SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up
testmy.net
testmy.net
I'm sorry but how is 42Mbps worth spamming the entire nightsky with to the point that it prevent astronomers from obtaining useful data? Not even 10Mbps upload?
My inlaws live in a village in France that has 70 people total. It's 25min drive to a bakery, 45min drive to anything resembling a supermarket. I'd say it's rural.
They now have 16Mbps *DSL and are scheduled to get Fiber in 2021. Next village already has it.
But because the American government refuses to invest in infrastructure the rest of the planet just has to accept some American company is going to put 14,000 sats in low orbit?
Besides the progress this resembles I still think it's pretty strange the US government can greenlight this plan even though it has global implications.
Even in Norway there are thousands of people without access to sufficiently fast broadband, and some 80k DSL customers who apparently will never get fiber at all. The proposed solution for the latter is to use 4G/5G, which comes with its own issues of course.
I'd say even in well developed countries, Starlink is a nice option to have. As I understand it, the 42Mbps they see now is only going to improve as well.
I mean someone in Norway also had to draw a powerline to these people, to use electricity. Why not draw a fiber link, too? It's just part of infrastructure.
I'm not saying that Starlink isn't useful. I'm just really wondering what the implications for astronomy are going to be, whether we will always see these things at dusk.
Now it's Starlink, but what if 3 or 4 companies in total want to have a network? What if on top of that China and India want their own, just like GPS?
It just seems we're running head first into this without anyone thinking of the implications or governance of it.
Their limited lifespan is what makes me much less pessimistic than I would be. They have relatively high maintenance costs which means that if utilization is low, it won't make sense to keep replacing them.
More space based telescopes?
Anyway, if governments, businesses and individuals care enough then it's easy enough to develop that infrastructure now. The satellites will come down in a few years.
Who volunteers to tell Musk?
The US is much larger than France of course, but whatever the reason, it's incredible and really upsetting that they can pollute the earth like this, and for the rest of eternity, just to solve a temporary domestic problem.
Temporary domestic problem? It's a problem worldwide, the fact that France can get fast ADSL almost everywhere doesn't means it's true worldwide.
Wireless has the advantage of not needing a huge infrastructure locally, which is a huge help where you don't have any. I remember a presentation from Charles Sirois, one of the guy that brought cellular networks to Quebec. He told us how he helped build some cellular networks in some place where they didn't even have phones. Sure I have no doubt it wasn't easy to build theses towers, but it was certainly much easier than bringing cable to every single building. Every business had cellphones afterward, it was a huge boom, it helped develop so many industry.
Now imagine the same but with freaking internet. This is going to be a huge boom for so many third world countries.
But no you are right, France can pay to lay fiber everywhere, theses third world country should just do the same, they are just not trying enough.
Also, Starlink doesn't have to be too costly for them. The constellation's operating costs could potentially be fully paid by North American and European users. The satellites would still incidentally fly over the southern hemisphere, and any revenue at all from Africa/South America/Asia would mostly just add to Starlinks bottom line profit. The marginal cost of additional users should be minimal once general revenue targets are met.
I'd like to hear whether the throughput will increase with additional satellites, or whether it requires re-designs. I wouldn't expect the current satellites to be saturated with users by the currently "limited" number of beta test users.
Cost of end-user terminals also will likely have to come down significantly before the worlds poorest would have any access. Although sharing the cost of that among a large group would help, it would also help a lot if the speeds were actually closer to gigabit for sharing the connection.
Also, the satellite are not geostationary above the US. They rotate above the Earth and will bring the internet everywhere... Bringing internet to everyone in the World is nothing to sneeze at.
(I agree with the last bit of the rant. It sucks that private companies can launch whatever they want in space. That is not specific to the US however.)
We already pay enough subsidies for roads, water, power, etc in rural/exurban areas.
I grew up fine but I pay for those with special needs.
I have a job during Covid but I pay for those who don't.
I guess in Europe we call this 'society'.
Further, the US's population density is very varied. About a third of the country (the non-coastal West) is very, very sparsely populated, punctuated by only a few semi-large cities like Denver and Phoenix. If you live on the coasts or the Great Lakes, density is a lot like Europe and the services are similar. In between, it's really, really sparsely populated.
