Starlink Is a Big Deal
sneak.berlin
sneak.berlin
It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house. It's a cool sight to see because there are up to 60 of them crossing the sky at the same time in a line.
When I got the location permission request I denied it and then it says there were no sightings available for the next 5 days :(
* manually entered location
* IP address based geoip
* location permission
The site doesn't work at all for me, even if I give location permission. Because that's disabled in Firefox.
> See Starlink
> Click to search for viewing times at your location.
So I click, and see a popup:
> Will you allow james.darpinian.com to access your location?
So I click on "Allow Location Access".
Then I see "Loading", with a GIF. But nothing ever loads.
Checking about:config, I see that NoScript likely added these:
> capability.policy.maonoscript.sites modified string [numerous domains]
> noscript.untrusted modified string [numerous domains]
I get the same result if I don't allow location access.
That's all I know offhand. But I'll be happy to check more carefully, if you like.
It's the old browser, not anything to do with your privacy settings. Sorry, when you decide to use an old and uncommon browser version the price you pay is that sites aren't going to be testing compatibility with it.
> Firefox ESR
> October 23, 2018
I'm just a little surprised that Firefox would have changed enough since last May to break your site.
And there's also the other tweaks I've made. For example, I don't allow WebGL or WebRTC. And I spoof referrer to a site's root. Plus other stuff that I don't recall offhand.
But anyway, now I'm curious, so I'll test in some otherf VMs, with different browsers.
It works perfectly in Firefox v71.0 :)
And a very cool sky view animation!
I used to display only the 3D globe by default, with a gigantic bright green button to switch to street view. The majority of people never saw the Street View feature even though it was only one button press away. The button even had an animated effect to draw attention. If you also had to type in some text before seeing Street View, hardly anyone would bother.
Your way seems like it just adds a step and possible side effects like people thinking less of the site for not having their correct location or not seeing the improve location option after being turned off, etc.
...suddenly I'm shy about listing my finger printable browser details online. I'll tell you I'm using brave.
I still can't use the app because the location denial is permanent, so I'll have to clear something in the browser...might be a bug worth addressing.
Edit 2: Jesus Christ man I had no idea I was giving you my fucking address. That's a little too granular for my taste, a warning would be nice. You could just use the zip code or prompt for the address, but seeing Google go straight to my address in streetview really rubs me the wrong way. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt but it looks like you're harvesting PII.
I didn't click the "notify me" button but I imagine it's asking for either a phone number or an email.
If this is truly innocent I'm sorry for my reaction, but you should be asking people first, given the current state of advertisement and surveillance on the net. We both read HN.
It was a nice idea though.
So the accuracy of the location being provided depends entirely on your device. From a website (or any other app) perspective, they simply request the client provide it's location.
Now if you happen to have a strong GPS lock on your device with 5m or less accuracy, that's not something the website (or app) knows ahead of time.
> If this is truly innocent I'm sorry for my reaction, but you should be asking people first, given the current state of advertisement and surveillance on the net. We both read HN.
Not trying to victim blame here, but if you're claiming more technical audience and concerns about privacy, are you genuinely unaware that this is how location services and permissions works? If so, I guess this is a painful learning experience for you. You're gonna have a bad time now as you think about how many different apps you've given location permissions too, because a lot of those apps will have a bunch of third party trackers involved that are connecting your IP, location, along with device identifier and any other information they can use to add to a much larger database to identify exactly who you are and everyone you know (think I'm exagerating on the last part? Have you ever shared your contacts list with an app like Whatsapp to find other contacts?)
The internet today sucks. I don't think this particular author is the person you want to be pooping hard on, they're highly unlikely to be part of the problem.
Alternatively, they may be accidentally triggering a vulnerability (more bug bounty money or reasons to patch)
Alternatively, you accidentally gave the permission for location services when prompted.
Alternatively, your IP has a GeoIP location that is at / very close to your home address. If this is the case, GeoIP databases are like telephone directories of yore. Except not only are they globally public, you also cant opt out.
Sorry!
And I suspect that you're using a VPN service, given the comment about deanonymization.
But really, this is exactly why it's kinda sorta pointless to use VPNs and Tor browser on smartphones. All it takes is one slipup, and your anonymity is toast.
This must be made up. I have been assured repeatedly on HN that Starlink is a visual non-factor, and that nobody would notice them in the sky, they won't get in the way of astronomy, stargazing, or just enjoying the night sky like humans have done for thousands of years.
They cross over so fast it’s basically like looking at planes, but they are much further away than planes so you have to really look to see them.
And I don’t think anyone ever (credibly) said they don’t affect astronomy. They do. Fortunately SpaceX is working with the astronomy community to minimize the effect.
If I do look up in the nights sky and see many faint little points, it’s still something to marvel at. But I think once at operational altitude they will be difficult to see with the naked eye.
I already collected 25 old microwave ovens which I plan to operate as phased array to produce a collimated beam of microwaves directed at the satellites to fry their electronics. I might have a better chance If know the exact frequency their receivers are tuned to. Does anybody know more?
The reckless littering of our precious LEO must end here!
Damn those billionaires and their... global high speed satellite internet access, right?
This sounds like you are invoking Kessler Syndrome in LEO to protect the geostationary monopolies. Totally violates antitrust law.
All my previous experience has been viewing the ISS, and watching the Starlink satellites go over was a much different experience. Each was only visible for a handful of seconds, but they kept coming one after the other in a perfect line, each equidistant from the next.
I didn't stay out to watch them all go by but it was a fantastic experience that I'd recommend to anyone.
Calendar events suck too because there's no standard way to add an event to a system calendar across platforms. Even the same browser on different platforms acts differently.
this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming you offer everyone a 100MB/s connection, that's... one city? And that doesn't account for transmission between the satellites or satellites not in range and so on, and the fact that those satellites are short-lived and need to be replaced.
How is this supposed to be economical or scale compared to regular terrestrial networks?
