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Starlink maritime coverage map [pdf]
- jaywalk 4y agoSo they're going to go from basically no maritime coverage to having the world's oceans fully covered within the next two quarters? That's pretty impressive, if they can actually pull it off.
- nathanyz 4y agoYeah, going from coastal waters only to full coverage seems like a herculean feat to pull off that quickly as I imagine the constraints keeping it to coastal waters at the moment would all need solved.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoIt’s seems as if current coverage is ground stations, next phase will be supported by constellation laser links, and final coverage stage is more satellites in the necessary latitudes/orbital planes (as they’re currently constrained by F9 payload capacity and desperately need Starship lift capacity to more rapidly deploy the constellation).
- rtkwe 4y agoDon't most of the satellites in the current constellation not have the laser links needed for intraconstellation communication? So they'd need to replace those too to keep consistent coverage.
- bdonlan 4y agoReplace, or simply augment with enough additional satellites to provide adequate bandwidth over the oceanic areas.
- bombcar 4y agoI can't believe the oceans would have anywhere near the usage you find in-land, so the links between satellites could be relatively small compared to the rest of the system.
- rtkwe 4y agoYou wind up with the same satellite average satellite density across the middle latitudes anyways because the orbits are very low for satellites. Any particular satellite will eventually service every cell (except for those above the inclination of the main constellation iirc those will eventually (tm) be covered by separate satellites in more polar orbits) between 53N and 53S, which is the orbital inclination of the majority of the constellation. Because of this you don't really have any distinction in function between land and sea servicing satellites because any given satellite will be both.
- gpm 4y agoI haven't double checked this, but I strongly suspect they're bandwidth limited by the total amount of uplink/downlink they have, not the inter-satellite bandwidth. Inter satellite links are basically fiber, just without the fiber (instead they just point the laser in the right direction and rely on the fact that space is empty). Up and down has to use valuable radio spectrum, handle interference and atmospheric effects, etc.
- Skunkleton 4y agoThose same satellites will cover land as well, right? I would guess that they are hugely over provisioned for their maritime usecases in support of their main mission.
- rtkwe 4y agoYeah to consistently cover land you'll have the same density over the ocean because they're LEO satellites so they're eventually covering the whole surface between the latitudes it flies over due to it's inclination.
- xoa 4y ago>Don't most of the satellites in the current constellation not have the laser links needed for intraconstellation communication? Nope, all v1.5 sats have them, so everything launched since January 2021. They experimented with them earlier for polar orbit sats. At this point that's by far the majority of the constellation and either approaching or at critical mass for the mesh. They're probably testing it globally now. To sibling: they definitely need Starship, but not so much for pure launch numbers as the ability to launch v2.0 at all. F9 fairing isn't big enough. 2.0 will let them shrink cell sizes and improve density and performance which they need too (obviously now more in light of yesterday's announcement). More 1.5 sats wouldn't help as much with that, though the mesh will help relieve ground station chokes as well as ilenabling beyond station service.
- rtkwe 4y agoLooks like June 2021 actually? [0] From the same page it looks like a bit under half at 44% are v1.5 birds. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_launches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_launches
- ortusdux 4y agoFrom what I can glean, it looks like about half of the units in orbit are V1.5 with laser links. I know that they had issues getting the links working, but it seems that they have worked the bugs out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_launches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_launches
- bergenty 4y agoMaybe the constraints are artificial. From a layman’s perspective it doesn’t seem all that hard. The satellites are already up there, so why would it be any different from providing coverage on land.
- bri3d 4y agoIt's entirely different. Right now Starlink is a bent pipe model. The customer's station connects to a satellite which relays data to the closest ground station. Therefore, the satellite must be in contact with both the customer station and a ground station at the same time. This is not possible over oceans. Newer Starlink satellites also have a satellite to satellite laser link which is intended to allow relay from consumer station -> satellite -> other satellite -> ground station to provide coverage over oceans, but this functionality has not yet been enabled and relies on enough satellite density that each satellite can see a neighbor.
- hef19898 4y agoSo we get Starlink on our yachts at the same time our Teslas can drive use autonomously to the harbour? Great!
- ncmncm 4y agoNot so impressive. All they have to do is ping-pong packets from the first satellite, via other marine subscribers' terminals, to other satellites in range of those, until they get to a satellite in range of a shore hub. I.e., "it's only software." It will mainly depend on having enough marine subscriber terminals in place, scattered around the world on shipping routes, to ping-pong the packets through. Presumably they already have authority to route other subscribers' traffic through "your" terminal.
- moolcool 4y agoHow is what you just described "not so impressive"? That sounds remarkably impressive.
- ncmncm 4y agoRouting is impressive. But we do routing already.
- Tuna-Fish 4y agoWon't work, there are way too many areas where there aren't enough ships for that.
- ncmncm 4y agoYet. There are a hell of a lot of ships. They just need for them to be subscribers.