Europe is just as big. Not as dense, maybe. But your telcos were given hundreds of billions to do something (that should have been the job of the government), and simply pocketed them, with your government doing nothing about it.
So, if that money was properly invested, instead of polluting low orbit, that'd be nice.
That the biggest thing Europeans do not understand about the US, many of us hate our government, distrust our government, and the only thing we desire from government is for them to leave us alone..
The US is a individualist nation, not a collectivist nation, though many are trying very hard to change that.
If this caused all of the water (streams, lakes etc) in the area to be polluted and unsafe to swim in and drink without heavy treatment, would you still be ok with this? I can't think of a single body of water where I live that doesn't have excessive algae growth from fertilizer runoff from the massive number of suburban/exurban lawns. I was exploring in my favorite nature preserve that has a nice size stream (well, one of the few over 10ft that hasn't been culvertized) and one of the park rangers told me to be mindful that there was a septic system a mile upstream leaking E. coli in to the stream. In a city that has a "township" designation literally so they can get tax breaks and grants for roads meant for farmers. There isn't a single farm in this city, nor in any of the other "townships" in the area.
I can go on and on, do you still think subsidizing this life for people is reasonable? It certainly isn't done to this level over in Europe. Why not?
This seems wholly different to the point of making the analogy laughable.
Kind of telling that North America immigrants were largely people escaping European utopian society. I guess different people have different values?
It makes no sense. I mean it’s not as if Ireland has changed at all since the potato famine when my ancestors came over right?
As you can tell, I do not think highly of the argument you have made. It seems to ignore something important.
In fact, your argument basically boils down to "Why should X pay for Y?" So why should astronomers pay for Starlink?
I should add that I live in the midwest (Cincinnati) so I directly see a lot of rural/exurban areas people are talking about here. There are just miles and miles and miles of suburbs out in the middle of nowhere because people here are obsessed with the idea of them. The amount of money that gets dumped in to those areas while people complain up a storm when the urban areas try to build out their own infrastructure is insane.
I can't tell you how many coworkers I have had that drive 45mins+ just so they can live in some suburb far away from everything. If they want to do that, fine, but don't beg for internet, roads, etc to be paid for at the cost of sucking resources away from people living in urban areas.
I've got no problem (to a point) subsidizing infrastructure for farmers and other key jobs, but acting like all of these people who insist on living in an incredibly unsustainable way deserve to be subsidized is ridiculous.
Ultimately it is in the best interest of cities to keep on good terms with their breadbasket.
Here's a example of these sort of areas on the midwest: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9232568,-84.4006112,11979m/d...
Almost none of the land in that area is farmland, yet I've had coworkers who got USDA loans for houses in the middle of this area while working white collar jobs.
For the last couple of few years a local developer keeps lobbying to have a multibillion dollar highway built through this area so they can develop more suburbs. http://www.cincyeasternbypass.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02...
Why does everyone else have to keep paying for this garbage? When you bring up things like toll roads all of these people scream their heads off, because they know it means they wont be getting their subsidies (ironic considering how many people in these areas are highly conservative, anti-subsidy).
This isn't about subsidizing farmers, this is about subsidizing people's choice to live an unsustainable life style.
OTOH, the benefit is the ability to participate in the modern economy.
Cost/benefit to the world seems pretty clear to me.
> In 2019, Internet access became available to 51 percent of the world's population. When households are taken into account, the index increases, reaching 57.8 percent.
42% of the world don't have internet. We aren't talking about not having competitive internet, literally, no internet at all.
At the bare minimum, you forgot about 42% of the world... that kind of sad.
Ask almost anyone what they care about most, the internet or a book on astronomy, and they'll think you're joking.
Also, don't trust the national provider Telecom Italia. Before finding that solution, we pestered them with requests to cover that area, and their canned response has always been "we're working on it", while actually they were waiting for more people to move in that area so that it would have been more convenient for them.
If I may, which provider offers you 4DL/4UL and how much does it costs?
I seem to remember we had to settle to a 4/4 setup although the contract allowed a bit more DL speed, due to the distance from the only repeater we had in line of sight. Performance was good during day and very good from evening, with speed tests around or very near the theoretical maximum.
