3 ms·

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

by 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.
    - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
      I've never heard anyone complain about filling the stratosphere with metal oxides, do you have somewhere I can read more about this risk? Naively, I would have expected that even thousands of 250kg satellites would be insignificant on the scale of the whole stratosphere (we're not talking about surface-level CO2, where we're pumping out gigatons per year), but I have no idea what that ecosystem is like. Is the metal oxide concentration measurable? I do think this is a temporary issue; once the cable ISP monopolies are no longer valuable because anyone can just get Starlink, that competitive pressure will push down hard on those cable monopolies and infrastructure laws will have to return to sanity. Terrestrial ISPs with fiber-sharing requirements and appropriate infrastructure build-out could absolutely out-compete Starlink, but right now they can just collude together and lobby against changing the status quo. I would much prefer to have a functional bureaucracy and intelligent, efficient infrastructure! But it's probably easier to fix that by launching the largest satellite constellation ever than by playing politics against some of the wealthiest media companies on the planet.
      - Clubber 3y ago
        "Space junk," was a boogie man the news threw at the wall and didn't quite stick. Many of the pictures/diagrams of the satellites made them appear about 1000x bigger than they actually are. Example: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/space-junk https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/space-jun... Beware the murder hornets! https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-washington.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-was...
        chargingmarmot 3y ago
        I agree with the sentiment about media sensationalism but I don't think "space junk" is an issue we should be so quick to dismiss. Just because the problem hasn't gotten too bad yet doesn't mean it isn't real (especially because the problem involves a positive-feedback "domino effect" and junk might be infeasible to clean up). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome With regard to Starlink: I was a little bit concerned because of the large number of satellites they're putting up, but as far as I understand, Starlink isn't actually a big risk right now as far as space junk goes because the satellites orbit at low altitudes (340 miles) and are expected to naturally de-orbit relatively quickly due to atmospheric drag. (The decision to put them at low altitudes had to do with network latency.) If Elon were to say tomorrow, "hey we're moving Starlink out to 500 miles" I would hope some kind of regulation would be able to prevent that.
  - anderspitman 3y ago
    How would you synchronize them?
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    Each satellite has N routers, and can support a certain bandwidth. Even if you hardwired a long LAN cable to it, more users drops the speed.
  - wayfinder 3y ago
    I imagine the total cost of installation and ongoing maintenance of all the infrastructure required for this proposed setup for a substantial amount of urban users dwarfs the equivalent total cost of just installing new cabling and the lobbying required to get that done, especially over a 20 year period.
    - jtchang 3y ago
      Don't underestimate lobbying costs in dense urban areas. Whenever you have to deal with people the alternative is often easier.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        I highly doubt it would 10x the cost though.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  It’s actually not the satellites as the bottleneck typically from what I understand, it’s the ground stations that serve those areas getting too congested.
  - reportingsjr 3y ago
    The satellites may not currently be the bottleneck for certain areas, but they definitely don't support anything resembling a densely or even sparsely populated area. Typical calculations (using only publicly available info as a caveat) generally point towards the current starlink constellation supporting a really low density of antennas. If you want the details, the person who created starlink.sx has a great blog with some incredible calculations[0]. The section that is most relevant is under the heading "Simulation with TDM and beam spread combined". Basically, the result is that starlink could support around 15 antennas/user terminals per "cell" at 75mbps, where a cell is about 252 square km. This is roughly 1 terminal per 17 square km. If you allow for 10x oversubscription, fairly common for ISPs, that gets you to 1 terminal per 1.7 square km. Not really that impressive when you compare it to the density and services where 99.9% of people live, but it clearly helps out the small number of people way out there. 0: https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f501 https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
    - asynchronous 3y ago
      This was a very interesting read, thank you for correcting me. Enjoyed the deep dive.
- esskay 3y ago
  If they can get the interconnect working that issue goes away (its mostly groundstation bandwidth limiting things). The 'end goal' is to have it use the laser link to send the traffic across to a satellite close to the final destination, that should in theory help massively redistribute the ground station traffic. It's obviously not foolproof, there's still bandwidth to be shared there but using a combination of some clever routing you could theoretically spread traffic across multiple satellites and groundstations with minimal latency impact.
WalterBright 3y ago
[flagged]
- Clubber 3y ago
  He's had the news mauling him for the past 2-3 years, I understand people kinda just regurgitate it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- woodruffw 3y ago
  Civics and industry co-exist in a healthy society. Musk has consistently demonstrated that he has no civic sense and, when injured, will randomly lash out at whoever the hecklers around him tell him to lash out at. That's not a quality that's worth celebrating, regardless of how much innovation he might enable. We can and should expect better of people, especially extraordinarily wealthy and powerful ones.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > he has no civic sense What about the civic sense of proving that great electric cars can be made at a profit, space launch costs can be cut 90%, and Starlink can enable communications by people who live under oppression? Doesn't actually doing things that matter to the human race matter far more than saying comforting words and avoiding giving offense?
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      I don't think any of these things imply civic sense. At best, it shows a man with decent business acumen. At worst, he's an opportunist and a reactionary who has substantially degraded the level of political and social discourse of the country he lives in. Of the things you've highlighted, Starlink has perhaps the strongest case for being evidence of civic sense. But that case is a potential one; in practice, Starlink (and Musk's vision) has yet to impress[1][2]. [1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/elon-musks-refusal-to-provide-starlink-support-for-ukraine-attack-in-crimea-raises-questions-for-pentagon https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/elon-musks-refusal-to-p... [2]: https://www.space.com/starlink-electronics-hum-disturbs-radio-astronomy https://www.space.com/starlink-electronics-hum-disturbs-radi...
pensatoio 3y ago
> I’m no fan of Starlink or Musk He's the driving force behind some of the greatest innovations of our time. He's also just a person. I doubt many people can say they've had greater impact or could withstand the same scrutiny.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  People would have a much better opinion of him if he stuck to realising crazy projects (an electric car thats faster than a supercar, reusable rockets, solar panels that look like normal roof tiles...) and kept his questionable political opinions to himself.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    Everyone is free to have their political opinions. The issue with Musk is that those opinions are being manifested in the product decisions at Twitter e.g. taking a laissez-faire attitude towards hate speech and deliberating promoting controversial accounts in order to drive engagement.
  - aPoCoMiLogin 3y ago
    i'm not sure what is the source of that but I've noticed that a lot of people has the need to take everything personally, and can't separate things. for example I really like tom cruise as an actor, one of my personal top 10, but I don't like what he is doing in his private life (the cult thing). so what i'm doing is separating things and take what I like, and ignore (to some extent) what I don't like. I feel like you guys take things way to serious, and expect everything to be perfect, which is not possible.
  - Breza 3y ago
    Plus he keeps making wild promises and only occasionally delivering. Those roof tile solar panels you mention are a great example.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  > ...or could withstand the same scrutiny. Not going to argue with the "greater impact" part, but mean pretty much every C-level executive in America with a twitter account manages to refrain from using it to repeatedly commit securities fraud.
wkat4242 3y ago
Weird... Here in Barcelona I can get fibre from 3 different providers (with actually separate networks at street level).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
htss2013 3y ago
Adding "I'm not fan of Musk" is odd here. Is this some kind of tribal signal? It's like writing about the market for new AWS services, preceded by "I'm no fan of Bezos but..."
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  It's not odd. Musk had a big cult-like following, even on HN. Bezos did not.
poulsbohemian 3y ago
I could be wrong, but I would bet you'll start to see alternatives available to you within the next year / 24 months. There's so much federal money flowing into fiber right now...

