Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
starlink.com
starlink.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174915&p=2
(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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?
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.
Some individuals in /r/starlink have started reporting being assigned globally routable ipv6 addresses. So right now it's probably being tested.
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.
there is no seasonal 'pause' service plan offered yet.
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
Like North Hollywood, CA.
https://abc7.com/att-internet-fiber-man-takes-out-wall-stree...
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.
How often do packets get dropped? Have you given it a try with quake or counterstrike?
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.
But do you think it would still work in a fixed configuration like that?
And how much do you think tree coverage would affect service?
Trees cannot be in the way. 11GHz+ doesn't like trees.
So how does it handle the switch from that satellite to the next one without losing signal?
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.
$499 USD for the dish, $99 USD per month for service (no data cap.) Price seems to change to local currency if your country is not USA.
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).
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).
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.
Neither of which is even remotely close to Starlink's offering.
1 - https://promo.viasat.com/plans/standard-30-715T5-11796UC.htm... 2 - https://www.hughesnet.com/get-started
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.
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.
"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.
> The Privacy policy
Is quite good for an ISP really https://www.starlink.com/legal/privacy-policy
Unless SpaceX has made a huge unannounced breakthrough in phased arrays they're actually taking large losses on the up-front cost at this point.
Exactly - but what are the EXACT revenue streams they expect?
How are they going to make money off the largest continent on the planet; Africa which also has the poorest population on the planet?
What's the difference between this and any other ISP?
And you're suggesting the encryption, privacy and data mining of location history policies exist and are diligently followed by current ISP's?
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).
"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?
So many questions.
I think this will be an interesting distinction.
I’m thinking about putting it on a boat at anchor or at a dock.
Thanks
> 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.
That being said. Guns on mars! GUNS ON MARS!!! They have a rIGHt to hunt space deer!
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.
We really do live in the future!
Why do you think so? Wouldn't it be better for them to be Earth dependent?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
EDIT: fixed typo of MB -> GB
>data cap of 80 / 150 MB
So if you had the full 25 mbps available, you would hit your peak cap in 26 seconds? Do you only use it for email/text based applications?
I meant 80 / 150 GB -- I'll correct my earlier post.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
If the remote working and education trend continues, location will be more or less irrelevant.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/diu/story/more-than-400-internet-l...
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.
It'll be interesting to see what China does.
0:https://www.spacex.com/updates/starlink-update-04-28-2020/in...
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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...
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink -- in the table of launches there's a column for orbit height.
The Wikipedia pages on low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, geostationary orbit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_Earth_orbit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
Interactive 3D visualization of synthetic satellites in orbit around earth (including the ISS, rocket bodies, debris):
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.
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.
Fortunately for Starlink, there's not much worry about Comcast having any of those things.
Right now service is locked to the cell you purchase in. The intent is to allow mobility eventually.
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.
Keep in mind, that searching for sources for military stuff, doesn't make a lot of sense. They are mostly classified.
But yes while the project was initiated for military purposes, they also want consumers to reduce the amount they have to pay.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
Essentially, it's not aimed at people that live in cities and have access to other alternatives.
People are, u know, people. They will defy the "not designed for you" clause. Still, is there a number for one sat bandwidth?
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?
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.
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!
https://observer.com/2021/02/spacex-secret-funds-starlink-ip...
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.
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).
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
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?
Fuck. That.
I tried random places near me to see if they show up on Starlink
The nearest one to me is Stornoway (the main town on Harris)
I am about 50 miles away from it
Would this solution work? Currently I am happy with my 4G internet but always interested to try something else.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/57%C2%B038'54.0%22N+7%C2%B...
Also the Satellite doesn't look like it would do well in a coastal area with saltwater.
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?
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.
i think they said 50mbps - 150mpbs
It's a little on the pricey side but at least, as far I know, it's not comcast or at&t.
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.
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.
trillion dollar??
it seems WAYYYYYYYY too much for
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1607004-charter-cost-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast/comments/9ytg25/comcast_wan...
https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r9512648-TWC-TWC-wants-want...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/want-...
This is for those people.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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:-(
I'd love to have Starlink for camping excursions this summer in areas where I can't even get cell service.
(Guessing they're prioritizing places with few other options.)
Or how much of Indonesia in remote places is dependent on satellite.
I could see addresses in Poland and Slovakia, but I didn't try order there since I don't live there :)