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Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
- bhaney 4y agoIt never stops surprising me how quickly satellites in LEO move
- ineedasername 4y agoIf they didn't move so fast then the Great Filter would catch them. #downvoteswelcomethestupidjokeisworthit
- itsyaboi 4y agoAsking a redditor to abstain from shitty jokes is like expecting Pavlov's dog to not drool at the sound of a bell.
- mikekij 4y agoAs impressive as the number of Starlink satellites is, the service has become unusable for me in Southern California, particularly for video calls. I’ve been told that the bottleneck is land stations, not satellites. Either way, I’ve had to cancel my Starlink service both at home and work.
- George83728 4y agoSpaceX have sought approval for 12,000 satellites, with a possible extension to 42,000. Right now they have less than 4,000. I think they have substantially fewer satellites than they believe they require, and the service is probably doomed in the long run if they can't get Starship flying.
- fooker 4y agoIt's not really a service meant for SoCal, but I'm sure they see it as a valuable stress test.
- noncoml 4y agoEvery time Starlink comes up it’s the same argument. “It’s not meant for high population density areas” Without the “high population density areas” it is simply not economically viable
- kortilla 4y agoBased on what? What user count do you think Starlink needs to be economically viable? Napkin math time because the economics for satellites are not intuitive compared to stuff where density is better. 10% of the surface of the earth is inhabited by people. 510 million square kilometers * .1 is 51 million square kilometers. At a service density of only one user per square kilometer, that’s 51 million users for regular service. Setting that aside, do you care to guess how much an oil rig in the North Sea will pay for Internet? And that user will put roughly the same load as Ted in SoCal will on the network. Satellite Internet is not for people in cities, period. Starlink, viasat, whatever.
- Symbiote 4y agoI have no idea, but this company has subsea cables across many North Sea oil rigs. Maybe they are laid as part of the pipelines. https://www.tampnet.com/oil-gas https://www.tampnet.com/oil-gas
- twosdai 4y agoI agree with you, and your 2nd point about the b2b areas being important. However I think the general math you do needs a bit more nuance. You'd want to exclude all people living in cities so you'd need to exclude the land mass taken up by cities to get a more accurate estimate. Also I'm not sure where you get the 10% number from for people inhabiting the world. From this report they talk about humans impacting 15% of the landmass https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-human-impact-on-the-earths-surface/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-human-impact-on-the-... Again, I agree with your point but I'm skeptical about your back of the napkin math.
- 4y ago
- newZWhoDis 4y agoThe future is now!
- NelsonMinar 4y agoThere's a bunch of Starlink coverage maps like this; the most useful one (IMHO) is Mike Puchol's at https://starlink.sx/ https://starlink.sx/ The nice thing about that Mike's is you can see exactly where you are in relation to nearby satellites and base stations. And get a pretty good guess as to where your packets are going to go. It is all guesswork - SpaceX only shares what they are required to by the FCC. But it's been pretty accurate in the way I can test it. (Also try clicking the little ringed planet icon in upper right to get an orbital chart.) In the early days there would only be 1 or 2 satellites in range of my house sometimes and I could feel the lag as the dish switched. Back then it only switched every 15 seconds whether a tree was about to block the view or not. Now there's regularly 10+ satellites to choose from and a smarter algorithm for switching to maintain signal. There's still significant problems compared to a wired connection or even fixed wireless but Starlink has definitely been a big improvement for my life.
- Aeolun 4y agoThe big problem with this one appears to be that it doesn’t load.
- lm28469 4y ago> Mike Puchol's at https://starlink.sx/ https://starlink.sx/ With an 8 core cpu, 2060rtx graphic card, 32gb of ram, this thing runs at like 2.5 fps (if even) on chrome and firefox What we did with web tech is truly amazing
- gondaloof 4y agoCan someone explain what is the point of having long lines of satellites traveling on the same path?
- NelsonMinar 4y agoThe closely packed dots you see are a train of satellites just after launch. They'll spread out over a couple of weeks.
- crote 4y agoThe ones really close together are freshly launched and still being moved into their final position. However, all satellites are by design placed into a small number of orbits, see [0]. For example, phase 1 consisted of 72 different orbits with 22 sats each, so each sat would be 1/22th of an orbit behind the previous one - and the orbits are shifted in a similar fashion around the earth. This ensures that there is a uniform global coverage, as a new sat will move over an area right when another one moves out. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#/media/File:Starlink_SpaceX_1584_satellites_72_Planes_22each.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#/media/File:Starlink_...
