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> Go compare it to what you will get for $150 per month from consumer grade geostationary based highly oversubscribed services. Viasat/Hughesnet/wild blue/etc.

> Go compare it to what you will get for $150 per month from consumer grade geostationary based highly oversubscribed services. Viasat/Hughesnet/wild blue/etc. Aside from "it's not a good deal just because it's cheaper than a bad deal" - your point is completely irrelevant to terrible design choices that have little to do with cost. A permanently-attached cable on a very expensive outdoor device is mind-boggling levels of asinine, to the point that it seems done purposefully to help subsidize the service by making money off returned units with damaged cables. Or guarantee that units will eventually die; it sounds like Musk wants to shift to being a satellite backbone, not providing interwebs for plebs - and one great way to shift to that is to simply stop selling dishes to consumers and wait for the existing units to die of cable failure. (And before you jump all over me: yeeeeees, I'm aware that implementing a connector for the cable has costs. Starlink chose to cut those costs.) It's completely up Musk's alley to pull this sort of blatantly anti-consumer nonsense. His entire life he's been profiting off exploiting his customers. For example, in the case of paypal, blatantly stealing money from people's accounts for "suspicious" activity, and getting away with it because "paypal isn't a bank, neener neener."

pedro2 4y ago
Far from me to defend Musk but assholes have a place in society -- they just need to be monitored. Whatever the means he has used, he kickstarted (in the minds of consumers) at least three industries. Would I willingly give him money? No. Unless I had an RV :)
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > he kickstarted (in the minds of consumers) at least three industries In reality he didn't.
  - steveoscaro 4y ago
    He didn't kickstart the stagnant commercial space launch industry? Really?
    - baq 4y ago
      Kickstarted is a strong word here, but revolutionized is perfectly adequate. If starship works out, he’ll monopolize it.
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      No, he's not an engineer or a scientist. He paid others to do the work. They did the work. > "at least three industries" He bought other companies that were already started. Bought, not founded and not invented technology himself. Somehow, when it comes to billionaires, "I paid a writer" becomes "I wrote a book".
walrus01 4y ago
> it sounds like Musk wants to shift to being a satellite backbone, Musk and his network team are not that dumb. They know about the Shannon limit in rf microwave and millimeter wave and the multi terahertz channel width capacity of basic 9/125 SM fiber. Anything RF based has incredibly tiny capacity compared to modern 100/200/400GbE 40/80 channel dwdm systems. The capacity of two strands of fiber on a long haul path is incredible. Internet backbone links carry far too much traffic to handle through even the most optimistic starlink sat to sat laser links. I 100% concur with you on the foolishness of the cable. It should be some kind of ip68 rated twist lock Ethernet connector.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Why do you think 100gbps+ is not feasible for sat to sat lasers? The vacuum of space is a better environment than 500km of glass with a bunch of inline repeaters.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    Because a few discrete OOK lasers in a single frequency aiming at another moving target, while they will have a lot of capacity compared to an rf link, will have a minuscule amount of capacity in Gbps compared to a whole DWDM based, coherent 100GbE+ optical transport system operating on singlemode fiber. Like, literally, twenty or thirty individual full duplex 400GbE circuits in two strands of fiber, if you have enough money to throw at the problem. The only way you could approach matching the same capacity on a sat to sat link would be if you had a massive array of 30-40 separate laser tx and corresponding massive array of 30-40 rx receptors on the other side. It's easier to understand if you've seen a DWDM mux and demux in person in a telecom facility. I'd like to be proven wrong if somebody can do multi Tbps of capacity on a sat to sat laser link, that would be awesome, but the challenges are very high.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      > The only way you could approach matching the same capacity on a sat to sat link would be if you had a massive array of 30-40 separate laser tx and corresponding massive array of 30-40 rx receptors on the other side. This does sound like the sort of thing Musk would try, especially post-Starship, if the rest of the setup was physically possible.
ryzvonusef 4y ago
The cable isn't permanently attached on the new square dish, iirc
bri3d 4y ago
The cable isn't permanent on the rectangular dish. It's got weird proprietary micro-HDMI esque connectors on both ends (and each end is different!) This at least isn't completely out there, since the cable can be replaced, but certainly isn't as good as an off the shelf cable that can be replaced in almost any town. I think this must have been done due to either weatherproofing (RJ45 is awful for this, you can make it waterproof with weird enclosures but it's painful) or some kind of issue with the excessive power requirements from the dish. The cable is just CAT5e. I cut it and put RJ45 in the middle (through a gas discharge surge arrestor) to avoid needing to drill another hole in my house, and my system works fine even in snow melt mode, so... shrug. The weirdest part about the rectangular Dishy system is that the router doesn't have an Ethernet port, and, to add one you have to buy a proprietary dongle because there's no Ethernet PHY for an additional port in the router itself. Plus, there's no official way to eliminate the router hardware - you can put it in passthrough mode and eliminate the actual routing part, but the proprietary PoE injector is fully integrated into the router hardware. Things are improving slowly, though - at least there's now a "remote management" function in the Starlink app, so passthrough mode users have (proprietary) access to their connection's vitals. Previously, enabling passthrough mode eliminated all telemetry from the connection, so you couldn't see if the link was obstructed, for example.

