15 ms·
SpaceX Starlink has some hiccups as expected, but users are impressed
- new_realist 6y ago$500 beta terminal cost, connections cut out every ten minutes, connection varies by weather. Latency variable, a bit worse than most DSL.
- mlindner 6y agoThe cutouts vary. It's not "every 10 minutes". DSL latency is not standard, it can vary a lot. Latency for the beta is worse than it will be for production. For the people this is marketed to, it's life changing. If you think it's overpriced, you were never the target demographic.
- neolog 6y ago> If you think it's overpriced, you were never the target demographic. Isn't that true of every product?
- zaroth 6y agoI would say it becomes increasingly relevant given that SpaceX has a multi-billion dollar SAM at the currently expected price/performance.
- swsieber 6y agoAlmost. It's possible for a company to overprice the product for their target demographic. But then it's likely that they fail to acquire customers and go out if business. So it's generally true. It's still very easy to forget.
- PinkMilkshake 6y agoI think parent was taking a stab at DSL, not StarLink. They could be from Australia, haha.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoThe article specifically has a quote from someone in Montana on CenturyLink DSL paying $120/month for 1Mbps, and getting 100x faster connectivity through their $99/month StarLink service (with some intermittency because the constellation and ground station network isn’t complete). Latency is acceptable enough to play a first person shooter, and target latency is 16ms-19ms (and meets the requirement for the FCCs rural broadband contract [1], which is latency below 100ms). For those with marginal service, this is a material improvement. It’s also firming up the case that StarLink will generate billions of dollars per year in revenue (eclipsing SpaceX’s launch revenues), from both government contracts (rural broadband and DoD) and unsubsidized subscribers. This doesn’t include revenue from StarLink’s contract building missile tracking satellites for the Defense dept (based on StarLink sats) [2]. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/spacex-gets-fcc-approval-to-bid-in-16-billion-rural-broadband-auction/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/spacex-gets-fcc-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/6/21503165/spacex-space-development-agency-contract-missile-warning-satellites-starlink https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/6/21503165/spacex-space-dev...
- zizee 6y ago“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”
- lmm 6y agoThis is the exact opposite of that. HN is hyped for Starlink because it's cool tech, not because it's a great user experience.
- modeless 6y agoThat's wrong. In this case, as with the iPod, the tech enables a dramatically better user experience. Compared to existing satellite ISPs you get dramatically better latency and dramatically faster/easier setup (no professional installation required, plug and play in 5 minutes). It's also likely to be far cheaper if you actually transfer a decent amount of data, and early tests seem to show better reliability in poor weather as well. It's even better than DSL and some wireless ISPs or 4G hotspots with marginal connections, which are probably the main competition for Starlink.
- lmm 6y ago> In this case, as with the iPod, the tech enables a dramatically better user experience. The whole reason CowboyNeal was attacking the iPod was that technically it was a step backwards. It couldn't do anything that a Nomad couldn't. The part that it did well (and that he missed the importance of) was the usability and polish. > Compared to existing satellite ISPs you get dramatically better latency and dramatically faster/easier setup (no professional installation required, plug and play in 5 minutes). It's also likely to be far cheaper if you actually transfer a decent amount of data, and early tests seem to show better reliability in poor weather as well. All true, but can you see HN caring about any of that if SpaceX wasn't involved? The HN userbase is overwhelmingly city folk; I suspect only a tiny proportion of us have ever used satellite internet before.
- modeless 6y agoYes, I can see HN getting excited about a dramatically better satellite internet option regardless of who it came from. OneWeb, Amazon, etc could have had this attention if they had gotten here first.
- kalleboo 6y agoThis beta test period is literally called the "Better Than Nothing Beta"
- StavrosK 6y agoAw, not "beta than nothing"?
- rektide 6y agothe beta test period will probably have a higher ratio of uplink to user bandwidth than any time in the future. these satellites are radically undersubscribed right now, serving a handful of users tops. that's not going to model what happens if this works & grows.
- mlindner 6y agoI think it's disingenuous of ArsTechnica to report two of the worst case posts on the Starlink subreddit as if they were common. The source used for the comment "every 5-10 minutes" doesn't fully clarify that point. Many users in the Reddit subreddit post that is quoted stated that the person likely installed it incorrectly and the cutouts were from trees blocking the signal. So "every 5-10 minutes" is not what most people are seeing. Source reddit post the article uses: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jsnd52/starlink_day_one/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jsnd52/starlink_d... Key reply: > Based on the disconnects every 5-10 minutes. I would definitely say the obstructions are causing issues. I had the same problem last week and timing between disconnects. Put mine a little too close to the house. Moved it yesterday and today my connections were holding with no disconnects for anywhere from 2 to 3 hours with maybe a short 10-30 second disconnect between.
