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> Opinion > No evidence a working starlink network can offer lower latency, or lower prices, than terrestial > > Impact on earth based telescopes has not been

> Opinion > No evidence a working starlink network can offer lower latency, or lower prices, than terrestial > > Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed > > Starlink is a play for pentagon funding to keep SpaceX launch schedule busy? Author doesn't seem to have any love for Starlink. I wonder why the built the site.

scohesc 6y ago
That's what I probably misunderstand about the technology - I don't understand how you can have lower latency than current WISP-based infrastructure (are they making these claims against ground-based infrastructure?) when there's satellite internet connections that fade out when a cloud goes by... Also, I would assume they'd have massive capacity issues if they're planning on over-subscribing (they'd have to if they want to sustain a viable profit model, unless they're surviving on government funding?)
- entropicdrifter 6y ago
  They're claiming lower latency than existing satellites due to lower altitude orbits and are using more satellites to compensate for the decreased coverage from each satellite. Presumably this setup would also help with the cloud coverage issue due to the shorter travel distance and higher likelihood of redundant satellites to connect to.
  - kitsunesoba 6y ago
    To be more precise, some of the lowest flying Starlink satellites will be at 340km, which is very low — lower than the ISS, even. By contrast, traditional internet satellites orbit at ~35,700km.
    - nyx_ 6y ago
      550km, actually, or 340 miles. Still a couple orders of magnitude closer to Earth than satellites in GSO.
      - modeless 6y ago
        v2 is planned to have satellites as low as 328 km. https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=2378669 https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
- the8472 6y ago
  Their competition are geostationary satellites that have high latency due to speed of light delays. In theory a LEO satellite network could also beat transoceanic fiber connections since the high refractive index causes the speed of light in fiber to be only ~2/3rds the vacuum speed of light. But that would require satellite-to-satellite optical links which the first generation of starlink doesn't have.
  - godelski 6y ago
    > Their competition are geostationary satellites that have high latency due to speed of light delays. Actually it is due to their distances. Speed of light delays is something that exists everywhere, like fiber internet. In fact, speed of light is faster in space than it is in optical fiber. The problem is distance.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      'Actually it is due to speed of light delays. Distance is something that exists everywhere.' Your weird pedantic distinction doesn't make a difference. They're synonyms in this context. Obviously the difference is how much you have, everyone knows that.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  The speed of light in a vacuum is about 50% faster than the speed of light in glass. But that requires the inter-satellite links be viable, which they aren't yet: the required lasers would survive reentry and they want the satellites to burn up completely on de-orbit so current versions of the satellites don't have them. And yes, there are significant capacity limitations. Only the truly rural will get good data rates.
MojoLobo 6y ago
That would explain why there are dense clusters of satellites over middle-of-nowhere oceans, but they're sparse over continents, particularly Asia and Africa. They're probably going after a different market?
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  The satellites orbit the earth every 1.6 hours. They're not in geo-stationary orbit, they're in very low earth orbit to reduce latency. And any orbit will spend a significant portion of it's time over water. Also, only the green circled satellites are in their final orbit, the yellow circled ones were recently launched and are not yet at their final altitude and position. It takes a couple of months for orbit raising.
  - MojoLobo 6y ago
    Ah, thanks for clarifying. I just assumed for some reason they were geostationary satellites.
  - makomk 6y ago
    Yeah, as I understand it the current generation of Starlink satellites are likely to be pretty much unusable when they're over the ocean since they need to have line of sight to a ground station.
    - aeyes 6y ago
      They might be usable for airplanes, ships, oil platforms, islands...
      - zaphoyd 6y ago
        without interlinks an airplane, ship, oil platform, or island could talk to the starlink sat, but the sat couldn't talk to its ground base station to forward their messages to the rest of the internet. Coverage for deep ocean will require a second generation that can talk sat -> sat.
modeless 6y ago
That's strange. All of those points are wrong. Starlink isn't designed to offer lower latency or lower prices than existing terrestrial wired or wireless ISPs (at least, decent ones). Instead it's designed to offer a low latency wireless service in places where that has never been available at all. Which is most of the land area of the Earth, and all of the ocean. It may also be cheaper and/or faster than some very bad terrestrial ISPs, because there are a lot of those out there, but that's not what it's designed for. Impact on earth-based telescopes has been discussed endlessly, to the point where it seems like there's a law that you can't mention Starlink on the Internet without talking about it. And SpaceX responded by talking to the astronomers most affected by Starlink and adding a sunshade that should prevent the satellites from ruining their images. Which is more than any other satellite operator has ever done, AFAIK, and there are many satellites much brighter than Starlink in the sky today. The Pentagon is certainly interested in Starlink, but commercial service has much higher revenue potential. There are several competitors planning to do roughly the same thing as Starlink, so the business plan is at least plausible.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Starlink will has promised better latency, bandwidth and prices compared to existing satellite internet. Perhaps that's where the confusion on the first point came from.