And one point on the social impact. We have heard this idea that you just need to 'connect people' over the internet to somehow give every disadvantaged place economic opportunity for decades now. This isn't how the real world works. Everyone still runs to California/their national equivalent You can count the areas where the VC money goes on one hand. Putting a satellite in the sky over Siberia isn't going to upend the social realities of geography.
Aside from that they already have plans to send up 30.000 more satellites [1] and of course future satellites might also have a significantly higher throughput.
[1]: https://spacenews.com/spacex-submits-paperwork-for-30000-mor...
On the other hand, we finally got FTTH and it's great. So nice to have good speeds.
It's ridiculous to assume that everyone will be using 100MB/s at all times.
I certainly find Starlink interesting, but I think its impact will be a lot smaller than the author does.
An average constant bitrate per person in the evenings is perhaps around 10 Mb/s. So 25 million people could use this assuming 100% satellite use.
One way to look at it is up to 42 million 4k streams at the same time. But, a significant fraction of the constellation will be over the ocean or other minimally inhabited regions so something like 25% of total bandwidth is likely utilized at any one time. However, that’s spread around the globe with some areas like Hawaii having much better than average available bandwidth.
SpaceX got approval to launch these satellites from the FCC.
Some countries attempted to claim sovereignty over geostationary orbit, but failed http://djilp.org/the-bogota-declaration-and-the-curious-case...
They could sell a certain data speed to areas with low subscriber base though and provide more speed than advertised/agreed upon though.
It’s not 100% of it, but it is absolutely an essential prerequisite. Slow or no internet makes places a nonstarter. Having a fallback option to a single national telco lets lots of places start the long process of building an information economy that they cannot begin at all without it.
If you were to do napkin math on which cities have the best internet speeds and the lowest cost of doing business, and the best regulations then probably we'd all have moved to Estonia by now, but people are still more likely to go to Israel, a place in the middle of a warzone.
So for that reason, I find hyping technology up as the great equalizer very cynical. It's mostly still people and culture at the end of the day.
If people can fall in love online, they can certainly collaborate without having to smell each other.
Think how much easier it gets to stand up a tower when all you need is electricity on-site.
I offered $1/yr lease to the providers, all of them, to put a tower on my farm and not one of them is even a little interested.
I know that I feel ripped off every single day by what we pay for mobile data compared to the rest of the world. If Starlink suddenly shows up there is an alternative to Bell Rogers Telus. They should be shaking in their boots. It should be easy for Starlink to undercut their business because they made a business out of customer gouging.
Obviously you meant “bars” but I found myself wondering what kind of throughput a single Bard has, assuming they sing at maximum speed...
Assuming a single (very talented) bard can sing five words per second at maximum speed, and assuming each word is a few bytes, plus some kind of checksum occasionally, we are looking at very roughly 200 bps.
So “two bards” is about 400 bps, or far, far slower than my first modem :)
If it's not sensible, I'm sure the speed will also be correspondingly slower.
I routinely drive through a tunnel that’s 4.5km long, sometimes at 30kph due to traffic.
The big ISPs make things like municipal broadband very hard to bring about. This leaves connectivity of these communities in the hands of an executive many miles away, and they will always place more attention to the massive profits of bringing 5G to people in rich cities (themselves included) than servicing low or even no-profit markets.
At this point some level of internet access could and maybe should be considered a public utility.
I'm haven't looked into the economics of running fiber everywhere, as compared to launching an extensive constellation of satellites but I will note that SpaceX has the competitive advantage of having at-cost access to reusable rockets, compared to an outside party paying SpaceX market rates for transit to space.
Really anything is better than what’s currently available in the rural US. Having grown up there I’m kind of mad that we give so much spectrum to cell companies who block people from setting up terrestrial radio networks in places like this.
https://www.satelliteinternet.com/resources/unlimited-satell...
We can argue about whether latency matters for most people, but it's not going to go anywhere.
Couldn’t you pay for more than one account and combine them?
Or are you saying the cap for an entire satellite is 20GB per month?
Any houses for sale nearby?
Sometimes I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing?
But if the only way to find out what your homework is is a website, and that homework is posted as a multimegabyte PDF (this is how it's working for my kids, not a hypothetical), then lack of an available internet connection immediately affects your ability to effectively attend school, for example.
Now we can have a discussion about whether school is necessary for a fulfilling childhood, of course. :)
If you’re remote, they shouldn’t care where you are. It’s just a sales issue, then, and can be overcome like any other sales objection.
It depends on whether you are an employee or contractor. For a contractor, it mostly shouldn't matter. (Some countries, especially countries with which the HQ country has difficult relations, may represent unacceptable risk even for a contractor.)
With an employee, the employer has to be registered to pay tax in the country; they need to familiarise themselves with the labour laws of the country to ensure they comply with them; they may need to make various arrangements with respect to benefits (insurance, retirement, etc); usually to do all this they need to have a legal entity set up in the country, which in turn also needs things like local bank accounts, directors appointed, accounting and auditing contracts, etc. For the first employee in a country, that can be a lot of overhead. If some manager wants to hire some random person in country X where there are currently no employees, it probably isn't worth it unless they plan to hire more people in country X, or that person is someone very special.
A workaround some places use is contract with some sort of agency who acts as the employee's legal employer and handles all those local legal/tax/benefits/etc issues. However, that adds overhead costs, and if a firm doesn't already have a relationship with such an agency, they probably aren't going to start one just because some manager wants to hire somebody in a country in which there is no legal entity.
For instance, my typical monthly mobile data consumption is around 4 GB, which is .0015 MB/s -- a far cry from 100!
Also the target audience of this, the people that will be able to afford it, are going to be highly paid people (assumption: it's going be charged higher than 30£/month, or even £60/mo) who will be more likely to do those sorts of activities due to having more free time.
On the other hand, it's far worse than "20G per satellite." Bandwidth is limited by available RF spectrum, and that's not magically gonna increase with satellite count. Best thing they can try is limit the coverage area of each radio as much as possible, but there's limits to that and now you have an onslaught of handovers since the satellites are moving quite fast.
