16 ms·

This is for very low bandwidth text communications when you're out in the country and can see the sky. Stuff like this has existed from companies like garmin f

by blhack 3y ago

This is for very low bandwidth text communications when you're out in the country and can see the sky. Stuff like this has existed from companies like garmin for some time. This is very cool, though. Here is when this was announced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzli-Ww26Qs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzli-Ww26Qs Pretty cool! Also kindof funny to see the TMobile CEO trying to hype people up and Elon sortof reigning it in.

colordrops 3y ago
The starlink website directly says "texting, calling, and browsing"
- blhack 3y ago
  I believe this is addressed in the video that I linked. There are very good compression algorithms to allow voice, and "browsing" means something akin to slow dialup. This is not something that could, for instance, replace your cell phone carrier. In the video at 21:00 Elon clarifies: 2-4 megabits per cell zone.
  - valianteffort 3y ago
    This is a service being provided by your carrier.
    - blhack 3y ago
      Sorry if that was confusing. I mean that for instance: tmobile will be adding this to their coverage map, but they're not getting rid of the towers, and the primary way your phone is communicating with the world is not going to be via starlink satellites.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    > browsing" means something akin to slow dialup. I mean, I fire up and use lynx from time to time for a couple newspapers and magazine. Beyond evading some paywalls, it also presents it the way I want it: a wall of text. “Slow dialup” to me is 2.4kbps. The HN crowd could get a lot done over a console.
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    > and "browsing" means something akin to slow dialup. So it will be faster than my carrier..
  - Retric 3y ago
    I occasionally get kicked down to 128 kbps for a few hours at the end of a month and a surprisingly large fraction of the internet still works. They are targeting voice which can go really low, but a moderately optimistic ~100kps is vastly better than 0. Much below that and the number of people using it is going to drop near 0.
    - starik36 3y ago
      Yeah, it says so in my AT&T contract as well. And I was concerned when I first signed up. But I haven't ever actually seen it happen.
      - Retric 3y ago
        AT&T actually enforces it for tethering. If I really need something I can still use my phone, but it’s convenient to leave the phone where it gets reception and then use the tablet nearby.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    If I can get a plain text weather report, emergency notification or email then that is HUGE. The difference between no communication and "take 5 minutes to get 1kb of text" represents a huge, huge jump.
valianteffort 3y ago
The difference here is you don't need a dedicated device or service, you can just use your existing cell phone. As Starlink is only providing the backhaul and cell carriers their spectrum, service will improve as the constellation grows not whenever the carriers feel like investing in it.
Scoundreller 3y ago
It’s too bad you’ll still need a “regular” cellular sub to take advantage of this. If I didn’t, this gets me a lot closer to “cutting” the wireless plan cord. I’m usually in wifi range and being able to have a few kb/s of comms is basically the lifeline I need. Most of my cell activities are cached on my phone: podcasts, maps, some increasingly out of date weather. Would be even cooler if it could “broadcast” some regular stuff like news and traffic updates (dunno how that could integrate with Waze…) The first kb/s gets me a loooot of value and each additional is less useful than the last. Data is very much diminishing returns.
- carabiner 3y ago
  You'd expect T-Mobile/starlink to provide this service for free?
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    No, I want to sign up for it without bundling it with a local Canadian oligopolist’s other services.
- slashdev 3y ago
  Likewise, this would be enough to replace my cell plan. I don’t need high bandwidth stuff, just text communications, PagerDuty, gmail. The rest I can do over Wi-Fi.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Given the price per bit per second per square meter, I'd be surprised if this will be more economical for operators to provide in anything but the most rural areas.
  - arecurrence 3y ago
    You can get 1 year global plans from esimdb.com pretty affordably for this use case right now.
    - 3y ago
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
But low-bandwidth text is all I need. I guess I won't be renewing my subscription for my InReach Mini forever (although that form factor is pretty nice). I don't need to be able to stream Netflix when I'm in the backcountry, it's just that my wife insists I need to be able to get a helicopter if I break my leg. Now we need app developers to log off their fiber-served wifi when writing messenger apps, and log into a high-latency, low-bandwidth, high-packet-loss network instead so Messages will actually open instead of whatever it's trying to do to upload my location history and download contact pictures...
- patryn20 3y ago
  Not sure if it’s still this way, but Kotzebue AK was the perfect place to test low bandwidth internet. The over the horizon satellite uplink the entire town shared could only allocate 56k speeds to each client and had horrific packet loss. I had to rearchitect an entire file synchronization and uplink system for resilience while sitting in a hotel room in the middle of a blizzard during the shortest days of the year so I could deploy software for clients up there.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > The over the horizon satellite uplink the entire town shared could only allocate 56k speeds to each client and had horrific packet loss. I found your uplink. IDK the date of the photo. https://uploads.alaska.org/blog/Carl-Johnson-Blog/Kotzebue/_1600xAUTO_crop_center-center_65_none/Carl-Johnson-Kotzebue-0314-NWARAC-OTZ-1034.jpg https://uploads.alaska.org/blog/Carl-Johnson-Blog/Kotzebue/_...
    - jamiek88 3y ago
      So weird to see a dish that size almost pointed horizontally!
    - patryn20 3y ago
      Yes! It literally pointed at the horizon. Awesome find.
grecy 3y ago
> Stuff like this has existed from companies like garmin for some time. No, this is entirely different from what Garmin and others sell. Those devices require dedicated hardware (and a subscription plan) to talk to satellites. Also you can only send and receive text messages. (no voice, extremely limited data (like weather reports)) What SpaceX are doing uses a completely normal phone, with a completely normal phone plan. It's text for now, but voice and data are coming.
- lxgr 3y ago
  > It's text for now Text is announced for 2024. And personally, I'd be really surprised if that actually works out for unmodified phones sold today. I've written more about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37848212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37848212
jessriedel 3y ago
Obviously we shouldn't pretend sat phones from Garmin and others haven't existed for decades, but Starlink direct to cell is very different. First, as others have mentioned, traditional sat phones requires dedicated hardware with a chonky antenna; this works with normal cellphones, which means order of magnitude higher adoption. Maybe more fundamentally, the satellites that existing sat phones use are in much higher orbits so there is irreducible latency (due to speed of light) and bandwidth costs that LEO Starlink sats will likely crush in the next few years.
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  Order of magnitude? Try 5 orders of magnitude. I’d be willing to be the ratio of cellphones to sat phones is > 10,000 to 1
  - jessriedel 3y ago
    Tbc, this was a typo by me. I definitely meant “orders” (hence no “an”). Thx.
spandextwins 3y ago
That’s not what the site says. It’s different than what’s available now.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
ada1981 3y ago
What about the voice and data they have planned for 2025?
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  never trust a 2 year estimate from elon musk
ec109685 3y ago
Why is it limited to only very low bandwidth applications?
- dboreham 3y ago
  Because Shannon.
cronix 3y ago
> This is for very low bandwidth text communications when you're out in the country and can see the sky. From the graphic in the article: > Text: 2024 > Voice and Data: 2025 > IOT: 2025
j45 3y ago
It’s still invaluable at low bandwidth text up there. Satellite data to run infrastructure (even cc processing for cards) where there is zero connectivity or power for hundreds of miles will likely become at least one order of magnitude more accessible price wise.
KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
The gain on those antennas must be insane, any idea how they work? There are millions of devices down there (from the angular resolution perspective of the satellite).
dharma1 3y ago
You can still access a lot of stuff via just SMS - could setup an SMS ChatGPT service for yourself and use it via this in the middle of nowhere

