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I don't understand. Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. Why are there no wired connections available? Do the connections not reach the famo

I don't understand. Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. Why are there no wired connections available? Do the connections not reach the famous last mile?

consensus1 3mo ago
Yes. The last mile problem is legitimately so difficult in rural areas that it is more cost effective to launch a constellation of 10,000+ satellites than it is to run the wires.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3mo ago
  If you happen to live within line of site of a cell tower buying a MIMO antenna and beaming internet off of a data plan is also somewhat viable, but Starlink is probably better on bandwidth and packet loss
  - fluoridation 3mo ago
    I wonder about the economics, though. Intuitively it doesn't seem like it can be more efficient to launch constellations of satellites than run kilometers of cables, even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop? So around two orders of magnitude cheaper than a satellite? Something isn't adding up for me.
    - Panzer04 3mo ago
      Starling is 10k satellites shared across the entire planet. A satellite will serve thousands of customers, whereas a fixed line only serves one. I think 10k is also severely understating the cost per customer. There's like hundreds of metres between these houses at a minimum, and in some areas possibly Kilometers from house to house.
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      Intuitively, what's the cost to get to orbit? SpaceX's Falcon reusable rocket lowered the cost to get to space by an order of magnitude or so, so you have to factor that in.
      - fluoridation 3mo ago
        I only counted the cost of the satellite itself. I assumed you can get it into orbit for free, so if it costs a cent more than that, it's a further argument against.
        elcritch 3mo ago
        Starlink is manufacturing the satellites at scale. They’re likely to cost not much differently from large ground based 5G towers at some point. The antennas are “digital” so no expensive mechanical systems needed.
        fluoridation 3mo ago
        Even if I grant that, radio towers don't deorbit after a few years. I have no idea what you mean by antennas being digital.
        inemesitaffia 3mo ago
        Older sats (and OneWeb) use parabolic dishes. Some fixed, some steerable. Apart from being SDR's, Starlink and its newer competition use phased array antennas. So they can provide extra capacity to denser areas.
      - inemesitaffia 3mo ago
        From the S1 satellites are $600k and launch is under $20 million
    - toast0 3mo ago
      > even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop? I don't know if we're still talking Africa or in general, but $10k doesn't get you anywhere near 20 km around me. I got municipal fiber recently, and our agency passes through the costs. On a 7 drop project of about 1 mile, aerial on existing poles, my share was $5k; plus I had to pay my own way to get conduit installed from the pole to my house, that was nearly $7k. Underground utilities are expensive!
      - deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
    - inemesitaffia 3mo ago
      The pre Starlink and pre AI estimate in the US was $20k per mile excluding terminating equipment and right of way and assuming regular soil. Now everything costs more and they'd rather build AI DC's
acchow 3mo ago
There are only 170 ground stations (about 100 in the US). So for someone living in rural america, it's really "famous last 300 miles".
- fluoridation 3mo ago
  That can't be right. The satellites can only cover a diameter of 15 miles. Anyone living any further from a ground station is still SOL.
  - sephamorr 3mo ago
    The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher, the diameter is at least 10x what you say. And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.
    - fluoridation 3mo ago
      >The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer. What the steering may get you is increasing the coverage of an area currently underserved by the constellation, and maybe a slight increase in diameter of ground covered due to the geometry, at the cost of lower signal strength. >And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station. Did they finally implement satellite-to-satellite links? Fine, if that actually works, they can indeed extend the range much further. I don't know if I believe it, though.
      - Dylan16807 3mo ago
        > You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer. Even ignoring that they have multiple arrays, they use separate antennas to talk to the base stations on a different frequency band.
      - 3mo ago
xoa 3mo ago
>Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. You are very out of date on your knowledge here. When it first launched yes, Starlink sats purely acted as "bent pipes" so you needed a ground station within 300-400 miles or so. But inter-sat optical laser links went online quite awhile ago so now data can go from a terminal through the orbital network to ground across the planet. That of course was required for them to offer air/maritime global service (as well as extremely remote areas like polar), can't put a ground station in the middle of the ocean. Incidentally that should allow them to beat the latency of standard fiber by quite a bit over a long enough distance, there was speculation it might become quite popular for HFT for example, but I haven't tried it. Edit: So I went ahead and checked, and interestingly at least via a v1 land based terminal on a basic plan they don't make use of it. So must be a higher end option or something? Picking a random top 50 site in Japan tbs.co.jp (163.45.254.1), a streaming TV site iirc, I got around 186ms ping on a fiber connection in rural New England, and 192ms via Starlink, almost exactly the difference one would expect for adding purely a LEO leg up to the nearest ground station. Maybe they want to charge for that, or maybe they're still fleshing out bandwidth on the intersat network. If anyone has a maritime or portable terminal or something it'd be interesting to see some comparisons. In principle on a great circle the distance for me should be something like 10600km, so maybe 12000ish including sats, 24k rtt, which at the speed of light should be more like 80ms. Even with some routing lag that's a big enough difference seems like it'd be noticeable if it was going via orbital mesh instead of ground and kind of fun to test.
- inemesitaffia 3mo ago
  Starlink right now only uses lasers where terrestrial paths aren't available. I'd have thought they'd sell a different product with lower latency over Ku band by now

I don't understand. Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. Why are there no wired connections available? Do the connections not reach the famous last mile?

consensus1 3mo ago

Yes. The last mile problem is legitimately so difficult in rural areas that it is more cost effective to launch a constellation of 10,000+ satellites than it is to run the wires.