  - arcticfox 6y ago
    I'm really confused what is going on here. It's really baffling how someone motivated and talented enough to make such a tracking site would have such an odd opinion section. Obviously, Starlink is not the best choice in all situations, but it is so compelling on some dimensions that such a flatly negative opinion is bizarre for anyone with even a cursory understanding of what's going on.
    - shaklee3 6y ago
      What dimension? It's not competitive for anyone who can get high-speed internet right now, and it's not clear if it will complete with traditional satellite in cost.
thoraway1010 6y ago
What's funny is if you go sailing on the ocean for extended periods (months) you realize that sat data / phone costs are RIDICULOUS in this age. $3 - $5/MB. So your 4 GB movie is $20,000. You'd think, why would anyone pay this, but there can be a lot of pressure these days to be able to send videos etc so you sometimes get jammed up with these types of costs (ie, if you do a telemedicine call the DR may want a video of joint movement etc etc, recreational trips people want to post videos and don't realize their phone records at pretty large file sizes etc etc). So if they can do better just on COST then this it would be wonderful.
- ccmcarey 6y ago
  We used a sat link for getting the latest weather information, though you can also get that frequently on V(HF), so .. not terribly useful. But, terribly slow and unreliable (Iridium).
- mcpherrinm 6y ago
  At least V1 of Starlink, there needs to be a ground station visible to the satellite, so it's not going to work in the middle of the ocean. It might work a few hundred miles offshore, but not further than that. So it'll be a while before you can have video calls from the middle of an Atlantic crossing.
  - Someone1234 6y ago
    There's no interlink between Starlink satellites? That's a surprising fact.
    - koenigdavidmj 6y ago
      That's a v2 feature.
      - ehsankia 6y ago
        Is there a rough v1/v2 timeline? The thing they wanted to release by the end of the year is v1 I assume? Is v2 just a software update? Does it require sending a whole new set of satellite or it something they are planning to patch into existing satellites someday and have inter-sat support?
noxer 6y ago
LMAO saw that too an got my daily does of conspiracy theories.
new_realist 6y ago
Perhaps the more expert someone is, the less impressive Starlink appears.
lawlessone 6y ago
>Author doesn't seem to have any love for Starlink. I wonder why the built the site. from the site >Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed I am guessing the author wanted to show how they fill up the sky.
godelski 6y ago
I used to work on rockets and I'm very confused by the author's opinions. > No evidence a working starlink network can offer lower latency This is weird. Even if we pretend that these satellites are directly competing with terrestrial based systems, their orbits put them in range for a latency that is at least competitive with terrestrial systems. It's unproven that they get those latencies, but there's clear evidence. Note: we're talking about like 50ms (IIRC 20ms - 100ms depending on which constellation). Geostationary satellites (which is what they are competing with) are like 250ms (these numbers are off the top of my head so correct me if I'm off). Starlink is competing with geostationary internet satellites AND places that have no internet at all. > lower prices Seems to me they can service a lot more people. Isn't this "scale?" Aren't they targeting something like a billion+ users? I know plenty of people with boats and RVs that are excited about this because the terrestrial solutions just suck (and generally aren't terrestrial based solutions). > Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed What? You're literally discussing it. It is pretty easy to find articles from astronomers getting upset [0][1]. I can tell you that everyone in my community (which includes astronomers and astrophysicists) is aware of this issue. The fact is that most people just don't care. They see greater utility so it is worth the cost. Of course, there are also plenty of people that disagree. > Starlink is a play for pentagon funding to keep SpaceX launch schedule busy? Little bit of this, little bit of that. Having worked at a rocket company I can definitely tell you that, like every other manufactured product in the existence of products, flights are cheaper the more you do (especially true for reusable rockets!). Sometimes this is called the "launch chasm." I'm not sure why you're mad at SpaceX here. If you have an issue with this, it is with Pentagon funding. Look, I'm not the biggest fan of Musk or SpaceX either, but these aren't great arguments. The things to dislike are a little more nuanced whereas this just comes off as hating SpaceX to hate on SpaceX. [0] https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-s-starlink-satellite-train-looks-amazing-but-astronomers-have-real-concerns https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-s-starlink-satellite-... [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/spacex-starlink-satellites-astronomy https://www.wired.co.uk/article/spacex-starlink-satellites-a...
- shaklee3 6y ago
  Their latencies are not at least as competitive as anything if they're not proven. With low orbits, they need multiple hops to get to most destinations, along with queuing and network delays. Propagation delay may not even be the dominant factor. The cost will need to be very expensive, relatively speaking. See this quick math for why: https://mobile.twitter.com/quirkyllama/status/1272748894380634113 https://mobile.twitter.com/quirkyllama/status/12727488943806...