by nico 3y ago

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.
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    I've never heard anyone complain about filling the stratosphere with metal oxides, do you have somewhere I can read more about this risk? Naively, I would have expected that even thousands of 250kg satellites would be insignificant on the scale of the whole stratosphere (we're not talking about surface-level CO2, where we're pumping out gigatons per year), but I have no idea what that ecosystem is like. Is the metal oxide concentration measurable? I do think this is a temporary issue; once the cable ISP monopolies are no longer valuable because anyone can just get Starlink, that competitive pressure will push down hard on those cable monopolies and infrastructure laws will have to return to sanity. Terrestrial ISPs with fiber-sharing requirements and appropriate infrastructure build-out could absolutely out-compete Starlink, but right now they can just collude together and lobby against changing the status quo. I would much prefer to have a functional bureaucracy and intelligent, efficient infrastructure! But it's probably easier to fix that by launching the largest satellite constellation ever than by playing politics against some of the wealthiest media companies on the planet.
    - Clubber 3y ago
      "Space junk," was a boogie man the news threw at the wall and didn't quite stick. Many of the pictures/diagrams of the satellites made them appear about 1000x bigger than they actually are. Example: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/space-junk https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/space-jun... Beware the murder hornets! https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-washington.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-was...
      - chargingmarmot 3y ago
        I agree with the sentiment about media sensationalism but I don't think "space junk" is an issue we should be so quick to dismiss. Just because the problem hasn't gotten too bad yet doesn't mean it isn't real (especially because the problem involves a positive-feedback "domino effect" and junk might be infeasible to clean up). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome With regard to Starlink: I was a little bit concerned because of the large number of satellites they're putting up, but as far as I understand, Starlink isn't actually a big risk right now as far as space junk goes because the satellites orbit at low altitudes (340 miles) and are expected to naturally de-orbit relatively quickly due to atmospheric drag. (The decision to put them at low altitudes had to do with network latency.) If Elon were to say tomorrow, "hey we're moving Starlink out to 500 miles" I would hope some kind of regulation would be able to prevent that.
- anderspitman 3y ago
  How would you synchronize them?
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Each satellite has N routers, and can support a certain bandwidth. Even if you hardwired a long LAN cable to it, more users drops the speed.
- wayfinder 3y ago
  I imagine the total cost of installation and ongoing maintenance of all the infrastructure required for this proposed setup for a substantial amount of urban users dwarfs the equivalent total cost of just installing new cabling and the lobbying required to get that done, especially over a 20 year period.
  - jtchang 3y ago
    Don't underestimate lobbying costs in dense urban areas. Whenever you have to deal with people the alternative is often easier.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      I highly doubt it would 10x the cost though.
asynchronous 3y ago
It’s actually not the satellites as the bottleneck typically from what I understand, it’s the ground stations that serve those areas getting too congested.
- reportingsjr 3y ago
  The satellites may not currently be the bottleneck for certain areas, but they definitely don't support anything resembling a densely or even sparsely populated area. Typical calculations (using only publicly available info as a caveat) generally point towards the current starlink constellation supporting a really low density of antennas. If you want the details, the person who created starlink.sx has a great blog with some incredible calculations[0]. The section that is most relevant is under the heading "Simulation with TDM and beam spread combined". Basically, the result is that starlink could support around 15 antennas/user terminals per "cell" at 75mbps, where a cell is about 252 square km. This is roughly 1 terminal per 17 square km. If you allow for 10x oversubscription, fairly common for ISPs, that gets you to 1 terminal per 1.7 square km. Not really that impressive when you compare it to the density and services where 99.9% of people live, but it clearly helps out the small number of people way out there. 0: https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f501 https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    This was a very interesting read, thank you for correcting me. Enjoyed the deep dive.
esskay 3y ago
If they can get the interconnect working that issue goes away (its mostly groundstation bandwidth limiting things). The 'end goal' is to have it use the laser link to send the traffic across to a satellite close to the final destination, that should in theory help massively redistribute the ground station traffic. It's obviously not foolproof, there's still bandwidth to be shared there but using a combination of some clever routing you could theoretically spread traffic across multiple satellites and groundstations with minimal latency impact.