- teleforce 4y agoCan someone tell how to interpret this global coverage map? The legend and the help sections are not very helpful.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y agothe one thing i think I figure out, is that you right click and set a home, and that will give you real time triangulation as to how many satellites your signal is bouncing off as they move in orbit at any given time. The more satellites linked to your home base, the better your latency and/or bandwidth. So with this you can see your location's service quality ahead of time.
- 101008 4y agoWow, this is incredible. Why the GPS satellites are far away from the planet, compared to the other ones?
- numbol 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
- renjimen 4y agoI thought the same, but they're actually below geostationary orbit. They have 12 hour orbits. Also, they don't orbit the equator, which is required for a geostationary orbit. See my comment above with more details.
- numbol 4y agowow that is cool! Thank you for that clarification looks like geostationary used for stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_System
- mardifoufs 4y agoI think this article, that most here have probably read or heard about considering how popular it was on HN, explains why quite well! It is a very long article though (which is awesome, imo!). The whole thing is an incredible primer on GPS .
- crote 4y agoGeostationary orbit wouldn't work for a GNSS: all satellites would be in the same plane, so it would be impossible to distinguish between the northern and southern hemisphere. This would render it inconvenient in most countries and unusable anywhere near the equator.
- danw1979 4y ago
- modeless 4y agoFrequently Commented Questions: Yes, space looks crowded in these visualizations. But the size of the satellites is exaggerated here by thousands of times. Space is huge and the collision risk is extremely low. If displayed at their true size the satellites would not be visible, and indeed the vast majority are not visible in the real life night sky. The exception is recently launched satellites that are still in transit to their final orbits, but even those are only visible sometimes and generally only within an hour or two after sunset or before sunrise. No, Kessler Syndrome is not a realistic concern for satellites in these orbits. Satellites here experience atmospheric drag and fall out of orbit in five years or so. Collision debris has a higher surface area to mass ratio due to the square-cube law and deorbits faster than that. And it takes a lot less than five years for debris to fall below the orbits of other satellites where it no longer poses any threat of a chain reaction. And no, a collision between two satellites in circular orbits cannot throw debris into much longer-lasting orbits, due to how orbital mechanics works. And even if Kessler Syndrome did somehow happen despite all that, it wouldn't trap us on Earth even for the five year period; a debris cloud would still be quite sparse and launching rockets through it would be no problem since the time spent in the cloud and thus probability of collision would be negligible.
- teruakohatu 4y agoI took a screenshot of the default view on my web browser. The satellites appear to be around 100km in diameter, but they are in reality 7m wide, so they are 14,000x larger on the map than in reality. The entire constellation would fit within 0.2% of one of the white dots as they appear in the map. Then you need to remember that the space is 3D, unlike road surfaces (ignoring bridges etc.)
- kylecazar 4y agoSeeing this visualized makes it more impressive... I'm not a user though, so I can't testify to the problems people have been having.
- praveen9920 4y agoI’m curious about how can they ensure connectivity for a particular area. Is it just that they place a bunch of satellites in orbits and hope that they have enough density? Or is there a method to the madness? I am assuming a single satellite covers very small area, in this case a single hexagonal area
- wmf 4y agoThe orbits are designed to maximize coverage; it's clearer if you look at the orbital parameters instead of a globe, where you can see that satellites are evenly spaced: https://imgur.com/a/aReh0EQ https://imgur.com/a/aReh0EQ The details are complicated, but each satellite can see quite a large area and any given spot on the ground is within range of 3-4 satellites.
- praveen9920 4y agoThis makes sense. Thank you for the image
- jessriedel 4y agoThat's not what that chart shows. The satellites are not evenly spaced over the globe. Most of the satellites are in 53 degree inclination orbits: those orbits have zero coverage at greater than 53 degrees latitude, and they have non-uniform coverage of smaller latitudes. (To see this, consider a constellation of 90 degree inclination polar orbits: the poles clearly have a higher density of satellites than the equator. Similar is true for lower-inclination orbits, albeit to a less extreme degree.)