I honestly am too lazy to do the math, but my gut says this may work great for larger areas with lower population density (let's say the Amazon, U.S. Midwest, Australia, Sibiria, etc.) but it's not gonna replace high-density broadband access.
Also, just for comparison, current optical network technology (in the market, not research) puts 50G on a single wavelength on an optical fiber. There's 80 wavelengths in a medium-density DWDM setup, so that's 4T ... on a single strand. A low-density cable has 12 cores (that's what you deploy on the outskirts of your network), so, uh, 48 terabit/s with current technology. Infrastructure cables are commonly 144 cores, that's 576 terabit/s...
(These are obviously "maximum" numbers, you rarely see all 80 wavelengths or all 144 strands in use, and there's gonna be slower links like 10G occupying some wavelengths too.)
That's not true. More satellites allows you to put them in lower orbits, increasing spatial multiplexing. Yes, even for the same spectrum.
This is not like mobile where the phones have fairly omnidirectional antenna (improving to a handful of elements under 5G). The user terminals will have dozens if not hundreds or thousands of phased array elements, allowing connections to multiple satellites simultaneously and very narrow beamwidths. The satellites also have phased arrays with lots of elements.
I agree that dense cities and optical fiber will still be able to beat out Starlink (and similar), but there is PLENTY of room for using the same amount of RF spectrum for vastly greater bandwidth using spatial multiplexing and phased arrays on both ends and multiple, cooperating satellites in view simultaneously.
In both setups, there are multiple levels of bottlenecks. The bottom line is that a properly configured network makes sure they can cover their usual peak usage easily, and has enough spare capacity that special events don't impact much of the customer base, and those it impact it doesn't do so much.
Consider that ISPs that offer gigabit speeds can't easily put in individual (or even paired) networking equipment that can serve thousands of people at that speed, because such equipment doesn't exist or is far too expensive to be using all over the place in the network. What you really see is that 100 people on gigabit circuits during peak usage (likely Netflix prime time in the evening) will use less than even a fiftieth or h undredth of their allocated capacity (unless you're steaming 4k all the time, and then you'll probably use about a fortieth of a gigabit sustained). As usage goes up, ISPs allocate more resources and shift traffic around to make sure they can supply for the demand. If done well, you don't ever notice.
You can also see this in highways and freeways. No highway is build to serve all the possible people that could use it at the same time, it's built to service what the number of people expected to use it in a specific time period is. This is also a good idea of what it's like when planning fails, as these works require a long lead time and a lot of accurate forecasting that's hard, so you often see vastly under-provisioned systems, and even by the time they upgrade them, they are sometimes already under-provisioned at the new size (or the time until it's under-provisioned is relatively short).
Because they can reallocate satellite time to a new region quite cheaply, they could have approximately zero customers while forcing ISPs around the globe to behave sensibly.
https://twitter.com/chmn_victor/status/1219721896075366403
Most likely this is mainly to be used by bankers and computer stock traders to buy and sell stocks even faster over the ocean.
For an extreme example, an area with extremely low population (like the middle of the ocean), the bandwidth (at least surface to satellite bandwidth) will be wasted if no one is using it. The price could be much lower.
A poor community in a rich and population dense area probably would be priced out.
Will be interesting to see how it shakes out in practice. I could see it go both ways honestly.
I don't think it is. People think they're going to get unlimited data, gigabit connection, etc etc and I think they're all highly delusional.
Starlink is not meant to replace wired internet, it's meant to give HughesNet customers something that is actually usable. It's meant to give people in remote areas with no wired connection available something that actually allows them to meaningfully interact with the internet.
Realistically I see it like this:
I think the bulk of the customers will always be companies working in remote areas such as ships, oil rigs, mining operations, gas stations primarily serving semi trucks in rural areas along highways etc. Also, first responder agencies as it will be handy in grid-down natural disasters for command centers.
Then you'll have RV parks, camp sites, rest stops, EV charging locations in remote areas, etc reselling access by subscription or in time increments.
Then you'll have folks that just live in rural areas that want something better than HughesNet and possibly THOW/vanlife folks that work remotely and move frequently.
Then you'll have low-profit/served-at-cost customers that will be schools in developing nations, especially in rural areas.
And of course, people don't use 100MB/s constantly. The ratio is not uncommonly 1:100 in max vs average throughput, and this ratio is higher the greater the max bandwidth (average used throughput increases sub-linearly with max throughput). So say about 1Mbps average per user with 40Pbps constellation-wide, and you're looking at on the order of billions of connections possible at the largest scale.
Still about 12Pbps possible at 12000 satellites. Enough for billions of connections still.
Even at 20Gbps and 12,000 satellites and 1Mbps average usage per connection, that's still on the order of a hundred million connections.
More likely, they'll have fewer-than-billions of connections with more available average bandwidth than 1Mbps. But it definitely is a gamechanger in rural internet capability.
I wonder if tracking down some malicious attacker will be much harder without the need for wires, although probably not too different
To begin with you need to acquire Starlink's receiver, which probably makes it inaccessible to North Koreans for example, and difficult to acquire for citizens of any country that has efficient import controls.
Then you have to use it without being detected. I have no idea whether that is easy or hard -- can you put the receiver in a covert location? Can the government drive a van around your neighborhood and detect signals going to and from the receiver, or triangulate it in some other way?
If it bypasses existing censorship infrastructure in a given country and Starlink refuses to comply with censorship, you can guarantee that country will make it illegal, and in some cases introduce some scary penalties for using it (i.e. prison).
I also think it might be somewhat difficult to detect and track receivers down. You need specialized equipment to triangulate receivers, multiple vehicles. AFAIK Starling satellites use phased array antennas, which, if I understand correctly, might mean that they can sort of direct a beam towards you, and your dish will be pointed at the sky, not wasting power directing waves in every direction. That makes triangulation significantly harder than it would be for a cellphone.
