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First deployed Starlink start of 2021 as part of the beta, and it's remained a rock. Glad to see it continuing to evolve, and very much looking forward to how t
by xoa 3y ago
First deployed Starlink start of 2021 as part of the beta, and it's remained a rock. Glad to see it continuing to evolve, and very much looking forward to how the network improves further once Starship starts letting them get up full size v2+ sats. But as someone who started with and is still running a bunch of the gen1 dishy's for various clients, I do regret that SpaceX chose to move away from (let alone improve) having the terminal by default be useful as a plain dedicated WAN with no pushing of their router at all. You could certainly use their router if you wanted, but could also just plug the power brick directly into a regular network and that was that (which is what we've done, generally via simple fiber translator). At least on the more expensive business version it'd be great to have native SFP or separate data plugs, power directly off a standard 12V terminal, etc, the way normal high performance outdoor networking gear works. It's certainly possible to work around it, but it's an irritation and diminishes the experience to not have things integrate as smoothly as they should (and indeed as they did).
That said they've been evolving it rapidly, dropped the price, and it's really Just Worked. For all fixed locations I really wish there was fiber too, but until that happy day arrives sometime in the distant future I'm really grateful for what Starlink has enabled for rural internet.
- morphle 3y agoI build custom setups with laser, fiber optic, SFP+ and QSFP28 switches and openflow routers, outdoor enclosures, airborne and watertight enclosures, low speed and high speed directional and gimballed mobile mountings, battery and solar 24/7 power supplies, drone carriers, etc. >For all [rural] fixed locations I really wish there was fiber too Happy to help you out here. Think bundeling many patched firmware Starlinks up to 10 Gbps to jump-start the rural backbone, then extend it for 100km for $10K. 36 years experience. Our Fiberhood speciality is rural, easier, cheaper, DIY deployable and already in more locations than you think [1]. Guerilla fiber plus instant Starlink. [1]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309254511_Fiberhood_Smart_Grid https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309254511_Fiberhood...
- inemesitaffia 3y agoSelling $3k equipment for $500 is the path to a death spiral. Especially when shipping equipment to a warzone where the equipment life is around 3 months and several of the users don't appreciate the losses. Starlink is doing value engineering so there's a company tomorrow. They hope to be the first constellation to recover lifetime costs and profit. Avoiding bankruptcy
- nojvek 3y agoMy observation is that SpaceX is Elon's most successful company. It is fully private, he has great ties with US govt and even if Starlink goes out, SpaceX will keep shinning on.
- inemesitaffia 3y agoIt's what captures the mind. Profits matter and they are on the way
- xoa 3y agoUh, the business terminal is $2500, not $500 (and the standard terminal is $600 too). I don't live in a warzone, I live in northern New England. The "$3k for $500" thing is from the beta period over 3 years ago, costs on even the basic one have long since dropped a lot. Not including a router at all would also save a big pile of hardware. And it's not presence of SFP or separate ethernet or not that has anything to do with most of the BOM either. Literally nothing you wrote had anything to do with my comment, just generic LLM type shlock. Try to do better.
- inemesitaffia 3y agoLLM what? I'm on pretty much every starlink forum. Those rectangular dishes cost around $1700 to manufacture when they first became available. Maybe $400 to $750 today. You've never heard of loss leaders? Contrarevenue? Cost curves? Yes the first round ones were 3k all in. There's new board revisions all the time. Until Q2 2023 SpaceX was losing money on Terminals in the US. The discounts are still there outside the US. Do you think the cost of manufacturing is now under $250? How much does air shipping to Europe in bulk cost for the dishes?