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"$5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals." Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than t
by yardie 4y ago
"$5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals."
Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income.
In other terms, Iridium Go is still the best value around and truly global for the time being.
- ok_dad 4y ago> Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income. More like: commercial and military vessels
- notahacker 4y agoCommercial and military vessels have contracts with Iridium/Inmarsat etc for mission critical stuff. An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
- baq 4y agoNeither iridium nor Inmarsat provides capabilities of starlink: low latency, high bandwidth, asat-resistant, jamming-resistant infrastructure, all this proven in a real world conflict. They are ‘only’ missing coverage. Military will pay top dollar for this, Musk is in the name-his-price territory here. It’s become mission critical overnight. If they manage to cover the full globe, you’ll see the DoD quietly spending billions to have access and more billions to deny any other military the option.
- madengr 4y ago
- WJW 4y agoI used to be a naval officer in the Dutch navy, this is the type of capability that we would love to have. It was always a mess to divide satcom bandwidth between operational and recreational purposes, so if we could put all non-essential traffic on Starlink (for only 5k/month/ship too!) that would be a huge win and free up massive operational bandwidth on the more serious satcoms.
- kbenson 4y agoWould there be any concern that you are essentially advertising your location at all times to some third party corp? Or is that only a concern during certain times and you can just turn off the commercial system at that point?
- wefarrell 4y agoAll surface maritime vessels, military or not, need to advertise their location to anyone who can listen for the purpose of collision avoidance. If they didn't that would probably violate a treaty.
- WJW 4y agoMilitary vessels are exempt from that particular treaty. That would not be a significant worry. But yes, when you go into serious operations, the ship typically enters "black hole" operations where all non-essential communications are blocked. In the ships we were at they just pulled the network cable for the non-operational comms, very effective at preventing anyone from emailing back home.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoMilitary ships routinely run with AIS off in peace time. This was the case in at least one of the recent US Navy collisions as I recall.
- FinnKuhn 4y agoI think you should be able to just turn off Star Link in those instances too
- mjlee 4y agoThese vessels still have people on board who want to watch YouTube. This will be amazing for retaining crew while sitting at anchor outside of Panama for day 27 of who knows how long. You can prepare for a 7 day cruise between ports when you're going to be pretty busy anyway. The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe.
- notahacker 4y ago> The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe. I sat through a Vodafone presentation at a maritime comms conference a couple of years ago and he quoted just how high a percentage of the world's commercial shipping traffic was within range of his LTE networks. The ability to provide high speed internet within sight of [most] land has been around for a while, at lower costs than Starlink. If providers haven't added it to their crew internet provision, it's not because they've been waiting for Elon.
- inasio 4y agoThe Starlink donations to Ukraine has probably been about showing Starlink capabilities to the military, now going after navy contracts?
- BurningFrog 4y agoThey're not going to all switch to Starlink overnight. But over a few years, if Starlink delivers on it's ambition, I'd expect a steady stream of converts.
- Dylan16807 4y ago> based on current coverage map Well that's the least important analysis compared to looking at what should be available in a year.
- yardie 4y agoYou can already get these speeds on Ku-band satellites, just higher latency, with real global coverage.
- xeromal 4y agoI feel like cruise ships will use this a lot. They're one of the last things on the planet that don't have cell service or internet that isn't 25$ a minute.
- Havoc 4y agoStill super cheap compared to what yachts are currently doing
- baybal2 4y agoIt's better than InMarSat, or any other regional fixed satellite communication system big time
- Someone1234 4y agoIridium Go is 2.4 Kbits/s compared with 350 Mbps here, and data is charged in minutes (i.e. the slower/worse the connection the more it costs). Apples and oranges. Iridium GO is cheap, but that's all you can really say positively about it. It is arguably not even offering "internet" in the normal sense, since loading a website would be incredibly expensive/bad and is therefore restricted to low data rate messaging and plain text weather updates. Is $5K/month a niche product? Undeniably yes, and I hope to see more flex offerings later, but this isn't a good comparison.
- 867-5309 4y agoI doubt there are many other options for internet in the ocean
- dweekly 4y agoDon't forget Inmarsat. https://www.inmarsat.com/en/solutions-services/maritime/services/fleetbroadband.html https://www.inmarsat.com/en/solutions-services/maritime/serv... Or Globalstar. https://www.globalstar.com/en-us/blog/articles/satellite-solutions-for-the-maritime-industry https://www.globalstar.com/en-us/blog/articles/satellite-sol...
- walrus01 4y agoglobalstar is a bad joke and not a viable option for maritime services (or over-ocean aviation services) because unlike iridium or inmarsat, its satellite terminal-to-earth-station architecture is a bent pipe. there is zero globalstar mid ocean coverage. there is a reason you will see lots of competing options for people integrating the iridium embedded modems into things designed to go on top of $40 million business jets and just about zero globalstar.
- jonah 4y agoAn Iridium embedded modem is one of the things we came across in the wreckage of a small plane we were recovering the pilot's remains from[0]. It was for his Spidertracks[1] flight tracking system. (Which, with the ADSB track, helped us hone in on the possible location. The wreck ended up being right in line with the last few pings. [0] https://lompocrecord.com/news/local/experienced-solvang-bush-pilot-dies-in-small-plane-crash-near-figueroa-mountain-on-wednesday/article_6c9e2567-6c86-5d0d-ba26-cda8bacac8f3.html https://lompocrecord.com/news/local/experienced-solvang-bush... [1] https://www.spidertracks.com/ https://www.spidertracks.com/
- sk8terboi 4y ago
- shmoe 4y agoThere's very little value with Iridium -- do you work for them or something?
- adrr 4y agoI thought they went bankrupt and had to deorbit all the satellites so I googled them. They have 1.7M subscribers. Seems they are doing something right.
- jhugo 4y agoWell, there hasn't been a lot of competition in their space traditionally. Many of those subscribers (I've been one) use it because they need it and there is no better option, but don't exactly enjoy it...
- Thrymr 4y agoThey did go bankrupt, and Motorola (their original main funder) lost billions on the initial investment [0]. But shed of debt and reborn with new investors, they are now profitable [1]. They have now deorbited the first generation satellites, but since 2017 they have launched the Iridium NEXT constellation and that is what is functioning now [2]. [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-5615034/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-rise-a... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-1464980784 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-14... [2] https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/iridium-next.htm https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/iridium-next.htm
- gehsty 4y agoOr vessels working offshore industry… having that kind of uplink speed could really change how the industries work. More ‘over the horizon’ control for equipment, immediate upload of huge point cloud files from as built surveys, constant video comunication with onshore engineers and project managers…
- silisili 4y agoI had the same first impression, but then realized there can't even be that many superyachts around to make the venture worth it. Probably targeted more are commercial shipping vessels, cruise ships, and even militaries. I imagine that number would make the venture worth it.
- steveoscaro 4y agoAnd oil rigs
- alkonaut 4y agoIs that price also for commercial? It seems like a decent deal for a cruise ship or monitoring offshore equipment worth millions of dollars. 350mbit can be sold ands split across 1000pax in on a cruise ship at $5/day so you’d have the fee covered on day 1.
- parentheses 4y agoThe first of most things are indeed expensive. I think it makes sense to pay $5000 for _reliable_ communications at sea. This is not that… yet.
- fastball 4y agoI think it is much more aimed at commercial vessels. Tankers, cruise ships, etc.
- yellow_lead 4y agoFor a cruise ship it seems like a bargain. I don't think you can expect to support thousands of passengers off $5000 / month
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]