Teardown of the SpaceX Starlink User Terminal | Hacker News Reader

Teardown of the SpaceX Starlink User Terminal

arstechnica.com

158 pointsmikestew138 comments

Eagerly awaiting an invite here in NW Oregon, seemingly just on the border of the beta zone. Last night I white-knuckled through a big presentation, hoping my over-the-cap LTE wouldn’t get throttled. It mostly worked out. Our traditional sat is expensive, capped, and the latency isn’t usable for video conferencing. For our family, the trade offs are worth it. But for rural areas, this is really exciting. Can’t come soon enough.

I'm right in the middle of the beta zone, in Washington state, and I've not yet received an invite.

I was surprised to get an invite with an address smack in the middle of Seattle. I've been tempted to bring it up as as failover for Centurylink, but it's still a bit pricey for novelty (about all it provides compared with the alternatives at this address).

If Starlink customer service knows what they're doing, they won't let you sign up with a metro address. Starlink has limited bandwidth per satellite footprint. It either won't work at all in a city, or be very, very slow.

Links for that? It sounds logical but I never heard about it before now.

>Elon: "We'll have some small number of customers in Los Angeles but we can't do a lot of customers in Los Angeles because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough" also "I wanna be clear, it's not like Starlink is a huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear. It is not. In fact it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest to serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with cell radio stations, cell towers."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/wiki/index#wiki_-_will_sta...

That links to two timestamps in a 47 minute livestream by Elon Musk. There's no canonical answer on starlink.com.... because that site has basically no info on it.

Last time telcos were taken on we got Google Fiber. I'm skeptical if the long-term play is to stick with servicing just rural customers. Also telcos get paid quite an insane amount of money to service rural areas poorly. I'm not so sure they'll see it as "not a threat".

Thanks!

It's also important to position the company in this light to prevent telecos being able to lobby hard against Starlink.

If Starlink had come out saying they wanted to provide access to everyone the telecos would have came in and said Starlink has to also allow reselling of access like how they're forced to (at least in Canada).

It is a lot easier to show up and just tell everyone, "Remember how rural areas aren't profitable for you? No worries, we'll take this trouble from you."

> Starlink has limited bandwidth per satellite footprint.

That's not actually the problem. The satellite footprint is >1000km across, and they can just launch more satellites to serve more customers. They would happily launch enough sats to serve every customer in the world if that was the only problem.

The issue is rather bandwidth density on the ground. Starlink achieves it's high system capacity by SDMA. That is, every antenna, both on the ground and on the satellites, is very highly directional, and they can have a single satellite talking to many customers on the ground at the same time on the same frequency, so long as the angles between each customer are large enough. The ground antennas are, for cost and physical size reasons, less capable of distinguishing between different directions than the satellite antennas, and can only do so if the angle between the transmission origins is ~>10°. This means that any location on the ground (iirc with a spot size of ~10km or so) can only handle a few dozen simultaneous beams, no matter how many satellites you have up there.

Almost everyone who would benefit from Starlink in a rural area shares the sky with a major metropolitan area containing millions of people.

Can you expand on that? "shares the sky"?

Sure. When you look up in a rural region you see stars. When you look up in an urban region within, say, the same geographic hemisphere, you're very likely to see the same stars.

I must not be under the same sky then. It’s too bright here to see any stars in order to confirm your theory.

The invites only last a few days, so if you got it a few days ago the link may not be valid anymore.

I check my e-mail for it pretty regularly, and I searched my history for it, no go.

From what I've read, they had a lot more people sign up for beta testing than they needed, so some people just didn't get the invite.

It's barely "beta" with plenty of downtime. I'm sure it's better than what you currently have.

Can someone explain to me the economics/ technology of Starlink and why it beats out traditional geosynchronous internet providers? Is it that owning your own cheap launch platform makes launching lots of satellites instead of one big one feasible? Is it some new antenna miniaturization technology? If that were the case, I would think this would have been invented by one of the myriad existing players in the space. Why is this apparently revolutionary progress in internet satellite technologies coming out of nowhere from a company (SpaceX) that has nothing to do with connectivity or satellites?

It's all about latency. Having broadband with 200+ms of latency to reach geostationary satellites is to slow for modern networks.

https://www.satsig.net/latency.htm

You have to move the satellites closer to Earth to reduce latency - hence low earth orbit (LEO). You can achieve much better latencies, <20ms, and support modern networking applications.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

But when you reduce the height to LEO, not only are the satellites no longer geostationary, they also have a much smaller coverage area. So you need more satellites to cover the same area, and fancy networking to handle the constant hand-off between satellites.

Bandwidth as well. Starlink can reach 100Mbps, and they're talking about 200Mbps. They can do that in part because they have more satellites.