> Other operators include the London-based OneWeb, which has launched 74 of what it hopes will be a gigantic fleet of 48,000 satellites
I'm more drawn to the fact that the American government can greenlight this, even though it has global implications.
These things will also impact astronomy in Argentina. Where can they lodge a complaint? They will impact the night sky in Europe, yet we have no say in American government or decision making.
I can understand this has never been a problem because no one has ever been planning to launch 14,000 sats! But within 10 - 15 year maybe 3 or 4 companies might do it. Then we have 50,000 sats in LEO.
Will this be worth it? And if so, who weighs these pro's and cons? Just one government?
Feels like we're running headfirst into a new world where no one has thought of the consequences yet.
They only need to greenlight the launch, and radio-transmissions over the US.
As far as I know, there is no central authority anywhere to stop you from putting/keeping a satellite in a certain orbit. (aside from someone else moving it out of that orbit by force)
Space border laws aren't super-well developed yet.
Starlink is not just about the US, it's a global service that will connect people anywhere the local infrastructure is not yet up to speed. Also comparing rural France to rural US is oranges and apples. The US is almost 20x larger than France.
The school officials have decided to do remote schooling.
Fully 50% of the students have no internet at all.
Another 30% have internet that is incapable of remote.
You might say that they're too poor. And that is part of it. But there are plenty of people with lots of money in DC and the surrounding area that would be interested in moving here or having a vacation cabin, but cannot buy internet access for any amount of money. It just doesn't exist.
The communication laws desperately need an upgrade from the 1930s laws on the books that regulate everything like it is a telephone invented in the 1800s.
Is simply not true. It's outright false and the commenter that posted it clearly just has an axe to grind against Elon Musk along with a million other people on this website
Hacked sats. Pirate-style space cleanup sats. It's gonna make an excellent Wired article.
It's a _big_ world.
Define useful
The American government "refuses" because there is no Constitutional Authority for which it could use to provide such a service, and that is a good thing
People seem to think government should just provide everything to everyone, the government should be very limited in size and scope, and providing internet is WELL outside what a limited government should be doing.
under the federalist system that is the United States you could make an augment that STATE governments could provide such a service but it should not be a Federal program at all
In an alternate reality, it’s easy to see how this could be interpreted broadly as meaning the government has an impetus to provide for communications infrastructure.
There was an Amendment process put in place expressly to prevent the type of "reinterpretation" you are advocating for, if we the people desire the US Federal Government to provide us with Internet then we the people need to pass an constitutional amendment declaring that power
https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/tho...
Jefferson was in favor of living people controlling government, rather than trying to divine what dead people would have wanted. The living document approach to understanding the constitution is a way to keep the text of the constitution static while still allowing for each generation to interpret it as they see fit. It's a pretty good compromise.
Also: words always mean whatever we choose them to mean. As my favorite law professor would always remind us, words don't leap off the page and become reality by magic. People read the words, and people take actions. So what you're disparaging as "reinterpreting" I'd argue is just "interpreting," and is a necessary component of all written language.
The modern "living document" is nothing like what Jefferson called for, which was all laws, even the constitution be sunsetted after 19 years allowing for the current generation to pass new laws and a new constitution
This is a far cry from "these words mean something else now because we 9 people say they do" which is what the living document of today comes down to.
Jefferson wanted robust debate and the consent of the governed to deiced the rules of their society not 9 people redefining words to fit their personal world view, in fact Jefferson wrote extensively about the problem the power the Supreme court held would have on society
the after effects of these government monopolies have been felt by scandal after scandal
Further before these enforced government monopoly on power farms were using a distributed network of Wind Generators, which Ironically are now being put back into place on some of these very same farms but instead of being able to give the farms good power they are being put in place by these came corrupt government run power companies
Had the government not interfered in the market place who knows what out have happened, may renewable energy and distributed power networks would have emerged decades sooner instead of just not emerging as a replacement for Coal power
Seems like pretty solid latency :)
Sub 100ms for satellite internet is incredible, hopefully it'll be cheap enough for people to actually get, compared to the current satellite internet we have.
