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SpaceX no longer taking losses to produce Starlink satellite antennas

• wongarsu 3y ago
  Good for them. Bringing production costs from $3000 per terminal in 2020(?) to $1300 in early 2021 to less than $600 now is quite the achievement, and not subsidizing terminals will make rapid expansion a lot cheaper.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • bklyn11201 3y ago
    Honest question: rapid expansion to where exactly? Are you thinking poorer, rural countries? E.g., with cheaper terminals Starlink will more aggressively sell to rural Brazil, Mexico, India, etc? If they can sell the terminal at cost, how low can they price the monthly service for these poorer countries to fill up unused capacity?
    • Robotbeat 3y ago
      They’re rapidly launching more and more capacity. The new v2 mini satellites are more than twice as big as the v1.5 satellites, which themselves are not yet totally in service. And as they improve the cost of terminals, there’s no fundamental limit in the amount of capacity for a given frequency allocation. Geometric multiplexing is only limited by the number and cost of the phased array elements. So rapid expansion everywhere. And then launching the full sized v2 Starlink satellites on Starship will account for another ~2-2.5x increase in size compared to the v2 minis. Then comes FCC approval for the full sized constellation which is about 5 times as numerous as their current constellation, which itself only is about half filled. So they have about a factor of 100 capacity expansion in the pipeline, and they can increase the satellite size even further due to Starship’s low costs. They can expand a lot, even in existing countries. Lots of people are on waiting lists due to capacity being filled up in many regions.
      • SEJeff 3y ago
        > Then comes FCC approval for the full sized constellation which is about 5 times as numerous as their current constellation, which itself only is about half filled. SpaceX has launched just under 5,100 Starlink satellites to orbit, of which a single digit percentage have either been deorbited for testing, failure, solar storm knocking them out, etc. Their current constellation total size is approved to be around 12,000 satellites. They've been working to get additional approvals up to 42,000 satellites.
      • wbl 3y ago
        Phased arrays aren't magic. The sharpness of the aperture depends on the physical extent of the antenna and very sharp mainlobes come with additional sidelobes.
        • Robotbeat 3y ago
          Of course.
    • xeromal 3y ago
      Large swaths of the US have bunk internet like Earthlink. My rural family in Appalachia already like Musk. I think they'd love to have Starlink if it was a little more affordable.
      • qup 3y ago
        Earthlink still exists? Wow. When I was a kid, we would steal "ELN" accounts for dial-up and then hop on to AOL via TCP/IP. Edit: we did that so when we got punted we didn't have to go throigh the whole dial-up sequence. Which happened a lot in those days if you were twelve years old.
        • xeromal 3y ago
          I miss the early days of the internet.
        • bookofjoe 3y ago
          My psychiatrist still has an Earthlink email address. I started seeing him in 1991 and we still talk 30 minutes every 4 months just for lulz.
      • Loughla 3y ago
        We live in a very rural area. The one time the federal government really came through for me was fiber development grants a few years ago. We went from Wild Blue internet, which was garbage all around, for $120/mo to a full gig fiber connection locked in at $80/mo for life. It cost us $200 to hook it up. More and more rural isp's are getting into fiber with grants.
        • HWR_14 3y ago
          And SpaceX was going to get some of that grant money as well. But they messed it up somehow.
          • inemesitaffia 3y ago
            They very well may still get it
    • politician 3y ago
      I'd buy service to put it on my rooftop to both put economic pressure on the local ISP duopoly in the form of an unambiguous publicly visible third alternative and, also, as a backup.
      • jtriangle 3y ago
        I know of a couple places that are using starlink as failover because they're only serviced by a single ISP. Makes sense really, and cheaper than 4/5g failover.
      • SEJeff 3y ago
        This is part of why I bought a Starlink dish and put it on the roof of the house I'm doing a full rehab on before the siding was installed. It will give me dual homed internet for when the crap local ISP has issues and a hedge against a single ISP with spotty service. Ironically, in doing this, I have managed to meet and convince a project manager of a new ISP to add our neighborhood to the list to places to pull fiber to, but it will likely be about a year out.
    • Out_of_Characte 3y ago
      Sattelite communication is generally more expensive than cable or cell towers. Though about 70% of the earth is unsuitable for these solutions. Alot of commercial boats are still on very low bandwith connections but could potentially benefit from higher bandwidth if only to make video calls or netflix more available for a similar or higher price. Then there are alot of smaller, private, boats that would benefit from sattelite communication if costs werent prohibitive.
