6 ms·

Its amazing to me that seemingly any project Elon Musk is associated with has at least 2-3 Top level comments shitting all over it from who are either incredibl

by nickik 6y ago

Its amazing to me that seemingly any project Elon Musk is associated with has at least 2-3 Top level comments shitting all over it from who are either incredibly nip-picky or inertly uniformed. But are utterly convinced their options are amazing. > “I have never set up any tactical satellite equipment that has been as quick to set up, and anywhere near as reliable” as Starlink, Richard Hall, the emergency telecommunications leader of the Washington State Military Department’s IT division, told CNBC in an interview Monday. > The company has confirmed that it’s been conducting a private beta test of Starlink with employees, but Hall said Washington’s emergency division use case “grew organically out of previously unrelated talks.” When Washington’s wildfires became increasingly severe in August, with catastrophic damage, Hall saw Starlink as a new solution for areas where the damage meant “there is no other available data connection.” > “I even did setup to allow kids to do some of their initial schooling too, because they were pressing forward with some limited presence slowly. We covered a whole lot of bases,” Hall said. “Starlink changes the game as far as what’s available.” Clearly all a PR stunt by Evil genius Elon Musk who never does anything other then spend his time planning the next big PR move to confuse the masses. Edit: I wrote a response but Hacker News does not allow it, basic point is, provide evidence that it is a PR stunt if that is your claim. The person interviewed seem to have credibility. Seems like interpretation in bad faith to me. Not question your technical knowledge.

walrus01 6y ago
If you're referring to my comments, I'm probably the only person in this thread who works professionally in two-way satellite. My day to day work encompasses the venn diagram overlap between terrestrial ISP backbone network engineering, point-to-point high capacity microwave and millimeter wave band transport links, and various two-way satellite access technologies when a link via geostationary is the only viable option. And I don't dislike Starlink. I actually think it's amazing tech. I'm criticizing the specific PR stunt of putting a starlink CPE at an exising ILEC CO, not what Starlink is. Starlink, when ready for ordinary end user production use, will be an amazing improvement over cheap ($110-200/mo) consumer grade VSAT terminals. The physics and economics of launching 4000-6200 kg geostationary telecom satellites and their extremely limited aggregate capacity means that a consumer grade VSAT must be oversubscribed at a 32:1 ratio or worse. Resulting in terrible things like 60GB/month data quotas for end users. It's overall a miserable experience. Starlink has the potential to entirely disrupt and kill what I call the 'shitty VSAT' market. Above the 'shitty VSAT' market there's a whole category of serious two way satellite technology that the ordinary consumer will never see. And things like o3b and starlink also have the potential to improve that. You would visibly cringe if you saw the monthly $ per MHz transponder costs for Ku spot beam capacity over eastern Africa. The dollars per Mbps ratio is ridiculously bad. In order to achieve any reasonable bps/Hz modulation density you can easily spend $100k to erect a pair of 4.5m size earth stations for a dedicated 1:1, SCPC link. And that's before you're looking at anywhere from $5000 to $30,000/month paid for transponder capacity, depending on how much data you're trying to move, and how asymmetric it is. There's a reason why every telecom/ISP in every developing nation is trying their hardest to connect to the nearest submarine cable landing station and not remain reliant upon monthly C or Ku band transponder leases.
- InvaderFizz 6y ago
  > There's a reason why every telecom/ISP in every developing nation is trying their hardest to connect to the nearest submarine cable landing station and not remain reliant upon monthly C or Ku band transponder leases. It's not just cost, it's also the latency. While it's apparent you know this, most commenters might not realize the game changing difference with Starlink. Starlink latency can be as low as 15ms to the nearest POP. The minimum latency for any geostationary satellite to the nearest pop is 528ms RTT. That's speed of light, going 28k miles 4x, assuming you and the POP are on the equator directly below the satellite.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    yes, that as well. FYI minimum latency for a round trip ICMP ping on geostationary is more like 492-495ms. 520-525ms is also typical. Will vary somewhat with modem FEC complexity, FEC code rate, and exactly what modems are in use on a 1:1 dedicated link.
    - InvaderFizz 6y ago
      Amazing how just a nugget of bad info can change things. Back in Satellite Controller school in 2003 we were taught geostationary is 28,500 miles. So even since then I've been using that as my reference point. In reality, it's about 35,786km, or 22,236 miles[0]. That means the minimum RTT time is 479ms, given the perfect scenario I previously laid out and zero equipment delay. Which isn't a thing. Then again, the mythical perfectly spherical radiation pattern dipole antenna that we base all dBi off of isn't a thing either. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
      - walrus01 6y ago
        One of the tradeoffs in modern state of the art VSAT modems is that you can intentionally choose more computationally 'expensive' FEC, to slightly improve your bps/Hz in a given fixed kHz/MHz amount of FDD transponder capacity, at the expense of higher latency. With the Comtech CDM-760 for instance. This is getting better as the years go on and modem manufacturers are able to throw additional CPU and FPGA resources at FEC processing, without increasing their cost to build a modem a great deal.