- aptwebapps 6y agoGiven the overall upbeat tone of headline, subheading, and article, is "disingenuous" the word you want to use? Is it your impression that Ars is attempting to deceive or trick its readers?
- curiousgal 6y agoSomething feels very wrong about covering the entire planet in satellites just so rural residents of the developed world can get faster internet. Sure, in theory, the entire world can have access but that won't come for free and won't be in any way affordable by the vast majority of the world population.
- mrfusion 6y agoQuite a straw man you’ve got there.
- vidanay 6y agoIf only it had a brain.
- wmf 6y agoA village sharing a Starlink dish could be quite affordable.
- zaroth 6y agoIndeed, combine a SpaceX backhaul with a 4G base station and you can provide essential service to even extremely remote or rural communities at an incredibly reasonable price.
- Klathmon 6y agoThrow some solar panels and batteries on there and you can have portable self-contained 4g base station that you can drop off anywhere covered by starlink and sunlight.
- pkaye 6y agoThere was a Native American tribe living in a remote area that got early access to Starlink. Now their children can do remote learning and everyone can get remote healthcare. https://www.pcmag.com/news/native-american-tribe-gets-early-access-to-spacexs-starlink-and-says-its https://www.pcmag.com/news/native-american-tribe-gets-early-...
- avalys 6y agoSounds pretty awesome! Anyone know how much performance might be expected to degrade as the number of users increases? Most of these people probably have the entire Starlink RF spectrum to themselves in whatever location they’re testing in.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoThis is what I figure, it will get oversold and then everyone is down to 10Mbps or so.
- londons_explore 6y agoYou'll probably end up just paying extra for priority. Eg. It costs $50 per month for regular speed, $100 for double regular speed, etc.
- YinglingLight 6y agoIf you're worried about too many users in the area using Starlink, then you're in an area you don't need to worry about needing Starlink.
- nickik 6y agoThe problem will not be the spectrum, the sats will likely be the bottle neck. The amount of users can scale with the amount of sats you have. You will hopefully get a better signal by having many sats in your view and the ability for the network to make smart choices about where to send what when.
- howlgarnish 6y agoThe current Starlink launch is limited to the US and parts of Canada. What would happen if I sign up there and then physically ship my dish to Saudi Arabia/China/North Korea? Would the service keep working (subject to satellite availability, which will obviously not be great), or are there geoblocks in place?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoThe terms of service you agree to at signup dictate you’ll use the equipment at the service location you provided with your order, and the constellation is able to determine ground station positions (StarLink can, theoretically, replace the functionality of the GPS constellation using ~0.8% of total downlink capacity). SpaceX would likely comply with their FCC fixed station license and US gov sanctions requirements through technical mechanisms.
- snewman 6y agoIn addition to the points made by toomuchtodo, I believe Starlink currently relies on the presence of nearby ground stations to relay your packets to/from the Internet backbone. Eventually they plan satellite-to-satellite hops but I don't think that's enabled yet.
- grecy 6y agoThere are reports that if you take the dish more than about ~35 miles from the co-ordinates you said you'd use it at, it stops working. For the beta it seems to be tied to a geographic location.
- jseliger 6y agoIt'll be interesting to see whether SpaceX allows, relatively easily and simply, Starlink to be used by brave people living under oppressive regimes: it could allow for far freer information than what's currently available.
- pkaye 6y agoDon't they need to get approval in each country they operate?
- withinboredom 6y agoThe thing with satellite internet (up and downlink) is mostly to do with jitter. You can get pretty good rates on a nice day, but you can’t control air refraction 2 miles off the ground doing weird stuff to your signal. I experimented with many things, but the best solution I had was using TCP over UDP with a server in a data center able to resend TCP (over UDP) packets if they were dropped. I think http3 will help out immensely here. Source: I ran a small satellite ISP on a base in Afghanistan.
- beams 6y agoWhy TCP over UDP? The whole point of TCP is retransmission. What did you gain by encapsulating this way?
- TYMorningCoffee 6y agoHe probably saw benefits from using UDP because he's no longer limited by TCP's congestion control and can flood the pipe with duplicates of his packets.
- dvdkhlng 6y ago> He probably saw benefits from using UDP because he's no longer limited by TCP's congestion control and can flood the pipe with duplicates of his packets. But he wrote that he'd used "TCP over UDP". The first lines of the TCP over UDP spec already state "It provides exactly the same congestion control, flow control, reliability, and extension mechanisms as offered by TCP." [1] [1] https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-baset-tsvwg-tcp-over-udp-01.html https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-baset-tsvwg-tcp-over-udp-01....
