4 ms·

Do you think you will be able to get the same up/down speeds once they go mainstream and start adding more users to each node? This is a concern I don't really

Do you think you will be able to get the same up/down speeds once they go mainstream and start adding more users to each node? This is a concern I don't really see discussed, would be nice to have actual data from Spacex on this. Those look like really good stats but my concern is that the satellites are likely to have a muxing limit where performance eventually degrades with more users.

walrus01 5y ago
I have a fairly high degree of confidence that however they're doing the contention/time-slicing right now (very much a secret), they'll keep pace on satellite network density with the number of terminals active in a given geographical area. Even if Starlink was only 20Mbps down and 4Mbps up, and you could do those sorts of speeds any time in the day, it would still be amazingly better for the consumer tier price ($95-140/mo) compared to a hughesnet or viasat type product.
- dogma1138 5y ago
  The year is 2078 and night time is as bright as day due to the density of the Starlink satellite super cluster. Maybe that’s how Musk will solve global warming launch enough satellites to block a sufficient percentage of the illumination the earth receives.
  - nickik 5y ago
    I hope you are joking, because if not you are totally misinformed. The sats are not detectable by human eye and are totally dark in the sky once in position. Even amateur astronomers would have a very hard time finding them. Maybe if you really look for them, you could potentially see them in twilight but you would be very unlikely to notice those even if there were 100k of them.
    - dogma1138 5y ago
      They are detectable I see them every few nights, and yes it was a joke...
nickik 5y ago
You can increase the bandwidth on the sats by launching more. They have 40k planned. The actual practical limited is how much data they can get between sat and terminals. For one cell, all terminals in that cell receive all data sent to that cell. Meaning your terminal also gets all the data from your neighbor. There is a max. bandwidth to one cell, so that bandwidth divided by the number of terminals is the limiting factor. We don't know exactly how large that number is. That is why this is not a good system for high density application.

walrus01 5y ago

I have a fairly high degree of confidence that however they're doing the contention/time-slicing right now (very much a secret), they'll keep pace on satellite network density with the number of terminals active in a given geographical area. Even if Starlink was only 20Mbps down and 4Mbps up, and you could do those sorts of speeds any time in the day, it would still be amazingly better for the consumer tier price ($95-140/mo) compared to a hughesnet or viasat type product.

dogma1138 5y ago
The year is 2078 and night time is as bright as day due to the density of the Starlink satellite super cluster. Maybe that’s how Musk will solve global warming launch enough satellites to block a sufficient percentage of the illumination the earth receives.
- nickik 5y ago
  I hope you are joking, because if not you are totally misinformed. The sats are not detectable by human eye and are totally dark in the sky once in position. Even amateur astronomers would have a very hard time finding them. Maybe if you really look for them, you could potentially see them in twilight but you would be very unlikely to notice those even if there were 100k of them.
  - dogma1138 5y ago
    They are detectable I see them every few nights, and yes it was a joke...

nickik 5y ago

You can increase the bandwidth on the sats by launching more. They have 40k planned. The actual practical limited is how much data they can get between sat and terminals. For one cell, all terminals in that cell receive all data sent to that cell. Meaning your terminal also gets all the data from your neighbor. There is a max. bandwidth to one cell, so that bandwidth divided by the number of terminals is the limiting factor. We don't know exactly how large that number is. That is why this is not a good system for high density application.