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Wow. Well, I believe that YOU are a bot, not me. Are you Grok? Anyway, yes, I am a human. And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point: https:/

Wow. Well, I believe that YOU are a bot, not me. Are you Grok? Anyway, yes, I am a human. And it is not that hard to find the sources for this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel... v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too.

hughes 1y ago
Why do you believe the inter-satellite links are not working?
- Fischgericht 1y ago
  [Due to the part of the spectrum I am on, I do not have believes or opinions.] The laser based inter-links still not working has been subject on various conferences like AngaCOM etc. But in my case: I have simply tried it *). And every Starlink user can do it, too: Use traceroute. And if you think "they might be hiding the hop-to-hops between Sats!", you can dig deeper using MTR behind the modem or simply rooting the modem itself. Last time I have connected to a v3 Sat however was ~6 months ago. Maybe an active user reading this can try today?
  - niwtsol 1y ago
    Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working? Hard to find it without getting lost in "Troubleshoot your starlink device" SEO hell.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working? The simpler answer is intra-constellation communication is a bleeding-edge technology. It's an extraordinary challenge for which extraordinary proof is needed to show success, not the other way around. SpaceX has solved most of the gating technical problems. But getting it to work reliably enough that it becomes more economic than ground-based backhaul will take time.
      - inemesitaffia 1y ago
        An even simpler answer is Starlink is available in locations too far from ground stations. Ergo they are served via laser. Cook Island Ascension Island Iran Venezuela Cuba Galapagos/Easter Islands Vanuatu Eastern Ukraine Syria Lebanon Iraq Iqaluit Antarctica, as South as the South Pole Tristan de Cunha The range of the ground stations are under 1500 miles and I really don't know where people are getting the idea that the lasers don't work.
        Fischgericht 1y ago
        "The range of the ground stations are under 1500 miles and I really don't know where people are getting the idea that the lasers don't work." Maybe because v1 and v2 did not even have working lasers on the hardware level...? The idea is coming from "reality", Starlinks own reporting, industry talks, tech press etc. Anyway, to shorten this we can agree that we have different definitions of what one expects from having a dedicate backbone. I would expect seamless handover amongst other things, which I have never ever seen, and unless you show me a video recording of a 24h Starlink session with MTR running I simply will trust the data I have over a random claim. As said elsewhere in this thread: It is extremely hard to find detailed benchmarks from happy Starlink users. Next to all positive content is paid content. And a quick look at trustpilot & co clearly hint that there a huge chunk of Starlink customers might be unhappy. And even if it's just because their online gaming sessions getting interrupted on every Sat hand-over, which exists in reality, but not in your mind :) Seriously, if you have access to any benchmark data sources, please gimme. I'm not here for "winning" an argument. Data, Data, Data.
        inemesitaffia 1y ago
        I've pointed out where you can get the data from a professor. You can also fly to one of the many Islands (or Iqaluit) I've mentioned and do your testing. https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming-42-million-gb-of-data-per-day https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming... It's quite fascinating, there's people who's only (or first) experience with Starlink is via lasers and there's people on the Internet who'll tell you it doesn't work (I forgot to mention Georgia and Kazakhstan) You really will hear everything on the Internet.
  - lxgr 1y ago
    You're equating occasional dropouts (which can happen for all kinds of reasons even in bent-pipe topologies) with the absence of inter-satellite links. That makes no sense. The empirical way to test for the existence of ISLs would be to go to the middle of an ocean, safely out of reach of any ground station, and see what happens. If you get a connection, that can only be due to ISLs. It seems like your actual complaints are with network/routing stability, and you're drawing invalid conclusions from there.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Fischgericht 1y ago
  Here is an example thread of someone having done the measurements of v3 vs mini: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1eg4e4d/starlink_v3_vs_mini_side_by_side_test_mobile_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1eg4e4d/starlink_... Have a look at the downtimes of the system. A simple way to verify that their inter-sat links are not working and/or are not used is to simply sit and wait: If you are switched from one Sat to the next, you get new "session" and previous NAT state is lost. If this would be a meshed backbone, that would not happen.
  - inemesitaffia 1y ago
    This is ridiculous. How's service delivered to the South Pole? Iqaluit? As long as your traffic is terminated at the same POP, you won't get any session terminations. And Starlink tells you when your public IP changes anyway
    - Fischgericht 1y ago
