8 ms·
Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink. Traditional ISPs are in trouble if the Starlink latency is really in the sub 100ms d
by gt565k 7y ago
Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink.
Traditional ISPs are in trouble if the Starlink latency is really in the sub 100ms due to the LEO distance advantage.
Global coverage with decent latency!
I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure.
Physical infrastructure is about to become obsolete as more advancements in wireless tech and satellite internet become available to the masses.
- randyrand 7y agoKeep in mind, the entire Starlink array will only be able to handle like ~1% of global consumer internet traffic. They're only a handful of gbps downlink each. ~10gbps downlink.
- bufferoverflow 7y ago20 Gbps per satellite, according to the FCC filings. Which isn't that great.
- tim58 7y agoSo theoretically the more remote a location the faster the starlink will be because it is shared by fewer people. Which is the exact inverse for wired infrastructure.
- jandrese 7y agoExcept that the more remote your location the further you likely are from the nearest ground station, which means more hops through the satellite network before you get back down to the ground, higher latency, and reduced total throughput of the system. The system Starlink is trying to beat is BGAN and regional Ku/Ka providers. If you're expecting them to beat the pants off of your terrestrial wired service you're probably going to be disappointed, unless you're on the edge of the range of some old neglected AT&T DSL line or still trapped on dialup. Even then it's almost certainly going to be much more expensive but at least it will have a sizeable speed advantage.
- paulsutter 7y agoYou want to downlink near the server, not near the client. Packets will move 40% faster through vacuum than through fiber.
- wmf 7y agoExcept if the terrestrial fiber backbone is cheaper and less congested you want to downlink near the client.
- _flgt 7y agoEach RF hop is going to have more latency than fiber for RF physical layer processing. Forward error correction intentionally uses large frames to spread out burst errors.
- Diederich 7y agoThat's interesting, can you expand on that? Thanks.
- paulsutter 7y agoSounds speculative. Given link bandwidths and likely error rates, it seems better to allow the higher layers to retransmit than to optimize for correcting burst errors. Especially given Starlink's goal to control latency.
- ianai 7y agoHave they given a range on latency goals? Ie seconds, tenths of seconds, milliseconds, etc? I’m seeing figures of 1 million$ per satellite. Over 10 years that’s roughly 100k/month in mortgage or around 1k customers at 100$/mo.
- _flgt 7y agoI haven't seen a link budget. Do you have a link for one about the "likely error rates"? My guess is Starlink is going to need FEC for Doppler effects and multipath in urban environments. Maybe they will be able to overcome multipath with modulation. But Doppler shift will be significant with LEO. The latest 802.11n standards have been increasing physical layer frame sizes, not decreasing them. I don't know of any modern wireless standard that doesn't use FEC. Coding gain is significant in most link budgets I have seen. The last satellite RF downlink I worked with was for JPSS-1 in LEO nearly 6 years ago. There was a (255, 223) Reed-Solomon code with an interleave depth of 4 frames. So you effectively had to receive 1024 bytes, decode, and you got 4x 223 bytes worth of information. While latency wasn't a major concern, this scheme seemed pretty standard to me. If you don't believe me, the spec is public information: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/jpss/documents/CDFCB/GSFC_474-00001-07-01_CDFCB_External_Vol.7-1_JPSS_Downlink_Data_Formats__D34862-07-01_.pdf https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/jpss/documents/CDFCB/GSFC_4... I'm sure SpaceX is trying really hard to control latency - so it doesn't get out of hand! One set of RF processing here, another over there, each with their own filters and decoding algorithms and then you have an extra 100 ms of delay in the system.
- Paul-ish 7y agoNetflix claims an UHD stream is 25 Mbps. This is probably the most demanding use case for your average consumer, but it may not be a rare use case in the near future. Each satellite can support 800 UHD streams. That doesn't seem sufficient if each satellite covers a large geographic area. This suggests to me a low data cap and/or rate, perhaps comparable to DSL.
