
Even without that, WISP’s are a thing, don’t require right of way (but do require line of sight), and compare favorably to starlink.
Having said that, there are still places where only starlink can reach; it should be a much smaller percentage of the population than it is though.
There aren’t any mandates to provide service, so it’s hit or miss.
My parents live in a town where the local franchise agreement allows the cable company to cover whatever they want. The company opted to cease maintenance of cable on their road. So their options are spotty 4G service or rolling a DIY wisp with a friend across the valley in a more civilized town.
I live outside of a rural town on 29 acres and my 4G gets 4Mpbs and my WISP provides 20Mbps. It’s no Google Fiber, but it’s enough to let my wife and me both work remotely and be on video calls most of every workday.
That said, I just signed up for Starlink because it’s faster and cheaper than my WISP, and hopefully more reliable. Right now we get a few minutes of dropped connection a few times per day.
The WISP reliability shouldn’t be that bad. (It’s not the radio’s fault.). Either there’s a tree branch or flimsy pole breaking the connection in the wind, or some backend network issue.
Satellite internet has already existed for a long time, and while it's not fantastic, it's not bad enough to be a show-stopper for a small self-sustaining community. My parents are on satellite internet, and for their uses (YouTube, Facebook, some FaceTime calls to family), it's fine.
This would just permanently entrench existing wealth structures. Gated communities will be celebrating at what you suggested. It would be the end of economic mobility. Great for the long tail, not so great for those left of the power law.
Economic mobility is enabled by jobs and education, not location. Speaking as someone who grew up in a small town and ended up making 10x my parents combined, a small town upbringing is not a hinderance if you’re inspired by learning about the world through the Internet.
If the remote working and education trend continues, location will be more or less irrelevant.
If "we only hire in our NY or SV head office" tends towards "we hire anywhere, as long as you're good enough" - wouldn't the effect be the opposite?
We've been seeing the slow death of rural communities for decades so the status quo doesn't seem to be of much help to them. Some reverse migration back into these communities and a trend away from increasing centralization into a few rich cities should only help their economic prospects.
I live in a remote town in the North Cascades in Washington State in the US and know about a dozen folks who have had Starlink for a few months now. I'm lucky enough to have line of sight to a tower on a mountain 6 miles away so I can have consistent service from a local ISP and haven't had to rely on sats. But it's a game changer for those who aren't as lucky as I. It still drops a lot which obviously causes problems for those on VPN's but it's so much better than Centurylink, the only previous non sat option. Areas that were previously only weekend homes for skiers and snowmobilers are now feasible for remote workers, which is a double edged sword given that our area has boomed significantly since COVID hit. A lot of local folk are now worried that our area will turn into the next Jackson Hole or Sun Valley as real estate prices skyrocket and longtime locals are priced out.
I've seen the Starlink satellite train in the early morning sky a few times while walking the dog and it's pretty trippy.
I am at about your same latitude and have seen 3-4 hour periods with as low as 0.08% packet loss to seattle. There is already 'full' make before break satellite hand off coverage at our latitude. If your neighbors are using terminals with tree obstruction on any side they may see much more loss than that. Things have also been a lot better since Jan 15 or so, as satellite density increases.
> A lot of local folk are now worried that our area will turn into the next Jackson Hole or Sun Valley as real estate prices skyrocket and longtime locals are priced out.
You can calm their fears by reminding them that Starlink is rolling out _nationwide_, so remote workers are going to move to lots of different places.
Curious to see how this plays out in a country like mine (India) where the government loves [1] to shut off Internet access on the flimsiest of excuses. Everything from entire states (like Kashmir), to few localities (farmer protests around Delhi) have had their mobile Internet access switched off because the government likes to curtail communication when it suits them.
Curious about this as well. The portal shows target delivery by 2022 when I apply to pre-order for an address in Kolkata. They will probably have to revisit the pricing model based on the local economy. But yeah, I'm worried whether the current govt will even allow such devices to be imported given they want a tighter control over the internet.
On the other hand, I believe this kind of connectivity will be extremely beneficial for cities such as Kolkata which suffer due to lack of proper infrastructure (and of course, lack of political will). I would love to see a future when I can move back to Kolkata and work with the same latency to servers in NorAM.
Musk has quite a bit of money invested in China, so it will be more interesting what he does when China wants to integrate Starlink into the great firewall.
I've heard that this will be a disaster for amateur astronomy. Yet Starlink is claiming that their mitigation techniques will avoid the problem [0]. I can't tell if their claim is sound. Can someone with expertise weigh in?
