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SpaceX plans Starlink broadband for cars, boats, and planes
- collias 6y agoPart of me thinks planes with a stable and fast connection would be amazing. The other part of me will mourn the days when a plane flight was one of the few places you could be expected to be totally unavailable.
- thebruce87m 6y agoIsn’t this already here? ~5 years ago I remember watching Netflix, playing rocket league and remotely accessing as unix server during a flight.
- mciancia 6y agoI tried using WiFi on intercontinental flights on Lufthansa in 2018/2019 aaand it was IMO unusable for anything besides text messaging. Maybe depends on what kind of tech is installed on plane, but there is definitely space to improve it.
- ketamine__ 6y agoIt's possible to cache NetFlix shows before you get on the plane. Ideally before the airport too since they appear to throttle it.
- rlt 6y agoI’m kind of surprised Netflix doesn’t partner with airlines to put mini Open Connect Appliances on planes and sell Netflix subscriptions per flight (if you don’t already have a subscription).
- collias 6y agoIn my experience, flying over oceans or less populated areas on the US reduce the speeds to a crawl, if you get any connection at all. It's different for every airline, but I believe the system for Southwest just uses signals from cell towers, which is spotty at best.
- tjohns 6y agoThis hasn't really been true for a couple years now. Most of the major US airlines have been migrating from cellular to Ka- or Ku-band satellite internet over the last few years. (Including Southwest.) There's some individual aircraft that haven't been upgraded yet, since installing the satellite antenna is a major upgrade. But at least on my flights, most offer it now.
- madeofpalk 6y agoDepends on airline and, mostly, where your flight is. For international longer-haul flights satellite coverage can be rough for airlines - at least a few years ago when I was familiar with it airlines had either global coverage, but slow, or smaller coverage but fast. It'll be interesting if Starlink can solve this for fast-moving planes for airlines like Qantas that fly from Aus to Europe, Asia, and America.
- naebother 6y agoThrow Neuralink into the mix and the "always connected" nightmare becomes quite literal.
- camjohnson26 6y agoNeuraLink is SciFi and lifetimes away from being even close to a consumer product.
- wait_a_minute 6y agoSource?
- krageon 6y agoCommon sense. Look around you, look at the state of the art, read some research on brain interfacing. It's fantasy.
- wait_a_minute 6y agothis is not a source
- camjohnson26 6y agoIt’s not a research paper it’s an opinion.
- wait_a_minute 6y agowe must request sources when someone else is making sweeping judgments about something amazing being just sci-fi and lifetimes away if you are only sharing opinion, then my opinion is that you're wrong and that neural links are already here and will be accessible to all within our lifetime.
- 6y ago
- dchuk 6y agoIf you’re flying on planes with viasat connections, it can feel like normal broadband. The GoGo terrestrial cell tower option is the terrible one that barely works.
- timmg 6y agoThis is what I want from Starlink. Drive around the wilderness and still have internet for evenings and emergencies. Glad they're thinking about it (even though it was obvious from the start.)
- onion2k 6y agoI strongly believe connecting cars (specifically Tesla cars) to the internet permanently so they can act as a giant data vacuum sucking up telemetry and improving maps is literally the reason why Starlink exists. Level 5 self-driving is going to require amazing map data and real time feedback on the state of roads, traffic, etc. Starlink is a very clear route to getting that data.
- Geee 6y agoDo we have information whether Starlink satellites have cameras on-board? I was just wondering one day that it would make sense to use the satellites itself to build real-time maps. Tesla cars are already connected through 4G/5G (when there's coverage) and they also store video feed in their memory, which they upload when the car connects to Wifi.
- txlpo78 6y agoAlmost certainly not. AFAIK the technology to do street-level imagery from satellites is still mostly only on government spy satellites, and certainly isn’t cheap enough to put on thousands of nearly-disposable sats. The type of imagery you see from Google Maps is taken from airplanes.
- alwayshumans 6y agoStarlink has the potential to completely revolutionise the shipping sector. Digitisation in the maritime space has been slow and adoption/innovation has been hampered by poor connectivity. Cheap connectivity could be incredible. Current sat systems are expensive and coverage is interesting. IoT and autonomy offer the potential cost saving measures to get the investment from some of the most frugal operators.
- mciancia 6y agoHow so? I mean, besides providing better connectivity for people on ships, what will/can change? What was blocked in building out by current satellite offerings?
- etrautmann 6y agoThere’s a surprising amount of real time route optimization that in theory could improve efficiency and cost by a few percent by taking current and weather into account.
- gomox 6y agoWeather routing is already prevalent over existing satphone connections. The GFS model that is typically used for this purpose has low enough resolution that there's marginal returns to additional bandwidth or reduced latency.
- guywhocodes 6y agoYou can interpolate the GFS very accurately in terms of wind over land and close to land with WRF-ARW. There is highish resolution land use data and good elevation models. This is something you can do on your laptop even these days. However I have no idea of good it is at wave and currents.
- repsilat 6y agoYou can also put the compute and the data on land, and do routing as a service. The decision bandwidth (i.e., ideal heading/route) is miniscule.
- pmlnr 6y agoI don't want an always connected car; I want it to be completely able to work off the grid.