- TYMorningCoffee 6y agoThen I'm wrong. Thanks for the clarification.
- dvdkhlng 6y agoYes, I had the same confusion. There seems to be a standard for TCP over UDP [1]. But in general, I would assume that it does not help at all WRT any of the packet loss/latency problems posed by satellite links. TCP is designed for encapsulation in IP, this is why it is called TCP/IP. And UDP is very similar to IP, only difference is that UDP gives you source and destination port numbers and a payload checksum, where IP only gives you a protocol numbers and non-checksummed data. None of these "features" is going to have any effect on how TCP is delivered. So the only effect that use of TCP over UDP would have here is: - increase the overhead used for headers, thereby decreasing the MSS (segment size) - "cloak" the TCP traffic as UDP and thereby prevent any routers and/or middleboxes [2] from applying special treatment to TCP (i.e. traffic shaping, buffering etc.) Maybe the latter effect is what made a difference for the link in question. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-baset-tsvwg-tcp-over-udp-01.html https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-baset-tsvwg-tcp-over-udp-01.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlebox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlebox edit: formatting
- futevolei 6y agoHow are they getting latency so low? I used satellite internet for a month back in 2009 and it was brutal. Minimum 500ms. Literally had to break my lease to move to another place that offered broadband so I could actually work. I see starlink satellites are orbiting much lower but that would seem to only account for maybe 25% (?) of the gap between 20ms and 500ms.
- sbeller 6y agoHow did you come to the estimate of 25%? Because that difference in distance is the actual reason. The geostationary satellites used for your internet in 2009 are at ~2.5 of the earth diameter above ground (35k km, ca 1.5 earth circumference), whereas the starlink satellites are near the atmosphere (less than driving distance SF to LA). And speed of light is rather slow in these dimensions already.
- futevolei 6y agoI misread a different article which said spacex originally planned to have these satellites orbit around 800mi and I mistook that as normal altitude.
- Dylan16807 6y agoThe analysis is basically the same for 800 miles. That's 5 milliseconds per leg. Geostationary is 22000 miles. Though if you got 25%... did you calculate 115 milliseconds of speedup? That's the speedup for one leg. A ping to a server has to travel that distance four times.
- lordcarnafex 6y agoIn this case its mostly the altitude. Old satellite internet talked to geostationary sats in orbit (out in space around 32000km), these are only around 500km, so the signal itself only has 1.5% the distance to travel. Just speed of light alone means your old signal took around 100ms to get to the sat, and 100ms back, new one is 1.5ms there and 1.5ms back.
- mulcahey 6y agoCertainly sounds quite a bit "better than nothing"!
- Diesel555 6y agoIs anyone else amazed that we are sending data to a satellite orbiting in space and getting a response that is 50-100 times faster (down) than the T1 links (1.544 mbps) our schools paid crazy amounts for when I was in high school almost 20 years ago? I mean that's pretty cool when you look at what Space X has done.
- edgyquant 6y agoWe certainly should be but I think we’re so used to the crazy advances over the last 30 years these things become mundane. I mean is it really not just as amazing that we have neural nets running on machines in our pockets when these were considered computationally too expensive for doing basic handwriting processing on super computers a couple decades ago?
- datameta 6y agoEven more amazing is the ability to now run neural networks on MCUs drawing <mW of power!
- rektide 6y agohow many satellites are up now & how many users are there? what happens to get to the next 10x users? 100x? it's cool that latency seems good.b that is the very first hurdle to viabity. but what hope there is for the future for this being real, useful, affordable broadband I think is still completely unknown. whatever is happening today is being done at a radical loss, with a radically undersubscribed batch of satellites that is in no way going to reflect what kind of numbers people see if this goes anywhere, succeeds. maybe it can keep acting growing accommodating, providing magnitudes more bandwidth to people. maybe. while retaining this so far moderate price. maybe it's possible this works. but how it grows to serve orders of magnitude more folk, well, there are some constellation size asks, some guidelines, but it's very much indeterminate that the price point & offering now is viable, is really for real. there's a lot more finding out to do.
- martinald 6y agoI agree. This to me is the major problem with starlink. Each sat only has 10-20gigabit/sec capacity, which really isnt a lot considering Netflix can use 15mbit/sec per stream, and call of duty patches can be nearly 200GB. It's not going to take many users to completely saturate 20gbit. It's not far off what a single 4G+5G cell site has, capacity wise, but instead of serving a few km max we are talking 100s of km^2. I think it's highly likely there will be data caps and/or fairly serious traffic shaping on the production version at some point.