There is a cohort of astronomers that don't want earths orbit filled with humans. It's sort of a naturalistic argument, effectively that they will lose their ability to take photos of what they want. On the margin, it's good for people like SpaceX to try and do what they can to minimize negative externalities.
But I think that we as a race should not cater to them for a few reasons:
1) there is no precident for "owning" the sky above you to infinity, it's an odd position legally
2) there is another cohort of people that want to expand consciousness who are impeded by this NIMOP (Not In My Orbital Plane) crowd. We can fit a quadrillion humans comfortably on rotating space habitats. This seems like a better goal under most moral systems than retaining the right to take pretty pictures.
3) any loss of "science" due to the loss of ground based sensors would be more than offset by having a robust space presence.
I am not an astronomer, but I have an idea and maybe folks could tell me if this makes sense. AFAIK some astronomers use digital optics and a computer with their telescopes. For those people, perhaps a solution would be to have software that identifies the satellites, then learns to "ignore" them. The satellites are moving relative to the earth which suggests if you are focused on one area of space, your computer will eventually see 100% of the space. So while not perfect, you could in effect make the satellites invisible. For those using a traditional telescope this obviously would not help. Thoughts? Is this feasible today using current technology?
Both can be true. The original Starlink satellites were horrible for astronomy. Astronomers complained and Starlink implemented some fairly effective mitigation measures like a shade and less reflective routes while orbit raising.
On this, I wonder if those satellites could be equipped with some astronomical devices and grant some kind of public access? Maybe just a download link of recent raw data from an antenna.
The biggest thing Starlink will bring is competition now people will be shocked at how the older ISP's are suddenly able to provide better speeds for cheaper and no download upload limits. Just like it area where google fiber was introduced.
I’m of the opinion people like to massively overpay for their Internet and speeds paid for are underused. I’m on 25Mbps at $40/month. I was on 75Mbps for a bit and I don’t notice the difference except if I’m downloading a 90 GB game or something. My ISP could probably give me 200Mbps and neither of us would notice. Still waiting on the killer app for fast Internet.
Surprisingly TMobile’s 5G on the iPhone 12 is giving my dad 60Mbps download and he’s on a cheap unlimited data plan so I’m wondering if that’s what is going to put more pressure on existing ISPs. 5G adoption has probably been kind of low so those speeds may not hold.
The primary ISPs competing with Starlink are geo-stationary satellite internet providers. They can't compete with Starlink just based on the speed of light delays inherent to being in GEO. Once I can get Starlink, Hughesnet can offer their service for free and I'll still be more than happy to tell them where to shove their dish.
This will be true for the first 1-2 years or so. Once more people can be reached, marginal cost for new customers will go down and consequently the prices of the package.
There is a big difference between delivering some hardware to 10k people vs. 400mio people. I will not be surprised if Starlink manages to be price-competetive within the next 3 to 5 years.
”Starlink satellites are over 60 times closer to Earth than traditional satellites”
Goodness! I really need to learn more about satellites! For some reason that statement really strikes me.
I wonder what the ‘band’ of distance from earth most satellites fall into. The range of area a satellite can orbit earth must be pretty wide if this is the case.
Now I need to look up what is the closest & furthest distance a small object can reasonably orbit earth. I mean, now that I think of it, the moon is a satellite. How far is the moon?
Dang it, I’m realizing I really take all these things for granted. I just realized my reading TODO list for the weekend :)
Starlink roughly orbits at 1200km. The most common orbit for internet sats is geostationary orbit, which means that the satellite is stationary with regards to an observer on Earth. It works because a satellite on a circular orbit at that height moves at the same speed as the rotation of Earth.
This way you can have a simple, pointed antenna and not an obscenely expensive phased array like Starlink. That being said, GEO is only 36000km,so I'm not sure where the "60 times" figure comes from...
Starlink currently orbits at 550 km. 550*60=33000 so that puts it slightly more than 60 times closer than GEO. There are other shells planned at different heights, but the current satellites, and ones launched in the near future, are all orbiting at 550km.
It still sounds so wild for some reason! 60X closer!
You’re saying these and other satellites are planned for this ‘shell’ and maybe others at different distances? Could this be partly due to congestion and the problem of ‘space junk’?
Also, won’t satellites in an orbit this close to earth eventually be ‘sucked’ in to the atmosphere and burn up?
Satisfied Starlink user here. It beats the pants off our DSL connection though there are still some hiccups. Outside DSL, all we had available were the high orbiting Hughes, etc. I’m stoked to see more folks have this as an option.
I wonder how many people would switch over if it was priced ~$10 higher than a Comcast plan, just to avoid having to deal with Comcast. I hope this ubiquitous competition will force prices for wired Internet down and customer service quality up.