      Erm. That person has posted a detailed explanation on how he has measured. How can this be ridiculous? Is it ridiculous because the data does not match your believes...? Confirmation bias? It's Data. And it hints, amongst other things that they have seen the same that I am seeing on every single Starlink installation I got my hands on so far: There is no active handover, and no shared state between Sats. And you are referring to the wrong layer, talking about the ground station. Of course that does not move, and does not forget about your IP. Wrong layer. It's about the Satellites (!) not doing an active handover and not sharing L2 state, like it would the case for any meshed network, no matter if cellular or WiFi. The analogy here would be a WiFi access point or a cell tower, and you roaming from one to the next while having a phone call, not having any drop-outs. That's the industry standard for Wireless. Starlink isn't there (yet). If you don't think that true data is true, check ARP table of the MAC of your gateway IP changing after handover. You appear to be a happy Starlink user - so do you care to share some 24h benchmark with us to prove your claims? I would highly appreciate that! So far sadly none of the "But it works!" people has been able or willing to provide a benchmark on their own setup. ` Again: I am not here to win and argument. But to change my conclusions, I need data that hints at my conclusions potentially being wrong. As explained elsewhere in this thread, due to lack of serious benchmarks, most of this is based on anecdotical data points.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> I believe that YOU are a bot I don't believe you were a bot, but there were one or two phrasings that gave me pause. (If I believed you had written that with AI, I'd have just asked that and not bothered engaging.) > v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too Fair enough. $3.6mm on $2mm--assuming $100,000 per month revenue and $2mm paid up front, which is unrealistically conservative--yields a 22% annualised. Take that out to the increasingly-attained design life of 5 years and it jumps to 25%. To put it bluntly, these are both incredibly high telecom returns. You've already incorporated launch, maintenance, disposal, et cetera in TCO. So the remainder is customer service (usually 5 to 10% of revenue) and cost of capital. Even assuming 10% WACC, which is on the upper end for a leveraged telecom play, we're still comfortably generating excess return. Where the comparison fall apart is in respect of fibre. Laying physical infrastructure is hard. You have long periods between capital outlay and return. Also, you have to right scale up front--you can't just launch more birds in a few months as demand scales (or hold them back if it doesn't). You're not going to replace fibre with Starlink. But the economic case for the latter doesn't fall apart with 20%+ operating returns.
- Fischgericht 1y ago
  Well, on purpose I have given Starlink very optimistic numbers, yes. :) And yes, 22% yield sounds nice, but if someone would hand me their pitch deck and give me a SWAT analysis I would just laugh them away: The risks are far too high. (See for example the article that this very thread is about.) Of course you can only guess based on that, but it looks that in real life things are worse: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growing-rapidly-as-it-faces-a-moment-of-promise-and-peril/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growin... These data points might be interpreted as "Starlink is getting 40% of their revenue from tax money". And while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium ;) Your point in regards of laying physical infrastructure is valid for a lot of western countries. But not all of them. Some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again. So: This is a regulatory subject really, not physical cost. Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example (which is unlike with copper obviously not a problem in regards of signal integrity), or existing underground pipes, or just throw it from house roof to house roof.
wmf 1y ago
The sat-to-sat laser links are used to provide connectivity on the open ocean and in remote parts of Australia and Argentina that are beyond the range of any ground station. They're definitely working but AFAIK they are only used when necessary so if you're within range of a ground station your traffic will never use laser links.
- Fischgericht 1y ago
  I will not disagree as I can not verify this claim. Have you tested it yourself or have a source which has some tech proof on that one?
- Fischgericht 1y ago
  Oops, forgot one important thing: Sure, why do additional hops if you can see the base station. But what about shared state? Why do you definitely still get a completely new session when moving to the next sat? If the laser links are working, that state should be shared between neighboring sats.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Why do you definitely still get a completely new session when moving to the next sat? If the laser links are working Imagine Amazon 10x'd its ingress/egress fees between regions.
    - inemesitaffia 1y ago
      You're not getting new sessions period.
  - inemesitaffia 1y ago
    Starlink switches beams every 15 seconds and satellites every 120 seconds. You keep your sessions through both. Lasers or no lasers
  - lxgr 1y ago
    Inter-satellite links simply provide additional (time-variant) paths, which doesn't inherently relate to shared state. You seem to be under the impression that inter-satellite links somehow imply a self-organizing mesh topology that preserves terminal-to-gateway associations at any cost (including that of extra in-space hops), but that does not necessarily follow from the existence of ISLs. In other words, your observation of occasional routing instability causing higher-layer issues is perfectly compatible with working ISLs.

hughes 1y ago

Why do you believe the inter-satellite links are not working?