- Tuna-Fish 4y agoThere are a lot of ships, but there are also a lot of places on the ocean where there will never be a second ship close enough to forward your packets (areas of south pacific for instance), and they are still painting those areas as having coverage. I understand you are enamored with the idea of using ground repeaters. It is, however, not what SpaceX is doing. They have been very open from the start that they intend to move the entire transport layer to orbit, and they have launched more than a thousand satellites capable of doing that with laser links. That's what they are using.
- HWR_14 4y agoIt's the difference between a satellite able to relay between two ground locations (e.g. ship and uplink) and series of satellites able to relay directly to each other. In the first case, you need both endpoints to be in same satellite's footprint. In the second, you need to just have any satellite overhead and any satellite in range of an uplink with a few intervening satellites. That is, that reflects a leap in technology, not an incremental growth from putting more satellites in orbit.
- Linkd 4y agoNow getting a 404 from the link.
- dylan604 4y agoI can imagine someone is kicking themselves for accidentally including that PDF in the repo, and removed it when recoginized. they're now sweating bullets hoping that it wasn't pulled before it was removed. oops! i like to make up stories to pass the time.
- notpushkin 4y agoWeird, it does work for me. Here's an archive copy just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20220711142141/https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20220711142141/https://api.starl...
- tpmx 4y agoI got the same. Three minutes later it suddenly worked. The content was then served by Fastly, so I guess it was their f-up.
- Mo3 4y agoThey're going to piss off so many other excruciatingly overpriced and slow providers. I love it
- atourgates 4y agoNot like Starlink's Maritime option is particularly cheap at $5K/mo. Probably paltry for cruise ships and megayachts, but sadly out of reach for the average private individual with a boat.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoyeah. the big difference is it actually provides useable Internet which makes it not really comparable to anything else satellite based.
- p_j_w 4y agoYeah, people acting like this is a market disruptor that's going to kill Garmin or Iridium simply don't know what they're talking about.
- jmole 4y agoWould be interested to see this map overlayed with the orbits of their satellites.
- tiahura 4y agoDoes anyone know what the situation will be for non-commercial use, i.e. sailboats circumnavigating? Will they be able to use the RV dish and pay $150/month, or will they have to go with the $5000/month maritime option?
- _joel 4y agoI think they'll have a more premium product for vessels that want to redistribute connectivity (i.e. cruise ships) and that probably need larger capacity. Or just a bunch of them :)
- LimaBearz 4y agoI'm in that same boat, no pun intended. I've been waiting for the maritime announcement for awhile for my SV. I was very disappointed that they only announced commercial service. I'd happily pay a huge premium for a gyroscoped dish, that monthly cost tho....
- sammyo 4y agoCheck out the "starlink on boats" forum on fb. Working now for folks.
- rtkwe 4y agoProbably the more expensive option because the mid ocean service is going to require using the intra-constellation laser links where the RV is just a roaming dish that can use the normal one hop to ground station method used in the rest of the network. /Maybe/ they'll come out with a cheaper consumer option but who knows, at any rate it will probably be more expensive than the RV version.
- toast0 4y agoOn the one hand, you need to use the laser links for this, on the other hand, the satellites over the water aren't going to be busy, so there's not a lot of congestion to want to use pricing to discourage; certainly, there's some congestion near the shore, but there's a lot of shore.
- supernova87a 4y agoThis is a nitpick, but the color tones chosen in the map can be very difficult to differentiate. (recall the visual puzzles when two tones separated by a 3rd tone are shown to be actually identical) I read the map as: -- There is full coverage around the coasts of N. America, Europe, Australia/NZ, Southern Brazil, Chile right now -- Q4 2022 will see the whole band of 20 to 60 deg North covered, as well as 33 deg South and below -- Q1 2023 will see the rest of the entire Earth covered Do I have that right? I'm also curious what physical or ground station-related developments happen to enable this? Is it related to enough satellite density to allow transmission satellite-to-satellite to land anywhere, without needing a nearby ground station any more?
- brandon272 4y agoYes, you have it right.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoActually the map stops at about 60 deg S; it's not clear why it's truncated there; it certainly extends much further north of the equator.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Tuna-Fish 4y ago> I'm also curious what physical or ground station-related developments happen to enable this? The v1.0 satellites have no intersat links, so the only way to get coverage with them is to connect to a satellite that is close enough to a functioning ground station. This is the coastal coverage shown. The v1.5 satellites they are launching right now contain laser links that let them forward incoming packets to other satellites until they reach one that can contact a ground station, but there are not enough of them up there to provide constant coverage anywhere yet. According to this map, by some time in Q4 there will be enough v1.5 sats up to cover the entire mid-latitudes. They get coverage first because the orbits SpaceX are using cause satellites to spend most of their time near these areas. Eventually SpaceX will launch polar sats and just have enough sats up total that they can cover both the poles and the equator. (The bands of coverage should be symmetric around the equator, so either the map is drawn imprecisely or you got your latitudes wrong.)
- _Microft 4y agoWe had some discussions regarding the Starlink maritime coverage map a few weeks ago already, you can find it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32018510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32018510
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- samstave 4y agoSo this is the reason for the Australian BIG ASS BATTERY. Only to power starlink-down-links. How much BORING company efforts are going on?