And if it is able to scale, this will be a VERY attractive offer in underdeveloped countries like Germany. (Germany may be a first world country, but the Internet access options sure don't feel that way.)
Will Starlink offer mobile solutions? I could see this being a game changer for Internet on ships or for temporary use in extremely remote locations where a sat phone at eye-watering prices were the only options right now.
It is not intended as a competitor for Comcast. A well built, engineered and maintained DOCSIS3 system with channel bonding can easily support 600Mbps+ down per user (not all at once simultaneously, the standard metrics of oversubscription apply), and 20-25 Mbps up. Starlink is intended for more fringe or impossible to reach areas.
It's weird but I've watched and cheered on almost every SpaceX launch since the Falcon 1 days, including Starlink launches. Starlink isn't the pinnacle of all that work, but I almost want to buy it just to celebrate it.
And though not a competitor to Comcast for the reasons you point out, I'm probably not the only person who's very happy to finally have a decent alternative showing up. Just a shame it didn't come in at half the monthly cost.
Part of me wonders if the price is artificially high in order to reduce the initial rush. You know if they were to offer high speed Starlink for half the typical land-based internet, there would be so many orders it would be pretty problematic.
I currently have Comcast, but I really despise them. Starlink will be a small step up in price, and a small step down in speed for me, but I'm going to do it just to be away from Comcast.
Starlink today slightly beats my Comcast performance-- both up and down. Starlink costs a bit more, but the service, bandwidth, latency is getting better every week--I'd rather be hitched to a modern company that knows how to improve.
It feels weird that I pay some small SaaS products more than this. You'd think slinging a few hundred satellites into space would be a more difficult / expensive endeavor.
SpaceX is way in the red on this right now. But I'm sure they've done the math on how much profit they can extract from the constellation in the long term.
We do know that. We know how much phased array costs, and many experts in that area have said so. Shotwell and musk both have said getting the terminal cost down is their biggest challenge. They wouldn't say that if it was $500.
No, they are commodity and we know how much they cost. SpaceX hasn't magically solved somehow decreasing the price of components they don't even make. They are paying over $1000 for a terminal.
Sure! You mean every phased array that's ever been built? I suppose you have the BOM for the starlink terminal that spacex themselves have said is too expensive? I guess the fact that musk is behind it means the cost is magic and you can discount all prior technology, right?
"DaveMosher reports @SpaceX has contracted @ST_World already "a few years ago" to build 1m #Starlink user terminals at $2400/pc, hence current hardware subsidy for beta testers is $1900. Article suggests, SpaceX may be paying $2.4 billion for the order.
https://t.co/jak0hKQBGn"
So the current estimate published in business insider means you are about four times off based on the contract with ST, who we now know builds the chips inside of it. Please show your sources of a $500 phased array terminal.
So we have $2.4 billion, but we don't know what this includes. This is likely for all the development, setting up the production system and so on. It could include a number of things.
To just take that number an convert it unit cost like that doesn't make sense. SpaceX will need many more then just 1M terminals, what matters is the marginal cost per terminal.
And if these numbers are accurate is also questionable.
What most people don't understand, is that Starlink is a military first service. Their primary customer is the US military. The most obvious application is UAVs where latency is critical. The consumer part is probably just marketing. It doesn't make much economic sense. Imagine they wanted to launch 1000s of classified military satellites. Everyone would be opposed.
Please provide actual sources to these claims. SpaceX has made roll out of consumer terminals a priority and started basically as early as it was possible.
If the military was really the primary target, why would they do it like that?
Not launching it until you have laser link would also made more sense if you wanted to sell to the military primarily.
The military and other commercial have run some trial test but they are not close to ready to adopt them. The military also doesn't need nearly as many sat to get the coverage.
Launching 12k+ sats just for the military makes no sense what so ever.
So please, substantiate your claims with something other then speculation.
The article doesn't prove anything other then that the Russian are scared about free access to information and hate SpaceX in particular because SpaceX is basically destroying Russian space flight.
And we do actually have sources that military have test Starlink, these contracts are not super secret. We also no that military has contracts with other sat providers already.
Yet there is no such contract with Starlink.
You just have opinion based on nothing that the consumer market is not worth it and nothing to back it up with, and it contradicts everything said by SpaceX and what many analysts believe.
I'm convinced that the primary purpose of Starlink is funding SpaceX's R&D for eventually going to Mars. Providing internet service to the public helps, providing internet service to the military helps too. I don't think the really prioritize one above the other.
While this may be amongst the long term goals, I don't think it's useful for military applications yet until laser com is fully online. Currently there is no sat to sat com, so there's is always ground station within sight of a sat. Unless SpaceX places a ground station near a conflict zone, military can't utilize it much yet.