- waiseristy 6y agoIf it makes you feel better, all of the actual car stuff, ECU's BMU's TCU's, etc will remain not-smart for a long while longer. Worst case, your head unit bricks and the HUD flashes a bunch of lights at you
- serf 6y agoit's all fine as long as you make the assumption that the CAN-bus network all of the components share isn't exploitable. unfortunately that was shown not to be the case since at least 2010.[0] The worst case is potentially much worse than a bricked head-unit. The worst-case is potentially a sizable loss of human life. Note : I don't have a solution. The industry is obviously trending towards connectivity; I just wish to elucidate that it's far from solved from a security & liability standpoint. [0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220713691_Experimental_Security_Analysis_of_a_Modern_Automobile https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220713691_Experimen...
- waiseristy 6y agoI have so far only seen the various car networks compromised through physical access to the vehicles diagnosis ports. It's safe to say all bets are off once you start plugging physical things into the car. Doesn't mean a head unit couldn't be compromised and start flooding the specific can bus its sitting on with packets, but usually head units are treated with a bit more care than the rest of the cars networks. Trying to jump can networks through one of the gateways, I don't think would be an easy task either.
- snypher 6y agoTencent gained remote access from Wifi all the way to CANbus on a Tesla on 2016. https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-17/thursday/us-17-Nie-Free-Fall-Hacking-Tesla-From-Wireless-To-CAN-Bus-wp.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-17/thursday/us-17-Nie-Free-...
- WalterGR 6y agoWhere are we currently with Starlink and its (remedied?) harm to astronomy?
- wmf 6y ago"VisorSats average 1.29 magnitudes fainter than the original-design Starlink satellites and, thus, they are 31% as bright." https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.00374.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.00374.pdf
- bombcar 6y agoThis is really cool stuff - glad to see they’re working on it
- ctdonath 6y agoI’ve long wondered when Tesla will include a Starlink system in every car. What better market penetration?
- akozak 6y agoAssuming it's not free (satellites / modem aint cheap) - what do you think the subscription rate would be? Especially given most people already pay for connectivity via their phone? Would that justify the BOM cost and complexity increase on the car build?
- ctdonath 6y agoAssuming: at-cost hardware built into car, subscription fee covers both car and home. Buy a car? $99/mo gets great service around the car, including your home when home. Want that service at home when car is away? one time $499 for hardware. Stare at those numbers, then realize you can dump that lousy $25-100/mo service, making Starlink the obvious choice ... and suddenly geography isn’t a limiting factor.
- akozak 6y agoI personally don't believe that very many people would dump their cell service because their car can get broadband.
- URSpider94 6y agoNot your cell service, your cable/internet service. Your car becomes your ISP modem for your house, and goes with you when you travel.
- wtf_is_up 6y agoThe terminals are a little big to be mounted on every car. That seems like a better use case for 5G.
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- mrfusion 6y agoFYI: not for cars. https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1369051431903268865 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13690514319032688...
- fastball 6y ago> large trucks & RVs. Those qualify as cars. Just not Tesla cars. At least until the Tesla Semi is out, I guess.
- mrfusion 6y agoI assumed he means semi trucks.
- jsight 6y agoI think most do not consider a truck or an RV to be a "car". The literal definition doesn't seem to make a distinction though, strangely.
- fastball 6y agoAnd by the downvotes I'm getting I guess others agree, haha. But before this moment, I personally would've definitely classified semis and RVs as "cars".
- chrisseaton 6y agoI think for some strange historical reason ‘car’ sort of means ‘sedan’ in the US. Like Ford recently announced they’re stopping selling ‘cars’... but they aren’t they have a full range of many types of cars, just not sedans anymore.
- oh_sigh 6y agoContra Wikipedia's definition of car: > A car (or automobile) is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transportation. Most definitions of cars say that they run primarily on roads, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport people rather than goods. An RV would seat more than 1-8 people, and a truck is designed to transport goods rather than people (despite what they may actually be used for).
- falcolas 6y agoI have a colleague in Canada who uses Starlink. He disconnects at least once per video call, and his latency spikes upwards of 4 seconds regularly. Perhaps this is the best use for it - locations which could never get wired (or stationary wireless) internet.
- tristanb 6y agoThat’s why it’s called “the better than nothing beta” - it’s not production ready until they have extra birds in the sky.
- falcolas 6y agoFunny, this is the first time I've ever heard anything say that it's expected to have highly degraded performance by default. EDIT: Key words: Highly Degraded Performance. This isn't the occasional disconnect or lag spike. It's frequent disconnects and lag spikes.
- Someone1234 6y agoIt is the first paragraph, of the first FAQ answer on their website: > There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all. Most articles or videos about the Beta has mentioned just that as a limitation (along with being geo-locked, both due to lack of coverage right now).
- bgirard 6y agoHas a root cause been identified? Is it a growing pain like coverage gaps / satellite scaling issues or a fundamental issue?
- falcolas 6y agoNot yet, no. A sister comment indicates that it's expected (news to me and my colleague) until more satellites are in place.
- Threeve303 6y agoWill it work when I get to Mars?
- 908087 6y agoGet ready for ~5-40 minute ping times.
- z3rgl1ng 6y agoStill waiting for someone to show me how starlink isn’t a scam.
- lgats 6y agoFiling: https://fcc.report/IBFS/SES-LIC-INTR2021-00934/3877179.pdf https://fcc.report/IBFS/SES-LIC-INTR2021-00934/3877179.pdf
- blackrock 6y agoElon should make Starlink free and complimentary for all his Tesla cars. This would probably be a big extra incentive to buy a Tesla.
- amanaplanacanal 6y agoIsn’t he already selling as many as he can build?