> because they have more satellites

I wouldn't characterize this as a function of having more satellites, but rather having fewer users per satellite (an admittedly subtle difference). But, related to the above post(s), the smaller geographical area each satellite covers is a problem for coverage (you need more satellites in orbit), but is a benefit for speed -- you have less users vying for the full bandwidth of the satellite.

And, because the geographical areas are smaller, instead of having one base station/uplink, you now have geographically distributed base stations, so you have multiple points to access the Internet. This also helps with bandwidth (instead of X total uplink capacity, you need X/n capacity for each site, where n is the number of sites).

Once you get around the logistics of managing a fleet of satellites, many, many benefits flow from having lower orbits.

To grab a couple bits of info from that page + google, to give people a good idea of the distances involved at a glance:

    Starlink orbit:           550km
    Geosynchronous orbit:  35,786km
    Earth's circumference: 40,075km

Geosynchronous orbits are quite a way out. Latency at terrestrial distances can be painful already, bouncing through geosynchronous satellites will be multiples worse at a minimum. Meanwhile, Starlink's are at "normal" distances for networking - you probably connect to things further away all the time already.

The low latency is also a requirement to receive FCC subsidies related to rural broadband, e.g. see https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/h04on0/fcc_just_vot....

Have heard (IIRC in https://theamphour.com/518-satellites-and-evs-with-joris-aer...) that this could have been part of the reason for Starlink's decision to have their satellites in a lower orbit.

The subsidy angle is also of course a familiar playbook across SolarCity/Tesla/SpaceX etc.

SpaceX is super heavily vertically integrated which probably helps a lot with the financials. Also note that their financials aren't public, so there's all kinds of funny possibilities (what if SpaceX launches are sold below cost as a loss leader?)

I'd also imagine that they need a TON of subscribers to make it profitable. However by commoditizing their satellites the marginal cost of improving coverage is low (compared to GEO where every satellite is a billion dollar bespoke system).

Phased array antennas have been around for a while but I wouldn't be surprised if the starlink terminal is the first consumer device to actually use them (other than maybe boat radars?). They're still pretty expensive.

When you say boat radar and phased array, what is your experience there? The only radar I've seen on a boat has one of those spinning antennas.

No moving parts required, but you do need multiple units pointed in different directions to get full coverage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_phased_array_radar

My experience is poor memory :) After looking into it a bit, it seems that only the military is using phased array radars on boats. I think I misremembered an article about Garmin and Raytheon introducing solid state radars a few years ago

I've heard it suggested that Starlink is used by SpaceX to keep their schedule fully booked, which helps them maintain quality standards, training, etc. If so, they could perhaps lose money on Starlink but still come out ahead when you factor in the benefit of having experienced workers for whom building and launching rockets is routine.

That's a great point. Similarly it's also a great opportunity for them to push the limits of reusability. A rocket failure with a paying customer's payload is Very Bad. But the risk tradeoffs look a little different if it's your own payload and you already have an assembly line churning out replacements

> they need a TON of subscribers...

This is where I get a bit suspicious of the whole thing, as the areas where this service makes the most sense for a consumer is sparsely populated rural areas. I don't see how the economics works out.

You don't see how the economics works out because you are not factoring the client with the deepest pocket: the military.

Putting tin hat

The low orbit large non-stationary constellation of Starlink makes harder for other countries to deny service by attacking the satellites.

Also, the sensor fusion from modern jets need a point to point (to avoid possible compromised infrastructure), high bandwidth low latency communication. Starlink seems a great fit.

This is only based on what we know the system is capable of. Going on the realm of speculation, it is not difficult to imagine how a system, at low altitude, that cover the whole planet, can be used to eavesdrop communication from other countries.

Also, the satellites are made to have a right turnover, they can be always updated with the latest technology.

Lets not forget that the Arecibo Observatory (that collapsed this week) was made to listen for russian radio waves reflected from the moon. Maybe Starlink is the Arecibo 2.0

In summary, I think the Starlink is a military project subsided with paying customer. I wasn't made to make profit, it was made to make SpaceX a viable company in the long run.

We know about how much investment was made in SpaceX. And the idea that SpaceX has for 10+ years sold launches as loss leader simply doesn't add up.

The opposite is more likely, they were profitable already for years and then the made re-usability happen and their margin should be huge. They have not really lowered the price since they introduced re-usability.

It's because of the altitude of the satellites. Normal geostationary satellites are required to be at 35,786 kilometers in altitude above Earth's equator. Any signal has to travel that distance 4 times for a round trip ping, which equates to a minimum ping time to any service of 477 ms simply defined by laws of physics. 477 ms means any online games are unplayable and loading an ssl connection is going to push you into over a second delay.

