SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Coming from San Francisco, I didn't realize how many people face this reality of poor connectivity. I don't care much about who is doing this as much as I care that someone is doing it at all. Most people don't realize how much of an internet access disparity exists. Especially as more education moves towards digital, internet access is a fundamental utility.
I'm a bit sad about it, because tech advances have technically made this sort of thing dead easy.
- They had dial-up until the early 2000s.
- Then they had that terrible asymmetric satellite service where the upstream service was also dial-up. That lasted a couple of years.
- Then they got some kind of two-way sat service. Still terrible latency, but tolerable for the time.
- Finally, sometime in the early 2010s cable television service made its way to their neighborhood. Television, not internet.
- About 2015 they were finally able to get cable internet, which they have today. It's an amazing 5mb/sec up/down.
When I go there I just tether to my phone because its faster. They never got DSL. I bet they'll never get fiber. Starlink could be a serious improvement to them even at 2x the price they pay now.
I’ve done it for weeks in the past, and (what I personally consider normal usage) burned through my monthly cap in a week, leaving me with large overage charges that wouldn’t be sustainable long-term. I haven’t heard of a US carrier-provided plan that’s less than several hundreds of dollars, and if there is one it’s likely unavailable in rural areas
More options would be great, and underserved areas aren't as far out as people often think they are. You can be five miles from Google's headquarters and unable to get decent internet.
50 metres uphill, there's a 4G signal which gets >20 Mbit/s download.
But ADSL is only 0.25 Mbit/s, and that's what you're getting in the shadows.
It's sold as "up to 8 Mbit/s".
4G is amazing these days, I recently moved from a big city (coax 500 Mbps) to a house that only gets 4G and I barely feel the difference.
If there was plenty of cooperation and interest among the residents, they could install a better shared solution for the whole village than 4G even. There was a company willing to install something like that. But not enough people signed up to make it worthwhile.
I agree with you about 4G. I switched from ADSL+ to 4G last year in the middle of a city, and it's been a good improvement in download speeds, and an x10 improvement in upload. Netflix works excellently. Though there tend to be latency spikes, and new connections to websites for some reason are quite slow. I actually switched to save costs - unlimited data on 4G was less than half the price of bottom-of-the-range ADSL too.
When I want the best connection out of every option, such as a big download. I switch to my mobile phone, which seems perverse but there we are. I get ~90Mbit/s download via my phone. It's faster than wifi at the office, faster than ADSL, and faster than 4G at home too - the phone has a better modem than the standalone 4G router.
However I've tried 4G in London, which is the largest city in the UK, and it was awfully slow there. Too much density I suspect. So it's not a solution for everywhere. I think I'm lucky with it where I live. Around the same city, there are plenty of "notspot" shadows where there's no signal, not even 3G.
If it's the price tag, this is something companies could fix.
Keep in mind, Comcast owns NBC as well. So probably we’ll get a lot of negative coverage of Elon Musk on NBC and MSNBC in the process.
It’s much easier to lobby against a public villain than a public hero.
So every tweet by Musk will be amplified out of context.
Wouldn’t surprise me even some allegations of foreign impropriety will surface and soon having starlink becomes a national security unless it’s sold to Comcast or it’s offered in a way that won’t compete with Comcast.
I've worked on the product side of legacy media companies before and trust me, given the disorganization I was seeing in the editorial departments at my peer orgs, they couldn't have pulled this off even if they wanted to.
NBC's coverage of Elon isn't any more negative than it's sister orgs and the simple, occam's razor explanation is that his ridiculous behavior is absurdly good at generating clicks rather than any organized media endeavor against him.
Im sure we can agree that ratings are one of the key drivers and pushed by management. Here’s how cable media profited by covering Trump. This Trump coverage resulted in 160% increase in ratings and in return gave Trump $3 billion [2]in free advertising ( I’ve seen $5billion number in total free coverage as well).
[1]https://youtu.be/-0w_8spt-6c [2]https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/487472/
Look it's one thing to hate on big corporations for existing actions, but's entirely something else to invent conspiracy theories. In reality Comcast isn't threatened by Starlink because Starlink market is aimed at less populated areas so Comcast has no need to fight it. It would be completely oversaturated by cities and cities are easy to invest in building network infrastructure.
