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Musk himself has said that Starlink is primarily meant for rural customers, and most urbanites should not expect to use it. He even specifically addressed that
by txcwpalpha 6y ago
Musk himself has said that Starlink is primarily meant for rural customers, and most urbanites should not expect to use it. He even specifically addressed that Starlink will not "stick it" to Comcast+co, and may actually "help" them.
> "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers."
> Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-says-starlink-isnt-for-big-cities-wont-be-huge-threat-to-telcos/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
- shaklee3 6y agoMusk originally said this would compete with fiber and other terrestrial carriers. That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiber started out.
- judge2020 6y agoI think the only claim is that it's gigabit speeds [as fast as fiber], however I can't find a specific tweet other than one talking about 1tbps capacity (they've launched more satellites since then): https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1128834111878193155?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1128834111878193155?s=20 > That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiyver started out. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132903914586529793?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132903914586529793?s=20
- shaklee3 6y agoI'm not sure if you're refuting what I said, but there is absolutely no way you will get 20ms end-to-end latency from this. Satellite propagation delay, yes, but for your ping to get to Google and back will be over 50ms.
- elif 6y agoWhy isn't space the biggest part of latency? can't they put a satellite link directly in google?
- shaklee3 6y agoThey have no cross-links, so up and down to space is going to happen multiple times in many cases. Second, they will not have data centers or ixps right where Google's ingress is, so it has to traverse fiber for quite a while. Someone gave some real numbers on the last SpaceX thread, but I believe that part alone will be 20-30ms added.
- ballenf 6y agoSo how long until Google puts a datacenter in space?
- eximius 6y agoSeeing as heat dissipation is a hard problem in space, probably never.
- aftbit 6y agoThey do have cross-links though?
- shaklee3 6y agoThey do not have cross-links. They were in the original public announcements, but none of the current satellites have them, nor have they announced when they would be launching some that do. It's likely years away.
- elif 6y ago> Early satellites are launched without laser links, in October 2019 SpaceX expected satellites with these links to be ready by the end of 2020. from wikipedia
- diroussel 6y agoIt should be lower latency for transaltantic and other long haul traffic, as the speed of light in glass is roughly half that of the vacuum of space. So the extra distance to space is offset by the faster speed of light.
- someperson 6y agoThey don't have the laser interconnects working yet, so long haul traffic won't go over Starlink for some time.
- kaliszad 6y agoThat is very roughly... it is about 2/3 c and can be calculated by the refractive index of quartz glass vs air (e.g. SiO2 has refractive index between 1.55 bad and 1.4 good for the speed) e.g. 1/1.55 ~ 0.645 and 1/1.4 ~ 0.714. According to "Main Parameters" section of [0] it seems to be 1/1.44 for the silica used in actual fibers. A good approximation would be 200 km/ 1 ms instead of 300 km/ 1 ms for speed of light in a vacuum/ microwave links. [0] https://www.rp-photonics.com/fibers.html https://www.rp-photonics.com/fibers.html
- phero_cnstrcts 6y agoI can’t imagine the project would pay off if it was only intended for rural customers.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoAll kinds of mobile users are definitely in play too. Trucks, cars, yachts, tankers - all need a connection, and in the middle of the ocean or in the Siberian plains you don't have many options. My friend is right now swimming under sail somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and she'd definitely benefit greatly from an affordable high speed internet connection.
- lend000 6y agoKeep in mind that the three best selling cars in America are pickup trucks, and pickup trucks aren't cheap [0]. [0] https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/ https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/
- onion2k 6y agoAt some point there'll be a Starlink connection in every Tesla, and Tesla will pay Starlink for that.
- kumarharsh 6y agoHow many tractors did Silicon Valley buy again?
- state_less 6y agoRoughly speaking, I think 1 million customers worldwide (rural or otherwise) should get them into profitable territory. 1m*$80 per month=$80m per month ~= $1b per year If the project costs the estimated $10b, the capital cost and operations cost should be covered, or close to it, at ~ 1 million subscribers. This looks like a milk run to me, but I guess we’ll have to see how subscriptions go.
- NullPrefix 6y agoYou assume people worldwide pay $80 for internet