That being said, Elon Musk can't just enable Starlink everywhere. China has enormous political leverage and a powerful military, and Tesla just finished building a new factory there. He can't just give them the middle finger. The official policy will be to either comply with the Chinese filtering rules, or not offer Starlink in China. Still, if Elon does care about censorship, maybe he will leave some kind of backdoor... Maybe it will be surprisingly easy to "crack" your Starlink receiver and set it to a fake country code, and suddenly have access to unfiltered US-region internet from anywhere (think mod chips). Then, China and other countries may not care enough to crack down. People routinely bypass the Chinese firewall using VPNs, and as far as I know, they're not going to prison for it. Hopefully it remains that way.
It's not "specialized", more like just dedicated, because those devices are pretty simple to create. Also, mathematically, one "running" vehicle is enough, but two is minimum for the sake of precision and efficiency.
> AFAIK Starling satellites use phased array antennas,
Phased arrays do leak signals all over the place ("side lobe"). If transmit power is high enough, this can be detected miles away. Say, during military exercise, activating phased-array based FCR randomly rings RWRs of nearby jets (if the signal is not whitelisted beforehand).
> maybe he will leave some kind of backdoor... Maybe it will be surprisingly easy to "crack" your Starlink receiver and set it to a fake country code, and suddenly have access to unfiltered US-region internet from anywhere
I don't get where people get this kind of blind optimism. The reality is that traffic control can be imposed based on physical location of satellite. Plus, VPN is cheap and works just okay, except occasional take downs. This new internet won't cause any kind of paradigm shift that some people desperately try to push.
I would expect the intensity of those signals to be constantly varying, given that multiple satellites are moving in the sky on different orbital planes. I'm also assuming that said "side lobes" are not equal in intensity in every direction. That has to be significantly more difficult to triangulate than a cellphone or an AM radio emitter. In other words, you would need trained crews specifically trying to locate Starlink users.
> The reality is that traffic control can be imposed based on physical location of satellite.
Satellites don't have enough fuel to constantly dodge specific countries. We're talking about low earth orbit satellites, that's one orbit every 1.6 hour. You could adjust your orbital planes to optimize coverage for some countries and not others, but once the whole Starlink fleet is up there, you will still have coverage basically everywhere.
> This new internet won't cause any kind of paradigm shift that some people desperately try to push.
Probably not, but it will be one more means of global communication, with more coverage than anything we've seen before.
The problem is mostly with the frequency band, because it's regulated (or should I say pre-allocated for certain purposes). It's just too easy to notice if someone is using satellite communication, how many and where.
> Satellites don't have enough fuel to constantly dodge specific countries
I'm not saying they should avoid certain countries. It's just about network policies - routing and filtering - which happen on software level.
> Probably not, but it will be one more means of global communication, with more coverage than anything we've seen before.
True. This is a progress. What I'm saying is that this is just one step, not a leap by itself.
I just can't stand people's indistinction b/w progress and paradigm shift, because it's the major source of hype. You know, it takes so many steps for technology to become magic, so why can't we just sit tight and watch, instead of going full frenzy every time something happens. I mean, that's how I see all those futurology stuffs.
SpaceX would need a strategy how to import and distribute their gear if they wanna bypass censorships. Satcom existed long before them and is strictly regulated in most dictatorships (you'd be surprised how long the list is).
Sadly, such optimistic posts are probably gonna do more damage to few who's going to be beheaded by regime...
Great article, but this part is just false.
Africa is blanketed with internet access already - often way ahead of 1st world (I recall reading an article about Seattle getting LTE-A and thinking...wait...got that a year ago). It doesn't quite create the magic the author implies. A bit like writing code doesn't mean you can create the next big app. A lot of ingredients go into it
External bandwidth costs are also coming down massively as loads of new submarine fiber cables are connecting africa.
However, even a basic smartphone will cost 400%+ of many people's monthly income. Penetration of feature phones is high though as they are so cheap.
Starlink imo will not be transformational for these places. It will be extremely useful for somewhat niche cases like rural broadband in the US, cruise ships and planes. It won't work well in cities or even suburban areas (20gigabit per sat is only 2,000HD video streams - which a small city of 100k will completely swamp).
I am not sure this is a good prediction ... the shaving of milliseconds that has been pursued by HFT firms (and other such actors) has progressed to the point where they are measuring cable lengths inside the datacenter.
Even at a greatly reduced orbit, I can't believe that bouncing up and down via satellite as part of your link could be any part of a time-arbitrage recipe in 2020 and beyond ...
Consider that the distance between New York and London is ~5500km, and these satellites are only ~500km up, that gives you quite a bit of margin to be faster.
Also, if the satellite is halfway between them (without taking the curvature of the earth into account, assuming a flat earth and the signal only goes through one satellite), the signal still has to travel 5590 km to cross the Atlantic (at almost c). Probably a solvable problem but not a trivial one.
1. Signals travel faster through the air and vacuum of space than they do fiber optic cables or electrical cables. 2. If there is an HFT trader based in the U.S. looking to trade based on events happening in Spain or Japan, they still want to get data across continents in the fastest way possible.
EDIT: Apparently other posters traded on the information arbitrage opportunity of replying to your post several seconds faster than I did. gg.
Really? Just some rough napkin math here, but only photonic bandgap fiber reaches near light speed (~99.7%) and I'm not aware of any large real world deployments of that or even near future ones. Regular fiber is only around 70% c. Transmissions through air (and obviously near vacuum as it exits the main atmosphere) are very nearly c. So from a latency perspective Starlink should in principle have up to a 42% inherent raw transmission speed advantage right? So that then has to go against the extra RTT to get up to a satellite and back. It looks like the lowest V-band shell is planned to be at just 210 miles, with another shell at 340 mi, and a final Ku/Ka-band shell at 710 mi. I don't know if the lowest shells are supposed to have any point to point mesh capability or must go to a higher shell first, but if they can that's only about a 420 mi inherent RTT penalty. For a link over 1400 miles, that seems like it might give them an advantage. Of course, there will be other routing factors, but then again on the fiber side only a few links (NYC to London for example) are actually really point to point optimized, most routes around greatly separated parts of the world have their own extra distance penalties due to transmissions having to take the legs of triangles rather then the hypotenuse.