This is something that is fascinating to me about really all of Musk's businesses - they all seem to be in some way misrepresenting themselves to the general public. And they all actually rely on insights into how governments have to spend at an enormous scale. And all of them make things that are of extreme strategic importance on a global scale. Like I'm not one for conspiracy bullshit, but there must be a deeper story going on behind the scenes. Right?
I mean, customers from all over the world using an USA ISP for their internet access, which can be tapped easily to gather mass surveillance data is a very valid reason to be paranoid :)
I have no idea if this number is realistic but lets say the US military pays 10 billion dollar a year for this. The consumer price is about a thousand dollar a year so they would need about 10 million customers to get the same revenue. If the whole system has enough bandwidth to support that many consumers I don't think it's just for marketing.
I went to the site to see the prices... 100eur per month for 50-150Mbit connection? There are no data caps at the moment. I bet there will be soon.
That is quite a bit more than people pay for their Internet access around here. I'm out in the countryside and I pay 20EUR per month for unlimited download LTE (15-25Mbps - I have a diy directional antenna to get the service where I am, without it I would get 1mb).I sure miss my 150MBit (soon to be upgraded to gig) fiber Internet I used to have when I lived in a city, but I wouldn't pay 5 times more for 5 times the throughput. It is not like the faster connection will actually be that many more times useful to an average remote worker/home user.
When reliable, low latency uncapped 10MBit cheap Internet is available it is very hard to justify paying many times more for faster access.
I'm glad they are developing this network so people who have no other connectivity can use it, but I wish they offer something comparable to rural LTE in price (and consequently speed probably).
>I'm out in the countryside and I pay 20EUR per month for unlimited download LTE
You're simply not the target market. I live in the American countryside, where cell service of any kind is a distant memory several miles before I make it to my driveway. I pay $900/month to rent a second house in town because I'm fully remote but my current slow GEO satellite internet at home isn't suitable for remote work. $100/month for broadband internet is a phenomenal deal for me.
Starlink seems to be priced more for the American market, where internet access to your home generally costs about $40-50 USD/mo, and cell service (with ~20gb of data, aka 'unlimited') generally costs about $35-$70/mo. For a lot of people, this will replace one of those, AND be available anywhere you can put the antenna.
I was able to order one for Slovenia. It says it will come in 2022. I generally have 2 questions.
1) Will there be local ground stations all over the world ? Or will it depend on laser interconnect only?
2) A lot of countries have local laws about ISP's. Our politicians are currently too busy making us look like idiots on world stage, but other countries generally expect ISPs to comply. Not sure how they intend to handle that.
Honestly based on Tesla's self driving pre order strategy, I fully expect them to have no plans to roll out to Slovenia but are taking pre-orders anyway
But you can't reserve from Cuba or Venezuela.
If the government of USA really wanted to overthrown those governments would let Starlink do business there providing an alternative internet to the state controlled internet.
For people hoping to get overseas latency better than fiber: not now, and probably never without a huge premium.
When they finally get inter-satellite comms, low-latency transport will probably be reserved for huge-premium tier accounts.
For everybody else, you can assume the satellites will aggressively dump packets to the nearest downlink terminal to feed into fiber. After they get laser links going, when there is no downlink terminal in view, packets might move to the next satellite ahead or behind on the same orbit, and then, if possible, down, or repeat. There will be no attempt to send packets to satellites in other orbits. They might sometimes delay traffic so as not to match performance of their premium tier, if it would otherwise be reliably fast.
For future super-high-premium tier accounts, packets will step through satellites to get to a terminal near the destination, and downlink there. Packets sent via this route will arrive whole milliseconds ahead of terrestrial fiber. Despite small amounts of traffic bouncing between orbit tracks, these accounts will constitute a substantial fraction of Starlink's total revenue.
In the eventual future, we can expect satellites to carry a few TB of on-board storage to proxy blockbuster media properties; and, to broadcast select real-time traffic, e.g. World Cup video. These will be done mainly to free up bandwidth.
Those are my predictions. If yours differ, explain.
Whats one satellite bandwidth? If a sat flies over a city with, say, 100k subscribers, and 10% is watching 4k video on Netflix? There gonna be limits, right?
"Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.
"The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said."
Other than the cool factor I’m not sure why you’d want it in a city. I get gigabit for 60$ a month and star link will never match the latency I get due to physics. If it was cheap enough I’d love to get it for traveling but it should be used for things like that not to replace your inner city connection.