Can't wait for humanity to become a multi-planet species, as then application developers would have to start taking multi-minute latencies into account, and hopefully that'll help me as someone with ~500ms latency to most services.
Pardon my ignorance, but what are some exampes of applications that wouldn’t work with +100 latency?
I think Adobe been one of the worst companies I've dealt with personally, as many of the endpoints have ridiculously low timeouts (for someone with really shitty latency).
< 100ms is usually the "minimum", > 150ms is often "unusable", and for a smooth experience you might need < 30ms depending on the application (e.g. depending on the game you might need < 90ms or <60ms or <30ms).
Around about 100ms things stop appearing instantaneous, beyond the scope that everything starts to suck if you're not a patient person.
Stuff that requires realtime (or near realtime) communication simply won't be possible.
What remains is bulk data transfer, here I guess the only viable way is:
1) on both ends in both directions, massive buffers (at least bandwidth x 4)
2) massive FEC (of course it will reduce the net bandwidth, but there's no real other way to avoid lots of retransmissions)
3) sender station transmits the data in blocks, with each object of data having a specified number of blocks
3) receiver station checks all the data blocks for integrity, places it in buffers, and transmits back a list of broken blocks and a list of successfully received blocks
4) sender station receives the list of broken/successful blocks, deletes successful blocks from its buffer and retransmits those marked as broken
5) receiver station waits until all the blocks for an object of data have been successfully transmitted, and delivers the message to the recipient system
Could definitely lead to more investment into space, more money to SpaceX / Blue Origin / etc for their new-gen lift vehicles.
Also, where'd you get the power? Solar panels will only yield a kilowatt per square meter at most, for half of the orbit. Beam it up from Earth?
Edit: Surprisingly little of the UK is actually built up areas: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-cover-atlas-uk-1.74...
Starlink network is nowhere near complete so I’d expect things to only get better (until customers start piling on)
ground <--> satellite <--> ground
ground <--> satellite <--> satellite <--> ground
Edit: Thanks for all the responses. I'd been assuming it was a test of Starlink latency only, but if it's Starlink -> ground station -> open internet -> ISP then it would make sense how that would be slower than a pure Starlink connection.
ground <--> satellite <--> ground <------------> ground
With satellite links:
ground <--> satellite <--> satellite <--> ground
i.e. the sat-to-sat link should be faster than the ground-to-ground link, on the basis that light transmitted in vacuum goes faster than light transmitted in glass. That's the theory at least.
Currently:
ground <--> satellite <--> ground <--> ground farther away via legacy infrastructure
ground <--> satellite <--> satellite <--> ground farther away directlyLow altitude orbits mean that the hops up and down can be compensated by faster hops across.
That all of course is not there yet and depends on Starlink implementing the cross sattelite links.
1. Hop count is not one on the ground to go same distance.
2. Speed of light is significantly faster in vacuum.
3. The path is potentially straighter for longer distances.
Judging from their high launch cadence, it seems satellite-satellite communication was just a means to excite the fanboys and motivate their employees, the same way the peddle the Mars stuff.
Berkshire Hathway has $1000+ spreads yet you dont see a lot of people complaining.
Light in vacuum is faster than light in fiber.
[1] https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs?t=288 (the whole video is worth watching, but that timestamp answers your specific question.
I watched it -- no it doesn't :) It is comparing fiberoptics latency with straight line light propagation. So the worst case scenario of non-existing inter-satellite communication could easily be worse than fiberoptics.
But I guess if the hedgefunds knew exactly which packet travels in a straight line, they could send one packet via Starlink and others via fiberoptics.
I can get satellite Internet right now with 40Mbps down / 5 up, but the latency is 800 to 1000 ms, so it's slow.
I remember when 4G was new and only few user where using it, it was very fast, but when more users arrived on the spectrum, the bandwidth per user decreased and the latency incised.
Which makes me suspect there’s something else going on rather than just undercapacity.
Chronic underinvestment across networks?
It's often easier to just use 4G always.
I still can (pulled 150mbps down as a test for this comment), but I could then too. Getting 150/30 to nearby servers.
I guess I live next to the tower lol.
Used to be consistently 50Mb+ back in the days.
It may be better than some wired home broadband in parts of London though (I used to get 3Mb/0.2Mb in zone 3).
