9 ms·

Starlink Ground Station Map

126 points by addflip 5y ago

stirlo 5y ago
Those stations in Chile are going to revolutionise comms down there. I trekked to El Chalten in 2019 and the entire town was connected with a ~150mb microwave link. With thousands of tourists in town it had slowed to a crawl. Starlink won’t do much in cities but for regional areas it will open massive opportunities particularly in tourism with today’s instagramming travellers.
- aeyes 5y ago
  El Chalten is in Argentina and its a completely different story over there. Chile has fiber all the way to the very south and is in the process of further expanding this network to all relevant cities in the south until the end of next year. https://foa.subtel.gob.cl/mapa-de-proyecto-foa/ https://foa.subtel.gob.cl/mapa-de-proyecto-foa/
  - stirlo 5y ago
    I am well aware El Chalten is in Argentina, hopefully there's not a requirement to have a national base station to serve a particular country. The Patagonian location should be able to cover both Argentina and Chile effectively. Interesting to see Chile's new Fibre network taking shape. I guess it was a factor in the placement decision for these base stations though I imagine they were also located in Chile for the higher wealth and economic stability compared to Argentina.
    - dwarfsandstuff 5y ago
      Well, there's no ground station in Portugal but starlink already announced availability of the service in Portugal. Unrelated: how should one go about to become a certified starlink installer, anyone knows?
      - manquer 5y ago
        Europe might be considered the same geography regulations wise. Strict regimes would want connections termination locally so they can monitor and implement content blocks/censorships etc. It would not be possible if the ground stations where not in the geographical control.
    - manquer 5y ago
      Depends actually,some countries want to monitor their inbound/outbound traffic so it might be restricted in that way in geographies requiring this, they can hardly add monitoring equipment in another country after all.
neals 5y ago
If this is going to work from my boat at some point, I'm never setting foot on land ever, again.
- chrissnell 5y ago
  Until you need to shop for groceries and boat repair supplies, of course.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    You just order those through Boatmates.
    - dzhiurgis 5y ago
      Delivered by gen-a's via fpv drone
  - rosstex 5y ago
    >groceries Ever heard of fish? >boat repair Ever heard of the fish people?
    - innocenat 5y ago
      > Ever heard of the fish people? Mermaid?
      - rosstex 5y ago
        I was thinking more "The Shape of Water".
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    One of my sailing channels I follow YouTube once said - it's not really cruising channel, it's a bluewater boat maintenance channel. Those episodes are always the most interesting!
  - deleted 5y ago
Mengkudulangsat 5y ago
Wow. For a service that should have global reach, these are mostly in the US! I'm a lot more excited about LEO broadband compared to 5G. Sounds like a career change worth pursuing, even if you are halfway around the world.
- sneak 5y ago
  There is no direct connectivity between the satellites at this point, so starlink can't be expected to have global reach yet - you go up, and you come down within a certain distance of where you are. They will need ground stations all over the earth soon.
  - ackbar03 5y ago
    So currently all the internet for Starlink customers are from bouncing off Starlinks low-orbit satellites to these ground stations where they are connected via cable connected (normal internet) and served up, am I interpreting that correctly?
    - sneak 5y ago
      That's how I understand it, yes. If double latency is okay, it may be possible to do M-shaped ones where an isolated ground station (with only power) relays solely between two different satellites to reach further, for example in the middle of oceans (with a ground station on an island or ship). I am not sure if they plan to implement this interim step or not, but it is technically possible. Their eventual goal is to allow communication directly between the satellites (via laser is the plan, but who knows if that will reach production). It's in testing/R&D and is quite a difficult challenge.
      - ackbar03 5y ago
        > Their eventual goal is to allow communication directly between the satellites I guess they'll have to though if they want to make it more scale-able? They satellites will always have to be up in space, but with communication between them they won't have to build ground stations everywhere. Plus ground stations themselves have to have good internet connectivity
chrissnell 5y ago
These are some very strange locations. Many of them are way out on country roads, some in places where I’m imagining they had to spent some money to get power service. Check out Panaca, NV, near the Utah border. I’ve been right through here and it’s super desolate. I’ve also been near the one in Evanston, WY and the one outside of Hutchinson, KS. There ain’t nothin’ out there! What’s the reasoning for these locations? Low RF noise floor maybe? On some major transcon fiber route perhaps?
- snypher 5y ago
  There's an ancient map here that shows a dogleg in the NV cable that may run by Panaca. https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/williamscommunications_large.gif https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cyberge... There is also an article that shows a few(?) cables in that area https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-detailed-public-map-us-internet-infrastructure-180956701/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-detailed-pub...
  - sneak 5y ago