by blhack 3y ago

colordrops 3y ago

The starlink website directly says "texting, calling, and browsing"

blhack 3y ago
I believe this is addressed in the video that I linked. There are very good compression algorithms to allow voice, and "browsing" means something akin to slow dialup. This is not something that could, for instance, replace your cell phone carrier. In the video at 21:00 Elon clarifies: 2-4 megabits per cell zone.
- valianteffort 3y ago
  This is a service being provided by your carrier.
  - blhack 3y ago
    Sorry if that was confusing. I mean that for instance: tmobile will be adding this to their coverage map, but they're not getting rid of the towers, and the primary way your phone is communicating with the world is not going to be via starlink satellites.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  > browsing" means something akin to slow dialup. I mean, I fire up and use lynx from time to time for a couple newspapers and magazine. Beyond evading some paywalls, it also presents it the way I want it: a wall of text. “Slow dialup” to me is 2.4kbps. The HN crowd could get a lot done over a console.
- lawlessone 3y ago
  > and "browsing" means something akin to slow dialup. So it will be faster than my carrier..
- Retric 3y ago
  I occasionally get kicked down to 128 kbps for a few hours at the end of a month and a surprisingly large fraction of the internet still works. They are targeting voice which can go really low, but a moderately optimistic ~100kps is vastly better than 0. Much below that and the number of people using it is going to drop near 0.
  - starik36 3y ago
    Yeah, it says so in my AT&T contract as well. And I was concerned when I first signed up. But I haven't ever actually seen it happen.
    - Retric 3y ago
      AT&T actually enforces it for tethering. If I really need something I can still use my phone, but it’s convenient to leave the phone where it gets reception and then use the tablet nearby.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  If I can get a plain text weather report, emergency notification or email then that is HUGE. The difference between no communication and "take 5 minutes to get 1kb of text" represents a huge, huge jump.

valianteffort 3y ago

The difference here is you don't need a dedicated device or service, you can just use your existing cell phone. As Starlink is only providing the backhaul and cell carriers their spectrum, service will improve as the constellation grows not whenever the carriers feel like investing in it.