Depends on where in the city. If I were closer to the city, I could probably get something better from Comcast, but CenturyLink bonded vdsl2 is 80Mbps down/10Mbps up, 20 ms round trip to PPPoE concentrator, $60ish/month. Starlink seems to have maybe better upload and comparable download and latency, and won't go down when the DSLAM (or whatever it's called for vdsl) loses utility power, like my centurylink service does or 2-4 hours later like the cell towers do.
I live in a remote, medium-sized city and need an internet link that constantly works. Comcast usually fills that need, but there are occasional outages. T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T's fixed internet offerings are not available where I am.
I’d keep in mind that some people really, really hate Comcast/AT&T/CenturyLink/etc from the years of abuse they’ve meted out. They might be willing to pay a substantial premium to not have to deal with them/contribute to their bottom line anymore.
I'm a big believer in Starlink and SpaceX generally.
It annoys me that I can not invest in these big bold innovations directly. Has anyone thought about how to invest indirectly on the belief that Starlink will succeed? For instance, are there satellite equipment suppliers or other upstream supplier who stand to profit with Starlink's success?
Likewise, who might fail based on Starlink's success? Should I be shorting Satellite based ISPs?
There are dozens of custom ICs from STMicroelectronics in each terminal. ST is a public company; NYSE:STM
The terminal is also using a large amount of high-frequency substrate. That could be Rogers, but maybe one of the much cheaper Chinese materials. But I don’t think a position should be taken based on what’s inside of a terminal. The real play is in shorting the entire satellite industry.
Every existing satellite operators stands to lose from Starlink’s success. Maybe not SiriusXM. Crazy that their net income is still increasing every year.
Intelsat’s cost per bit is much higher than Starlink’s. They also have much less system capacity.
EchoStar owns HughesNet. NASDAQ: SATS
Eutelsat: same as Intelsat, but with less debt on their books.
SES: Wild card among legacy satellite operators, as they have a new, high capacity (O3B mPower) system in the works.
Viasat’s 3-terabit GEO system should be competitive from a cost-perspective, but latency will be much worse. If price is the same as Starlink, they will lose on quality of connectivity/latency.
Iridium, GlobalStar, Orbcomm. Public companies that focus on narrowband/low bitrate/IoT communications. Much of the use cases can be solved with a Starlink terminal and an IoT hub/gateway, rather than going directly from a small sensor to a satellite.
There are a few public GEO operators in Asia; they’ll have the same problem as the European and American operators.
There’s virtually nothing that these companies can do to compete. They are all procurement specialists, rather than being engineering-led/driven. Most importantly, they all pay full price for launch, whereas SpaceX gets it for not much more than gas-money.
And SpaceX can get way more cash than anyone else at a much cheaper price. It’s tough to fight against that kind of war chest.
We have hindered a of Inmarsat base stations and sims around the world. Rarely use them, but when we do we are happy to pay for the bandwidth, and we spend a lot each year pre-buying bandwidth whether we use it or not.
They are now moving to charge us a monthly fee per station, not as much as starlink yet, but it seems an odd choice. Perhaps a final squeeze of their customers.
Bgans still have a benefit - smaller than starlink, battery powered, movable, but this latest move has made us reevaluate our satellite strategy, and that’s never a good thing for incumbents.
Are you aware of the players in Australia? There is Skymesh (owned by a UK company) but I'm not aware of other players in the Aus market.
Of all of the providers on your list - are any of them doing LEO constellations that are able to provide low latency in the way that Starlink can offer?
One might quibble about cost efficiencies and system capacity, but in the consumer market I cant see how you can argue with the physics advantage of being 50x closer to your customer!
Iridium and Global Star make the majority of their money from governments supporting custom use cases and working with OEM partners. Starlink might be a viable alternative in 10 years on the next-gen bidding cycle, but not before.
That’s a solid point, though I think there is still a shorting opportunity. If they only have 10 years before revenues start to decline drastically, then their value doesn’t increase. It’s possible that the downward revenue spiral starts sooner than 2030. Maybe. Who knows.
$GOOGL invested in and owns 5-10% of SpaceX. Even if SpaceX is valued at $100B, every $200 you invest in Google would be around a $1 into SpaceX, but if you think SpaceX is going to be the first 10 trillion dollar company or something crazy, it could make sense.
I was looking for starlink IPO. There is some good news I read for the last few months. I think it would succeed more than Tesla since it is more global and affordable.
Pricing looks like $499 for hardware, $50 shipping and $99/mo for service.
I had trouble getting fast internet at a rural location and ended up going with T-Mobile Home Internet for $50/mo and no setup fee. They claim 50mbps but ours typically exceeds 100mbps with unlimited data so no complaints so far.