scohesc 6y ago

That's what I probably misunderstand about the technology - I don't understand how you can have lower latency than current WISP-based infrastructure (are they making these claims against ground-based infrastructure?) when there's satellite internet connections that fade out when a cloud goes by... Also, I would assume they'd have massive capacity issues if they're planning on over-subscribing (they'd have to if they want to sustain a viable profit model, unless they're surviving on government funding?)

entropicdrifter 6y ago
They're claiming lower latency than existing satellites due to lower altitude orbits and are using more satellites to compensate for the decreased coverage from each satellite. Presumably this setup would also help with the cloud coverage issue due to the shorter travel distance and higher likelihood of redundant satellites to connect to.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  To be more precise, some of the lowest flying Starlink satellites will be at 340km, which is very low — lower than the ISS, even. By contrast, traditional internet satellites orbit at ~35,700km.
  - nyx_ 6y ago
    550km, actually, or 340 miles. Still a couple orders of magnitude closer to Earth than satellites in GSO.
    - modeless 6y ago
      v2 is planned to have satellites as low as 328 km. https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=2378669 https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
the8472 6y ago
Their competition are geostationary satellites that have high latency due to speed of light delays. In theory a LEO satellite network could also beat transoceanic fiber connections since the high refractive index causes the speed of light in fiber to be only ~2/3rds the vacuum speed of light. But that would require satellite-to-satellite optical links which the first generation of starlink doesn't have.
- godelski 6y ago
  > Their competition are geostationary satellites that have high latency due to speed of light delays. Actually it is due to their distances. Speed of light delays is something that exists everywhere, like fiber internet. In fact, speed of light is faster in space than it is in optical fiber. The problem is distance.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    'Actually it is due to speed of light delays. Distance is something that exists everywhere.' Your weird pedantic distinction doesn't make a difference. They're synonyms in this context. Obviously the difference is how much you have, everyone knows that.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
The speed of light in a vacuum is about 50% faster than the speed of light in glass. But that requires the inter-satellite links be viable, which they aren't yet: the required lasers would survive reentry and they want the satellites to burn up completely on de-orbit so current versions of the satellites don't have them. And yes, there are significant capacity limitations. Only the truly rural will get good data rates.

MojoLobo 6y ago

That would explain why there are dense clusters of satellites over middle-of-nowhere oceans, but they're sparse over continents, particularly Asia and Africa. They're probably going after a different market?

bryanlarsen 6y ago
The satellites orbit the earth every 1.6 hours. They're not in geo-stationary orbit, they're in very low earth orbit to reduce latency. And any orbit will spend a significant portion of it's time over water. Also, only the green circled satellites are in their final orbit, the yellow circled ones were recently launched and are not yet at their final altitude and position. It takes a couple of months for orbit raising.
- MojoLobo 6y ago
  Ah, thanks for clarifying. I just assumed for some reason they were geostationary satellites.
- makomk 6y ago
  Yeah, as I understand it the current generation of Starlink satellites are likely to be pretty much unusable when they're over the ocean since they need to have line of sight to a ground station.
  - aeyes 6y ago
    They might be usable for airplanes, ships, oil platforms, islands...
    - zaphoyd 6y ago
      without interlinks an airplane, ship, oil platform, or island could talk to the starlink sat, but the sat couldn't talk to its ground base station to forward their messages to the rest of the internet. Coverage for deep ocean will require a second generation that can talk sat -> sat.

modeless 6y ago

That's strange. All of those points are wrong. Starlink isn't designed to offer lower latency or lower prices than existing terrestrial wired or wireless ISPs (at least, decent ones). Instead it's designed to offer a low latency wireless service in places where that has never been available at all. Which is most of the land area of the Earth, and all of the ocean. It may also be cheaper and/or faster than some very bad terrestrial ISPs, because there are a lot of those out there, but that's not what it's designed for. Impact on earth-based telescopes has been discussed endlessly, to the point where it seems like there's a law that you can't mention Starlink on the Internet without talking about it. And SpaceX responded by talking to the astronomers most affected by Starlink and adding a sunshade that should prevent the satellites from ruining their images. Which is more than any other satellite operator has ever done, AFAIK, and there are many satellites much brighter than Starlink in the sky today. The Pentagon is certainly interested in Starlink, but commercial service has much higher revenue potential. There are several competitors planning to do roughly the same thing as Starlink, so the business plan is at least plausible.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
Starlink will has promised better latency, bandwidth and prices compared to existing satellite internet. Perhaps that's where the confusion on the first point came from.
- arcticfox 6y ago
  I'm really confused what is going on here. It's really baffling how someone motivated and talented enough to make such a tracking site would have such an odd opinion section. Obviously, Starlink is not the best choice in all situations, but it is so compelling on some dimensions that such a flatly negative opinion is bizarre for anyone with even a cursory understanding of what's going on.
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    What dimension? It's not competitive for anyone who can get high-speed internet right now, and it's not clear if it will complete with traditional satellite in cost.

