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SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
- mrauha 6y agoI'm in the (slow) process of acquiring and fitting a sailboat for living at remote places. While I acknowledge that the cheapening of satellite internet will be nice, practical, and make my plans more realizable money-wise, I'm also a bit sad on what this implies to the taking a real distance to the information overloaded society.
- pandamaniac 6y agoWhy not just omit the internet fittings? Surely you can control the access that you have.
- pmontra 6y agoI'm not sure this is for you, if you plan to move your boat: https://www.starlink.com/faq https://www.starlink.com/faq > Can I travel with Starlink, or move it to a different address? > Starlink satellites are scheduled to send internet down to all users within a designated area on the ground. This designated area is referred to as a cell. > Your Starlink is assigned to a single cell. If you move your Starlink outside of its assigned cell, a satellite will not be scheduled to serve your Starlink and you will not receive internet. This is constrained by geometry and is not arbitrary geofencing
- mjevans 6y agoI wonder if they'll reserve a segment for global use, probably at higher expense. I could see a lower tier strata that requires planning but allows for relocation on a planned schedule.
- extrapickles 6y agoIt’s because most of the satellites do not have laser links yet, so the satellite you use must be able to see a downlink station in order to provide internet. When they have laser links widely deployed, you will be able to move about.
- nickik 6y agoUsers have already shown that you can move the dish and Starlink doesn't block it. However they might in the future. They are already testing Starlink on planes and those are clearly moving. A dedicated product for boats and planes is certainty on its way. Understandably to do capacity planning, they are focusing on stationary at first.
- lgats 6y agoBeta users on Reddit indicate the service shuts off 90 miles from the home location
- rootsudo 6y agoWell, that sucks but good to know, so no RV traveling yet?
- irjustin 6y agoI can imagine this is only in the beginning. As more sats go up ships can easily be a lot of customers.
- oh_sigh 6y agoWould you like to upgrade to the roaming plan for $99.99?
- iso1631 6y agoShut up and take my money! Seriously I have sites running 5 figure data bills every week.
- em-bee 6y agoi'd pay for that if i really needed it.
- a012 6y agoIt's pretty cheap for the speed if they (starlink) cover a vast space of oceans.
- evil-olive 6y agoAny sort of commercial fishing or shipping vessel would pay for that without hesitation.
- paul_f 6y agoIt has to change or it cannot be used by airplanes, which surely is a prime target for Starlink.
- csomar 6y agoAlso a sailboat (even a big one) is not stable and from experience satellite receivers can lose connection on slightly strong winds. So I guess this wouldn't work even if Starlink allowed it.
- codesnik 6y agoi'm pretty sure boats (especially big ones) are one of the potential markets for starlink, so even if current receiver will lose a connection, there will be special receiver for boats eventually. Stabilizing phased array shouldn't be that hard, even without adjusting motors constantly.
- callesgg 6y agoJust place the current one in a gimbal. Problem solved.
- japanuspus 6y agoThe starlink antenna may look like an ordinarry satelite dish -- but it is a super-advanced phased array antenna which uses a lot of signal processing to electronically steer the beam. This electronic beam steering should have no problems keeping up with boat motion.
- oseityphelysiol 6y agoFrom what I gather beamforming operates only in limited range, i.e. tracking satellites as they move small fraction of a degree per second. For bigger adjustments the dishes turn mechanically. It's not clear if beamforming could handle relatively small waves, but for big ones mechanical adjustment would be needed. I'm speaking out of my ass, but if I had to guess moving the antenna mechanically would not keep the link up in wavy waters.
- jcims 6y agoI have one, the dish doesn’t move after it initially sets up.
- the_duke 6y agoMusk mentioned on Twitter that it should be doable. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1323691195239960579 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1323691195239960579 I reckon the current restrictions will ease up when more sats are deployed, especially with more laser interconnects.
- wj 6y agoWhen this was announced I actually assumed this was a ploy to get fast Internet into Teslas.
- carlivar 6y agoIt's a way to for Musk to benefit from government subsidies (as described in the article), like all Musk ventures.