I’m not affiliated with either company, just interesting to see the new internet offerings available to rural homes.
Hi hackernews, I have a couple of questions on the potential to undermine existing telcos.
1) what is the theoretical capacity near term of the network in terms of # users per unit area and bit rate per unit area? What do you think the maximum single connection speed using the spectrum they have available?
2) is there potential to increase that capacity in the future? To what level? Perhaps they can develop multi-dish base stations which connect to many satellites at once? Beam forming? Multiple frequencies?
3) is there potential for starlink to offer more density by linking to space in one location and installing a cell phone tower to spread the connection locally? This has potential to drastically cut the cost to the user (standard hardware) and also increase density, but it requires fast single location connectivity to space.
4) has there been an analysis done of which existing telco customers starlink could potentially steal? Which telcos are most exposed? How many customers are in the group that would switch?
5) have you guys considered starlink from the perspective of zero marginal cost per customer acquired, Vs standard cable is high marginal cost per customer acquired? Said another way - all of starlink costs are upfront whether they have 1 customer or 1m customers, but standard telcos need to decide on investing in cable spend on a per customer basis. From this viewpoint have you guys thought about which customers normal telcos will decide to let go to starlink and not invest in new infrastructure in the face of starlink competition?
6) is it likely that Musk is sandbagging the potential capabilities of starlink in order to put cable/Telco companies at ease of the threat in case they look for regulatory protections?
7) have you guys compared starlink services to software services and what the implications of this might be? Software is all upfront in development and then zero marginal. Sounds like starlink may be quite similar. The other telcos are not in this position however (see #5 above).
All this talk of uplink on the roads...for what? Uploading cat vids? Going into the wilderness and not cord cutting? Spying on people? So your phone has an excuse to be on more often?
There are no real justifiable applications to this tech, and it comes at real cost, to our scientific understanding of the universe, to our general ability to appreciate nature, and even arguably to our ability to transition to new tech (what's the realistic upgrade scenario here, so far nobody has successfully safely pulled a junked satellite out of orbit, not to mention the issue of space junk), all so some geeks can play vidya games in the woods?
Try using a Plus Code? The link you sent is 9C9MRJ9C+XP (visible in the left panel of Google Maps when you click on a location) which isn't on land and is rejected by the Starlink website, but "V84R+RR Isle of Scalpay" (the nearest land) gives me the same pricing as I see for my location in Edinburgh. So I suspect you'd be fine.
The plus code for my area returns nothing, however for a satellite that is ~500km above me, surely subscribing to a location that is 27 miles away from me won't make a difference?
No idea why the Starlink website won't recognise the short Plus Code, especially when it shortens the full code if I put that in :P. Your area code is "9C9J", making your full code "9C9JJQX3+84".
As an aside, plus codes should be wonderful things but the tooling isn't particularly well built out -- this is the first application I've seen using them that's not Google Maps, and it's not worked as well as I'd hoped it would :(. In this case, the geocoder for the area hasn't done what it ought to have done. And I fear that while the full codes don't need a geocoder, short codes might be generally susceptible to incompatible geocoders leading to incompatibilities between implementations. Which is what we seem to be seeing here.
Would they open it to a country such as Iran? It will disrupt censorship and access contol efforts of the government. I read the gov have recently assembled a task force to find a "solution" for this upcoming problem. I'd guess it'll be difficult to spot the receivers, since a large number of the will be deployed at any corner of the country, due to low price, high mobility and ease of installation and use. Obviously they can't sell hardware there, however it will be smuggled. They can sell subscription though, if they accept crypto. I wonder whether they will consider it?
Does anyone know how many users can be supported per dense area? Would this make sense in a city of 10k? 100k? 1M? Generally speaking Starlink goes against one of the main ideas in 5G, namely that of small cells.
Compared to other satellite Internet solutions, I believe Starlink has much smaller "cells". Obviously nowhere near as small as terrestrial 5G in dense areas.
I'm pretty pumped for the Starlink rollout even though my current ISP provides better service at a lower rate.
I work remotely, so a quality internet service is a big concern for me when looking for a new home. Once Starlink is available, I don't have to worry so much about that.
It also provides many ISPs with much-needed competition, even at that price point. Even though my parents live in a suburb which should have good connectivity options, they pay almost as much as a Starlink subscription for lower bandwidths plus a data cap.
It’s not really meant to compete with cable/fiber. This is for people stuck with geo stationary trash, dsl, microwave relay, etc. It’s a massive market and can take SpaceX to a trillion dollar company easily without ever stealing a cable customer.
The incredible thing is that despite not having to compete with wired connections, it is almost competitive with them.