Now the obvious idea is to put the satellites much closer to Earth, in that case they're rapidly moving across the surface and you need thousands/hundreds of them for full coverage, depending on the altitude the satellites are at. This wasn't really feasible until you had a rocket and satellite manufacturing designed for dumping large quantities of satellites into orbit at a time.

> If that were the case, I would think this would have been invented by one of the myriad existing players in the space.

A hundred-dollar bill is lying on the ground. An economist and an engineer walk past it. The economist nods at it and opines: "I thought I saw something over there, but I must've imagined it. If there had been $100 on the ground, someone would've taken it by now."

The engineer picks it up.

I feel like this joke would be improved by the engineer instead responding, "Yea, I did."

In the end, it's all of that and more. Geosynchronous is just too far away for good latency, plus the signal is weak and the bandwidth is saturated quickly.

So low earth orbit it is, but that meant doing several technology breakthroughs never seen before and at massive consumer scale.

First, you need to have massive launch capacity, otherwise satellites wouldn't be in view for most of the world, most of the time.

At this ground relative speed, they also stay in view pretty short at that speed, so you need to continuously roam from one satellite to the next every few minutes, hence the need for the cutting edge antenna array.

Lastly you need a truckload of satellites. Even the largest fleets are small series productions with specialized, expensive equipment such as radiation hardened processors, flywheels and propulsion to keep in orbit. Mass producing these from commercially available hardware was the third large challenge here.

Most companies would go bankrupt just tackling one of these and Starlink pulled them off in parallel. Pretty wicked.

It is due in part to them owning a cheap launch platform. The world has not caught up yet to how cheap space launches are going to be. SpaceX knew that with their Falcon 9 reusable rockets that launch costs for them were going to go down by a factor of 10 and with their new SuperHeavy, by a factor of 1000. Think $30/kg to orbit instead of $10000/kg. 14 of the 23 rockets launched by SpaceX this year were for Starlink. They want to build up a culture and skills for rapid relaunch and building StarLink gives them a hopefully profitable way to drive that.

Phased array antennas are necessary for this to work (no tracking of the low satellites necessary), because one wants to have the satellites in very low orbits to achieve low latency. Geosynchronous satellites are very far away from earth so that speed of light gives unacceptable delays for things like gaming, chats, remote server admin, etc. Very low orbit can get short pings (in theory better than fiber because light moves faster in a vacuum than in glass). But very low orbit means one needs a lot of satellites to have wide coverage and no dropped connections. They are thinking around 12,000 in the first phase and around 42,000 in the second phase. Having so many satellites also gives the system much higher bandwidth as each satellite is limited in data transfer rates.

Plus SpaceX is looking for a cash cow to fund their ultimate goal: a cheap, extensive Mars transportation system to facilitate building a city on Mars.

I agree with the cheap launch platform argument but from another, perspective.

I don't believe SpaceX numbers and BFR (it will always be BFR for me) is still a paper rocket (Raptor looks good though). But it is still cheap compared to traditional launches.

The problem is: SpaceX has now plenty of cheap, reusable Falcon 9s but not a lot of stuff to launch. There are not that many companies who want to build and launch satellites: it is expensive no matter what and the cost has to be justified. Falcon 9 rockets (including heavy) are also limited in capability: small fairing space and not the most efficient beyond LEO. Also, it may not be suitable for some sensitive payloads (military, etc...).

Ii means that SpaceX has good rockets, they already have the "culture and skills for rapid relaunch" but not enough market for it. So they did the obvious thing: create their own.

As for BFR. I made the choice not to take SpaceX communication into account, it is worthless. Same thing with everything by Elon Musk. I only believe what they show, which is already impressive enough.

I think there is still a pricing problem with reusability because spacex doesn’t have any competition that is reusable.

There is no downward pressure on pricing because spacex only has to be slightly cheaper than the cheapest non-reusable rocket. So for a marginal cost of, let’s say, $2m for a reflown booster, there are still able to charge $50m+.

But since their customers are seeing prices of $50m, space is still expensive... nothing much has changed.

(I’ve simplified this by omitting the fact that the upper stage is not reusable)

A lot of BFR development is being done in the open in Boca Chica, and you can follow along because it’s being live-streamed almost 24/7. BFR has had small incremental hops recently and will try for a 15km flight this week. We’ll see what happens.

Hopefully Bezos and Blue Origin can get New Glen on the launch pad soon. It is the only viable competitor to SpaceX that I see at the moment. One other possibility is for some company in China to appear on the scene.

Elon Musk has said he would love some competition because it helps increase the pace of progress. He even tried that internally for a bit by developing StarShip in two locations for awhile. I heard him in an interview saying that SpaceX might have too many great engineers and that it would be better for his goal of a city on Mars to have them spread over many companies.

By no definition is Starship a paper rocket. Either you have not been paying attention or you don't know what the definition of a paper rocket is.