- rkangel 6y agoI think it was dreamed up as a way to monetise the increasing capacity of SapceX launches. They might run out of customers and so they need ways to make money out of launching. A constellation of 10k+ satellites is a good way to need lots of launches!
- LinuxBender 6y agoIt is for the US Army. They are the initial customer anyway. Civilians are the best beta testers. The internet was originally created to have a network in place for the military and I see this as the natural evolution beyond hard wired systems or intermittent wireless towers.
- rich_sasha 6y agoSupposedly it’s meant I work in airplanes and trains, so sailboats I’d imagine too. +/- constant swaying etc.
- namibj 6y agoWith a simple passive gimbal they should be able to use the electronic steering to correct for the remaining swaying on planes and boats. Trains might have more issues with vegetation and geography obstructing clear view of the satellites.
- tpmx 6y agoA practical concern with Starlink in this scenario is that the dish consumes ~100 watts. Bring 2 square meters of solar panel, an inverter and some batteries and hope for sun.
- Johnythree 6y agoYou can turn it off when not in use. Whatever, your present PC, Monitor, printer, Router, and Internet wireless will already be using more than 100W.
- tpmx 6y agoPrinter, monitor, ... ? A ~15 watt Macbook Air M1 seems suitable when living on a boat.
- MattGaiser 6y ago> I'm also a bit sad on what this implies to the taking a real distance to the information overloaded society. You could just turn it off.
- barbegal 6y agoThis is only a dozen users per active starlink satellite. I wonder how many customers each satellite can actually support in terms of both available bandwidth and the ability for the phased arrays on the satellite to target the customer. I can't really see how Spacex will scale their system to reach the millions of customers they need to cover the costs of launching and maintaining all those satellites.
- kiba 6y agoIt's literally still in testing?
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoGP is not questioning the feasibility of Starlink, yes you can make it work, yes you can provide 60Mbps links. But there is physical limit per satellite, so all of this goes out the window beyond maybe a few million users? If you create all this infrastructure (with the impact it has) to then just serve a couple million people then this service will be unaffordable for mortals and limited to the wealthy and most likely the military. [0] [0]https://spacenews.com/u-s-army-signs-deal-with-spacex-to-assess-starlink-broadband/ https://spacenews.com/u-s-army-signs-deal-with-spacex-to-ass...
- csomar 6y agoThere is (practically) no limit to how many satellites you can put in place. You just position the next satellite a bit up-north and the dishes adjust their position.
- freeflight 6y agoPractically even LEO ain't "unlimited" space, theoretically an oversaturation of objects in LEO could lead to Kessler syndrome [0] Practically the presence of Starlight satellites already has an impact on the work of astronomers, an issue that will only get worse as more of them are sent up [1]. That's not to belittle how cool the whole thing is, but it's kind of disheartening how we've already managed to pollute pretty much every place on the planet, and are now on our way to even polluting the space around our planet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome [1] https://teachingkidsnews.com/2020/02/03/are-too-many-satellites-ruining-our-view-of-space/ https://teachingkidsnews.com/2020/02/03/are-too-many-satelli...
- threeseed 6y agoHere is a link to some benchmarks: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/i9w09n/list_of_confirmed_starlink_speed_tests/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/i9w09n/list_of_co...
- ogre_codes 6y agoI'm not sure benchmarks on an unloaded beta system are extremely useful. Once they add more satellites it may go down, but more users counter that... It's decent early indicator, but hard to say long term if it's useful.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoWhen Verizon 4G first launched I had a 45mbps connection all over silicon valley. Then adoption spread and my data rates on the same device dropped to 5mbps. Loading matters!
- ofrzeta 6y agoI always think about uplinks when I hear about "guaranteed" bandwidths to users, fiber to the home and such. Maybe I can get 1 Gbps to the next hop but can you realistically expect the uplink to be n times 1 Gbps? Also I guess it wouldn't be economically feasible to provide uplinks that can cope with that. Can anyone expand on the technological assumptions (average saturation etc) and the economics of such ISP setups?