Fischgericht 1y ago
[Due to the part of the spectrum I am on, I do not have believes or opinions.] The laser based inter-links still not working has been subject on various conferences like AngaCOM etc. But in my case: I have simply tried it *). And every Starlink user can do it, too: Use traceroute. And if you think "they might be hiding the hop-to-hops between Sats!", you can dig deeper using MTR behind the modem or simply rooting the modem itself. Last time I have connected to a v3 Sat however was ~6 months ago. Maybe an active user reading this can try today?
- niwtsol 1y ago
  Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working? Hard to find it without getting lost in "Troubleshoot your starlink device" SEO hell.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working? The simpler answer is intra-constellation communication is a bleeding-edge technology. It's an extraordinary challenge for which extraordinary proof is needed to show success, not the other way around. SpaceX has solved most of the gating technical problems. But getting it to work reliably enough that it becomes more economic than ground-based backhaul will take time.
    - inemesitaffia 1y ago
      An even simpler answer is Starlink is available in locations too far from ground stations. Ergo they are served via laser. Cook Island Ascension Island Iran Venezuela Cuba Galapagos/Easter Islands Vanuatu Eastern Ukraine Syria Lebanon Iraq Iqaluit Antarctica, as South as the South Pole Tristan de Cunha The range of the ground stations are under 1500 miles and I really don't know where people are getting the idea that the lasers don't work.
      - Fischgericht 1y ago
        "The range of the ground stations are under 1500 miles and I really don't know where people are getting the idea that the lasers don't work." Maybe because v1 and v2 did not even have working lasers on the hardware level...? The idea is coming from "reality", Starlinks own reporting, industry talks, tech press etc. Anyway, to shorten this we can agree that we have different definitions of what one expects from having a dedicate backbone. I would expect seamless handover amongst other things, which I have never ever seen, and unless you show me a video recording of a 24h Starlink session with MTR running I simply will trust the data I have over a random claim. As said elsewhere in this thread: It is extremely hard to find detailed benchmarks from happy Starlink users. Next to all positive content is paid content. And a quick look at trustpilot & co clearly hint that there a huge chunk of Starlink customers might be unhappy. And even if it's just because their online gaming sessions getting interrupted on every Sat hand-over, which exists in reality, but not in your mind :) Seriously, if you have access to any benchmark data sources, please gimme. I'm not here for "winning" an argument. Data, Data, Data.
        inemesitaffia 1y ago
        I've pointed out where you can get the data from a professor. You can also fly to one of the many Islands (or Iqaluit) I've mentioned and do your testing. https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming-42-million-gb-of-data-per-day https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming... It's quite fascinating, there's people who's only (or first) experience with Starlink is via lasers and there's people on the Internet who'll tell you it doesn't work (I forgot to mention Georgia and Kazakhstan) You really will hear everything on the Internet.
- lxgr 1y ago
  You're equating occasional dropouts (which can happen for all kinds of reasons even in bent-pipe topologies) with the absence of inter-satellite links. That makes no sense. The empirical way to test for the existence of ISLs would be to go to the middle of an ocean, safely out of reach of any ground station, and see what happens. If you get a connection, that can only be due to ISLs. It seems like your actual complaints are with network/routing stability, and you're drawing invalid conclusions from there.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Fischgericht 1y ago
Here is an example thread of someone having done the measurements of v3 vs mini: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1eg4e4d/starlink_v3_vs_mini_side_by_side_test_mobile_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1eg4e4d/starlink_... Have a look at the downtimes of the system. A simple way to verify that their inter-sat links are not working and/or are not used is to simply sit and wait: If you are switched from one Sat to the next, you get new "session" and previous NAT state is lost. If this would be a meshed backbone, that would not happen.
- inemesitaffia 1y ago
  This is ridiculous. How's service delivered to the South Pole? Iqaluit? As long as your traffic is terminated at the same POP, you won't get any session terminations. And Starlink tells you when your public IP changes anyway
  - Fischgericht 1y ago
    Erm. That person has posted a detailed explanation on how he has measured. How can this be ridiculous? Is it ridiculous because the data does not match your believes...? Confirmation bias? It's Data. And it hints, amongst other things that they have seen the same that I am seeing on every single Starlink installation I got my hands on so far: There is no active handover, and no shared state between Sats. And you are referring to the wrong layer, talking about the ground station. Of course that does not move, and does not forget about your IP. Wrong layer. It's about the Satellites (!) not doing an active handover and not sharing L2 state, like it would the case for any meshed network, no matter if cellular or WiFi. The analogy here would be a WiFi access point or a cell tower, and you roaming from one to the next while having a phone call, not having any drop-outs. That's the industry standard for Wireless. Starlink isn't there (yet). If you don't think that true data is true, check ARP table of the MAC of your gateway IP changing after handover. You appear to be a happy Starlink user - so do you care to share some 24h benchmark with us to prove your claims? I would highly appreciate that! So far sadly none of the "But it works!" people has been able or willing to provide a benchmark on their own setup. ` Again: I am not here to win and argument. But to change my conclusions, I need data that hints at my conclusions potentially being wrong. As explained elsewhere in this thread, due to lack of serious benchmarks, most of this is based on anecdotical data points.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> I believe that YOU are a bot I don't believe you were a bot, but there were one or two phrasings that gave me pause. (If I believed you had written that with AI, I'd have just asked that and not bothered engaging.) > v1 constellation was completed in 2021, and decommissioned from 2024. v2 deployed from 2023, but the sat-to-sat communication is not working, so all of them, will need to be replaced by v3, too Fair enough. $3.6mm on $2mm--assuming $100,000 per month revenue and $2mm paid up front, which is unrealistically conservative--yields a 22% annualised. Take that out to the increasingly-attained design life of 5 years and it jumps to 25%. To put it bluntly, these are both incredibly high telecom returns. You've already incorporated launch, maintenance, disposal, et cetera in TCO. So the remainder is customer service (usually 5 to 10% of revenue) and cost of capital. Even assuming 10% WACC, which is on the upper end for a leveraged telecom play, we're still comfortably generating excess return. Where the comparison fall apart is in respect of fibre. Laying physical infrastructure is hard. You have long periods between capital outlay and return. Also, you have to right scale up front--you can't just launch more birds in a few months as demand scales (or hold them back if it doesn't). You're not going to replace fibre with Starlink. But the economic case for the latter doesn't fall apart with 20%+ operating returns.