> small fairing space and

Its not actually small. Its a little smaller then the biggest that you could launch on Delta 4 (that you can't buy) or a New Glenn (that you can't buy), but to just say its 'small' is just not accurate. Essentially its size is big enough for 99% of payloads.

There are like a few military sats in the next 5 years that need a slightly bigger fairing and they will have that for those launches.

> not the most efficient beyond LEO

By what definition? Just because it doesn't use hydrogen doesn't mean its not the suitable for beyond LEO. There is a reason the alternative for SLS is Falcon Heavy and not anything else.

> Also, it may not be suitable for some sensitive payloads (military, etc...).

That is just false. Falcon rockets are fully qualified for all military orbits and payloads.

The only thing they can't do right now is vertical assembly and that will be built by the time they have the first contract.

Building on the other comments here, SpaceX has more knowledge and certainty about recent and upcoming launch economics than other satellite providers, which opened up the possibility of a system like Starlink. Starlink is capable of such higher bandwidth and lower latency due to its lower orbit. Each satellite has a fixed amount of bandwidth capacity, and the area it covers is based on how high it is (how much of the Earth it can see at one time). High orbits mean they cover more area and spread that bandwidth out between more customers, low orbits mean less coverage area per satellite (so you need lots of satellites for global coverage) but more bandwidth per customer in that area.

What I don’t see talked about enough (in relation to SpaceX) is the one big customer who has been wanting global high bandwidth/low latency since at least the 90’s.

That is the US military. Think drones and all the fancy battle space information management stuff they’ve been talking about forever.

I don’t see how this gets built without the US mil wanting to use it. Furthermore I don’t see how this was designed without their input. It’s entirely possible that the US govt is covertly funding Starlink.

I believe even now hundreds of millis latency is quite enough for military applications, not even speak of 90's.

There's also a caveat: currently a satellite should have a ground station in view to relay data. It is rarely the case in areas of military activity.

The best part of this teardown is that Ken is sending it to Shahriar from The Signal Path for a proper RF assessment (and if history is any guide, repair). I can't wait!!!

This is where the good stuff is gonna happen.

Still though, phased arrays aren't all that complicated conceptually. The little chips are probably TX/RX switches and the larger chips probably do block up/downconversion, mixing, and provide controllable phase delay.

It is the overall integration and combining of 600+ signals that is the real impressive part. ST Microelectronics deserves as much credit on this as anybody. Truly stunning.

Totally agree and I'm no expert but was thinking likewise in the architecture. They clearly put some thought into the package, it's got to be the most sophisticated bit of commodity RF kit ever sold.

The Signal Path is no joke. EE's will say "RF is voodoo" and looking at HF to Wifi, you think it's a little bit hyperbolic. Then TSP goes and dissects some 80GHz monster and you realize that you know absolutely nothing about electronics and you should have stuck to software.

I'm excited to hear he's getting a crack at this and I can't wait for that video to drop.

https://youtu.be/1_M-Wccn2w8?t=287 Exhibit A

As someone who likes to make music with (analog) synthesizers, I understood some of those words!

I want one of these. I promise to take much better care of it than this other human, since it would be invaluable for me to have connectivity from the countryside :)

A teardown like this is much more valuable than you (singular) having countryside access to HN. Teardowns and ifixits provide a large benefit to the environment (less waste) and just general learning.

I am already fantasizing about a future "workplace" where remote work is common and good satellite internet is everywhere so you can work from whatever corner of the world you wanted to.

I am hoping for high bandwidth on airplanes to enable a VR appliance.

I don’t think the regulators would particularly like the idea of people playing VR games on an airplane. Or do you mean something else?

That sounds like fun. I think the very limited per-passenger space would prevent enough useful movement for many VR games, though. Interacting with the stewardess would also be challenging without adding outward facing cameras.

The Quest 2 can deal with most of that (including passthrough), but yes, the movement range would be a challenge. You'd need to rely on close gestures or controls.

This isn’t necessary for VR because worst tolerated motion to photon latency of 20ms means you can’t be more than 6000km/3700mi from GPU physically assuming zero display and various processing latency, which realistically take 1/3rd each of total latency and eats into budgets accordingly

Also assuming you don't do any post processing tricks locally to accommodate recent movement. I don't think we've explored vr thoroughly enough to know what's actually possible.

Edit: An no reason we can't stick GPUs on an airplane, they aren't heavy.

You bring up an interesting point, independent of VR. Sounds like the incumbents' days might be numbered. I wonder if and how quickly airlines could shift to Starlink. And if so, how easy it would be to bet against the incumbent providers. Unlike government, industrial, and scientific customers where the incumbents might be able to compete on stronger, minimal service guarantees[1], passenger connectivity on airlines seems to have always been flaky and relatively poor. Switching to Starlink would be a win-win for them--cheaper and better quality.[2]

[1] Not that Starlink wouldn't suffice in practice, but I assume Starlink probably won't want to cater to those customers with fancy, bespoke contract terms.