I'm not an HFT person, but I assume there is probably arbitrage to be done between, say, NYC/London and Tokyo or other Asian exchanges and the like too. A lot of those are 6000 to 7000 mi, something like NYC to Sydney (ASX) approaches 10,000 mi. At those kinds of distances even if the signal has to go all the way up to the outer shell to mesh it looks to me like it could still beat a conventional fiber transmission right? I don't know if HFT firms will be that core as customers or how important they are in the scheme of things here, but a rough check certain seems to indicate there should be potential there in terms of the physics and what infrastructure is current deployed.
Later satellites will have inter-satellite links, but probably not till near the end of this year, and most of the first phase will already be deployed by then.
You're conflating optimisation of latency within a colo - how quickly can you send an order in response to seeing an event on that exchange - with latency between colos - how quickly can you send an order in response to seeing an event on another exchange.
Within a colo, latency is measured in microseconds and fractions of a microsecond. Between colos, it's milliseconds. Some random source here has 4.13 ms for New York - Chicago:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/11/final-frontie...
At the moment, to play that game, you need to build a microwave network. Someone needs to build towers in a line between your two exchanges - buy the land, get planning permission, placate the locals, build the tower, install microwave antennas, hope the weather is okay. That's expensive!
With Starlink, there will be a reasonably direct path between any two points on earth - on demand! The path will be longer than a dedicated microwave chain, although some of it will be in vacuum, which will save some time, but it will cost the end user no money and no time to build. If you come up with a trade idea that needs a low-latency path from Moscow to Stockholm, you can send a request to the Starlink API and just get one in moments. You can be up and running with your trade months or years before a tower-building competitor even joins the game.
I (sitting in the Bay Area, at home, with Sonic fiber) am getting 5.122ms RTT ping times to MIT's CSAIL server. That's way further than NY-CHI.
Edit: oops, I forgot basic physics. 1ms =~ 300km. It should take at least ~10ms each way. I must be hitting a CDN.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=San+Francisco+to+Bosto...
I can assure you that lucrative paths like New York-London and New York-Tokyo have not been built yet. In fact, the vast majority of lucrative trading paths have not been built yet due to geographical restrictions. Yes, fiber optic links exist, but those only go up to 0.7c.
To a trading firm, the choice between a satellite link that does ~0.9c and a fiber optic link that does <0.7c is obvious.
[0] Unless their in a harmonic orbit I guess not 100% sure abou that one. There should always be some jitter in the connection time just from the satellites moving even if their ground tracks are very stable.
We will basically see what happened to computing happen to space. Remember the mainframes of the 70s that cost millions and only governments and megacorps could afford? Remember how those gave way to the personal computer, the laptop, and eventually the smartphone and tablet?
Now, it's pretty unlikely that every citizen in the country will get their own cubesat, but what is more likely is that if you are a normal private citizen who has an idea predicated on having a satellite overhead (think: localized aerial surveys, more accurate GPS, real time weather updates), you will be able to put together the capital needed to get that satellite launched.
Personally I'm excited to see the rise of satellite "cloud" services, like AWS, in which one satellite can use its sensors and cameras to serve hundreds of thousands of customers at once. How cool would it be to spend $20/mo to host a global satellite based chat service for you and your friends?
Satellites are traditionally designed to last for a long time because they're so expensive to launch. As such they're also expensive to make, and it's slow to iterate on them.
Being in low-earth helps the launch cost (on top of the existing SpaceX advances). Putting out 60 per launch helps too.
Land-based solutions are going to be cheaper and faster for many situations and people, but this gives us another tool to expand connectivity.
Maybe Starlink could serve people w/o internet if a whole village buys a subscription, or if a cell provider uses Starlink as backhaul for voice? Still seems expensive for the third world that the author is talking about.
Trains? Buses? These both have density issues with the existing cellular network. How many times have you come to a halt in a traffic jam only to have horrible cellular coverage due to the local cell site being overwhelmed?
5G doesn't solve any of these use-cases. There is plenty of room for adoption of starlink at premium prices.
It's even worse than a cellular network. With a cell network, one can just build more towers in a particular city.
With LEO satellites, the only way to get more coverage over a particular city is to get more coverage over the entire world.
Half a million satellites ought to be enough for anybody.
I mean, they're planning their own internet satellite constellations. None of them are anywhere close to the 12k satellites in the original Starlink proposal. If you added everyone else's proposals together, you might make 1 more Starlink, but probably not.
This might put more pressure on national firewalls.
Having a backup way of communicating can be important, even if you don't use it much. Land lines are expensive. If there is a low enough monthly fee, maybe a backup connection via Starlink will be feasible?
I imagine if Mr. Musk wants to keep his shiny new Tesla factory in China, he'll make sure this won't be used to circumvent the Great Firewall.
Countries already do this to pressure countries and/or individual entities. Trade embargoes are against entire countries, trade sanctions are over certain industries/companies/specific individuals.
I clear international freight through customs for a living, when I have a shipment containing something coming from/made in a sanctioned country I have to search the OFAC sanctions list for every party mentioned on the shipment https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
China, or Fictionaltopia, could easily put pressure on one company to influence another if they have a significant investor in common.
It wouldn't if the satellite network is operating at capacity, and therefore you can't guarantee service.
Satellites communicate with one another to send information around the world. Most servers are not in developing nations— a lot of them are in the US, for example. Satellites from all over the world will all try to reach the ones that are near the US, so those will dictate the actual capacity of the entire network.
If the network operates at capacity, prices will rise so low-profit customers leave and make space for high-paying ones.
Consider the inter-satellite relay is still in development and current mode of operation was described as "bent pipe". Even when it will be developed, it makes sense to offload data to nearest convenient fiber-connected ground station instead of satellites around the globe.