They likely have to price it a bit above wired connections just to keep load manageable in dense areas, but it puts an upper bound on how badly monopolist incumbents can treat their customers.
While I don't think it will actually replace cable/fiber, I think it will drive prices down and service quality/customer treatment up, so its existence is a huge benefit even for people in populated areas that will never actually use it.
What is the latency? I find there is a material difference in my internet experience with 5ms fiber connection vs 100ms+ cable connection. I imagine it’s worse for satellite links due to the limitations of physics.
20 ms was cited elsewhere in the thread. Unlike older satellite Internet solutions that use geostationary satellites (~36000 km altitude), this uses satellites in low earth orbit (~550 km altitude, with additional, slightly lower and higher levels planned).
Their 12000 satellites will have a total bandwidth of 240000 Gbps. I don't see how they get to a trillion dollars on that. A 100 Mbps stream being uploaded to one satellite and then relayed through others and finally download to and end user is going to use at least 200 Mbps of that total system bandwidth.
That puts an upper limit of 1.2 million worldwide simultaneous 100 Mbps streams, and that's probably being too generous. In a given region the limit is much smaller. The numbers I saw said 500k simultaneous 100 Mbps streams in the US.
Overselling can push those numbers up, but I don't think they can oversell enough to take them to a trillion dollar company.
> Overselling can push those numbers up, but I don't think they can oversell enough to take them to a trillion dollar company.
You’re vastly underestimating how much you oversell as a consumer ISP. Fiber companies with dedicated lines to your house can’t even handle all of their customers pulling 100mbps at a time because the bottlenecks are the IXPs.
The AMS IXP is one of the largest exchanges in the world, and it only hits about 10,000 gbps max per day.
You’re also forgetting that $100/mo is a cost offered to consumers on the ground. Commercial shipping and military won’t bat an eye at paying $1000/mo for a measly 10mbps to a ship in the pacific. Oil rigs, mines, military bases, etc, etc.
Great insight, and I agree. With a lot of family and some friends in rural parts of the U.S., the weak internet and cable connections are detrimental to any sort of internet-based tech.
Hi! I live on a major arterial in a major US city. We have buried utilities to my house, and my house was never wired for anything faster than what you can get on a phone line. Even though all six of my property-line adjacent neighbors (whose houses are in stone-throwing distance) have gigabit connections.
After 9 months and a call to the City Council, I finally got a quote from Comcast: $37,000 for copper. They laughed when I asked what it would cost for fiber.
It's a competitive price for a satellite service. HughesNet and Viasat will charge upwards of $100/mo for ~25 Mbps service with significantly higher latency and limited data allowances (<100 GB/mo).
Typical in rural areas is $100 for 5mbps or even less. This is less than a mile outside of a town with a university and decent cable connection — they just don’t lay cable out into the country, and the phone lines can’t (or won’t) handle higher speeds
I would expect it'll be relatively the same cost everywhere, but I could be wrong in that. These satellite (and point to point) internet services aren't really designed for people who have a lot of internet options.
If I was them, I'd offer uncapped Internet, but prioritize based on past bandwidth usage if there is congestion.
So if you use a lot of bandwidth, you still get full speed at night, but during peak times, other users get priority and your connection becomes slower.
Bonus points if they only take bandwidth usage during peaks into account, incentivizing customers to move bulk transfers to off-peak hours when the traffic is effectively free.
Anecdotal for sure but our connection has been fairly consistent. We do experience the occasional 10 second disconnect every so often. SSH over Starlink has me reach for my DSL for those use cases. If you want specific numbers, I can pull whatever data.
Did you tested/used anything like Zoom, Google Meet, Face Time, Signal, Whatsapp ? How is the beta experience ? Usable ? Can you comment please ? Thank you
I see that some people think we can do much better in latency. But you need to realize an information will never, never ever, travel from Europe to US West under 30 ms.
Why? Light travels from Berlin to SF in 30 milliseconds. That is absolute minimum you can do. This is not even roundtrip time.
So when Starlink tells you it will be 20 ms, just think about 20 ms to where? To the nearest satellite? Sure.
There probably are routes where RTT time for Starlink is faster than the RTT over a dedicated fibre optic link. Fibre optic links need to follow geographical and political constraints, which these do not.
These satellites are at an altitude of 560km, so it's not hard to imagine there are some places where it could be faster to use Starlink (say Spain - Turkey). You also need to consider the speed of light in the atmosphere is faster than fibre optic cables by around 40%. However if there is a need for something like that, then it's probably already going via satellite.
For the average consumer these will probably be faster for Western US - EU just because there are less hops and less companies involved (as I understand the backhaul isn't yet going between satellites).