[2] And perhaps simpler equipment and maintenance in terms of fleet commonality. AFAIU, currently domestic service is via cellular and international service, where it's provided, is via satellite.

I've done the whole digital nomad thing for the past 5-6 years. Believe me it's possible now with 4G internet access around the globe.

Yes you have to teether with your phone, but when 10GB only cost like $6 USD, you can make it work.

Same, but remotely working from a sailboat, bouncing from desolate anchorage to desolate anchorage.

I wonder what possible DIY applications could this dish have. Something that immediately comes to mind would be a radar or a transmitter for drones.

Any DIY applications are very illegal in the US. There is basically nothing you can do with this dish other than it's original purpose that doesn't make you a felon.

Not true, as long as you’re only broadcasting in the appropriate frequency bands, it’s completely legal.

I doubt you can make it transmit far outside the bands it's designed for. Doubt any of those frequencies are unlicensed...

Isn't the entire frequency range that it is capable of transmitting in licensed spectrum?

Aren't there strict limitations on the maximum power output of any radio transmitters? At least in Germany there are quite low levels even for "free" frequency bands, so long-range FPV flight boosters/repeaters are already illegal, although they are working in a free band.

Yeah that's not at all how radio laws work in the US.

If you have a Ham license that gives you permission on the right bands, and you are careful to only transmit on those bands, then it's legal. There are power & frequency rules, among others.

It'd be a pretty big DIY project, and quite possibly unable to be done due to physics of the dish preventing you from shifting over to the legal (Ham licensed) frequency.

It's not on-face illegal to build radio equipment though.

If you hold an Amateur Radio license it would be entirely legal for you to repurpose this hardware for transmitting in one of the many allocated amateur bands, as long as the standard rules were followed. (No encryption, always identify yourself with your callsign.)

There is a long tradition of radio amateurs re-purposing other radio hardware. CB radios can often be retuned into the 10 meter band, wifi transceivers can work inside the 13cm band, for example.

Once you get into this kind of special purpose microwave gear, it's all made to only operate at a very specific frequency. So in this particular instance, no the dish really isn't able to be used or repurposed for anything else. The only thing it is ever gonna be capable of doing is listening or talking to Starlink. There's no shifting it into a nearby amateur band as you can do with some wide bandwidth LNBs or old commercial radios.

I only said it was legal. Not that it was practical. :)

And that is my entire point. The range that a starlink antenna can transmit or receive at is ~10.7GHz - 14.5 GHz. (possibly a bit wider than that, but not by much) All of which is licensed spectrum. And starlink only has a license for using that band if the beam is steered at least 25° above the horizon, and 25° away from the geostationary orbit band.

Good luck doing anything other than the intended use with that.

You can transmit using unlicensed equipment on Ham bands with appropriate amateur license, or on the ISM bands without a license under certain more restrictive power emission rules.

Anyone here know the likely component costs?

Reports say ~$2000 each https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/iuvqdq/starlink_t...

But this feels like more of a finger in the air guess

Wouldn't be surprised if it were that order of magnitude, but I bet the engineering effort cost much, much more. I'm ballparking the PCB alone at a hundred dollars each (that large of a multilayer board with controlled impedance), custom silicon probably had a high startup cost that will eventually amortize, a few hundred dollars in extra components, and then an expensive custom process for the top section with all the antennas.

Wouldn't SpaceX be amortizing though vs their satellites and rockets too? They must have had to invest a significant amount in R&D and supply chain setup already to figure out aerospace grade electronics. It seems like the terminals, despite being extremely impressive, would still be much easier (and could reuse some know-how) than what they've needed to deal with for their rockets, capsules, and satellites? And they're definitely aiming pretty mass market with millions of terminals in the US alone.

Right now these dishes are most likely completely overdesigned on the high-end RF scale. Unless Elon is repeating his stupidity of hiring a idiot of a consultant like they did for the Model 3 body (and eventually fired when made look bad by that reverse engineering firm). The design should get cost reduced in the future once they have enough field feedback over RF performance/behavior.

Yea, a leak said $2400, ordering 1m units from ST. ST covered the factory spin-up costs.

That leak also mentioned that SpaceX had the option of manufacturing the terminals themselves, which might be what they ended up doing (and is certainly how the cost of $2400 can be reduced). If they manufacture Dishy themselves, they buy chips from ST and pay ST an additional fee for not buying 1,000,000 finished terminals.

$699 for hardware, $99/mo for subscription according to a few youtubers. That is in the U.S. No idea what it will be elsewhere. Or do you mean their manufacturing cost per unit? [Edit: ] Was I incorrect, did I misunderstand the question?