      • panick21_ 3y ago
        If think the competitiveness of sats changes quite a bit once you have really mass produced sats and the Starship. It will like not beat earth bound stuff in many scenarios, but it will be closer then it was in the past.
    • MangoCoffee 3y ago
      Apple is offering satellite phone service. Starlink shown it's important in the Ukraine-Russia war. There is Starshield for the government uses. Whatever shortcoming of current telecommunication, Starlink can supplement it.
      • sp332 3y ago
        Apple is offering emergency satellite text service.
        • rightbyte 3y ago
          In only one direction too right? I e. you don't know if the message has been received?
          • V99 3y ago
            You do, you can try it with updating your find my location without an actual emergency. It tells you where to point/hold and when it's done. The emergency texting is also 2-way.
          • jaywalk 3y ago
            No, it's bidirectional.
          • gregsadetsky 3y ago
            It's two-way: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213426 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213426 "Once you’re connected, your iPhone starts a text conversation with emergency responders by sharing critical information [...] You might be asked to respond to additional messages. Only Latin characters (such as English or French) are supported in these messages. [...]"
            • rightbyte 3y ago
              Ok, nice, then my colleague got it wrong.
      • 3y ago
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • fallingknife 3y ago
      If they get 10 million subscribers at $120 per month, that's $14.4 billion per year which is way more than the cost of the network. And they can easily get 10 million in just the US and Canada. So they can price new subscribers in poorer countries at whatever price they need because the marginal cost to add to the network is near zero.
      • soperj 3y ago
        That math doesn't check out. 10,000,000 * $120 = $1.2 billion per year.
        • enigmurl 3y ago
          $1.2 billion per month would be $14.4 billion per year
          • soperj 3y ago
            Thank you!
    • nico 3y ago
      I live in the LA-metro area, 15min away from downtown LA This is a pretty dense urban area, and we can only get Spectrum, which goes down at least once a month for hours at a time, in the middle of the day The only other alternative is getting a microwave antenna for $300/mo with a 4 year contract from a company called Geolinks Had a similar issue when living in SF Some buildings, and sometimes entire neighborhoods or small cities, only have one (crappy) vendor I’m no fan of Starlink or Musk, but there’s definitely a market for them in well established, densely populated areas in rich countries
      • dotnet00 3y ago
        The reason they specified sparsely populated areas is that Starlink is designed for sparsely populated areas. In a denser area the performance would drop drastically because you'd need far higher satellite density to sufficiently distribute the load.
        • labcomputer 3y ago
          That may be true with current space vehicles, but there’s no fundamental reason that two or more SVs can’t form a distributed phased array (for MIMO a la WiFi). At least from a physics / spectrum perspective. The engineering might be tricky. With SVs separated by hundreds of km, the beam width would be absolutely tiny, and channel reuse would be effectively infinite.
          • dotnet00 3y ago
            Hadn't heard of that concept before, sounds pretty interesting! Will have to read up on it more.
          • rini17 3y ago
            The distributed array will however share one link and satellites don't have unlimited capacity either. Wonder why you'd rather fill LEO to the brim, emitting vast amounts of CO2 in the process and filling stratosphere with metal oxides, than figure out how to improve infrastructure in your neighborhood.
    • panick21_ 3y ago
      I'm always kind of puzzled by this question. There are like 7-8 billion humans. Millions of ships, planes, farm machines and other equipment. Expansion will happen in all direction at the same time, in all market. In very poor country a single village might share one antenna. All the way to very expensive antennas for military aircraft.
    • dotnet00 3y ago
      There's an additional consideration regarding the price, that poor places can probably share one terminal among one or more villages, thus distributing the cost. Another possibility is distributing costs by using Starlink as backhaul. India for example already has very cheap high speed mobile data, so a telecom company could spread out the costs of terminals and service (maybe even get a better deal for bulk usage) while simplifying and strengthening their own infrastructure for remote or disaster-prone areas. Plus, for SpaceX, any point where a satellite is inactive is money left on the table, so they should have significant price flexibility for places which can't afford the current service fees but can afford something that is more than the cost of bandwidth at the downlink station.
    • starbase 3y ago
      Friend in a developing country has Starlink, he says the dish is about $100 cheaper there and service is just under $50 per month.
    • lkbm 3y ago
      Poorer, rural countries like 20% of the US. In rural NC, my brother was paying over $100/mo for 2mbps down cable Internet as 2021. Starlink's customer acquisition cost has dropped $600 (or whatever they were losing on each antenna), so they can afford to advertise way more than before. If they can pick up a decent portion of the 60,000,000 rural Americans, that's a huge revenue stream (and huge market power, for whatever that's worth).