- ObsoleteNerd 6y agoOur Wireless NBN install in rural(ish, 1 hour from a capital city) Australia went from 25mbps to 0.1-0.5mbps and has sat there for 2 years until we gave up calling them monthly to complain, and switched to a 4G booster and just tethered to our phones. Due to blatant corruption there’s zero competition for broadband here, just resellers of the same system. If Starlink can even sustain 20mbps+ and rolls out to rural Australia they’ll pretty much own the market, let alone similar stories across the entire globe. Considering it doesn’t require any infrastructure, I can’t see how our tech-illiterate decrepit government can stop it. Just sell the modems online and ship directly worldwide.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoWhat is the theoretical limit of the system they have planned? How many people can it support? I’ve added my email to the waiting list. :)
- kornbattery 6y agoEach satellite is said to have ~20 gbit/s usable bandwidth, and they're launching tens of thousands of them. The answer should be "a lot"
- mtgx 6y agoSo they shouldn't have more than 200-500 users per satellite.
- ixfo 6y ago10,000 * 20Gbps = 200Tbps, and that all assumes that the traffic is going in and out directly from customer to internet with none of that capacity used for anything else like groundstation-to-groundstation hops or anything like that. You'll find a *lot* more than 200Tbps of usable bandwidth in even a moderately sized national operator. At a small ISP (~90k users) we have about 25Tbps of capacity in our equipment. A single mid-range carrier router can easily handle a dozen terabits; something like a Juniper MX2020 has 80Tbps capacity. A Nokia 7950 XRS-20e has 96Tbps. These are single racks worth of kit that deliver half the entire constellation's capacity. Headroom is particularly important for usable high speed services as traffic becomes burstier. Statistical multiplexing gets you so far. Now bear in mind that's with 10,000 perfectly working satellites and no degradation from 20Gbps based on spectrum availability and I'd be surprised if SL carries more than a million or two people - maybe 10 at the highest level. Don't get me wrong, service for the hardest-to-reach million or two places on Earth with good latency and throughput would be awesome, though I think they have a lot of work to do on their impact on ground based scientific astronomy if they really want to launch and maintain 10,000 sats. But a mass-market service it ain't.
- mrkstu 6y agoNote that the cost of an MX2020 likely exceeds Starlink's cost of building and launching one of their satellites. Now there is likely to be an relatively few MX2020s in a mid-size carrier (conceding that Starlink will be launching many more satellites) but Starlink has essentially 0 cost infrastructure for last mile deployment other than the satellites themselves. But lets say Starlink gets to your upper limit of customers (which I assume they will, eventually, assuming they aren't already up against a Shannon limit on their bandwidth,) that is a billion dollars a month at $100 vs ~1.2 billion in launch revenues total in 2020, not even counting high revenue customers like the Department of Defense. This is going to be a money printing machine for SpaceX once their main cost is just replacing deorbiting satellites and bandwidth on the ground.
- psaux 6y agoI see comments on latency every so often when Starlink come ups. I would love some clarity on how satellite connectivity is expected to perform. Example: Streaming services will be great, but syn ack dependent SAAS apps have to be optimized for local cache and data retrieval? What ways are they looking to overcome latency? I could soap box, but this community is much smarter than me.
- andy_ppp 6y agoLEO leads to very little latency about 20-40 ms.
- db48x 6y agoThis video has a good simulation of the latency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY
- psaux 6y agoThis video is great, thank you for sharing.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoThe satellites are very low altitude. They are not geosynchronous which would require them to be very far from the earth's surface. Instead they orbit at low altitude and the antenna base station uses a complex antenna arrangement (a phased array) to follow the satellites as they move rapidly overhead. Once the inter-satellite laser links are fully deployed, starlink will be the fastest way to ping a signal to the other side of the planet.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- evil-olive 6y agothe "original" satellite internet [0] used geosynchronous satellites. geosynchronous satellites (~35,000km) have an inherent speed-of-light latency of ~250ms. that means even if every other link along the route imposes <1ms latency, you've still got that absolute minimum quarter of a second on every single packet. Starlink is in LEO (~500km) with a corresponding reduction in the minimum possible latency. that lower altitude also requires much more complex antennas and other ground hardware, compared to just pointing your antenna at a (relatively) stationary point in the sky. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#History_of_satellite_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Hist...