Initially they wont actually do that.
Isn't covering the world in a blanket of satellites from a single company the epitome of a global Monopoly?
I'm worried about such a future controlled by SpaceX...
If SpaceX does become a monopoly it will simply be treated as a utility and forced to offer FRAND wholesale pricing to anyone who wants it.
And the fun part is that SpaceX being global will have to negotiate with each country that it wants to operate in. Good luck with that.
If Starlink is profitable, I would fully expect multiple competing networks before long.
shivers.
My gripe with this comment is the subtle neo-colonial undertone it has too. "The world needs saving from their inefficient local authorities! It's their fault other countries don't enjoy the spoils of modernity. Luckily this charitable Westerner will bring you under their efficient global empire... ermm, company".
This argument makes absolutely no sense at all. How is that colonialism? I would like a further explanation. Because corporation <-> government?
Lots of us could benefit from Starlink without ever paying a subscription - just look what happened with US internet providers in cities where Google Fiber launched. Once they had some reasonable competition they suddenly discovered that they could deliver a much better quality of service. Starlink will force the wired carriers to compete properly, for maybe the first time ever.
It's easier than that.
To provide a low latency service satellites can't just forward the signal to other satellites and beam it down to a base station on the other side of the planet and back. It would take too long.
StarLink needs base stations (on Earth) close to the terminals of their users: terminal -> satellite -> base station -> internet -> base station -> satellite -> terminal
So if a country doesn't want its citizens to use StarLink it only has to deny permissions to build base stations there. Of course that's useless for small countries with a base station in a nearby country, but it's OK for large countries. Or they could welcome a base station: it will be connected to the local internet and be subject to all the usual monitoring and censorship.
A different take to the same issue: probably StarLink has to apply as an ISP in every country they want to service (take money from people there). This means a base station there or not.
From [1]
> 2019 April - SpaceX files for 6 base stations for Starlink. Locations: North Bend WA, Conrad MT, Merrillan WI, Greenville PA, Redmond WA, Hawthorne CA, Brewster WA
> 2020 - Service to be offered across the contiguous United States and Canada
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/wiki/index#wiki_what_kind_...
Inmarsat technocrat offsr broadband to North Korea, they aren’t registered there. Some countries won’t let you import a bgan, but if you do you can get access.
Also, Starlink gonna use p2p, so perhaps your solar roof can make extra $$ by providing internet for the rest of the planet.
Too bad we have to give up the night sky for it, though.
With Starlink we're talking about covering the whole world, not a 40 million country. So I believe it may be usable for rich people in rural areas, but in densely populated areas it stands no chance to LTE (and 5G is coming and promises lower latency than physically possible with Starlink).
I imagine usage is not evenly distributed between those nodes!
Also LTE connections are limited by the speed of the connection running to the base station. even worse, if that base station is on a microwave link to another tower that then has fiber running to it, expect slower speeds.
Also there is the phone hardware. Take Wi-Fi for a minute, which is a more controlled environment, the performance difference between different chipsets rated at the same speed can be huge! Firmware, drivers, and just how the chip is wired up. Plenty of opportunities to screw things up, sometimes even with the same chipset between different laptop manufacturers.
https://www.speedtest.net/insights/blog/samsung-galaxy-s10/ is a nice overview of how carriers cap speeds, though I have to say 50Mb/s isn't exactly shabby for a phone.
And finally, there is going to be a power trade off, I wonder how inefficient those LTE chips are when running full bore! Now I am curious as to what that graph looks like. :) Some sort ∩ shape I imagine where it starts being more efficient as you download faster so the radio is on for a shorter period of time, and then getting less efficient as you try to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the chipset.
Oh, I wasn't aware we were getting any choice in the matter? Isn't this SpaceX just putting whatever they want up there?
Oppressive governments that don't like the internet aren't going to just allow the transceivers. They need line of sight to the sky and even if you hide them, detecting them would be trivial. Super rural areas and 3rd world areas have their own set of problems. I'm thinking of the OLPC type issues here. I'm all for spreading knowledge, but these areas have far bigger issues than internet access.
Personally, I view this as just another bulldozing a place of nature to build a hospital or something like that. Is that hospital useful? Undoubtedly. Is it worth having one less place of nature? Debatable.
The only difference is scale. We're talking about the destruction of a place of nature for the entire world. Over dramatized? I don't think so- there are many examples of people talking about looking up at the stars in wonderment, driving them to great things. Maybe that will still happen when there are thousands of satellites streaming by, but nobody has that foresight.
Sure he cooks on a fire because it's practical. You don't need to fetch gas/fuel for your stove. Now with Starlink you won't need to go to town once a week to check your bitcoin transactions.
> Too poor to make stove out of bricks
> Goes spend full day per week to go an check on their bitcoin transactions
Uh, are you sure you have a grounded understanding of what rural poverty means?
Starlink satellites are quite small and probably won't be very visible even when deployed. SpaceX is working to reduce "glare" so this will probably be further improved.
Even with a full grid deployed, I doubt you would see more than a dozen satellites at any given time. Someone probably has numbers so please correct me or chip in.
[0] http://astronomy.com/news/2020/01/with-more-spacex-starlink-...
We're going to have a lot of satellites and even space stations (hopefully) in our future, its just the way it is.
Exactly. If ITS/BFR/whatever it is right now actually starts launching in the next 10-15 years we'll be able to deploy (relatively) cheap space telescopes of all variety.
Even better, if it does get operational, we'll be able to build one or more observatories on the moon where you'll basically have a 14 day night at any point and they could be operated entirely remotely and actually be upgraded/changed as needed with manned missions showing up to swap out instruments.
You could even go drop a bunch of smaller-optic telescopes on the moon and use optical aperture synthesis to do some pretty impressive stuff. Spread little clusters all around the moon and you'd have an optical astronomer's dream come true. Similarly you could distribute a bunch of relatively small radio telescopes on the far side of the moon and aside from some communication relay satellites (which you could use lasers for) you'd have virtually no interference from Earth.