pedro2 4y ago

Far from me to defend Musk but assholes have a place in society -- they just need to be monitored. Whatever the means he has used, he kickstarted (in the minds of consumers) at least three industries. Would I willingly give him money? No. Unless I had an RV :)

goodpoint 4y ago
> he kickstarted (in the minds of consumers) at least three industries In reality he didn't.
- steveoscaro 4y ago
  He didn't kickstart the stagnant commercial space launch industry? Really?
  - baq 4y ago
    Kickstarted is a strong word here, but revolutionized is perfectly adequate. If starship works out, he’ll monopolize it.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    No, he's not an engineer or a scientist. He paid others to do the work. They did the work. > "at least three industries" He bought other companies that were already started. Bought, not founded and not invented technology himself. Somehow, when it comes to billionaires, "I paid a writer" becomes "I wrote a book".

walrus01 4y ago

> it sounds like Musk wants to shift to being a satellite backbone, Musk and his network team are not that dumb. They know about the Shannon limit in rf microwave and millimeter wave and the multi terahertz channel width capacity of basic 9/125 SM fiber. Anything RF based has incredibly tiny capacity compared to modern 100/200/400GbE 40/80 channel dwdm systems. The capacity of two strands of fiber on a long haul path is incredible. Internet backbone links carry far too much traffic to handle through even the most optimistic starlink sat to sat laser links. I 100% concur with you on the foolishness of the cable. It should be some kind of ip68 rated twist lock Ethernet connector.

kortilla 4y ago
Why do you think 100gbps+ is not feasible for sat to sat lasers? The vacuum of space is a better environment than 500km of glass with a bunch of inline repeaters.
- walrus01 4y ago
  Because a few discrete OOK lasers in a single frequency aiming at another moving target, while they will have a lot of capacity compared to an rf link, will have a minuscule amount of capacity in Gbps compared to a whole DWDM based, coherent 100GbE+ optical transport system operating on singlemode fiber. Like, literally, twenty or thirty individual full duplex 400GbE circuits in two strands of fiber, if you have enough money to throw at the problem. The only way you could approach matching the same capacity on a sat to sat link would be if you had a massive array of 30-40 separate laser tx and corresponding massive array of 30-40 rx receptors on the other side. It's easier to understand if you've seen a DWDM mux and demux in person in a telecom facility. I'd like to be proven wrong if somebody can do multi Tbps of capacity on a sat to sat laser link, that would be awesome, but the challenges are very high.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > The only way you could approach matching the same capacity on a sat to sat link would be if you had a massive array of 30-40 separate laser tx and corresponding massive array of 30-40 rx receptors on the other side. This does sound like the sort of thing Musk would try, especially post-Starship, if the rest of the setup was physically possible.

ryzvonusef 4y ago

The cable isn't permanently attached on the new square dish, iirc

bri3d 4y ago

The cable isn't permanent on the rectangular dish. It's got weird proprietary micro-HDMI esque connectors on both ends (and each end is different!) This at least isn't completely out there, since the cable can be replaced, but certainly isn't as good as an off the shelf cable that can be replaced in almost any town. I think this must have been done due to either weatherproofing (RJ45 is awful for this, you can make it waterproof with weird enclosures but it's painful) or some kind of issue with the excessive power requirements from the dish. The cable is just CAT5e. I cut it and put RJ45 in the middle (through a gas discharge surge arrestor) to avoid needing to drill another hole in my house, and my system works fine even in snow melt mode, so... shrug. The weirdest part about the rectangular Dishy system is that the router doesn't have an Ethernet port, and, to add one you have to buy a proprietary dongle because there's no Ethernet PHY for an additional port in the router itself. Plus, there's no official way to eliminate the router hardware - you can put it in passthrough mode and eliminate the actual routing part, but the proprietary PoE injector is fully integrated into the router hardware. Things are improving slowly, though - at least there's now a "remote management" function in the Starlink app, so passthrough mode users have (proprietary) access to their connection's vitals. Previously, enabling passthrough mode eliminated all telemetry from the connection, so you couldn't see if the link was obstructed, for example.