WalterBright 3y ago

[flagged]

Clubber 3y ago
He's had the news mauling him for the past 2-3 years, I understand people kinda just regurgitate it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
woodruffw 3y ago
Civics and industry co-exist in a healthy society. Musk has consistently demonstrated that he has no civic sense and, when injured, will randomly lash out at whoever the hecklers around him tell him to lash out at. That's not a quality that's worth celebrating, regardless of how much innovation he might enable. We can and should expect better of people, especially extraordinarily wealthy and powerful ones.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > he has no civic sense What about the civic sense of proving that great electric cars can be made at a profit, space launch costs can be cut 90%, and Starlink can enable communications by people who live under oppression? Doesn't actually doing things that matter to the human race matter far more than saying comforting words and avoiding giving offense?
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    I don't think any of these things imply civic sense. At best, it shows a man with decent business acumen. At worst, he's an opportunist and a reactionary who has substantially degraded the level of political and social discourse of the country he lives in. Of the things you've highlighted, Starlink has perhaps the strongest case for being evidence of civic sense. But that case is a potential one; in practice, Starlink (and Musk's vision) has yet to impress[1][2]. [1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/elon-musks-refusal-to-provide-starlink-support-for-ukraine-attack-in-crimea-raises-questions-for-pentagon https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/elon-musks-refusal-to-p... [2]: https://www.space.com/starlink-electronics-hum-disturbs-radio-astronomy https://www.space.com/starlink-electronics-hum-disturbs-radi...

pensatoio 3y ago

> I’m no fan of Starlink or Musk He's the driving force behind some of the greatest innovations of our time. He's also just a person. I doubt many people can say they've had greater impact or could withstand the same scrutiny.

newaccount74 3y ago
People would have a much better opinion of him if he stuck to realising crazy projects (an electric car thats faster than a supercar, reusable rockets, solar panels that look like normal roof tiles...) and kept his questionable political opinions to himself.
- threeseed 3y ago
  Everyone is free to have their political opinions. The issue with Musk is that those opinions are being manifested in the product decisions at Twitter e.g. taking a laissez-faire attitude towards hate speech and deliberating promoting controversial accounts in order to drive engagement.
- aPoCoMiLogin 3y ago
  i'm not sure what is the source of that but I've noticed that a lot of people has the need to take everything personally, and can't separate things. for example I really like tom cruise as an actor, one of my personal top 10, but I don't like what he is doing in his private life (the cult thing). so what i'm doing is separating things and take what I like, and ignore (to some extent) what I don't like. I feel like you guys take things way to serious, and expect everything to be perfect, which is not possible.
- Breza 3y ago
  Plus he keeps making wild promises and only occasionally delivering. Those roof tile solar panels you mention are a great example.
aidenn0 3y ago
> ...or could withstand the same scrutiny. Not going to argue with the "greater impact" part, but mean pretty much every C-level executive in America with a twitter account manages to refrain from using it to repeatedly commit securities fraud.

wkat4242 3y ago

Weird... Here in Barcelona I can get fibre from 3 different providers (with actually separate networks at street level).

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

htss2013 3y ago

Adding "I'm not fan of Musk" is odd here. Is this some kind of tribal signal? It's like writing about the market for new AWS services, preceded by "I'm no fan of Bezos but..."

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
It's not odd. Musk had a big cult-like following, even on HN. Bezos did not.

poulsbohemian 3y ago

I could be wrong, but I would bet you'll start to see alternatives available to you within the next year / 24 months. There's so much federal money flowing into fiber right now...