- rektide 6y agoThe subscription ratio (people: satellite) is a big one. I'm also quite nervous about uplinks. According to dlgeek there are 893 satellites up right now [1]. If we grow to 10x that number, and each satellite can do 20Gbit (where is that number from, btw?), how do we begin to provide that throughout, whatever fraction of that max 2.2Tbit/s aggregate downlink for the satellite fleet? What is it going to take to literally uplink such huge volumes? I'm not well versed in satcom & how much spectrum is available, & how good ground stations are at pointing. Can one base station potentially fully saturate 10 or 50 or 250 satellites, once the sky starts to fill? Maybe we are that good, maybe we can shoot tiny narrow high-bandwidth wide-spectrum needles exactly as needed up into the sky, en masse, dozens of high bandwidth beams emmentating from each ground station. Or maybe we just need millions of ground stations, but can work that. Does even that work? I keep hearing of "constellations," trains of satellites. How close will satellites stick? Can a ground station reuse spectrum across multiple transmitters seen talking to constellation members? or are the satellites too close, lumped together? this filters back to a previous question, how much spectrum is available for uplinks? Trying to imagine the scale of this project, seeing both how we get data to in to the sky, then down to folks, it's epic. All the "zero to one, one to many" modes of growth discussion feels short of the epic planning & demands it'd take to both hoist satellites up (which SpaceX Starlink seems to be doing!) & the supply network to make the satellites useful. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25109020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25109020
- Const-me 6y agoDid they tell what gonna happen with geofencing after the beta? I know a few people who would probably want that thing installed on their boats. For marine applications, it needs to work globally without any fences. Geofencing-wise, international waters == nowhere. In territorial or internal water you normally have some 4G from the land, not much need for satellites there.
- ncallaway 6y agoThe current generation of satellites don’t have laser interlink connections. That means the connection needs to go directly from the ground, up to a sat, then immediately back to the SpaceX ground station. That means for a while you’ll need to be within a certain range of a ground station, so international waters won’t work for a while. The marine “anywhere on earth application” won’t be really applicable until they get the next generation of satellites with laser interlinks launched.
- Const-me 6y agoInteresting. Still, territorial waters extend for 12 nautical miles. Apparently, these satellites fly at 1100-1300 km. If ground stations (both SpaceX backbone routers, and mobile terminals) can talk to a satellite 45 degree above horizon, the satellite can connect the terminal with the ground station in a circle 1100-1300 km radius underneath (slightly less due to Earth curvature, but not by much). Not gonna work in the middle of the Pacific, but might be good enough for many. For instance, one can sail from here across Mediterranean Sea all the way to Africa or middle East, while staying within reach of Europe-based routers. That’s assuming SpaceX gonna build them.
- kanox 6y agoWhat seems to be missing from these discussions is the gigantic bet that SpaceX is making on Starlink. They performed 15 launches for this constellation already that they paid for themselves. If the internet service business doesn't generate revenue the launcher side will see a majority of its launch manifest evaporate and book enormous loss. From the outside it seems that a commercial failure of Starlink would bankrupt all of SpaceX.
- grecy 6y agoThat is how Elon has always run. He has said many times the slower-than-ideal ramp for the Model 3 assembly line very nearly bankrupted Tesla (it was within a few months). When the first two SpaceX launches failed he spent all their remaining money on the next one - if it failed, SpaceX would have too. He has also said if either Tesla or SpaceX go bankrupt, so does he. He is literally betting the house with every major decision.
- 93po 6y agoI think this is admirable. He's clearly very passionate about his companies and though I'm sure money is a motivating factor it's not his priority - he's said as much before and he doesn't exactly live a lavish lifestyle for a billionaire
- apeace 6y ago> If the internet service business doesn't generate revenue the launcher side will see a majority of its launch manifest evaporate Can you clarify this? I don't know much about it but can't see how they relate.
- mlyle 6y agoSpaceX has launched 21 times so far this year. 12 were Starlink. About half of SpaceX's launch manifest is launching their own satellites for Starlink.
- 1123581321 6y ago
- i5heu 6y agoI wonder if it is possible to reduce the radio hole phases with an automatic tracking system. This cloud be a nice little DIY project.
- nuccy 6y agoThe dish has a phased array antena already, so it is already tracking the satellites. Likely such approach, unless integrated in a bigger dish of some kind to increase signal to noise ratio, already is much more precise and faster than any physical moving mechanism.
- rfreytag 6y agoI heard a core business case for Starlink was for arbitragers seeking faster inter-market communications. Can anyone confirm?
- wmf 6y agoSee the original source: http://web.archive.org/web/20200819084001/http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20200819084001/http://nrg.cs.ucl.... This assumes that laser links are working which they are not currently.