If that's the case, more users leads to more efficient paths and potentially a higher peak throughput for each user (assuming most links are idle most of the time, which they are).
We are entering the era of spacenet and the future looks bright.
Imagine having devices as small as phones or set-top boxes that can directly access internet using satellites. It would lead to a revolution in many industries.
User -> Satellite -> multiple hops between satellites (as they are orbiting earth and the right one has to be selected to relay data to -> earth DNS servers -> multiple hops across internet -> satellite -> user
Additional latency is introduced due to satellites and the grid between the satellites, as well as complications from rotation of satellites.
All of that in general is comparable to the costs incurred on the ground from any other kind of network.
> complications from rotation of satellites
As far as a single routed packet is concerned, the satellites are stationary.
Smart phones and set-top boxes etc can already access the internet without satellites, and often with much better latency.
What would satellites add for urban or sub-urban applications?
I do appreciate the extra competition that satellite internet brings. Especially in parts of the world with suppressed competition (like the US..) this could have huge practical effects without having to be a big deal in any technical sense.
Cellular networks have limited coverage. Imagine tracking a truck traveling across the US, or a ferry, across the English channel. Currently, that's not possible with 4G. But with a satellite driven internet system, it very well could be.
As for urban and sub-urban applications, not much.
You will need a ground station to communicate that isn't going to fit in a pocket.
Maybe we will not see such miniaturization, but I can safely assume that a small backpack size device should be light and last long enough for meaningful high speed internet with StarLink.
And that was already advanced. Portable phones used to be so unwieldy, car phones used to be a thing!
Edit: I've spent a lot of time trying to find alternatives - none are really practical at this time. Starlink looks pretty exciting to me.
Edit 2: We have fantastic line of sight to Edinburgh and you'd think that would give us more options, apparently not...
I guess you mean things like internet on planes, shipping internet, off-shore rigs? But what things can't they do at the moment because of prohibitorily slow/costly satellite internet?
Shipping - Same as logistics, but across oceans.
Real-Time weather data, from solar powered sensors, spread across the world.
Real-Time video for tracking endangered wild-life.
I think different people can come up with more ideas.
The difference between satellite and cellular networks is coverage.
Imagine if a nature loving adventurer fell into a ravine and can just video call authorities about his location and condition.
Shipping: already done via AIS
Real Time Weather: already done by satellites with the required features. SpaceX is not building this.
Real Time Video: again, there's no way you're getting animal scale images out of a starlink scale sat.
I swear people have taken the usual Elon hype with this and gone to absolutely absurd lengths. This is not your iphone suddenly works globally. This is not a star trek communicator. This is an alternative to sat internet like Dish network et all. Is your hiker really gonna be hauling around a giant freakin' dish?
It's going to be a premium priced broadband service for rural customers and institutions that can afford it. If you know anything about the market you know DoD is gonna be the customer they focus on.
Imagine being able to see live video, or AI enhanced video (movement detection, etc). A lot more bandwidth will open up many areas for innovation.
Imagine being able to get real-time data of patients being transported in planes or ground vehicles.
>Real Time Weather: already done by satellites with the required features.
But there is not much data about wind patterns, directions, barometric pressure, etc. Satellites can observe on a macro level. If you can combine that with micro level ground data, perhaps predictions for weather would be more accurate.
>Real Time Video: again, there's no way you're getting animal scale images out of a starlink scale sat.
Perhaps, but periodic photos, would be possible, and that would be enough for many innovations.
>I swear people have taken the usual Elon hype
Even I have the after taste of Hyperloop. However, this is different because there are billions being spent to send actual satellites to space. That is not hype. I would not cast aside Elon's vision so easily, especially if he has committed and spent so much on the idea and is actually building out the infrastructure.
>This is not a star trek communicator.
But Imagine if you could have one.
>Is your hiker really gonna be hauling around a giant freakin' dish?
Would it be too far fetched to think that those can be shrunk down, perhaps to the size of a suitcase or a backpack?
>It's going to be a premium priced broadband service for rural customers and institutions that can afford it. If you know anything about the market you know DoD is gonna be the customer they focus on.