      • ghaff 3y ago
        My dad's (now brother's) house a few minutes outside a decently-sized town by Downeast Maine standards had a barely 1Mbps down "broadband" link and it was the last house on the road that could even get that. With Starlink, it's actually viable to work from there in addition to streaming video etc. Of course, he wouldn't pay literally any amount but he'd probably pay a lot; I would.
        • lkbm 3y ago
          Yeah, I suspect they could have gotten my brother to pay the old full cost plus extra. Still, many people in rural areas aren't willing/able to drop $1k on Internet setup, so keeping costs down is worth more than gouging a few remote software engineers.
          • ghaff 3y ago
            Certainly. I'm sure there's a correlation between poor wired broadband and lower income even if it's not perfect. But Starlink is a game changer for a lot of people who otherwise can't get decent wired Internet--and, especially if you can't get wired broadband, the options are mostly pretty bad. Probably changing some with 5G but still not ideal for many people.
      • jhallenworld 3y ago
        This is an idiotic USA problem. For example, China claims: http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0106/c90000-9941481.html http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0106/c90000-9941481.html
    • realusername 3y ago
      I'm also not sure the financial aspect is going to work. There's not many developed countries without proper fiber rollout and very poor countries likely can't support the high infrastructure cost. You're left after that with marginal use cases (boat, remote places...) which won't be enough either. There's a reason why the comments are mentioning rural US, because it's a clear outlier among the developped world.
      • snovv_crash 3y ago
        The developing world is typically unequal, not universally poor. There are a lot of people in Africa and South America who would get drastically improved internet with Starlink, and can actually afford it.
        • realusername 3y ago
          I'm sure you can find such places, is there enough of them to fund the service which is very expensive? That I'm not so sure. When people are richer, they also tend to live in countries where the internet access is very important to the state and where installing good internet is an important public policy. Of course you have exceptions to that general case but I'm not convinced those exceptions are enough by themselves. They are in a very different market than a traditional product, they are basically servicing the people that nobody else want to service and the distribution of revenue in that group is going to be drastically different from the norm.
          • snovv_crash 3y ago
            The sattelites give coverage everywhere except polar regions at no extra cost. Africa has 1.4 billion people. South America another 400 million. Even if only the top 2% are your target market that's still roughly the same as the entire rural US.
    • slashdev 3y ago
      For my parents it’s replaced their cable internet which was slower and less reliable. I wish I could get it where I live in a city apartment. The internet is usually fast, but not reliable. The only way to have satellite in an tall apartment building is to put it on the roof, which is complicated.
    • snapplebobapple 3y ago
      Near term naval and aircraft. Regarding rural third world: the thing about a satellite is it is basically going around in a circle. If the business plan was built around being profitable over the first world then everywhere not over the first world is basically free because you have to build whatever bandwidth you want to provide the first world around the entire orbital ring.
    • rdsubhas 3y ago
      Starlink is not yet ubiquitous even in western countries (EU, UK, US, Can, ...). I believe the rapid expansion meant becoming more ubiquitous in western countries and commercial operations (shipnav, etc). They have a long, long way to go before even talking about developing countries which already are densely populated and mostly have fast, cheap internet already.
• dotnet00 3y ago
  As far as I know, the terminals were mainly so expensive due to the large phased array antenna. I wonder if these cost reductions are mainly from managing to produce them cheaply and if that might be valuable as a commoditized phased array for other applications.
  • cfcosta 3y ago
    I also imagine they can work with cheaper antennas now that they have many more satellites on orbit.
  • carabiner 3y ago
    The F-22's APG-77 phased array radar became cheaper when one key component became a commercial off the shelf part for wifi routers.
    • teleforce 3y ago
      I'm curious, can you share the name of that particular key component?
      • carabiner 3y ago
        No idea unfortunately. I think I read this a long time ago possibly from a Bill Sweetman report.
        • teleforce 3y ago
          Thanks for the clue, apparently it's the GaAs MMIC technology according to the ChatGPT-4 [1]. I've should have figured it out in the first place due to my previous research work of Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology that now become the successor to GaAs technology due to high power Radar requirements. I suppose this is where ChatGPT become really handy for research, as Google is extremely useful for search. Similarly with LIDAR, the autonomous vehicles demand has made the LIDAR sensor now become very affordable for the masses. [1] ChatGPT-4 response: "The key component of the F-22's APG-77 phased array radar that was made cheaper by Wi-Fi technologies, according to Bill Sweetman's reports, is the Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC) technology. This technology was significantly reduced in cost due to its widespread use in commercial Wi-Fi systems, allowing the defense industry to leverage economies of scale and reduce the overall cost of producing the radar system for the F-22 Raptor."