- Someone 6y agoReading it cynically/critically/literally, one could interpret it as counting users, not customers (so a family of four sharing a link would count as four users). They also mention “thousands of customers”, so I guess that reading may be correct. Also, as to economics, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink) says there will be up to 30,000 of these satellites. Even if (from https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1020316268311/Starlink%20Services%20LLC%20Application%20for%20ETC%20Designation.pdf https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1020316268311/Starlink%20Servic...) “hundreds of thousands of individuals spread over diverse locations across all 50 states signed up to register their interest at Starlink.com even without any formal advertising” turns into a million paying customers, that’s about 30 customers per satellite. Can 30 families in rural locations (so, presumably, not in the highest income brackets) really afford to pay for launching and maintaining a satellite in low-earth orbit? (Real number of satellites probably will be lower, initially, but so will the number of paying customers) Edit: thinking a bit more about it. These satellites weigh about 260kg. That would be 10-ish kg/customer. They fly, mostly, at 340km, or 30-ish as high as jets. Not trying to model this precisely (to say it mildly), let’s guess, with highly reusable rockets, it’s as expensive to move a kg up a km as with a commercial jet. If so, it’s 30 times as expensive per kg to bring such a satellite in its orbit as it is to use a jet airplane to take a kg to cruising height. So, each customer would have to pay the equivalent of moving 300-ish kg by long-distance jet. That’s 3 personal flights with luggage. Guessing at a satellite lifetime of 6 years, that’s ½ a flight a year. Seems affordable for many in the USA, even taking into account that the satellites have to be built and managed.
- unixhero 6y agoI don't understand why they are slow to roll it out. The world needs this service, NOW.
- jcims 6y agoIt’s not ready yet. They don’t have enough satellites in operation yet and as a result it goes offline for short spells throughout the day. They are also estimated to be losing about $1900 per dish sold. I’m sure they want to get that number down before they really go into mass production. Lastly, there’s going to be regulatory hurdles in every country they release in.
- mschuster91 6y ago> I’m sure they want to get that number down before they really go into mass production. For what it's worth scale matters a lot in pricing - the more you order of chips, the cheaper they get. I've seen 30x differences in per-unit price for 10 to 10k pieces for chips. For PCBs and injection molding of plastic cases, the situation is similar - especially for plastic cases, where the actual material worth of the plastic is negligible, but the setup costs for (sometimes multiple) rounds of milling molds until the quality of the parts is sufficient are enormous, to the range of 80-100k per mold.
