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Honestly, this is just awesome. It's a working demonstration of high-speed satellite internet, showing this approach is a viable solution for "anywhere on Earth

Honestly, this is just awesome. It's a working demonstration of high-speed satellite internet, showing this approach is a viable solution for "anywhere on Earth" internet. For all those people who don't have broadband available, this will be life-changing. It'll only get better from here, welcome to the future :) (and remember that perfect is the enemy of good)

birdyrooster 6y ago
I’m still not sure we won’t get develop Kessler Syndrome (runaway debris situation in LEO) so let’s hope you are right.
- infogulch 6y ago
  LEO is not as much of a problem as higher orbits. At the height that Starlink operates unpropelled debris falls out of the sky relatively quickly due to drag.
  - bob33212 6y ago
    The greater the surface area the quicker the decay. So if these satellites naturally fall after 3-5 years that means that if they somehow collided with each other creating millions of pieces of debris they would clear out with in less than a year because of the loss of energy during the collisions and the increased surface area.
elnik 6y ago
I wonder what happens on a cloudy day.. currently the satellite based DTH television displays a cloud and refuses to work. Technically is there a work around to that?
- bargl 6y ago
  Cloudy days will 100% affect internet speeds. But it's also possible for them to have better equipment at LEO due to lower launch costs to overcome that affect. It's kinda funny because cloudy cover are a smaller portion of signal loss at GEO, (most loss is due to distance), but it affects that signal quite a bit once satellites are tweaked to get signal to Earth. Most GEO satellites try to have something like 95+% uptime due to average cloudy days in an area, which means they account for those really bad days where the clouds are just too thick. They use weather stats to project how much cloud cover each region will get so they can build bigger beams for that area. In the past those beams would cover large areas (Like the entire USA). Now they're getting smaller (State Sized) so they can tweak how much signal could go to say Washington vs. Idaho. They're always trying to make this stuff better. But those newer sats at GEO cost 300+ million dollars per sat and are expected to last 20+ years. So it'll be a while before this new generation of GEO sat is out there. The workaround would be. More signal power at the satellite (costly), or you as a consumer get a bigger/more powerful receiving antenna.
- yencabulator 6y ago
  Well, on a rainy day both LTE and point-to-point wifi here go bad anyway, so it's still an improvement (more signal routes = more chance one works). People keep comparing Starlink to their ideal non-rural internet connection. That's not what it needs to compete with.
- shaklee3 6y ago
  Existing satellite internet doesn't go out with clouds, and only with heavy rain.
xenadu02 6y ago
Having this kind of network is a good thing but the idea that any kind of satellite or wireless can replace wires is just fantasy. Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. And that's just a tiny fraction of the market. Physical cables/fiber represent several orders of magnitude more capacity and always will. So satellite is great for remote areas or unique situations but absolutely not a substitute for running cables.
- Alupis 6y ago
  And even in remote areas, building out VDSL2 networks with relatively decent speeds (200Mbps down and 100Mbps up[1]) would be better, honestly. Most homes already have a phone line and can support a DSL network... and in some countries a phone line is mandated by law, so the infrastructure already exists. But, DSL is not nearly as "sexy" as thousands of satellites... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDSL%20offers%20speeds%20of%20up,25%20kHz%20to%2012%20MHz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDSL%20offers%20s....
  - chuckhendo 6y ago
    I mean, you're not wrong, VDSL in rural areas would be great! But it also hasn't happened.
  - grahamburger 6y ago
    I haven't personally deployed VDSL2, but I have deployed DSL and other data-over-twisted pair systems including recent G.fast, G.hn and MOCA. I strongly doubt that VDSL can achieve those kinds of speeds reliably at the distances and densities needed to provide this service to the areas that need it most. In rural areas the copper lines are too long and too old to achieve these speeds (but they're fine for voice/POTS, so there's no mandate to upgrade.) Twisted pair is also really susceptible to noise and crosstalk, so in more densely populated areas once you start doing DSL to a lot of customers whose cables are bundled together they start to interfere with each other and everybody's service gets bad. In both cases the problem is signal to noise ratio - long cables mean poor signal, density means high noise, and twisted pair copper just isn't designed to deal with either very well.