by nickik 6y ago

walrus01 6y ago

If you're referring to my comments, I'm probably the only person in this thread who works professionally in two-way satellite. My day to day work encompasses the venn diagram overlap between terrestrial ISP backbone network engineering, point-to-point high capacity microwave and millimeter wave band transport links, and various two-way satellite access technologies when a link via geostationary is the only viable option. And I don't dislike Starlink. I actually think it's amazing tech. I'm criticizing the specific PR stunt of putting a starlink CPE at an exising ILEC CO, not what Starlink is. Starlink, when ready for ordinary end user production use, will be an amazing improvement over cheap ($110-200/mo) consumer grade VSAT terminals. The physics and economics of launching 4000-6200 kg geostationary telecom satellites and their extremely limited aggregate capacity means that a consumer grade VSAT must be oversubscribed at a 32:1 ratio or worse. Resulting in terrible things like 60GB/month data quotas for end users. It's overall a miserable experience. Starlink has the potential to entirely disrupt and kill what I call the 'shitty VSAT' market. Above the 'shitty VSAT' market there's a whole category of serious two way satellite technology that the ordinary consumer will never see. And things like o3b and starlink also have the potential to improve that. You would visibly cringe if you saw the monthly $ per MHz transponder costs for Ku spot beam capacity over eastern Africa. The dollars per Mbps ratio is ridiculously bad. In order to achieve any reasonable bps/Hz modulation density you can easily spend $100k to erect a pair of 4.5m size earth stations for a dedicated 1:1, SCPC link. And that's before you're looking at anywhere from $5000 to $30,000/month paid for transponder capacity, depending on how much data you're trying to move, and how asymmetric it is. There's a reason why every telecom/ISP in every developing nation is trying their hardest to connect to the nearest submarine cable landing station and not remain reliant upon monthly C or Ku band transponder leases.

InvaderFizz 6y ago
> There's a reason why every telecom/ISP in every developing nation is trying their hardest to connect to the nearest submarine cable landing station and not remain reliant upon monthly C or Ku band transponder leases. It's not just cost, it's also the latency. While it's apparent you know this, most commenters might not realize the game changing difference with Starlink. Starlink latency can be as low as 15ms to the nearest POP. The minimum latency for any geostationary satellite to the nearest pop is 528ms RTT. That's speed of light, going 28k miles 4x, assuming you and the POP are on the equator directly below the satellite.
- walrus01 6y ago
  yes, that as well. FYI minimum latency for a round trip ICMP ping on geostationary is more like 492-495ms. 520-525ms is also typical. Will vary somewhat with modem FEC complexity, FEC code rate, and exactly what modems are in use on a 1:1 dedicated link.
  - InvaderFizz 6y ago
    Amazing how just a nugget of bad info can change things. Back in Satellite Controller school in 2003 we were taught geostationary is 28,500 miles. So even since then I've been using that as my reference point. In reality, it's about 35,786km, or 22,236 miles[0]. That means the minimum RTT time is 479ms, given the perfect scenario I previously laid out and zero equipment delay. Which isn't a thing. Then again, the mythical perfectly spherical radiation pattern dipole antenna that we base all dBi off of isn't a thing either. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
    - walrus01 6y ago
      One of the tradeoffs in modern state of the art VSAT modems is that you can intentionally choose more computationally 'expensive' FEC, to slightly improve your bps/Hz in a given fixed kHz/MHz amount of FDD transponder capacity, at the expense of higher latency. With the Comtech CDM-760 for instance. This is getting better as the years go on and modem manufacturers are able to throw additional CPU and FPGA resources at FEC processing, without increasing their cost to build a modem a great deal.