- mastax 7y ago12,000 satellites is the current FCC approved launch figures, I believe. 20Gbps per satellite but I don't know if that's full duplex or how much is divided between terminal/gateway, so lets divide that in half. For simplicity let's say they only sell consumer-grade 100Mbps connections, which are oversubscribed 100x as is typical. Divide the possible number of customers by 3 to account for uneven geographic distribution and other factors. 12000 * 20Gbps / 2 * 100 / 100Mbps / 3 = 40,000,000 customers A service like that could sell for a lot in rural North America, but maybe not to 40m customers. Let's assume most of those customers are from lower income countries or from places with more competitive ISP environments. Maybe $20/mo average revenue per customer. That's $800m a month. That already sounds compelling to me, before considering the potential for more or higher bandwidth satellites, or for higher margin commercial or government contracts.
- ianai 7y agoAnother calculation is revenue per satellite per customer served. Would 100k per month per satellite finance these things long term?
- Paul-ish 7y agoThis seems like the important metric.
- sneak 7y agoI think your simple calculation assumes relatively even geographical subscriber distribution, which absolutely is not the case. Just rough estimating, assuming every other figure is approximately correct, you’ll probably have to cut that by 50-75% based on people’s natural tendency to live near other people. A few HFT customers will probably finance the whole thing, tbh.
- tpetry 7y agoBut if you remove all streaming/porn/torrent traffic it would be able to handle a lot more of the global traffic.
- hamandcheese 7y agoThat’s a bit tautological wouldn’t you say?
- nexuist 7y agoI'm sure people who intend to do business will accept such restrictions as long as they can access email and Salesforce dashboards. Although it might break the spirit of net neutrality (which, to be fair, isn't really a thing anymore anyways).
- bufferoverflow 7y agoWhat's the point of such internet? I can already buy low-cap 4G cheaply.
- millettjon 7y agoExcept where you can't. Lots places have no coverage.
- jandrese 7y agoIf you remove all of that what's the point of even having Internet anymore?
- dotancohen 7y agoActually, during the early 2010's I had heard from a reputable source that half to two-thirds of the internet traffic was "unwanted by the end user" i.e. spam, involuntary software updates, and advertising. Another source from the same time period mentioned that about a quarter of all internet traffic originated from Youtube.
- btian 7y agoOr just charge based on volume. I'm sure USAF is willing to pay a lot for true global Internet access on their planes
- gfodor 7y agoStarlink apparently won't be a fixed concept. 5 year sat lifecycle means its likely we'll see rapid year-over-year turnover and hence macro-level iteration on the specs and design.
- akira2501 7y agoRF and the Atmosphere being what they are and the non-variable parts of this equation mean there are significant real physical and abstract legal limits for any project attempting to put "bandwidth in orbit."
- dwaltrip 7y agoWhat are some ballpark figures on the theoretical / practical limits?
- carlosdp 7y agoGoogle dipped out of rolling their own fiber because all the other ISPs started doing it, so there was no need anymore.
- mdorazio 7y agoPretty sure Google dipped out of rolling their own fiber because dealing with city councils, pole sharing nonsense, lobbying from incumbent ISPs, and customer service overhead was a huge pain in the ass that doesn't fit with their current operating model.
- carlosdp 7y agoSure, that too
- paulkon 7y agoOr they wanted to spur the major ISPs to roll out fiber quicker.
- rootusrootus 7y agoI'd feel about the same as I do when Comcast wants to use my own cable modem as a public wifi hotspot. At this point I'd just like to have a built-in wifi hotspot for my own usage in my car. My Chevy can do this. My fancy high-tech Tesla cannot.
- briantmaurer 7y agoWhat if you were paid some/all of the profit via micropayments when people used your tesla/modem hotspot?
- froindt 7y agoIf I recall correctly, Ubiquity had a network around this concept for broadband connections in the late 2000's. I don't think it ever caught steam, but I could be wrong.