Sure, that would be one revenue source. But many innovations in the world are made possible due to what is available. Would an app store be possible without the iPhone? But, when the iPhone was made, the app store, as a concept was at best, a theoretical idea in Jobs' mind.
For what benefit?
> Imagine being able to get real-time data of patients being transported in planes or ground vehicles.
This is a very niche use case.
> But there is not much data about wind patterns, directions, barometric pressure, etc. Satellites can observe on a macro level. If you can combine that with micro level ground data, perhaps predictions for weather would be more accurate.
I'm sorry but this is incredibly ignorant. There's a huge volume of data that's fed into several global weather modeling supercomputers continuously. That's literally where the weather forecasts on your tv come from.
> Perhaps, but periodic photos, would be possible, and that would be enough for many innovations.
You still aren't getting it. There are fundamental physical limits to image resolution based on the size of the optics. You'd have trouble resolving individual creatures even with a telescope the scale of Hubble/KeyHole. Starlink changes nothing about this.
> However, this is different because there are billions being spent to send actual satellites to space.
The hype is people speculating on applications like the above that are entirely implausible and unrealistic. It's on the same scale as thinking the next Tesla is going to be a flying delorian with fusion power.
> But Imagine if you could have one.
But you just aren't fantasizing, you're claiming these fantasies will become real in the short term without understanding the limitations that preclude them.
> Would it be too far fetched to think that those can be shrunk down, perhaps to the size of a suitcase or a backpack?
Yes, it is too far fetched. You cannot shrink a wavelength. In addition, starlink's design requires the transmission/received lobes have a certain maximum beam width. The global capacity of the system depends on this parameter. That means they need phased arrays of a certain minimum size in terms of array area and number of array elements to meet their specs.
> But, when the iPhone was made, the app store, as a concept was at best, a theoretical idea in Jobs' mind.
There were examples of app stores before iPhone. That wasn't a unique new concept.
https://www.findmespot.com/en-gb/
Edit: Starlink looks fantastic but maybe not for that particular scenario, at least not any time soon.
Not sure how big this, objectively speaking money-wise, but for teleop/autonomy it sure does enable new things when there is true 100% coverage everywhere on earth.
Starlink is cool and al, but satellite internet isn't new. Both forestry, mining and farming is utilising existing satellite services for monitoring and operations.
Starlink is better than all existing services, but with some drawbacks. Like it will be really expensive to provide service in really remote areas until sat to sat relay is possible as there must be a ground station within 500 km radius of the satellite. This means that to provide service in the Amazonas SpaceX will have to build ground stations in the Amazonas. To provide service in the Pacific and Atlantic SpaceX will have to deploy several floating ground stations in the middle of the oceans.
Again, not taking anything away from Space X. Starlink is really cool and will be a wake up call for the satcom industry, but satcom is not a new thing and Starlink have significant drawbacks for the time being.
But there won't be. Not with Starlink at least. Even at their envisioned full constellation size of 40000 satellites, coverage won't be 100%. The Arctic and Antarctic regions won't have any coverage at all, for example.
Imagine being able to conduct a robot controller surgery in Africa, by a doctor in the US. Currently, not possible, but with high speed satellite based internet, it could be.
Imagine an electrical engineer being able to help his colleagues in Africa, with specific issue, over VR or Video calls, enabled by Satellite based internet.
I can see a number of possibilities and opportunities.
Highly unlikely for many reasons: latency too high, cost of equipment way too high, only very few hospitals are even equipped for remote surgery even in the West, let alone underdeveloped countries...
> Imagine an electrical engineer being able to help his colleagues in Africa
That's already possible even without satellite-based internet and doesn't require it at all.
The only point I agree with is the military - surveillance and remote controlled drones could benefit from greatly from low-latency high-bandwidth satellite internet.
You're talking about today, which is the lowest potential time scenario. How about the time frame of 15-20 years from now? It'll take years just to fully build out Starlink's constellation, then many more years to fully spread its use. Remote surgery will continue to expand, becoming increasingly common, and the prices will come down. As that process unfolds, you will increasingly see the major robotic-assisted surgery companies donate (or otherwise massively subsidize) equipment to poorer nations, exactly as is done with very expensive drugs now. Also, while today robotic-assisted surgery costs are very high (dominated by companies like Intuitive or Stryker), China and others will eventually fully knock down that door and flood the market with lower cost systems that are 85% good enough and will become very widely used.