Confirmed, in Canada, the unit is $649 and then $129/mo

I’m surprised this type of tear down was allowed under the beta user agreement. Or maybe just ignored.

The video's creator didn't necessarily have to violate the agreement. He could have bought it on ebay.

Competitors are going to do these teardowns privately anyway. In the case of starlink, it seems like there'd be nothing to gain and a lot to lose by being litigious when there are hoards of tech-enthusiasts which will devour content like this. It's free marketing.

> nothing to gain and a lot to lose by being litigious

I'm a big fan of Elon Musk, but I would have trouble denying that this line could be a chapter heading in any biography on hum and it wouldn't surprise anybody.

I asked for one for use, and teardown. I haven't received a reply.

StarLink is underrated. Where I live, it's $100 a month for 100Mbps Fiber to the Home (it was $200 last month) if you can actually get in touch with the "National" telco, which has a monopoly on FTTH, xDSL. The other operators offer "4G", which goes to 10Mbps at 3 or 4 in the morning. It's also capped as you can only download with "high-speed" about 1GB before it's throttled.

Mostly, though, it's a few kilobytes per second. We lost millions of euros in business because of that, couldn't make video calls with physicians when we needed it the most for extremely urgent situations [tried 8 devices simultaneously with three different networks to get that to work and it did not work]. We bought about six 4G devices (routers, dongles). We bought a 4G antenna. Main xDSL provider took a year to bring us a line. For businesses, it's $300/month for 20Mbps. (Yes, that's 20 mega bits not bytes per second).

There were other providers, but they were shut down by the "regulators" because they were too popular.

Seriously, fuck them. Let StarLink shatter these assholes. It's taking too long.

If there's anyone from StarLink here, I'd like to get some of these babies.

Is it like this across USA? In the UK I have a 350mb/15mb connection for £50($66) and I'm paying over the odds to get a business connection that almost never goes offline. I am fairly central to a big city though.

I love the idea of Starlink but it wouldn't make any sense for me here.

Europe in general has much better telecom/internet services than most other areas of the world, both in pricing and performance. I'm really jealous of you guys..

It is. I'm in southern California in a fairly high density area, and my only options until recently were 10mb/1mb cable internet with a 1TB data cap for $60/month and 1.5mb DSL for $15/month (no data caps though). TMobile recently started offering internet over 5G with no data caps, so I'm going to try that to see if it's better.

Saying it is or isn't true is just wrong, there is no one America. How many EU nations could you fit inside of Texas?

I'm in NYC paying $65 a month 500 Mbps (up and down), with no contract, 2 year price lock-in.

For $75 my provider offers Gigabit with a lifetime price lock-in, I just don't have a use for it since I'm not big on streaming.

In Raleigh, NC I was paying $75 for 500 Mbps, same deal on no contract

It's not meant to be a strict statement. At the same time, based on my personal experience and discussions with colleagues at work (with many remote), broadband access in the US tends to be relatively expensive.

The exception to that seems to be where fiber is available, but a lot of the US, even in areas where the population density is similar to Europe, don't have fiber available.

I mean the question was literally "Is it like this across the USA"

If anything the answer is, no it's not (see: places I mentioned)

But realistically it's a poor question.

I can see that. If I took "across" as "everywhere", it's clearly not. If I take "across" as "in many places in", then I think it is, even in some places with high population density, with the exception being fiber and some locally owned wireless providers.

Verizon FiOS?

Out of curiosity, can you name the providers?

Optimum in NYC. It was a while ago so I'm not hundred percent on NC but iirc it was Spectrum

I'm trying T-Mobile internet now. (super sick of calling Comcast every year when they double my rate so they can lock me into another contract)

They sent a 4G LTE modem. I'm getting 5-24 Mbps down, 10-40Mbps up, and 40-60ms ping. It varies quite a bit and, surprisingly, upload is consistently much faster than download. You need to experiment where to put the modem -- 8 feet can make a 10Mpbs difference.

The bandwidth seems acceptable for my in-the-sticks area but the latency is noticeable on conference calls. Not sure I'll keep it.

I'm not in the U.S. I'm in Algiers, Algeria. North Africa.

I will probably buy many StarLink terminals to put in several places, offer to family and friends, and, frankly, out of spite.

https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

Two positions from the bottom. It's faster to start from the bottom. Although if you're on mobile, you won't see the ranking for fixed broadband. It's only better than Yemen and Turkmenistan. It has worse fixed broadband and mobile broadband than fucking war zones. How is that even possible, even if you make efforts to make it possible?

apologies - you wrote the price is $ so I assumed. my bad!

No need to apologize.

> Is it like this across USA?

The person you replied to isn't in the USA.