Scoundreller 3y ago

It’s too bad you’ll still need a “regular” cellular sub to take advantage of this. If I didn’t, this gets me a lot closer to “cutting” the wireless plan cord. I’m usually in wifi range and being able to have a few kb/s of comms is basically the lifeline I need. Most of my cell activities are cached on my phone: podcasts, maps, some increasingly out of date weather. Would be even cooler if it could “broadcast” some regular stuff like news and traffic updates (dunno how that could integrate with Waze…) The first kb/s gets me a loooot of value and each additional is less useful than the last. Data is very much diminishing returns.

carabiner 3y ago
You'd expect T-Mobile/starlink to provide this service for free?
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  No, I want to sign up for it without bundling it with a local Canadian oligopolist’s other services.
slashdev 3y ago
Likewise, this would be enough to replace my cell plan. I don’t need high bandwidth stuff, just text communications, PagerDuty, gmail. The rest I can do over Wi-Fi.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Given the price per bit per second per square meter, I'd be surprised if this will be more economical for operators to provide in anything but the most rural areas.
- arecurrence 3y ago
  You can get 1 year global plans from esimdb.com pretty affordably for this use case right now.
  - 3y ago

LeifCarrotson 3y ago

But low-bandwidth text is all I need. I guess I won't be renewing my subscription for my InReach Mini forever (although that form factor is pretty nice). I don't need to be able to stream Netflix when I'm in the backcountry, it's just that my wife insists I need to be able to get a helicopter if I break my leg. Now we need app developers to log off their fiber-served wifi when writing messenger apps, and log into a high-latency, low-bandwidth, high-packet-loss network instead so Messages will actually open instead of whatever it's trying to do to upload my location history and download contact pictures...

patryn20 3y ago
Not sure if it’s still this way, but Kotzebue AK was the perfect place to test low bandwidth internet. The over the horizon satellite uplink the entire town shared could only allocate 56k speeds to each client and had horrific packet loss. I had to rearchitect an entire file synchronization and uplink system for resilience while sitting in a hotel room in the middle of a blizzard during the shortest days of the year so I could deploy software for clients up there.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > The over the horizon satellite uplink the entire town shared could only allocate 56k speeds to each client and had horrific packet loss. I found your uplink. IDK the date of the photo. https://uploads.alaska.org/blog/Carl-Johnson-Blog/Kotzebue/_1600xAUTO_crop_center-center_65_none/Carl-Johnson-Kotzebue-0314-NWARAC-OTZ-1034.jpg https://uploads.alaska.org/blog/Carl-Johnson-Blog/Kotzebue/_...
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    So weird to see a dish that size almost pointed horizontally!
  - patryn20 3y ago
    Yes! It literally pointed at the horizon. Awesome find.

grecy 3y ago

> Stuff like this has existed from companies like garmin for some time. No, this is entirely different from what Garmin and others sell. Those devices require dedicated hardware (and a subscription plan) to talk to satellites. Also you can only send and receive text messages. (no voice, extremely limited data (like weather reports)) What SpaceX are doing uses a completely normal phone, with a completely normal phone plan. It's text for now, but voice and data are coming.

lxgr 3y ago
> It's text for now Text is announced for 2024. And personally, I'd be really surprised if that actually works out for unmodified phones sold today. I've written more about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37848212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37848212

jessriedel 3y ago

Obviously we shouldn't pretend sat phones from Garmin and others haven't existed for decades, but Starlink direct to cell is very different. First, as others have mentioned, traditional sat phones requires dedicated hardware with a chonky antenna; this works with normal cellphones, which means order of magnitude higher adoption. Maybe more fundamentally, the satellites that existing sat phones use are in much higher orbits so there is irreducible latency (due to speed of light) and bandwidth costs that LEO Starlink sats will likely crush in the next few years.

newZWhoDis 3y ago
Order of magnitude? Try 5 orders of magnitude. I’d be willing to be the ratio of cellphones to sat phones is > 10,000 to 1
- jessriedel 3y ago
  Tbc, this was a typo by me. I definitely meant “orders” (hence no “an”). Thx.

spandextwins 3y ago

That’s not what the site says. It’s different than what’s available now.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

ada1981 3y ago

What about the voice and data they have planned for 2025?

micromacrofoot 3y ago
never trust a 2 year estimate from elon musk

ec109685 3y ago

Why is it limited to only very low bandwidth applications?

dboreham 3y ago
Because Shannon.

cronix 3y ago

> This is for very low bandwidth text communications when you're out in the country and can see the sky. From the graphic in the article: > Text: 2024 > Voice and Data: 2025 > IOT: 2025

j45 3y ago

It’s still invaluable at low bandwidth text up there. Satellite data to run infrastructure (even cc processing for cards) where there is zero connectivity or power for hundreds of miles will likely become at least one order of magnitude more accessible price wise.

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago

The gain on those antennas must be insane, any idea how they work? There are millions of devices down there (from the angular resolution perspective of the satellite).

dharma1 3y ago

You can still access a lot of stuff via just SMS - could setup an SMS ChatGPT service for yourself and use it via this in the middle of nowhere