While it's certainly said for research from Earth right now, if Starlink gets profitable it gives SpaceX more money to develop better launch technology which opens up space for far cheaper science.
Work is ongoing to reduce their visibility during twilight, and even during twilight it's not giving up the sky, just making a minor alteration.
For comparison, there are as many planes in the sky at any time as their second phase plan of 12,000 satellites, and planes are much more concentrated around where humans are. There is also something like 5000 satellites already in orbit.
With Starlink there will be many ground-based transmitters that can't do CSMA (because they are directional). How many channels are available could depend on the dedicated bandwidth, but I have a hard time believing we won't see significant transmit collision issues.
[1] https://blog.parsecgaming.com/how-your-wifi-band-impacts-low...
From the famous IEEE article at https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-end-of-spectr...:
> Moreover, interference is not some inherent property of spectrum. It's a property of devices. A better receiver will pick up a transmission where an earlier one heard only static. Whether a new radio system "interferes" with existing ones is entirely dependent on the equipment involved. Consequently, the extent to which there appears to be a spectrum shortage largely depends not on how many frequencies are available but on the technologies that can be deployed. Many regulations intended to promote harmony of the airwaves have instead, by putting artificial limits on technology, created massive inefficiency in spectrum utilization.
14Mbps in Berlin? How is this possible?
I had 20Mbps in Mexico City almost a decade ago. A family member who lived in the same building at the time had 100Mbps symmetrical.
EU-wide, the official goal (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/broadband-euro...) is to have 100Mbps available to every EU household by 2025, with 1Gbps & 5G in all major cities.
Pretty soon cable providers in Germany will upgrade their entire network to DOCSIS 3.1 enabling gbit bandwidth.
> This is not just a game changer for people like you and I, living in relatively populated places struggling against greedy last-mile monopolists
So I was wrong that it was omitted, the article explicitly makes it clear that it's going to be a game changer even for people with existing internet.
Also it makes it pretty clear that the service is going to affect individual users and not just enterprises:
> Starlink means that you can go live in the woods in Siberia if you like
> some automakers will likely build them into the roofs of cars or trucks
There are existing solutions, like o3b to cover underserved areas with high speed internet. They pivoted to cruise ships because the equipment is too expensive. If you have a link other than this blog showing otherwise, please provide it.
Even in russia in most major cities everyone (!) have optical (!) fiber directly (!) in their apartment (!).
If you want you can get 10GB in your average home. In USA in SF in Bernal Heights i can get RF link with 30mbits at best for ~5x price.
As someone else pointed out, I anticipate Starlink will benefit even non-subscribers by motivating other providers to minimally compete.
These words could have come from an article about: the internet, mobile phones, telephones, morse code
With minor modification also: automobiles, the printing press, the steel plow, airplanes, the cotton gin, antibiotics, etc.
None of them were true equalizers, they were incremental steps forward at best.
The goal should never be to lower the ceiling. The goal is to raise the floor.
I remember my impression of him at the time was that he was simply a tough CEO who could also be a bit of a jerk to his team. But he refused a government request to break the law and shortly thereafter was arrested. I don't know the merits of the government's case, but it was suspicious that nobody else in his notoriously corrupt industry ever got into trouble for their quite blatant corruption.
I feel claustrophobic just thinking about it. I don't want this and I have a feeling I'm not alone in that.
It might not be as bad as you are worried about.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-...
Another big deal discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397285
tl;dr: starlink and its competitors pose serious Earth-based observation problems across the spectrum (§§4.1-4.2) especially for faint variable objects which require long exposures and for which any missed pixels matter.
The missed-pixels problems run around the clock, not just when the sattelites are visibly flaring, as do non-visible-spectrum noise problems.
Dead-simple algorithms to erase satellite trails are available for hobbyists right now: https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-blogs/imaging-foun...
And more complex ones for professional astronomers should still be super simple to implement compared to many of the algorithms astronomers have to wrangle with.
The objects in question are often extremely faint, and even if one knows a lot of the details of periodic noise, removing the noise does not recover the faint signal.
> baffling
Stand by, there will be lot of professional science communication on this topic in due course.
> moon, 1%, ...
Suppose right now at the very limb of the sun we detect an extremely interesting light curve that is clearly not extragalactic yet still atypical of supernovae, but know that it is in the process of moving directly behind the sun (from our perspective). How do you propose to remove the sun from the image of the suspected supernova?
Here's a list of solar-system objects that moved directly behind the sun in 2019: https://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/index.php?p=transits/transits... This Christmas would have been an interesting time for 2010: The Year We Make Contact's great black spot of Jupiter to appear.
The moon also occults Jupiter fairly regularly. If Jupiter was doing something strange behind the moon, think of the loss for all the Earth-based observatories. Or would it be trivial for them to faithfully reconstruct the unusual behaviour of Jupiter?
Yes, the sun and moon are slow-moving, bright, and high-solid-angle obstructions compared to any spacecraft. However, so is Jupiter and a galactic supernova, and neither of them are usually interestingly variable on the scale of a glitching millisecond pulsar (for example) or the electromagnetic counterparts to a gravitational wave detection.
In short
> algorithms to erase satellite trails
are doing cosmetics, not astronomical or astrophysical research.
And if cosmetically you erase the wrong pixel, you miss out lots of observation time of events like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASASSN-15lh#Discovery and end up regretting missing early data (as in e.g. SN 1997D).
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/asassn/index.shtml exists to avoid missing out on such things again, and if you have a thick skin, there's https://twitter.com/SuperASASSN
A recent tweet is interesting: 'This is, by the way, a discovery made in "astronomical twilight" - one way Itagaki and other amateur astronomers can discovered such events before professional astronomers is by observing fields (galaxies) quite close to the Sun.' (although that's in large part because bigger observatories deliberately aim away from the sun, because it's very noisy and its luminosity may damage sensitive detectors).