- rootusrootus 7y agoThat would make it more palatable. And QOS so that anybody in my car using the hotspot has priority for traffic.
- toast0 7y ago> I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure. Google stopped deploying fiber for several reasons: a) they weren't able to get reasonable access to poles for deployment. b) incumbents started large rollouts of gigabit capable services (FTTH from telcos and DOCSIS 3.1 from cablecos) in markets Google had announced, but hadn't built out c) maybe? lots more LTE deployment
- sp332 7y agoAlso, they weren't very good at it. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/google-fiber-exits-louisville-after-shoddy-installs-left-exposed-wires-in-roads/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl... "When you're walking around the neighborhood, [the lines are] popping up out of the road all over the place," resident Larry Coomes said at the time. "People are tripping over it." ... "AT&T has been using various forms of shallow trenching since 2009 and hasn't seen similar issues."
- organsnyder 7y agoLike so many other examples, a new entrant realized that the industry wasn't as simple as they thought it was.
- dantheman 7y agoIt was an experiment to see if a new technique would drastically lower costs - it didn't. We should be encouraging people to try new things.
- jfengel 7y agoIt sounds like (b) achieved Google's ends. I don't think they wanted to be in the fiber business. They just wanted everybody to have it so that Google could sell them services over it (including the service of feeding ads to them).
- LeoPanthera 7y ago> Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink. The Starlink receiver is the size of a pizza box (and cannot get smaller, since that is the size of the necessary antenna) - and doesn't work while moving. So it's impractical to use on cars. What Tesla probably could do is put a receiver at every Supercharger and broadcast wifi there. It would be especially useful at the more rural locations.
- zlsa 7y agoWith the USAF, SpaceX has demonstrated 610mbps[0] to the cockpit of an aircraft in flight. [0]: https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-starlink-broadband-services-in-2020/ https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-starlin...
- gscott 7y agoIt would be great for the military, future warfare will be all about having the best signal through all of the jamming from the other side.
- jfrankamp 7y agoCurious about the 'doesn't work while moving' that seems to me to be one of the advantages of a phased array. Since it is software derived aiming I would guess it would excel at adjusting for movement. Do you have details on that I can read on?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mlindner 7y agoPhased arrays have been used in moving vehicles for decades with things like AESA radar systems. So what you're saying is ahistorical.
- BoorishBears 7y agoPeople already covered why that's not possible with Starlink, but in-car WiFi is already incredibly cheap and works well. My Volt included unlimited data for 20$ a month, and it was fast enough for streaming video and worked at times where my phone didn't (presumably because of the better positioned antenna)
- derekp7 7y agoWhat do you use in-car wifi for, that you couldn't already use your existing unlimited cell data plan for? I have unlimited data, plus "unlimited" hotspot on my t-mobile phone for a really reasonable price (the unlimited hotspot throttles down after a certain point, but even that speed is still plenty for what I used it for -- I only which I could explicitly tell it I want to use the throttled speed gigabytes now, and save the high-speed gigabytes for when it would be useful).
- pfundstein 7y agoMight be useful if you use a laptop on the go, or networking with the car's entertainment and other systems?
- mlindner 7y agoSorry to rain on your parade. But Starlink will never be competing with internet in urban areas. The economics for simply laying a few miles of fiber are too good (if the fiber isn't even already there). More so the satellite density needed to serve an entire city is many more than even SpaceX is proposing. Starlink is for long distance backhaul and for rural/underserved areas.
- um_ya 7y agoIf starlink allows roaming high speed internet, then I would be willing to pay for that instead of a fiber line.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoI think the speed is going to have a tight inverse correlation with the population density of your location.
- Kenji 7y ago> 100ms > decent latency pick one
- sunstone 7y agoGoogle put $1bn in to the early stage of Musk's satellite ISP plan as I recall. Did they get 50% for that investment? I'm not sure.
- randomsearch 7y agoI heard from a constellation internet company that fibre will always be the go-to solution as far as they were concerned - they’re going for marketers where fibre isn’t available.