- lutorm 4y agothose orbits have zero coverage at greater than 53 degrees latitude That's not actually true -- the horizon distance at those altitudes is several thousand km, and one degree of latitude is about 100km, so the satellites are actually visible quite far to the north of there. Of course, they'll be increasingly far away and close to the horizon, so not optimal for reception.
- charles_f 4y agoI never realized how many of these buggers there are. It's just impressive of how much a quasi-disposable-commodity small satellites these are. What is the data source?
- walrus01 4y agoNORAD publishes orbit element data for everything launched. https://www.google.com/search?q=norad%20tle&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-m https://www.google.com/search?q=norad%20tle&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-...
- stainablesteel 4y agoidk any sources but i've always seen it as a weapon enemies of the us will not be able to turn off the internet in their own countries if the us wants it, giving power to rebels to coordinate outside of government-controlled connections
- 2h 4y ago> $120/mo for service and $599 for hardware Noope. no thank you. https://www.starlink.com/ https://www.starlink.com/
- 0xffff2 4y agoThis service is not for you if that is your reaction. Until recently I lived in a location where there is literally no other option capable of supporting Teams calls. Before Starlink I rented a second house in a "nearby" (49 minutes each way) town to use as an office. Comparatively, Starlink is a phenomenal deal.
- charcircuit 4y agoWhat does competition look like for Starlink? Will competitors have to launch their own mesh of satellites? If you want to actually have your own IPv4 address you will have to pay $250 per month + $2500 for the terminal. This is despite the fact an IPv4 address only costs them a one time cost of about $40.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mardifoufs 4y agoI think the closest they have to a competitor is oneweb, which hasn't completed the roll out for their first constellation yet. They are surprisingly close though, and could've been able to actually have an operational internet service if it wasn't for a scrapped launch related to the Russian invasion. I remember thinking they were basically dead, but they have recovered surprisingly well. Though their satellites are more likely to remain in space since they don't deorbit as easily as starlink. Otherwise the "traditional" satellite internet providers don't really even count as actual competitors. Also, I thought starlink didn't provide customers with IP addresses and that the whole thing was going through a CGNAT and the sats themselves used private internal addresses. Even starlink business users don't get a static IP, just a publically addressable one through DHCP that could in theory change at any time more or less. That means that the premium is most probably due to the added complexity that comes with making some of their network publically addressable rather than having anything to do with IPv4 costs. From what I'm reading they also seem to be working on ipv6 support (soon™), which is hopefully going to make IPv4 pricing matter a lot less for users. Until then they are probably limited by their CGNAT architecture. I'll look it up since it could've been just some launch date speculation.
- lll-o-lll 4y agoVery cool visualisation, but my phone is getting very hot!
- herpderperator 4y agoHow long does Dishy communicate with one satellite before switching to another one? It looks like they move across quite fast.
- flangola7 4y agoThey move across the sky faster than an airliner, so not long.
- irrelative 4y agoRoughly 30 times faster than an airliner.
- genewitch 4y agoIn central Louisiana, between 15 and 60 seconds. It might be slightly longer but I have a tree in the FOV to the east, so I get drops on that timescale.
- hammock 4y agoAlaska isn’t in the mesh, how is it in the coverage zone?
- kieroda 4y agoThe connectivity was pretty terrible in Alaska, at least as of November of last year when I cancelled and returned Starlink.
- JerryB77 4y agoSeems available: https://www.starlink.com/map https://www.starlink.com/map
- jccooper 4y agoThey have a certain number of near-polar orbit satellites. There's not yet the same level of coverage as inside 57 degrees, but they do have ground stations and offer coverage, though it seems to be of the "just barely" sort. The polar orbits are rapidly filling in, however, so it should get better before too long.
- botanical 4y agoIn South Africa we have the Square Kilometre Array in the Meerkat National Park; I sincerely hope it doesn't come here. We don't need it polluting our skies. Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream
- SECProto 4y agoThat really isn't how orbits work... At any given time, there are as many starlink satellites overhead at Meerkat National Park as there are at any other point in the world around 30* north or south.