There are very few non-periodic events in the universe that happen over the fraction-of-a-second timescale for which a satellite occludes an area of the sky, the linking of EM to gravitational wave events being perhaps the only notable exception. Meteor impacts on planets happen over the course of seconds. Supernovae occur over the timeframe of hours. Glitches in millisecond pulsars (the millisecond name notwithstanding) occur over the timescale of days.
This is also the issue with using occlusion by the sun and moon as analogy - their occlusions do operate on the timescale of interesting astronomical events. If the moon whipped around the Earth at the same rate as LEO satellites it might occlude Jupiter, but you would have plenty of vision between the shutters to reconstruct events on the timescales we are interested in. I'll also note that the analogy breaks down with the focus on objects in the solar system since they all roughly lie on the ecliptic - you've reduced the occlusions over a 2D sky to occlusions between objects that live on a 1D slice of it. The Sun and Moon both take up 0.3% of the angular diameter of the sky, but only 0.001% the angular area.
Are you losing real data with a sky full of 10's of thousands of LEO satellites? Yes. Is it a significant amount? Not by any reasonable metric. Is it over a significant timescale? No.
An analogy: If you have some video footage and for whatever reason have a punchhole in the corner of every 100th frame, that by no means precludes you from doing analysis on the video. I'd expect the video conservationists to be up in arms about any blemishes on their original film, but I'd argue that that is the position from aesthetics. To answer questions such as "how many times does the ball in this video bounce" or "how does the lighting in this video change over time" or "how does that person's hair react to the wind visible in the video" the hole is insignificant to obtaining the answer, even if the area of interest is directly covered every 100th frame.
I'll close with the acknowledgement that radio interference is a legitimate concern here. But satellites are hardly the only emitters which are increasing in number at an increasing rate, and that commons will be polluted whether we launch them or not.
No, a website that tells you when it's coming, ooooh... No this is every single night, and morning, a grid from HELL.
I'm a fairly regular poster, a software engineer, decently intelligent guy - and this future absolutely disgusts me. I hope things change and it ends up not happening. I would rather telephone pole the world.
Most people will never even notice those satellites.
We're prioritizing yet another billionare's networking business over the capacity to study our night's sky. Much like other types of pollution, this is something that could stick around for hundreds of years, even after all its utility is gone.
Cell towers, like most structures, can be brought down, repurposed, updated and altered. We can't do nothing about satellites, and don't know how to clean space pollution.
Oh, I see. That explains things, thanks!
And yes, time zones are not just one kind of bonkers; they're all sorts of bonkers. :)
Starlink is here not because it makes a networking business (although it doesn't hurt).
Starlink is here because on Mars you need reliable communication and positioning over the planet, and you can only do that efficiently with satellites, and Starlink is destined for Mars, not Earth. What we have here is just the testing grounds for the technology.
Personally I'm stoked about pushing 1200 sattelites in orbit to Mars - highly automated, and it would make the current 2 orbiters by NASA as peanuts.
We are talking about a extremely tiny part of the sky that will only be visible very infrequently and the position is known at all times.
This does not impact most of astronomy at all.
Cleaning up space is not a technically impossible problem. It just has not yet been done because nobody had a need for it.
The waste majority of these satellites would fall back to earth, they can not stay 100s of years even in the worst case. Those few that do actually break and are to high up to wait out, can be collected once we have the scale of launch and service infrastructure. Until that point they would be on known location and SpaceX could make sure they don't hit anything.
It seems utterly absurd to me to ignore a massive technological leap for humanity because a tiny part of it hurts research (or is assumed to possible hurt research) and the idea that there is not enough space in orbit and that is not convincing at all.
A few thousand astronomers disagree with your statement: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/global-astrono...
Anyone remember the SWANsat project,[0] which was going to use a VPN service[1] as its client gateway? They called it "SWANSAT LIBERTY™ Suite".
Somehow, I doubt that Starlink has anything like that in mind. But still, one could use it with any anonymity network, unless that was somehow blocked.
1) https://web.archive.org/web/20100813004230/http://www.swansa...
I have unmetered gigabit fiber (1G UP 1G DOWN) In london
From an analysis I read, there isn't enough external demand for SpaceX to be viable, profitable.
So they created their own internal demand as well as a potential alternate revenue stream.
That seems really low to me. I was under the impression that Europe had generally better internet access than in the US. Comcast delivers much better speeds than that even to boondocks cities, let alone major metropolitan areas?
I had better connectivity to Freifunk via their churchtower hub in Lausitzer Platz than I did to the actual internet.
You'd think something that central would be better connected, especially directly along the U1. Oh well.
By reducing their "function" until they're basically a battery with a radio repeater strapped onto it. Obviously it's a bit more complicated, but there's very little these satellites actually have to _do_.
The starlink satellites are relatively small, but they're still larger than Sputnik for example. ISRO has launched 100+ satellites at a time, although I believe those were mostly cubesats which are an order of magnitude or two smaller than the Starlink sats
Check out all the stuff people are accomplishing with CubeSats, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/star link-is-a-very-big-deal/
Strange enough the title is similar: starlink is a very big deal
Are they a reality?
The "cheap" part is somewhat questionable because current prices are lower but still comparable to those of traditional providers. This is likely because fixed costs are high and there is limited demand from satellite operators.
A big part of the reason SpaceX is jumping into the satellite business is to create demand for itself and fully exploit Falcon 9 technology.
At this point, prices are a coming down, and it is effectively assumed that any SpaceX core will fly at least twice. That covers cheap and reusable. Cheap at least compared to the market (I still can't afford it), and 2 flights is re-use.
"Everyday" might be a stretch by the literal definition. But "commonplace" wouldn't be. No one gets super excited about re-flown cores anymore.
Edit: oops, those Bs should be lowercase. Will update post soon. Thanks for the bug report!
essentially, their caching mechanism was broken for a ton of the sites I went to visit.
The only thing that makes sense to me right now is what airlines are already doing: serving cached video from a server on the airplane.
sneak@sneak.berlin