birdyrooster 6y ago

I’m still not sure we won’t get develop Kessler Syndrome (runaway debris situation in LEO) so let’s hope you are right.

infogulch 6y ago
LEO is not as much of a problem as higher orbits. At the height that Starlink operates unpropelled debris falls out of the sky relatively quickly due to drag.
- bob33212 6y ago
  The greater the surface area the quicker the decay. So if these satellites naturally fall after 3-5 years that means that if they somehow collided with each other creating millions of pieces of debris they would clear out with in less than a year because of the loss of energy during the collisions and the increased surface area.

elnik 6y ago

I wonder what happens on a cloudy day.. currently the satellite based DTH television displays a cloud and refuses to work. Technically is there a work around to that?

bargl 6y ago
Cloudy days will 100% affect internet speeds. But it's also possible for them to have better equipment at LEO due to lower launch costs to overcome that affect. It's kinda funny because cloudy cover are a smaller portion of signal loss at GEO, (most loss is due to distance), but it affects that signal quite a bit once satellites are tweaked to get signal to Earth. Most GEO satellites try to have something like 95+% uptime due to average cloudy days in an area, which means they account for those really bad days where the clouds are just too thick. They use weather stats to project how much cloud cover each region will get so they can build bigger beams for that area. In the past those beams would cover large areas (Like the entire USA). Now they're getting smaller (State Sized) so they can tweak how much signal could go to say Washington vs. Idaho. They're always trying to make this stuff better. But those newer sats at GEO cost 300+ million dollars per sat and are expected to last 20+ years. So it'll be a while before this new generation of GEO sat is out there. The workaround would be. More signal power at the satellite (costly), or you as a consumer get a bigger/more powerful receiving antenna.
yencabulator 6y ago
Well, on a rainy day both LTE and point-to-point wifi here go bad anyway, so it's still an improvement (more signal routes = more chance one works). People keep comparing Starlink to their ideal non-rural internet connection. That's not what it needs to compete with.
shaklee3 6y ago
Existing satellite internet doesn't go out with clouds, and only with heavy rain.

xenadu02 6y ago

Having this kind of network is a good thing but the idea that any kind of satellite or wireless can replace wires is just fantasy. Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. And that's just a tiny fraction of the market. Physical cables/fiber represent several orders of magnitude more capacity and always will. So satellite is great for remote areas or unique situations but absolutely not a substitute for running cables.

Alupis 6y ago
And even in remote areas, building out VDSL2 networks with relatively decent speeds (200Mbps down and 100Mbps up[1]) would be better, honestly. Most homes already have a phone line and can support a DSL network... and in some countries a phone line is mandated by law, so the infrastructure already exists. But, DSL is not nearly as "sexy" as thousands of satellites... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDSL%20offers%20speeds%20of%20up,25%20kHz%20to%2012%20MHz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDSL%20offers%20s....
- chuckhendo 6y ago
  I mean, you're not wrong, VDSL in rural areas would be great! But it also hasn't happened.
- grahamburger 6y ago
  I haven't personally deployed VDSL2, but I have deployed DSL and other data-over-twisted pair systems including recent G.fast, G.hn and MOCA. I strongly doubt that VDSL can achieve those kinds of speeds reliably at the distances and densities needed to provide this service to the areas that need it most. In rural areas the copper lines are too long and too old to achieve these speeds (but they're fine for voice/POTS, so there's no mandate to upgrade.) Twisted pair is also really susceptible to noise and crosstalk, so in more densely populated areas once you start doing DSL to a lot of customers whose cables are bundled together they start to interfere with each other and everybody's service gets bad. In both cases the problem is signal to noise ratio - long cables mean poor signal, density means high noise, and twisted pair copper just isn't designed to deal with either very well.