    If all you need is power and fiber, and you have to maintain the site indefinitely, it makes sense to go as cheap as possible I guess. I imagine there are also some minor security benefits from being way out in the middle of nowhere. I'm super glad for starlink in general as it allows me personally to just need power and water (and a clear view of the sky) and opens up a bunch of extremely cheap land options for viable places to build a house.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I bet the noise floor thing. Inmarsat (and the intelligence monitor station beside it) have been trying to block the 3.5Ghz spectrum in most of the Netherlands (up to 100km away or so). They're now going to move somewhere else but it basically delayed the 5G rollout in the northern half of the country for years.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  The majority of sites in the United States, actually all of them I've checked, are pre-existing fiber shelters, mostly CenturyLink's in the west. They exist at various points on the fiber line for add-drop and power injection. It's not especially unusual to negotiate with carriers to install equipment at these sites as part of your transit agreement. I don't immediately see any aerial photos where SpaceX's equipment seems to have been installed but I would imagine they're adding the antenna and maybe another prefab shelter. But basically everything you're seeing at those sites on Google Maps right now isn't Starlink, it's existing carrier equipment.
supernova87a 5y ago
Does anyone have an image of what one of these ground stations looks like? Do they piggyback on some existing antenna shack? Or did they build their own from scratch? I also wonder whether they considered partnering with AWS Ground Station? https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/ https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/ Or maybe the Starlink constellation's requirements are not amenable to that?
- sneak 5y ago
  Amazon is also planning an LEO internet constellation; being dependent upon a direct competitor for core infrastructure probably isn't a good idea, especially when that specific competitor (Amazon) has been busted before abusing its position as vendor to appropriate their customers' private information and enter their markets directly as participant. If you are going to compete with Amazon, don't use AWS to do it. I also doubt AWS ground station locations are numerous enough to provide the kind of service that Starlink needs.
  - supernova87a 5y ago
    Ah, that is a good point, of course. What kind of ground station density does Starlink need in its eventual state?
    - ac29 5y ago
      The ground stations I saw on the map had 2.1GHz of uplink and 1.3GHz of downlink. If we assume 4b/hz (about as efficient as LTE/WiFi), thats 8.2Gbps up and 5.2Gbps down. I'm not too sure to what extent they can use MIMO techniques, but if they can, throughput could be multiplied by the number of MIMO channels.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        I don't think you'd have much benefit of MIMO on a connection that's line of sight like this. MIMO is all about making the most of separate connection paths through reflections from walls, buildings etc. But in this case there'll be only one path.
supernova87a 5y ago
On a tangent, I wonder what effects Starlink will have in countries where the government wants to control or filter/restrict people's internet access?
- yosito 5y ago
  I know Cuba strictly controls which antennas can be imported into the country. I think it would be pretty hard to sneak a Starlink device in undetected, even if Starlink supported it.
  - sumedh 5y ago
    > I think it would be pretty hard to sneak a Starlink device in undetected, I am sure people who smuggle drugs will find a way.
- sneak 5y ago
  I wondered this too, but came to the realization that it will be like any other ISP, and comply with any/all local laws it has to comply with to get the revenue that it is ultimately a company's job to get. Most companies don't engage in activism/disobedience at the expense of revenue. Apple censors the App Store and backdoors iCloud for the CCP (via state-operated servers) to operate in mainland China, for example. The ground stations will have to be fairly close to the customers for a while, and the customer antennas aren't particularly covert. It will probably have all manner of government-mandated filtering like any other established commercial ISP. After all, it's nothing without its ground stations right now. EDIT: It was HN that changed my view on this, in some of the comments in the HN thread on my Starlink blog post. I started out hopeful and idealistic about Starlink being an anti-censorship technology.
- outcoldman 5y ago
  I am sure it is going to be prohibited to use it over there. I feel like I already read somewhere that government in Russia is concern about it.
- beambot 5y ago
  "Russia may fine citizens for using SpaceX's Starlink internet. Here's how the internet service poses a threat to authoritarian regimes." https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-may-fine-citizens-spacex-starlink-internet-authoritarian-regime-2021-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-may-fine-citizens-spa...
gameshot911 5y ago
The 'legend' is not really a legend, (right?). It lists out base stations, but I still have no idea what the icons mean. (Really cool project, btw. Thanks unidentified Googlers for creating it!)
- elcomet 5y ago
  the legend is in the atlantic ocean near the bermudes (click on the three round dots, + and two eyes)
erwinh 5y ago
Check out the starlink satellite orbits here: https://space-search.io/?search=starlink https://space-search.io/?search=starlink Still a number of trains spreading out so global ground coverage is coming soon!
jcadam 5y ago
Put down a deposit for service up in Alaska near Kenai. They're estimating early 2022 at the moment. Might be stuck on one of the GEO sat providers until then.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Very nice! What do the orange circles mean?
- skykooler 5y ago
  They are roughly the area in which you can be connected to a satellite that is directly connecting to the ground station in the middle of it.
bcrl 5y ago
It's a pity that those of us offering to host ground stations in areas where the nearest ground station is hundreds of kilometers away are ignored. I've tried to reach folks at Starlink with zero success thus far. That said, I wonder what the bottleneck is for setting up new ground stations.