Now, I could imagine other satellite internet companies to fight it, but they're much less powerful.
These low-latency satellite constellations will reduce the local oligopoly/monopoly rents (and thus profitability) of Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Cox, Frontier, etc... And the money that would've been profit will go to consumers' pockets, even if they don't themselves subscribe.
Elon Musk aside, who wouldn't drop comcast/verizon in a second if there were another viable option at a better price?
It's good if Starlink has enough demand to make the service a success, so SpaceX will want to expand it. Beyond that, you're just pricing other people out, until they grow to the point that they can actually serve everyone.
If it's a political problem blocking the launch of more satellites, well then, solve the political problem of course.
I suppose owning the launch systems helps, but there is still going to be lag.
Perhaps the reader would be better off making a donation or investment into SpaceX instead, such that they receive money to better compete with Comcast in exchange for no obligation of service :)
Given the capacity of the network, it is more likely that you would be paying 20x-100x as much, per byte, and would get perhaps the same factor, as the denominator, in terms of data cap. Comcast has several times the capacity of the entire Starlink global constellation in each real PoP.
eg ships, yachts, and that kind of thing
Guessing the in-built motors the user terminals come with for correcting orientation wouldn't know how to cope with waves.
So maybe need some kind of gimbal thing for added stabilisation?
A larger problem for use on sea might be that first generation Starlink sats do not have satellite-to-satellite links, so the boat and a ground station would have to be within range of the same satellite.
One representative example, Subscriber acquisition costs for Dish network: "DISH TV SAC was $822 during the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to $759 during the same period in 2018, an increase of $63 or 8.3%." [1]
"We lost approximately 511,000 net DISH TV subscribers during the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to the loss of approximately 1.125 million net DISH TV subscribers during the same period in 2018. This decrease in net DISH TV subscriber losses primarily resulted from a lower DISH TV churn rate and higher gross new DISH TV subscriber activations." [1]
[1] https://www.marketscreener.com/DISH-NETWORK-CORPORATION-4870...
"Subscriber Acquisition and Retention Costs
We incur significant upfront costs to acquire subscribers, including advertising, independent third-party retailer incentives, payments made to third-parties, equipment subsidies, installation services, and/or new customer promotions."
According to google
“ Almost 4.57 billion people were active internet users as of July 2020, encompassing 59 percent of the global population.”
So about 15% of everyone connected to the current internet...
You're a little off. Check your math. It looks like you mistook 700k for 700 million.
1 billion = 1,000,000,000
1 million = 1,000,000
It could still be impressive if they published actual numbers. Instead we have that $0 claim that gets repeated.
Disclaimer: They could pay people with "exposure" I heard that is the way to go with graphics artists at least.
Have you seen an space x ads on TV/radio/online/print?
The total switching capacity of the entire __planned__ constellation is around that in a _single_ large switch chassis or internet core router and the individual satellites have the capacity of a beefy enterprise Wifi6 access point; however the geographic area each will service is enormous.
What I can't figure out is: what is the market? The market for an Iridium-style remote access is demonstrated to be tiny, there just is not the bandwidth or capacity to target "unserved" areas for ordinary internet.
So what's left that's big? Industrial IoT? Military? Even industrial placements (Rio Tinto, etc. mining concerns) will prefer to set up dedicated links and regional wireless to this solution, so IIOT use case is really a pre-development stage market, which is again small.
I even went looking for what the business press said (example: [1]). Reading this almost makes me think the author is in on a sort of dark joke; especially the “Fortunately, companies have new options for generating revenue from connectivity” section appears to be written by someone with a very dark sense of humor who is straight up trolling the reader.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/aerospace-and-defense/ou...
edit: added "planned" to distinguish the long term from the immediate term [the first batch Starlink satellites didn't even do any in-space switching at all]..
I have read that they don't expect to be able to provide high levels of service in dense urban areas. Which does make me question the business model...
I think you nailed it that the military and government will be a big customer. Iridium has ~1300ms+ latency and very low data rates, very high costs and the government is their largest customer from what I understand.
Airlines are another likely market that would be a significant amount of business (post-covid19).
If Starlink can compete against Iridium and the other existing satellite providers on price, they could at a minimum take most of that business.
Depending on how they're measuring that, the actual throughout could be substantially less than that. Given that their FCC filing was 20gbps per satellite, I think that's the raw, uncorrected bit rate, not the corrected bitrate which will be lower.