- tuatoru 6y agoThere's a youtube of a teardown of a Starlink dish.[1] A nicely patterned printed circuit board, two servomotors, plastic housing parts and an aluminium foil back shield. There's not even an ethernet jack on the PCB, just a JST connector for the ethernet cable. First time I've seen that level of cost cutting. Those'd have to be some seriously expensive ICs on that PCB for the bill of materials to come to $1000, let alone $2400. And ICs are like software, printed circuit boards, aluminium foil stampings, and plastic mouldings. The expensive bit is the upfront design. The more you make, the cheaper the unit cost. EDIT: I see mschuster made the same point. --- Totally agree about the regulatory hurdles. Those could be insurmountable, especially (sadly) in countries where people would really benefit from having access to better internet. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmdQnIlnRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmdQnIlnRo
- clon 6y agoAs an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer, I'm biased against the massive cost of the StarLink pollution fleet to our ability to gaze at the wonders above. I think the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a much higher priority project for humanity, than StarLink. That said, I think Elon needs to travel the world a little more. Several of his attempts to solve purported world-relevant issues may be founded in limitations present in the US. 1) I have been to the jungles of Cambodia, trekked across Myanmar, stayed in villages of central Iran, driven across the deserts North Africa. Never have I felt deprived on good connectivity, even in the deserts of Iran. Everyone glued to their smartphones like everywhere else. And I had a pretty strong case of FB-itis myself back then. Where there is a human settlement, there seemed to be a connection. As an anecdote, I recall having Skype calls with my folks from the Shwedagon Pagoda - it had excellent wifi ~7 years ago. Walking across a salt lake one can and should expect to drop our for a while. The only exception I recall is some village in Tunisian Sahara where locals made a point of not being connected (mostly expats). Ksar Ghilane, perhaps? How is it that in rural US there is no alternative to satellite internet? There seems to be some local systemic failure. The rest of the world will be left holding the bag, so that people do not have to dig down some cables in Arkansas. 2) Building the self-driving car. It already exists everywhere. It is called the metro, tram, bus, tuk-tuk, rickshaw, whatever. It exists, and works great, servicing billions and if you exclude the latter options, safe. But not in N.America, where you cannot even cross a street without a vehicle. Thankfully, this seems to only use up VC money, without any externalities for the rest of the world.
- kilroy123 6y agoWhile I mostly agree with you, as I too have traveled a lot (I've been to all 7 continents). I've been to many places with very poor internet. Still, I think you're missing one very important point. The likely biggest user of this system will be the US military and Department of Defense. Just how they use the iridium constellation, only phone calls aren't enough in the 2020 and beyond. They need the same system but with broadband speed _internet_. They can not be dependent on some other nations infrastructure and there are a lot of boots out at a sea and places where there isn't a cell tower. The math just doesn't add up. Mark my words, the StarLink system will never work or be profitable without the US Gov being a major customer.
- MrLeap 6y agoA lot of these comments read kind of like the ones when dropbox did a ShowHN. "Why not just use rsync?" I suspect starlink will change the course of human history in substantial ways. It already stands to be the most positive technological development for my life since I've been living. At the very least, until the market adjusts, it will provide a verdant field of lifestyle arbitrage.
- ginko 6y ago>It already stands to be the most positive technological development for my life since I've been living. Video streaming? Smartphones? Wikipedia? Google maps? CRISPR? mRNA vaccines?
- extrememacaroni 6y agoSuperfast internet anywhere on the globe will intensify video streaming, Smartphones, Wikipedia, Google maps, CRISPR, mRNA vaccines everywhere
- ginko 6y agoThere's already sufficiently fast internet in most places. This is like comparing the societal impact of the Ford Model T to the latest race car.
- MrLeap 6y agoSome things about me are probably pretty atypical, but I'll say starlink beats every one of those (for me specifically!) handily. Wikipedia comes closer. Maybe I live long enough to benefit from CRISPR, but I suspect that's for other -- wealthier people. If I end up being able to afford any CRISPR treatments it'll be because of Starlink. Starlink is going to enable me to own a home without a mortgage. It will allow me to make good money while living in one of the cheapest places in the country. This lets me move the goalposts on success so I have to do significantly less just to feed myself and my family. Suddenly retiring by 35 seems conceivable. I can do work I want instead of what's available. Nothing else on that list comes close for me.
- Consultant32452 6y agoOne of my favorite YTers lives in the PNW. Previously they had to scrounge up wifi from somewhere or spend hours uploading their video in 720p over their awful "satellite" internet. They are one of the beta testers for Starlink and now they can live-stream in 4k. Sometimes it stutters, but it's still beta.
- new_realist 6y agoTen users for every satellite now in orbit.
- garbene 6y agoI’ve had StarLink installed for a week now. We live on a floating house in Oregon, and up until now, DSL was our only viable option. That’s been hard given my wife and I both work remotely and do a lot of video calls. Our impression: it’s fast, latency is awesome, but “downtime” is common and disruptive. Having the internet go offline at random intervals through the day, often for 10+ minutes, is a thing. We expected some of this given it’s currently in beta and it should get better as they make improvements and add satellites.