I think it’s implied that’s 20 ms to geographically close destinations on the internet rather than within their own network.
Online gaming is mostly where this matters. I don’t know much about this but I assume most games have geographically diverse set of game servers so no matter where you are (within limits) latency isn’t terrible.
So it costs 99$ a month. I guess by Western standards that low but in India I pay roughly 50$ for 3 months 150mbps internet at 600gb per month. The 1 tb per month package costs 60$ for 3months.
I guess they won't be launching anytime soon in India, but I guess it can used in remote parts of India where there is no internet connectivity for miles. Still rather expensive though.
I pre-ordered and will probably not get it until July/August, I'm pretty excited about it. One thing I noticed when pre-ordering is that it didn't offer to sell me roof mount, which I'll need... I hope I can buy this later? I know they sell them but it wasn't an add on for the pre-order.
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I've seen the figure of 130W used by the ground station. 100W is a lot, from memory 4G cell towers are only ~10W. What's the kind of RF exposure you get around a ground station? Is SpaceX giving recommendations around where to place the ground station (eg: not on the top of your house)?
I'm currently in the middle of trying to help loads of human rights defenders in Myanmar plan to deal with the internet shut downs that are happening. Satellite stuff like Iridium is too crazily expensive to be useful. I really wish some thing like this was available.
Starlink will follow local regulations when there's money to be made locally, but what's their incentive to comply with places like Myanmar or North Korea, where the regime is going to prohibit Starlink anyway?
Last weekend two of my team were working hard getting Inmarsat beans up in Myanmar. Those tend to be illegal imports though - I’d be very surprised if countries that turn off in greener would license satelite ip modems
Wouldn't these be easily visible from the sky? They need clear line of site. It seems like it would be like putting out "come arrest me" smoke signals.
Do anyone know if I can choose to only use (and pay for) Starlink like a couple of months at a time? I want it for my rural summer house that is used like 3 months a year. Would be like 400 dollar /month if I have to pay all year.
How hard / difficult is it to change the service address?
For example, if I go on a week long vacation to Miami, can I change the address before I get on the flight, and have it ready to use when I check in to the hotel..?
Anyone know how to contact support through the web interface? In the FAQ it says it's possible to do so when you're logged in -- somehow by changing my shipping address the service address got screwed up.
Hopefully you can now move your Starlink around. Being pinned to one address greatly reduces the value of Starlink to me. I had planned to use it off-grid with an RV trailer setup.
Maybe naive question, but what are the tech and/or economical hurdles that impede 'edge' nodes to become satellites now that Starlink is approaching a large scale?
I don't think so. Either Musk will change Starlink to comply with the great firewall (giving starlink access to a market of over a billion people), or China will ban Starlink terminals (which would be sort of like the current situation- Chinese citizens can get around the firewall with a VPN, but doing so is illegal)
Most likely not. At minimum China will require the local regulations to be observed if SpaceX wants to sell Starlink services to Chinese citizens. Also, currently ground-based stations are required so the filtering could be implemented there.
No. Starlink relies on base stations which would need to be located within a couple of hundred of kilometres of the customer. It also relies on RF licenses which it needs to receive from every country in which it operates.
Just placed a pre-order in north Georgia. Right now, tethering cellular is my best option. The local ISP is like 3Mb/s, and Hughesnet has a really low datacap.
It seems people getting most value of it are rich people from developed countries with dysfunctional monopolies. People in developing countries (my exp. in India/China and SEA) already have access to decent 4G at much better prices. Most people without not covered will not be able to afford it anyway.
You clearly have not seen how much of Nepal is currently dependent on very costly geostationary satellite. Fiber and terrestrial point to point high capacity microwave isn't everywhere.
Or how much of Indonesia in remote places is dependent on satellite.
What will the percentage, in terms of population? I have been to big cities in both countries and small villages in India and never had a major connectivity issue in last 2-3 years.
Remote hills/jungle may not have any coverage but feasible market in those areas is miniscule.
Look at the combined annual revenue in billions of intelsat, eutelsat, ses, arabsat, yahsat, russia's geostationary gazprom, amos spacecom and other geostationary satellite owners. plus the revenue of the various latin america geostationary sat owners. The market is there, worldwide.
I'm not supporting this project due to space pollution and hope others will do the same. If starlink is gonna be a success they will start more of this insane projects. let's stop it here.
This is just hype created as part of SpaceX and marketing it as sci-fi tech. Satellite internet has been there for a long time. They are unreliable in bad weather and best for rural areas where there is no internet connection or slow option. For $99/month it is very expensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Inte...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174915&p=2
(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)