126 points by addflip 5y ago

Those stations in Chile are going to revolutionise comms down there. I trekked to El Chalten in 2019 and the entire town was connected with a ~150mb microwave link. With thousands of tourists in town it had slowed to a crawl. Starlink won’t do much in cities but for regional areas it will open massive opportunities particularly in tourism with today’s instagramming travellers.

aeyes 5y ago
El Chalten is in Argentina and its a completely different story over there. Chile has fiber all the way to the very south and is in the process of further expanding this network to all relevant cities in the south until the end of next year. https://foa.subtel.gob.cl/mapa-de-proyecto-foa/ https://foa.subtel.gob.cl/mapa-de-proyecto-foa/
- stirlo 5y ago
  I am well aware El Chalten is in Argentina, hopefully there's not a requirement to have a national base station to serve a particular country. The Patagonian location should be able to cover both Argentina and Chile effectively. Interesting to see Chile's new Fibre network taking shape. I guess it was a factor in the placement decision for these base stations though I imagine they were also located in Chile for the higher wealth and economic stability compared to Argentina.
  - dwarfsandstuff 5y ago
    Well, there's no ground station in Portugal but starlink already announced availability of the service in Portugal. Unrelated: how should one go about to become a certified starlink installer, anyone knows?
    - manquer 5y ago
      Europe might be considered the same geography regulations wise. Strict regimes would want connections termination locally so they can monitor and implement content blocks/censorships etc. It would not be possible if the ground stations where not in the geographical control.
  - manquer 5y ago
    Depends actually,some countries want to monitor their inbound/outbound traffic so it might be restricted in that way in geographies requiring this, they can hardly add monitoring equipment in another country after all.

neals 5y ago

If this is going to work from my boat at some point, I'm never setting foot on land ever, again.