- botanical 4y agoThere's currently one in the vicinity. It would get worse as demand rises
- mardifoufs 4y agoYet starlink is available where broadband sometimes isn't, so the insensible dreams seem to be coming from those who expect broadband to be deployed even in the most remote parts of the world (not necessarily talking about the place you mentioned, but I certainly wouldn't expect broadband in places like a remote cabin in the woods here in Quebec, or in a lake hunting station). Who cares if Elon is beyond this? I remember thinking how ridiculous it was that everything he did was overhyped and treated as the next revolution. But in a lot of ways discarding an amazing technology like starlink and being against it to own the musk is somehow even weirder to me. It's such a profoundly... online (terminally online perhaps?) outlook at things. Like some people are unironically not buying Tesla's and openly saying that they went for a car they liked less just because the guy is a clown on twitter. Reminds me of conservatives who spite themselves just to own the libs in a weirdly self defeating way
- botanical 4y agoWhy are you framing it as a hate Musk endeavour? So weird. It's pollute the sky because some people are on the hype train. The answer is already radio towers, they can be installed anywhere. We have cheap fibre rolled out throughout South Africa, but now the Square Kilometre Array (which previously had complete radio silence) must deal with this nonsense flying overhead.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- amir734jj 4y agoI did something similar for my SpaceX interview: Website: https://threejs-earth-satellites.vercel.app/05_equatorial_plane https://threejs-earth-satellites.vercel.app/05_equatorial_pl... Github: https://github.com/amir734jj/threejs-earth-satellites https://github.com/amir734jj/threejs-earth-satellites Beam Planner: https://github.com/amir734jj/beam-planner https://github.com/amir734jj/beam-planner
- diebeforei485 4y agoWould polar coverage require satellites that move north to south from pole to pole?
- jessriedel 4y agoYes it does. Most of the Starlink satellites are in 53-degree inclination orbits, but there is a shell of satellites in polar orbits to ensure polar coverage. (The commercial market for polar internet access is minimal, but the military is willing to pay a lot for it.)
- wkat4242 4y agoIridium uses that kind of orbit so they have excellent coverage over the polar areas. With the few customers in that area (all commercialor institutional so they can afford it) they pretty much have that market covered. Ps talking about the real polar areas here, not Alaska, Nordics etc.
- vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago[dead]
- pier25 4y agoHow come there are so many satellites all over the world but so little coverage? (I'm assuming the green hexagons it's the service coverage)
- jrockway 4y agoI believe the current implementation of the network requires the satellite to see both you and a ground station at the same time. So ground stations are the limiting factor.
- walrus01 4y agoIt was this way until very recently, google "starlink lasers". The newer satellites have satellite-to-satellite laser links which can form a chain until they reach a satellite that is presently overhead of an earth station. SpaceX has now started selling the global ocean maritime product version of starlink which specifically advertises full ocean coverage worldwide. I recently saw a person's first hand experience of successfully using Starlink on a cross ocean voyage from Polynesia to Ecuador. Most starlink traffic still is "up and back down again" to a satellite that's moving while simultaneously in view of the CPE and a starlink-run earth station.
- ricksunny 4y agoIs the Starlink service geofenced to cutoff where Starlink doesn't have a telco license? Like if the maritime product finds itself sailing within the EEZ of a country that hasn't issued a telco operator license, will the service shut off?
- walrus01 4y agoStarlink is live in all of terrestrial Iran right now if you can smuggle a terminal in, and have an accepted foreign method of billing. Whether they choose to geofence certain areas seems arbitrary right now.
- ianburrell 4y ago
- VadimPR 4y agoNot much coverage for the Nordics which is interesting.
- ezconnect 4y agoThat's a lot of junk orbiting earth.
- pjscott 4y agoThose are functioning communication satellites, not yet junk. At the end of their (fairly short) planned lifetimes, they will use their maneuvering thrusters to de-orbit. And even if that fails, they're in a low enough orbit that they'll naturally fall out of the sky and burn up in the atmosphere about a decade after launch. Do you have any further objections?
- ezconnect 4y agoThey are still junk, their only purpose is military.
- K5EiS 4y agoI think you would be surprised if you saw how much debris there is up there. These satelites are at least providing value to people.
- hungryforcodes 4y agoNo one in Asia or Africa or India seem to be using it. Are we just polluting LEO for the sake of a handful of Americans? I feel like in the US it's not even widely used...