• NelsonMinar 3y ago
  I'm surprised they haven't added an ethernet port back to their router.
  • TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    I was very surprised when our starlink showed up and I had to buy an Ethernet adapter! Extremely weird that they don’t just have the port on the router.
    • genewitch 3y ago
      Is it really that surprising? there's two hardware pieces, both are rated for outdoor (permanent) use. I don't see a way to guarantee that sort of thing with a user serviceable ethernet port except the way they did it. I actually debated buying the longer dish wire vs leaving the thing outside, and made the decision to buy the longer cable and the ethernet port adapter, because i live in an area where sustained power outages longer than 24 hours will allow moisture ingress into any device left outside, and the higher the IP rating, the more likely this is to damage said device.
      • zajio1am 3y ago
        User serviceable ethernet port on outdoor antennas is standard on wifi devices. Just put it behind movable cover and direct it down, partially recessed in plastic case (so it is protected from flowing water, rain and snow). See e.g. https://www.wifihw.cz/img.asp?attid=4754 https://www.wifihw.cz/img.asp?attid=4754
        • genewitch 3y ago
          that sort of thing works great if you can guarantee power to the device, 24/7. At least where i am. the moisture in the air at night will be pulled into the device, through whatever seals exist, if the device is unpowered. Then, during the day when the pressure inside the device increases (due to the seals), the extra air is released, but the condensation remains. here, it takes literally 2 nights without power to kill stuff like Wyze cameras, Solar powered spotlights, etc. and those don't have a half inch rectangular hole allowing ingress. I'm not saying that stuff like what you're talking about doesn't exist. I've installed relays that had "downward facing rj-45 behind a panel", on top of buildings... but the building had generator backup that we were shareholders in, as well as our own UPS systems that kept the POE enabled in the event the generator failed, but shut off all "data" to the radios, leaving them using idle power. If there were no generator, we'd have used a different type of radio on the roofs.
• _whiteCaps_ 3y ago
  Strange - I see them on sale for $199 CAD. They seem to be sprouting from off-grid cabins around here. I'm posting from one right now via Starlink :)
  • downrightmike 3y ago
    If you have the will to resell, you could do a WISP: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/22/1118734792/michigan-man-isp-fiber-internet#:~:text=Job%20Snijders-,Jared%20Mauch%2C%20a%20network%20architect%20by%20day%2C%20wanted%20better%20internet,his%20own%20internet%20service%20provider.&text=Long%20before%20the%20pandemic%20forced,home%20for%20about%20two%20decades https://www.npr.org/2022/08/22/1118734792/michigan-man-isp-f....
  • pixl97 3y ago
    What something sales for and what something costs are two completely different things. Quite often game consoles sell for less than the cost of production, they make it back on the games/services you buy.
    • _whiteCaps_ 3y ago
      Yes, but the point of the article is that they aren't doing this any more. I'm pointing out that's not true if you live in certain places. https://mobilesyrup.com/2023/05/03/starlink-hardware-sale-70-percent-off-rural-canada/ https://mobilesyrup.com/2023/05/03/starlink-hardware-sale-70... "SpaceX’s satellite internet platform currently has its hardware on sale for $199 for rural Canadians, down from the usual $759."
  • mortureb 3y ago
    Starlink was good but not for me because I was surrounded by trees. I had an interruption every 3 mins. Sometimes for a couple of seconds and sometimes for a few minutes. There’s no disruption when you’re streaming things but it makes video calls almost impossible which is what I needed the most for my job. Ended up keeping starlink and reenabling my Viasat system just for the video calls. I have a wired fiber connection now and it’s heaven.
• giantg2 3y ago
  I wonder if the antenna is expensive or if it's the other electronics in the terminal? I assume it uses a phased array. I also assume most phased arrays are pretty cheap.