It's also more likely that it'll be highly skilled doctors in one less developed nation doing work in another less developed nation. That will help keep the costs down more than the parent's example. US doctors will likely do most of their remote work within the US (other than charitable work), where they can command far higher fees.
Maybe in developed countries. In India, most Power Plant construction sites don't even have dial-up internet. There are a lot of projects going on in a lot of remote places, where there is simply no infrastructure available for internet. StarLink could be rented for a while and perhaps used after that.
There is tremendous potential for such a service.
Web browsing, of course, isn't really affected by latency.
Web browsing involves a lot of ping-pong traffic pattern that multiplies latency.
So Starlink would be the infrastructure and they need to allow others to use it on the same level as the Starlink ISP uses it.
One example of this already working is in Sweden, where Telia-Sonera is owning the actual infrastructure but they have to allow others to use it as well. So in Sweden you have plenty of ISP choice, one of them being Telia-Sonera, but not only them.
We were specifically talking about Elon, Starlink and rural Internet. Obviously Starry is a completely unrelated company.
Does this usually apply to space-based operations? I would guess there must be minimal coordination, or otherwise anyone space-based could degrade the infrastructure of countries in line of sight.
If such regulation exists, then satellite internet either needs to make sure they have all the permission to use their band (bands?) in particular countries, or... I guess they can just ignore the local laws, blast away, and claim no jurisdiction?
The regulatory situation might get quite complicated I think, for example if you're in international waters, connected to the internet by a global ISP whose infrastructure is also outside of territorial limits then whose regulations do you have to comply with (besides your clients)? What's stopping the likes of Google poaching the concept of Radio Caroline, planting a datacentre somewhere in the North Sea and raising a two-fingered salute to any sort of data protection laws?
I think it'll be OK. Cellphone roaming works just fine for example
It could lead to a bit of a "wild west" situation with governments giving themselves extraterritorial powers. In the late 1980s the British government gave itself very draconian powers to conduct armed raids on radio ships in international waters for example, they take a really dim view of information outside of state control even if they're not the state controlling it.
Interesting to watch. And most of the world does not live on yaughts. I think the answer will be a lot of deals. I'm in China and Elon is putting in a lot of energy here, and with Starlink a big potential conflict of interest with Starlink vs Tesla. Not sure how fickle that is. We will see.
whippersnappers who complain about 20ms ping should watch some quakeworld or quake 3 cpma where this dude rat used to destroy everyone on 300ms.
Whether there's a clear advantage to having 50 vs 20 ms ping I can't answer. I'm quite certain that's an advantage I personally can't make any use of, but a Quake pro might be able to.
Also, today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago.
I played a lot of Quake and that was not remotely close to being the case. There were the high ping and low ping players, with not much of a % inbetween. In 1996-1997 the vast majority of people were playing Quake online via dial-up modems. The best players had low pings and were playing over ISDNs or better (a lot of players were on fast university or corporate networks).
> today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago.
The pro-level players in the later half of the 1990s were as elite as anything that exists today in the FPS space. They were playing like it was a job even when it wasn't, and they had been doing it for a while (Doom LAN competitions were common before that). Quake clans were prolific. They also had professional caliber competitions / tournaments back then, see: the 1997 Red Annihilation Quake tournament in Atlanta, where Dennis Fong won Carmack's Ferrari.
Edit: See https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-starlink-heres-how... and https://www.zdnet.com/article/spacex-starlink-internet-prepa...
So about $80 pm. That's pretty good imo.
I'm not holding my breath... but I had VM before I moved here, and prefer the BT-network service to it.
Hopefully it's sub-second. I can't think of anything apart from a competitive gamer playing a shooter that might be intolerant of this.
What would change would be the latency which would have a bit of a jump on a handover.
It also can't be an alternative to cell networks since the antenna is huge and heavy compared to phones, requires LOS and needs to follow the satellites [1].
[1] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0173/8204/7844/articles/GM...
Are there any interference/loses issues that might popup when scaled?
What is stopping spaceX to provide internet outside US?