- lionkor 4y agoI believe so - its a very small niche. If I understand correctly, the target audience is: - remote places, with - people who need internet but dont have a wire or fiber running to them, and - who can afford a super expensive starlink (have disposable income), and - for who 3G/4G isnt good enough Thats not a lot of people outside the US
- 7952 4y agoThere is no reason why they would necessarily need to charge such high monthly prices in poorer countries. If the marginal costs can be kept low enough then it would be stupid to miss out on the revenue. A key to that is probably the inter satellite links to avoid needing so many base stations. Also, parts of Africa have pretty good cell coverage. So it may not be needed in a lot of areas.
- jen729w 4y agoIt’s a lot of geographical Australia. Which isn’t a lot of people. A million, perhaps. Two at most.
- wkat4242 4y agoThat's pretty ideal for satellite services. It doesn't cope well with large clusters of customers, having them spread out is pretty ideal.
- ghaff 4y agoYou don't need to be in "remote" places for Starlink to be a big benefit. My brother lives about a 10 minute drive from about a 10K person city in coastal Maine and he could not get wired Internet at all and the other wireless options are poor and data limited. There are a ton of places like that. You could argue that there should be a program at the national level to get wired Internet to anywhere that gets electricity but, given the existence of Starlink, I'm not sure a many many billions of dollars program to do that makes a lot of sense and would have at least some people here throwing a fit about subsidizing rural residents.
- sagarpatil 4y agoThis looks beautiful.
- doubler 4y agocheck more stuff here: https://github.com/thedoubler/awesome-maps-data https://github.com/thedoubler/awesome-maps-data
- zolosa 4y agoOnce China launches it's own 13000 satellite in the coming year then we will start hearing about Kessler syndrome. Till then it's a beautiful sight to behold.
- oittaa 4y agoWhy? Are they going to use higher orbits?
- throwaway2037 4y agoFirst, I assume SpaceX Falcon 9 is the only large resuable rocket in the world. Without reusable rockets, how could any massive array of satellites be economical? (If for military, ignore this post.) Look at all the other big satellite arrays owned by private industry. The return on investment is awful.
- diimdeep 4y agoNow do live map with latency measurement through Starlink New York City - New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NASDAQ Stock Market Tokyo - Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) Shanghai - Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) Hong Kong - Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) London - London Stock Exchange (LSE) Toronto - Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) Mumbai - Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) Frankfurt - Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FWB) Paris - Euronext Paris Sydney - Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)
- LightBug1 4y agoLike a planetary rash ... over the long term, the fever will get rid of this.
- daneel_w 4y agoIs this accurate? Starlink has since a while back offered service in most of Sweden, but that doesn't align with this map.
- kalefranz 4y agoStarlink’s own map of world coverage availability is at https://www.starlink.com/map https://www.starlink.com/map
- hypertexthero 4y agoDoes anyone have experience streaming with Twitch using Starlink? I have a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) that works fairly well with occasional issues. I’m consisdering Starlink but heard there may be issues with latency and dropped frames, and it is around 60% more expensive.
- ghaff 4y agoNot Twitch, but it seems to work pretty well with video in general. Not as reliable as my wired connection at home but pretty good. Can't really speak to latency (though looked OK on a connection test) but I don't really do anything that's especially latency sensitive.
- hypertexthero 4y agoThank you! Note to self and others considering this: The dynamic bitrate setting in Open Broadcaster Studio could help smooth things out: https://obsproject.com/wiki/Dropped-Frames-and-General-Connection-Issues#dynamic-bitrate https://obsproject.com/wiki/Dropped-Frames-and-General-Conne...
- oittaa 4y agoThe bitrate won't be a problem with Twitch since their maximum bitrate is super low. Just depending on where you live there might be outages every now and then if all the satellites are behind trees or buildings.
- itsthecourier 4y agoDominican Republic has coverage, but doesn't appear in the visualization
- ldng 4y agoBefore the Dyson sphere, the Musk sphere ?
- reustle 4y agoIt's incredible to see how many fresh groups of satellites there are around the world (the solid lines), apparently all less than a day or two old?
- seekingthelight 4y ago[dead]
- litlikeamatch 4y ago[dead]
- lavenderwitch 4y ago[dead]
- myinstaspace 4y ago[dead]
- autorun 4y agohttps://orbita.terrestre.ar https://orbita.terrestre.ar That's a site I've made to track satellites. Yet another one! It's a 2D map, where you choose / fast-forward time, see the ground track prediction, and horizon radius.