chrissnell 5y ago
Until you need to shop for groceries and boat repair supplies, of course.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  You just order those through Boatmates.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Delivered by gen-a's via fpv drone
- rosstex 5y ago
  >groceries Ever heard of fish? >boat repair Ever heard of the fish people?
  - innocenat 5y ago
    > Ever heard of the fish people? Mermaid?
    - rosstex 5y ago
      I was thinking more "The Shape of Water".
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  One of my sailing channels I follow YouTube once said - it's not really cruising channel, it's a bluewater boat maintenance channel. Those episodes are always the most interesting!
- deleted 5y ago

Mengkudulangsat 5y ago

Wow. For a service that should have global reach, these are mostly in the US! I'm a lot more excited about LEO broadband compared to 5G. Sounds like a career change worth pursuing, even if you are halfway around the world.

sneak 5y ago
There is no direct connectivity between the satellites at this point, so starlink can't be expected to have global reach yet - you go up, and you come down within a certain distance of where you are. They will need ground stations all over the earth soon.
- ackbar03 5y ago
  So currently all the internet for Starlink customers are from bouncing off Starlinks low-orbit satellites to these ground stations where they are connected via cable connected (normal internet) and served up, am I interpreting that correctly?
  - sneak 5y ago
    That's how I understand it, yes. If double latency is okay, it may be possible to do M-shaped ones where an isolated ground station (with only power) relays solely between two different satellites to reach further, for example in the middle of oceans (with a ground station on an island or ship). I am not sure if they plan to implement this interim step or not, but it is technically possible. Their eventual goal is to allow communication directly between the satellites (via laser is the plan, but who knows if that will reach production). It's in testing/R&D and is quite a difficult challenge.
    - ackbar03 5y ago
      > Their eventual goal is to allow communication directly between the satellites I guess they'll have to though if they want to make it more scale-able? They satellites will always have to be up in space, but with communication between them they won't have to build ground stations everywhere. Plus ground stations themselves have to have good internet connectivity

chrissnell 5y ago

These are some very strange locations. Many of them are way out on country roads, some in places where I’m imagining they had to spent some money to get power service. Check out Panaca, NV, near the Utah border. I’ve been right through here and it’s super desolate. I’ve also been near the one in Evanston, WY and the one outside of Hutchinson, KS. There ain’t nothin’ out there! What’s the reasoning for these locations? Low RF noise floor maybe? On some major transcon fiber route perhaps?

snypher 5y ago
There's an ancient map here that shows a dogleg in the NV cable that may run by Panaca. https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/williamscommunications_large.gif https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cyberge... There is also an article that shows a few(?) cables in that area https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-detailed-public-map-us-internet-infrastructure-180956701/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-detailed-pub...
- sneak 5y ago
  If all you need is power and fiber, and you have to maintain the site indefinitely, it makes sense to go as cheap as possible I guess. I imagine there are also some minor security benefits from being way out in the middle of nowhere. I'm super glad for starlink in general as it allows me personally to just need power and water (and a clear view of the sky) and opens up a bunch of extremely cheap land options for viable places to build a house.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I bet the noise floor thing. Inmarsat (and the intelligence monitor station beside it) have been trying to block the 3.5Ghz spectrum in most of the Netherlands (up to 100km away or so). They're now going to move somewhere else but it basically delayed the 5G rollout in the northern half of the country for years.
jcrawfordor 5y ago
The majority of sites in the United States, actually all of them I've checked, are pre-existing fiber shelters, mostly CenturyLink's in the west. They exist at various points on the fiber line for add-drop and power injection. It's not especially unusual to negotiate with carriers to install equipment at these sites as part of your transit agreement. I don't immediately see any aerial photos where SpaceX's equipment seems to have been installed but I would imagine they're adding the antenna and maybe another prefab shelter. But basically everything you're seeing at those sites on Google Maps right now isn't Starlink, it's existing carrier equipment.