A coworker and I did a back-of-envelope guess based on their power budget (switching capacity in bandwidth and pps and power are basically directly tied, ditto capacity and spectrum) and that's about what we arrived at as their upper bound (imho, not even half of that will be achievable). Note that this is a double-counted metric (bps total is bps_in+bps_out) for actual traffic volume.
So let's go with that.
The current SpaceX fantasy business model is to build out a constellation of 30,000 satellites, but near term not even close to that. Being very generous, let's credit them with an incredible 10k satellites, pretend they are not power constrained and use the full 20gbps allotted to them, and you get a total of 200k gbps total capacity for the constellation, uncorrected, assuming ample power, or on a good day 125Tbps for real data.
Using a somewhat older core switch, the Juniper QFX10016, can do line rate switching for 480 100GE ports; 48Tbps in a single 21RU chassis from 2017. [2] These are commonly deployed in pops. The next generation will be doing that for 400GE ports in the same form factor, 192Tbps. A Cisco 8818, which is shipping right now, does 260Tbps per chassis in a 33RU form factor.
The point is, anyone claiming we could serve even a large metro with a single one of these switches, let alone planet earth, would be laughed at, yet here we are. A given nation-scale network will have hundreds of routers with these kinds of capacities.
I also don't think Starlink will get anywhere near the estimates I'm using here.
[1] https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-upgrade-...
[2] https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/release-independ...
[3] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/80...
edit: moved the [2] to the right place. edit damage.
I think something to consider here is that there is an iterative development process taking place with the satellites. Given the stated lifespan of the satellites is 3-4 years, they likely expect to see additional innovation over time and are gambling that the network will be improved over time, and may one day actually be capable of serving urban areas.
This seems like a wise approach and appears to work well for both SpaceX and Tesla.
The most viable use case in the near term is clearly to serve remote and rural areas which is admittedly a small market. There is a chance you might see governments subsidize service to rural areas that are underserved. I also imagine there will be a number of marine and aviation customers - though that's likely even smaller than the rural market.
But yeah, I'm not one of the people who will claim it will serve urban markets any time soon... That's rediculous - as rediculous as saying Tesla will achieve level 5 autonomous driving this decade
I just do not get the business model. It makes no sense for commercial internet access, even in rural areas. I think perhaps temporary access in undeveloped areas, where the total capex is lower than that needed for a temporary LTE deployment, for example, might be it, but that is not a big market.
Starlink lets SpaceX make use of cores with long launch records that others may not be willing to risk their payloads on, and SpaceX can also use those launches to test other risky maneuvers. So... Perhaps there's some other value in Starlink that we're not privy to.
These people can even be just a mile or less outside of a town with internet options, but none of the telecom companies have upgraded capacity in the countryside for years. Obviously, a modern wired connection would be way better, but ISPs are just not willing to invest in the upgraded infrastructure where nearly no one lives. You could lay a mile of fiber to reach only one or two households. (Or less.)
Satellite makes a lot of sense here because it can cover the whole area without having to build a ton of infrastructure relative to the population.
Why are ground stations required? I thought you were connecting from your dish to the satellite and therefore could be anywhere with a view of the sky.
But hidden from view behind their main building a bunch of satellite dishes. =)
Basically, user computer <--> user wifi or router <--> user terminal <--> satellite <--> ground station <--> fiber <--> peering to other internet providers.
Fortunately my internet has only had problems maybe 4 or 5 times in the last year. It just feels irresponsible of me to rely on data that eventually gets throttled to be almost unusable when I need it for my job. Maybe I will get a backup AT&T internet connection and expense it at some point :(.
Nice side business
I think the market for this often would not even have a cable option. They’re stuck on old DSL at like 6mbps down or less for $90/mo with bundled landline, or if they’re lucky, the cable company ran a line by their house. If starlink was offering just 20mbps down for $50, everyone I know in the country would switch immediately. I definitely don’t think starlink will compete with city fiber or cable connections. Heck, mine is $30 for 250mbps down. No way satellite is going to compete with that.
In the city, and even small countryside cities, this isn’t a big deal, but rural communities don’t have choice or speed, at least in the US! That’s not a big market on a small scale, but added up across the US, it would be a lot of people.