Almost certainly has its own slice of spectrum. You need a pizza-box sized antenna set up, so it's not quite person-portable yet, but not too bad for installing on a vehicle.
> Are there any interference/loses issues that might popup when scaled?
Each satellite only has so much bandwidth. So the more people using it in the same area, the worse it's going to get. In theory they'll add more satellites as needed, but it's never going to be much good for towns/cities.
> What is stopping spaceX to provide internet outside US?
Ground stations and regulations. Once they have satellite-satellite communications running the ground stations become less of an issue (though there's a latency penalty if your signal has to go a long way round the satellites before getting to the ground).
Since the angular resolution of these beams is limited, they each cover a fixed ground area (let's say 20km across). If more than one customer sits in that area, they will have to share airtime with the others.
Now, it's probably easier for the satellite to perform (time-division or other) multiplexing, since it knows how much data each node is going to receive.
I guess it's a lot more involved when it comes to sharing upload bandwidth with another client you can't see.
Anyway, this makes it easy to scale in rural areas, and pretty much a no-go for cities.
Now, a question of my own: do SpaceX satellites already have HW for sat-to-sat communication?
This will never be some tool to counteract totalitarian governments.
If SpaceX violates ITU policy they risk their licenses globally.
A black market for this service is not possible. The equipment necessary to confirm SpaceX is transmitting into an area, or to radiolocate the ground stations themselves costs a few grand. Even low income nations can afford to monitor and enforce spectrum requirements if they desire to.
But more fundamentally, this is not a goal of SpaceX or Elon. The projection of "hero" onto him and this project is out of control. Elon is doing this to make money, plain and simple.
Can't use a service that you have no method of paying for...
And is latency in Asia or the Caribbean or anywhere else outside of North America that bad? Nah.
In 2020, latency from almost every continent is good enough for 99.99% of use cases.
Good enough that I can sit here in Bangkok and use Vim all day remotely into servers in Texas without any difficulty.
Starlink will be awesome for the majority of the world. Even "gamers" (if the pricing is good).
Many years ago, before life got so busy, I used to play FPS games online over various forms of dialup and then (somewhat) faster links. Bandwidth was fine, if you were patient about downloads, but latency caused real problems, even on "good" days when you could get close to 100ms on some of the better links. In short, 100ms latency (taken from another thread) is definitely enough to cause problems for many games, and would also make things like stadia/geforce now/playstation now not viable. This doesn't mean it's not useful tech - I can think of many useful applications, but I don't think we can just handwave away all the cases where 100ms of latency might, actually, cause an issue.
Chrome's devtools will let you simulate this. It's not pretty but it is better than nothing.
* Yes yes yes, Elon promises better than that, but 30-90ms is what it's currently tested at.
Elon confirmed the target is <20ms and <10ms over time.
Awesome!
12 Mbps down and 768kbps up, almost 20 to 1 ratio.
Most ‘consumers’ download more than they upload.
> Shotwell said millions of people in the U.S. pay $80 per month to get “crappy service.” She didn’t say whether Starlink will cost more or less than $80 per month but suggested that would be a segment of the public the company would target as well as rural areas that currently have no connectivity.
My hope is that this will lower the cost of access to space with another magnitude, which should allow a serious scale up of the amount of astronomy done from space.
Whatever.
Is there any new information about latency since before that you want to expand on?
But it's more interesting if we discuss the latency itself, rather than complaining about previous discussions around the latency.
As it seems right now, the latency is more than alright, at least for people who are used to really shitty latency. Sure, it's not gonna replace your home connection if you live in-or-near a city, but for the rest of us, it's much better than what was offered before.
At 550k off the deck, my house to Los Angeles isn't that much closer via satellites link that terrestrial fibre, maybe a few hundred kilometres.
Wait till the service is massively over subscribed and get back to me.
With any luck Starlink operators (Elon Musk?) won't let that happen, but it does tend to be the way of things.
Additions, the unintended consequences haven't revealed themselves fully yet.
One thing I personally dislike about electricity, cable internet, and fibre optic, is what they do to the visual appeal of the built environs. Could be underground, but only areas missed that boat.
Not saying the trade-offs, if any, won't be worth it though.