That said, broadband costs are inversely correlated with population density, more or less. In most (but not all) US cities fast, reliable broadband is easy to come by. Obviously you can find one-off complaints here and there from people who have exceptions, but the general situation isn't as dire as the edge cases.

> I have a 350mb/15mb connection for £50($66)

For comparison, I have 1000Mbps for about the same price in a medium sized US city. I have friends in other US cities who pay more than you for less bandwidth, though. It just depends on the location.

> In the UK...

The challenge with the USA is that we have a lot of land, some of which is very sparsely populated. We have 10 different states that each have more land area than the entire UK. For example, Texas is almost 3 times the size of the UK, but has half the population. It's a challenge to get high speed infrastructure everywhere, and another challenge to keep it updated every decade as speeds advance.

That's where Starlink shines: The sparsely populated areas where running high speed infrastructure to everyone is prohibitively expensive.

Granted, I don't live in a big city (only about 5 million people), and yes, you can get stable internet. But not 1Gbps..

I also move between three or four places and I want consistency. The extreme case I talked about was in the mountains. However, the coverage was good, but the "internet" sucked. It is this that's infuriating. You never know. Sometimes, you have 30Mbps on mobile, sometimes you have 120kbps. If there's no consistency, you can't forecast. You can't rely on something like that.

The operations part also sucks. So, given the unreliability and the inability to be consistent, I'll just sprinkle places with StarLink terminals and have one thing fewer to think about.

>> The challenge with the USA is that we have a lot of land

Ya, try being in Canada. Take those problems and multiply them by 10. Then look at the Starlink satellite inclinations. The first 1400, the bulk of the system, won't even get to where I am standing at the minute (54* latitude). Starlink targets at very specific markets. It is not the globe-spanning uber-ISP that many think it to be.

That doesn't seem right - the Starlinks go up to 53.8 degrees. That means that you should have quite a few satellites above your horizon, once that first shell is finished.

After that, later satellites will be at 70 and 97.6 (retrograde) inclination, so the entire world should be covered upon completion.

Just having sats at an inclination is not enough. It is a numbers game. How many are visible at any one moment, and their slant ranges, at a particular spot dictates available bandwidth. Also: the number of hops to the nearest downlink station. This is a massive structure of sat and ground installations. What we are seeing now is a system that goes just north enough to cover london, leaving much of the north un/underserved.

It's coming, have patience. The beta has already started in Canada, and they are launching more sats every month.

Last mile is expensive, but that’s just a question of local population density. Network backbones are relatively cheap making total land area mostly a meaningless limitation. 4x land area increases average distance between cities by ~2x so that doesn’t change much. Thus while truly rural areas are an issue wiring every suburb and midsized town in the US is roughly as difficult as the UK.

The difference mostly comes down to corruption as the US government heavily subsidized network deployments, but without any requirement they actually build networks. Add a lot of anticompetitive legislation in the US and things really slowed down. It’s slowly gotten better over time, but many areas still have terrible internet availability.

PS: I pay ~66$ per month for 20/20 and live in a 22 story building so density isn’t the issue.

9Mbps download / 0.84 Mbps upload here in the boondocks of New Mexico. And that's the recent new faster speed. Just got the bill: $110.60 last month, which is normal. I plan to buy Starlink as soon as they'll sell it to me.

I have ~350/20 (just tested 342.6/20.9) in a small city in the USA (300k pop). I currently pay $80, but on nonpromotional pricing, its about $100 for internet only. Reliability has been great, but it's important to note that this is the only high speed internet option in my area. Basically, most of America is split between Comcast(xfinity) or Charter(spectrum), and some lucky places have real competition. I _could_ get worse internet via satellite or w/e, but if I want over ~20mps (last time I checked), I have to use Charter. I've used Comcast when living elsewhere, with similar pricing, but anecdotally worse reliability.

Internet is dirt cheap in my city in India now.

But if you wanted to go up to the mountains or the beach or any part of the country that wasn't an overcrowded city, you'd get spotty internet, certainly nothing to run a business on.

I’m in Scotland and get about 3/0.1 and it dies whenever it rains( very often), open reach don’t care. They send someone who measures something and says someone else will come and fix it and they never do. I guess the cost of fixing the line for our one house isn’t worth it. Scottish gov said we’d have fibre optic by now but it’s been pushed back another year. We should receive a £400 payout if it isn’t here by next summer, but again my guess is they’d rather pay the fine than pay the cost of installation.

Can’t wait for starlink to come in and destroy them. I’ll sign up the second it becomes available.

Starlink will never() directly compete with most of the in-ground Internet providers. Even with tens of thousands of birds up, the physics just don't allow the kind of bandwidth density that cables do.

) However: never say never!

Maybe it should say that StarLink will never compete with an in-ground ISP that wants to be competitive themselves.