  • bottlepalm 3y ago
    Inside a terminal - https://x.com/olegkutkov/status/1526986473114935298 https://x.com/olegkutkov/status/1526986473114935298
  • teleforce 3y ago
    The antenna or the array antenna should be pretty cheap because they're technically passive devices. The expensive parts, however, are active circuitry namely the down conversion circuitry and signal processing for beam steering. The trick is to reliably down convert the signal to low frequency baseband by maintaining its amplitude and phase in which information is encoded since frequency is ephemeral (can be changed and manipulated without losing the information). According to ChatGPT-4, the user bands for Starlink satellites are mainly using Ku-band for downlink between 10.7 to 12.7 GHz (satellite to user) and 14 to 14.5 GHz for uplink (user to satellite). They are 3 ways of doing the frequency conversions namely superheterodyne (Single-IF), Direct conversion (Zero-IF) and the latest Direct RF sampling. The complexity is decreasing, hence the price is decreasing as we go from former to latter. Due to the relatively high frequency of Ku-band, Starlink antenna systems probably also utilize multiple down conversions or multi superheterodyne which make the price to be rather expensive due to the increased complexity of the circuitry and signal processing. Now due to the rapid improvement in RF SoC/chip design by company like ADI and TI, we now have RF transceiver chip that can perform Direct RF sampling utilizing high speed ADC/DAC operating in Ku-band. Thus we can expect the price to be going down even further. I suspect the decreased in manufacturing for the antenna price is not so much due to the their better manufacturing iterations, increase yield, etc but mainly due to the recent availability of this high speed Direct RF sampling transceivers but I can be wrong.
  • inemesitaffia 3y ago
    Phased arrays on the market start at $16k $25k is probably what you'll spend
• phkahler 3y ago
  Does Starlink offer a plan for multi-tenant buildings? I'm thinking condo with 30 units. It seems like it should be more efficient to run one high bandwidth connection than multiple regular customers. Could we share cost among all tenants and get a really good deal?
  • adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
    probably not. Any 30 unit building is probably in too urban an area for Starlink to be competitive with fiber.
    • ultrarunner 3y ago
      Think ski resorts
    • pnpnp 3y ago
      That’s not necessarily true! I can think of 3 nearby Rocky Mountain resort towns without great cellular or terrestrial internet.
      • HaZeust 3y ago
        In fact, I believe Ameristar (or another casino) in Blackhawk CO was thinking about using Starlink
      • ravi-delia 3y ago
        There's gotta be a point where the cost of running enough fiber drops below a sufficient amount of starlink capacity though. Hard to say where that number is though.
    • moyix 3y ago
      You'd be surprised. In dense cities like NYC/Brooklyn fiber availability varies from block to block, I assume because adding new infra is so expensive. We recently moved about five blocks away and lost access to fiber :(
    • mcpackieh 3y ago
• Damogran6 3y ago
  There's always a guy in these threads and this time it's me. Sure wish they had an a-la-cart option. We're in the Trailer 6 weeks a year, over 5 trips, and starlink internet access is $150 a month, for the full month. This isn't unique to starlink, if I need any kind of bandwidth, it's $80 for a 100gb month of Verizon. I'm already paying for tethering on the AT&T phones, and Comcast at home. This stuff really adds up if you're doing any kind of travel.
  • tobyjsullivan 3y ago
    Do you mean an option to pay per Gb of usage, rather than monthly? At least its a possible offering now that they won't be losing money on the terminal (thus necessitating predictable time-to-recover via monthly subscription). That said, I wouldn't hold my breath. There are good reasons very few businesses offer that option alongside monthly plans.
    • Damogran6 3y ago
      I'd be good for that, but those situations generally end up being more expensive than just buying a month. Not only that, it's trivially easy to have a single poorly choked device blow through a cap. (e.g. one laptop decides it wants to download paath updates...the Tier you have is $60 for 25gb or $80 for 100gb...or, you know, $150 for uncapped starlink.) The amount of brainspace required to have reliable internet access in an RV is crazy....and it won't be cheap.
  • throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    Sounds like a secondary market opportunity. Keep 20 Starlink subscriptions, rent them out for a few days at a time at $8/day. $600 deposit on the antenna.
    • Damogran6 3y ago
      I'm betting that's all sewn up in a click-wrap EULA somewhere.
  • beaugunderson 3y ago
• canucker2016 3y ago
  related news, ars article quotes WSJ article, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/spacex-projected-20-million-starlink-users-by-2022-it-ended-up-with-1-million/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/spacex-projected...: "A 2015 presentation that "SpaceX used to raise money from investors" reportedly projected that in 2022, Starlink would hit 20 million subscribers and generate nearly $12 billion in revenue and $7 billion in operating profit. The WSJ said it obtained the 2015 presentation and recent documents with numbers on Starlink's actual performance in 2022. Actual Starlink revenue for 2022 was $1.4 billion, up from $222 million in 2021, according to the report. The documents apparently didn't specify whether Starlink is profitable."