supernova87a 5y ago

Does anyone have an image of what one of these ground stations looks like? Do they piggyback on some existing antenna shack? Or did they build their own from scratch? I also wonder whether they considered partnering with AWS Ground Station? https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/ https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/ Or maybe the Starlink constellation's requirements are not amenable to that?

sneak 5y ago
Amazon is also planning an LEO internet constellation; being dependent upon a direct competitor for core infrastructure probably isn't a good idea, especially when that specific competitor (Amazon) has been busted before abusing its position as vendor to appropriate their customers' private information and enter their markets directly as participant. If you are going to compete with Amazon, don't use AWS to do it. I also doubt AWS ground station locations are numerous enough to provide the kind of service that Starlink needs.
- supernova87a 5y ago
  Ah, that is a good point, of course. What kind of ground station density does Starlink need in its eventual state?
  - ac29 5y ago
    The ground stations I saw on the map had 2.1GHz of uplink and 1.3GHz of downlink. If we assume 4b/hz (about as efficient as LTE/WiFi), thats 8.2Gbps up and 5.2Gbps down. I'm not too sure to what extent they can use MIMO techniques, but if they can, throughput could be multiplied by the number of MIMO channels.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      I don't think you'd have much benefit of MIMO on a connection that's line of sight like this. MIMO is all about making the most of separate connection paths through reflections from walls, buildings etc. But in this case there'll be only one path.

supernova87a 5y ago

On a tangent, I wonder what effects Starlink will have in countries where the government wants to control or filter/restrict people's internet access?

yosito 5y ago
I know Cuba strictly controls which antennas can be imported into the country. I think it would be pretty hard to sneak a Starlink device in undetected, even if Starlink supported it.
- sumedh 5y ago
  > I think it would be pretty hard to sneak a Starlink device in undetected, I am sure people who smuggle drugs will find a way.
sneak 5y ago
I wondered this too, but came to the realization that it will be like any other ISP, and comply with any/all local laws it has to comply with to get the revenue that it is ultimately a company's job to get. Most companies don't engage in activism/disobedience at the expense of revenue. Apple censors the App Store and backdoors iCloud for the CCP (via state-operated servers) to operate in mainland China, for example. The ground stations will have to be fairly close to the customers for a while, and the customer antennas aren't particularly covert. It will probably have all manner of government-mandated filtering like any other established commercial ISP. After all, it's nothing without its ground stations right now. EDIT: It was HN that changed my view on this, in some of the comments in the HN thread on my Starlink blog post. I started out hopeful and idealistic about Starlink being an anti-censorship technology.
outcoldman 5y ago
I am sure it is going to be prohibited to use it over there. I feel like I already read somewhere that government in Russia is concern about it.
beambot 5y ago
"Russia may fine citizens for using SpaceX's Starlink internet. Here's how the internet service poses a threat to authoritarian regimes." https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-may-fine-citizens-spacex-starlink-internet-authoritarian-regime-2021-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-may-fine-citizens-spa...

gameshot911 5y ago

The 'legend' is not really a legend, (right?). It lists out base stations, but I still have no idea what the icons mean. (Really cool project, btw. Thanks unidentified Googlers for creating it!)

elcomet 5y ago
the legend is in the atlantic ocean near the bermudes (click on the three round dots, + and two eyes)

erwinh 5y ago

Check out the starlink satellite orbits here: https://space-search.io/?search=starlink https://space-search.io/?search=starlink Still a number of trains spreading out so global ground coverage is coming soon!

jcadam 5y ago

Put down a deposit for service up in Alaska near Kenai. They're estimating early 2022 at the moment. Might be stuck on one of the GEO sat providers until then.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Very nice! What do the orange circles mean?

skykooler 5y ago
They are roughly the area in which you can be connected to a satellite that is directly connecting to the ground station in the middle of it.

bcrl 5y ago

It's a pity that those of us offering to host ground stations in areas where the nearest ground station is hundreds of kilometers away are ignored. I've tried to reach folks at Starlink with zero success thus far. That said, I wonder what the bottleneck is for setting up new ground stations.