thoraway1010 6y ago

What's funny is if you go sailing on the ocean for extended periods (months) you realize that sat data / phone costs are RIDICULOUS in this age. $3 - $5/MB. So your 4 GB movie is $20,000. You'd think, why would anyone pay this, but there can be a lot of pressure these days to be able to send videos etc so you sometimes get jammed up with these types of costs (ie, if you do a telemedicine call the DR may want a video of joint movement etc etc, recreational trips people want to post videos and don't realize their phone records at pretty large file sizes etc etc). So if they can do better just on COST then this it would be wonderful.

ccmcarey 6y ago
We used a sat link for getting the latest weather information, though you can also get that frequently on V(HF), so .. not terribly useful. But, terribly slow and unreliable (Iridium).
mcpherrinm 6y ago
At least V1 of Starlink, there needs to be a ground station visible to the satellite, so it's not going to work in the middle of the ocean. It might work a few hundred miles offshore, but not further than that. So it'll be a while before you can have video calls from the middle of an Atlantic crossing.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  There's no interlink between Starlink satellites? That's a surprising fact.
  - koenigdavidmj 6y ago
    That's a v2 feature.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      Is there a rough v1/v2 timeline? The thing they wanted to release by the end of the year is v1 I assume? Is v2 just a software update? Does it require sending a whole new set of satellite or it something they are planning to patch into existing satellites someday and have inter-sat support?

noxer 6y ago

LMAO saw that too an got my daily does of conspiracy theories.

new_realist 6y ago

Perhaps the more expert someone is, the less impressive Starlink appears.

lawlessone 6y ago

>Author doesn't seem to have any love for Starlink. I wonder why the built the site. from the site >Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed I am guessing the author wanted to show how they fill up the sky.

godelski 6y ago

I used to work on rockets and I'm very confused by the author's opinions. > No evidence a working starlink network can offer lower latency This is weird. Even if we pretend that these satellites are directly competing with terrestrial based systems, their orbits put them in range for a latency that is at least competitive with terrestrial systems. It's unproven that they get those latencies, but there's clear evidence. Note: we're talking about like 50ms (IIRC 20ms - 100ms depending on which constellation). Geostationary satellites (which is what they are competing with) are like 250ms (these numbers are off the top of my head so correct me if I'm off). Starlink is competing with geostationary internet satellites AND places that have no internet at all. > lower prices Seems to me they can service a lot more people. Isn't this "scale?" Aren't they targeting something like a billion+ users? I know plenty of people with boats and RVs that are excited about this because the terrestrial solutions just suck (and generally aren't terrestrial based solutions). > Impact on earth based telescopes has not been discussed What? You're literally discussing it. It is pretty easy to find articles from astronomers getting upset [0][1]. I can tell you that everyone in my community (which includes astronomers and astrophysicists) is aware of this issue. The fact is that most people just don't care. They see greater utility so it is worth the cost. Of course, there are also plenty of people that disagree. > Starlink is a play for pentagon funding to keep SpaceX launch schedule busy? Little bit of this, little bit of that. Having worked at a rocket company I can definitely tell you that, like every other manufactured product in the existence of products, flights are cheaper the more you do (especially true for reusable rockets!). Sometimes this is called the "launch chasm." I'm not sure why you're mad at SpaceX here. If you have an issue with this, it is with Pentagon funding. Look, I'm not the biggest fan of Musk or SpaceX either, but these aren't great arguments. The things to dislike are a little more nuanced whereas this just comes off as hating SpaceX to hate on SpaceX. [0] https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-s-starlink-satellite-train-looks-amazing-but-astronomers-have-real-concerns https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-s-starlink-satellite-... [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/spacex-starlink-satellites-astronomy https://www.wired.co.uk/article/spacex-starlink-satellites-a...

shaklee3 6y ago
Their latencies are not at least as competitive as anything if they're not proven. With low orbits, they need multiple hops to get to most destinations, along with queuing and network delays. Propagation delay may not even be the dominant factor. The cost will need to be very expensive, relatively speaking. See this quick math for why: https://mobile.twitter.com/quirkyllama/status/1272748894380634113 https://mobile.twitter.com/quirkyllama/status/12727488943806...