  • _Microft 3y ago
    A prediction made seven years into the future, for a service which didn't exist then, only off by an order of magnitude doesn't sound too bad imo.
    • sergiosgc 3y ago
      Sporting a growth rate that, if it holds, means the prediction was off only by a couple of years.
    • b59831 3y ago
      [dead]
    • xoa 3y ago
      Additionally, holy crap has a lot changed in that time. Falcon 9 didn't complete its first landing until the very end of 2015 with Flight 20. What's now routine and key to their costs is a feat less than a decade old. SpaceX was still talking about the Mars transport/BFR at that, which were very different in a variety of ways from the Starship SS/SH system we see now. What they've got now feels a lot more practical and sustainable long term, moving to steel for example was a great change. So as far as long term forward looking plans go I'd agree that execution here was pretty darn good, and they've got a very clear roadmap for the next 5 years as well with full size v2 sats waiting in the wings and Starship proceeding along at a solid clip. It was a curiously negative feeling piece particularly for the WSJ. How many companies execute ambitious highly capital intensive global scale infrastructure rollouts using never been done combos of tech at never been done price points and pull it off like that?
• teleforce 3y ago
  >SpaceX sells antennas with its service in a range from $2,500 to $150,000 each. What, a freaking antenna that cost about the same as Ferrari Enzo? Are we missing something here? Just wondering can a third party make and sell compatible Starlink antenna? Is it permissible? Anyway these HN threads have so many useful information, it feels like in a conference room with various Starlink stakeholders.
  • jakeinspace 3y ago
    It's for aircraft
  • inemesitaffia 3y ago
    You can get one for more money from DUJUD or Ball Aerospace. $150,000 is probably the cheapest in it's category
    • teleforce 3y ago
      Thanks for the info. In that case, it is possible and feasible to create a third party business making and selling cheaper antenna systems for the Starlink customers. As I've mentioned in my other comments, I suspect the decreased in manufacturing for the antenna price is not so much due to the SpaceX better manufacturing iterations, increase yield, etc but mainly due to the recent availability of the high speed Direct RF sampling transceivers that now encroaching Ku-band territory.
      • inemesitaffia 3y ago
        Amazon claim they'll be able to hit $400. In Ka band SpaceX spent $2.4 billion on dish R&D and production of 1 million antennas upfront with ST Micro. That kind of commitment goes a long way. It's probably not. SpaceX doesn't have a separate modem. It's in the dish. These two companies got in via the military. OneWeb is in Ku band like starlink, they may be open to talk
        • teleforce 3y ago
• davidktr 3y ago
  Funny, just two hours ago I saw my first Starlink satellite train running across the sky. It felt spooky and futuristic at the same time.
  • mlindner 3y ago
    Do note, that any "satellite trains" you see are from freshly launched satellites. The "trains" are from still relatively densely clumped satellites that are still separating from each other. After they separate, they re-orient which makes them almost invisible from the ground. You need long camera exposures or a telescope to see them at this point. They then start gradually raising their orbits to a parking orbit. After they reach a parking orbit they begin to drift the plane of their orbit so as to separate a single launch's satellites into multiple different planes, after which they then raise their orbits again into the operational orbit.
• throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  I want to like Starlink, but there is no way the product can both continue to grow and also service customers at advertised speeds. It will literally only get slower over time. And it's already spotty.
  • Retric 3y ago
    Ultimately bandwidth per customer is just a revenue vs cost of each satellite question. They or a competitor can scale the number of LEO satellites and their mass basically indefinitely. Also inline traditional communication satellites these things have a short lifespan which means the network can see significant improvements over time as technology improves.
    • throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
      From what I heard there is literally a cap on the number of signals that can be serviced per cell, extra satellites will not expand potential signals per cell, so you literally run out of how many people can be connected in a given area. Bandwidth is already limited and becomes moreso as the cell gets crowded.
      • Retric 3y ago
        Cell sizes can be shrunk it’s really dependent of the technology involved. Starlink is currently tied to a specific technology stack but different providers can be using different frequencies etc. If you’re looking for the ultimate limit you need to consider stuff like this 100Gbps optical link. https://news.mit.edu/2022/communications-system-achieves-fastest-laser-link-space-yet-1130 https://news.mit.edu/2022/communications-system-achieves-fas.... That’s not directly viable for home internet users, but an airline or cruse ship might be interested in such technologies.