SOLAR_FIELDS 3mo ago
If you happen to live within line of site of a cell tower buying a MIMO antenna and beaming internet off of a data plan is also somewhat viable, but Starlink is probably better on bandwidth and packet loss
- fluoridation 3mo ago
  I wonder about the economics, though. Intuitively it doesn't seem like it can be more efficient to launch constellations of satellites than run kilometers of cables, even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop? So around two orders of magnitude cheaper than a satellite? Something isn't adding up for me.
  - Panzer04 3mo ago
    Starling is 10k satellites shared across the entire planet. A satellite will serve thousands of customers, whereas a fixed line only serves one. I think 10k is also severely understating the cost per customer. There's like hundreds of metres between these houses at a minimum, and in some areas possibly Kilometers from house to house.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Intuitively, what's the cost to get to orbit? SpaceX's Falcon reusable rocket lowered the cost to get to space by an order of magnitude or so, so you have to factor that in.
    - fluoridation 3mo ago
      I only counted the cost of the satellite itself. I assumed you can get it into orbit for free, so if it costs a cent more than that, it's a further argument against.
      - elcritch 3mo ago
        Starlink is manufacturing the satellites at scale. They’re likely to cost not much differently from large ground based 5G towers at some point. The antennas are “digital” so no expensive mechanical systems needed.
        fluoridation 3mo ago
        Even if I grant that, radio towers don't deorbit after a few years. I have no idea what you mean by antennas being digital.
        inemesitaffia 3mo ago
        Older sats (and OneWeb) use parabolic dishes. Some fixed, some steerable. Apart from being SDR's, Starlink and its newer competition use phased array antennas. So they can provide extra capacity to denser areas.
    - inemesitaffia 3mo ago
      From the S1 satellites are $600k and launch is under $20 million
  - toast0 3mo ago
    > even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop? I don't know if we're still talking Africa or in general, but $10k doesn't get you anywhere near 20 km around me. I got municipal fiber recently, and our agency passes through the costs. On a 7 drop project of about 1 mile, aerial on existing poles, my share was $5k; plus I had to pay my own way to get conduit installed from the pole to my house, that was nearly $7k. Underground utilities are expensive!
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  - inemesitaffia 3mo ago
    The pre Starlink and pre AI estimate in the US was $20k per mile excluding terminating equipment and right of way and assuming regular soil. Now everything costs more and they'd rather build AI DC's

acchow 3mo ago

There are only 170 ground stations (about 100 in the US). So for someone living in rural america, it's really "famous last 300 miles".

fluoridation 3mo ago
That can't be right. The satellites can only cover a diameter of 15 miles. Anyone living any further from a ground station is still SOL.
- sephamorr 3mo ago
  The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher, the diameter is at least 10x what you say. And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.
  - fluoridation 3mo ago
    >The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer. What the steering may get you is increasing the coverage of an area currently underserved by the constellation, and maybe a slight increase in diameter of ground covered due to the geometry, at the cost of lower signal strength. >And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station. Did they finally implement satellite-to-satellite links? Fine, if that actually works, they can indeed extend the range much further. I don't know if I believe it, though.
    - Dylan16807 3mo ago
      > You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer. Even ignoring that they have multiple arrays, they use separate antennas to talk to the base stations on a different frequency band.
    - 3mo ago

xoa 3mo ago

>Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. You are very out of date on your knowledge here. When it first launched yes, Starlink sats purely acted as "bent pipes" so you needed a ground station within 300-400 miles or so. But inter-sat optical laser links went online quite awhile ago so now data can go from a terminal through the orbital network to ground across the planet. That of course was required for them to offer air/maritime global service (as well as extremely remote areas like polar), can't put a ground station in the middle of the ocean. Incidentally that should allow them to beat the latency of standard fiber by quite a bit over a long enough distance, there was speculation it might become quite popular for HFT for example, but I haven't tried it. Edit: So I went ahead and checked, and interestingly at least via a v1 land based terminal on a basic plan they don't make use of it. So must be a higher end option or something? Picking a random top 50 site in Japan tbs.co.jp (163.45.254.1), a streaming TV site iirc, I got around 186ms ping on a fiber connection in rural New England, and 192ms via Starlink, almost exactly the difference one would expect for adding purely a LEO leg up to the nearest ground station. Maybe they want to charge for that, or maybe they're still fleshing out bandwidth on the intersat network. If anyone has a maritime or portable terminal or something it'd be interesting to see some comparisons. In principle on a great circle the distance for me should be something like 10600km, so maybe 12000ish including sats, 24k rtt, which at the speed of light should be more like 80ms. Even with some routing lag that's a big enough difference seems like it'd be noticeable if it was going via orbital mesh instead of ground and kind of fun to test.

inemesitaffia 3mo ago
Starlink right now only uses lasers where terrestrial paths aren't available. I'd have thought they'd sell a different product with lower latency over Ku band by now