Fischgericht 1y ago
Well, on purpose I have given Starlink very optimistic numbers, yes. :) And yes, 22% yield sounds nice, but if someone would hand me their pitch deck and give me a SWAT analysis I would just laugh them away: The risks are far too high. (See for example the article that this very thread is about.) Of course you can only guess based on that, but it looks that in real life things are worse: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growing-rapidly-as-it-faces-a-moment-of-promise-and-peril/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growin... These data points might be interpreted as "Starlink is getting 40% of their revenue from tax money". And while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium ;) Your point in regards of laying physical infrastructure is valid for a lot of western countries. But not all of them. Some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again. So: This is a regulatory subject really, not physical cost. Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example (which is unlike with copper obviously not a problem in regards of signal integrity), or existing underground pipes, or just throw it from house roof to house roof.

wmf 1y ago

The sat-to-sat laser links are used to provide connectivity on the open ocean and in remote parts of Australia and Argentina that are beyond the range of any ground station. They're definitely working but AFAIK they are only used when necessary so if you're within range of a ground station your traffic will never use laser links.

Fischgericht 1y ago
I will not disagree as I can not verify this claim. Have you tested it yourself or have a source which has some tech proof on that one?
Fischgericht 1y ago
Oops, forgot one important thing: Sure, why do additional hops if you can see the base station. But what about shared state? Why do you definitely still get a completely new session when moving to the next sat? If the laser links are working, that state should be shared between neighboring sats.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Why do you definitely still get a completely new session when moving to the next sat? If the laser links are working Imagine Amazon 10x'd its ingress/egress fees between regions.
  - inemesitaffia 1y ago
    You're not getting new sessions period.
- inemesitaffia 1y ago
  Starlink switches beams every 15 seconds and satellites every 120 seconds. You keep your sessions through both. Lasers or no lasers
- lxgr 1y ago
  Inter-satellite links simply provide additional (time-variant) paths, which doesn't inherently relate to shared state. You seem to be under the impression that inter-satellite links somehow imply a self-organizing mesh topology that preserves terminal-to-gateway associations at any cost (including that of extra in-space hops), but that does not necessarily follow from the existence of ISLs. In other words, your observation of occasional routing instability causing higher-layer issues is perfectly compatible with working ISLs.