Or the other way round: why should telcos sink billions into covering rural areas with extremely low population density where they'll never be able to recoup costs even closely? They're not having any incentive to do so now, they'll have even less once Starlink is up and running because half the target customers will be happy with that.

That is why basic telecommunication infrastructure should be built out by the government, similar to roads, sewers/drinking water/gas pipes and postal service. Letting private companies do the job without mandating equal service will always lead to rural areas being dropped off the radar, and besides it's an enormous waste of resources if two or more service providers have to dig up half the country to bury infrastructure.

>Starlink will never() directly compete with most of the in-ground Internet providers.

It only has to compete with in-ground Internet providers that don't provide internet in-ground. There are a lot of them.

StarLink will do for the Internet what satellite dishes did for TV and radio in many, many parts of the world that only had access to government controlled broadcasts. Satellite dishes allowed these people to have access to other cultures and become aware of things their governments were hiding from them.

The reason I say StarLink is underrated is that SpaceX is a U.S. company providing internet from space. Pretty hard for a government body, or a government, to control this. Even if they try, there definitely will be a black market for the receivers and people will get them where they need them. There will be customs agent who will take a bribe from someone importing them illegally.

That's without even addressing the fact that some governments spy on their citizens and arrest them. Granted, nothing guarantees that a StarLink customer won't have U.S. intelligence deep packet inspect the heck of their traffic, but the bigger threat for these people is their own government, and serious jail time for nothing. The lesser of two evils will play a role in adoption.

With satellite TV, you need only receive and controlling who can do that is a matter of DRM which the transmitting companies struggle to implement securely. In the case of some satellite TV broadcasters, no DRM is employed. With satellite internet however, centralized control is trivial because merely listening to the satellite is not sufficient; the satellite must also accept data you transmit to it. This means that it will be trivial for the American government to regulate Starlink. Whether other governments can regulate Starlink as well will depend on a few matters, not least of which will be the American government's willingness to facilitate their regulation. And even in some countries the American government dislikes, access to Starlink will likely be blocked by mandate of the American government (I wouldn't expect feds to tolerate Starlink selling subscriptions to Iranians or providing service to stations located in Iran.)

>(I wouldn't expect feds to tolerate Starlink selling subscriptions to Iranians or providing service to stations located in Iran.)

I would expect that, on the contrary, the U.S. would very much want to get as many citizens of a nation of interest as possible on a network they have some control over.

On the one hand, more people chatting leads to more insight. On the other hand, more people chatting creates noise that allows to hide people exfiltrating "interesting information".

On the more "businessy" side of things, Facebook and Google have been trying to enter China for quite some time. Google has through Dragonfly until there was a leak, and it announced shutting it down last year.

The problem in my opinion is that, to get those few billion people on the internet meant that these corporations had to deal with the Chinese government and "compromise their morals". If getting these people on the network is done through customer-premises equipment, it can be useful. It may prove harder to control the flow of devices than it is to control a corporation.

Facebook may as well become an important SpaceX customer. They tried to increase penetration with internet.org and deals with major telecom companies. Both have tried with balloons and drones. StarLink is a new mode (well, not entirely new, but one that has become more affordable).

It may create tensions between China and the U.S., and the former may restrict imports of these devices, but they'll find their way. It could also give leverage to the U.S.:"you want us to restrict your citizens' access to StarLink, give us something".

Who knows.

The user terminal is in scope for their bug bounty program:

https://bugcrowd.com/spacex

That said I don't really expect SpaceX to subsidize his research with a free replacement.

It's a "reactive impedance surface" metasurface (the squares) to better isolate the circular patch (or mushroom?) antennas and then a suspended layer of director elements for both linear polarizations (which passes circular).

Would be nice if this tech got copied and started showing up in asian tech markets. Phased arrays are super cool and affordable ones would be useful for a lot of different projects.

Dishy looked rather expensive to manufacture. I think it's sold way under manufacturing costs. Real costs could very well be in thousands.

In what kind of projects could this phased arrays be used for?

listening to multiple satellites at once

Depending on transmit power it could possibly be used for short range active radar. Tracking comms with any moving source, e.g. UAVs, satellites, etc. Localization of RF sources. Possibly MIMO-type operations to build more resilient RF point to point networks. etc. etc.

Lots of this depends on the RF architecture of the board though. The device clearly has high bandwidth but we have no idea what the tuning range is or if those subassemblies can be operated independently to build multiple beams. Also it is very high frequency (12GHz+) and uses circularly polarized antennas which may limit utility with existing terrestrial RF infrastructure.

- radar I.e. to track drones - create microwave links - receive/transmit to multiple parties simultaneously - extend the range of wifi/Bluetooth - all of the above simultaneously - put it on your own satellite or drone and the possibilities... All depends on what the Antennas, the electronics and the Software of the array allow you to do. And then of course you could chain them,...

I have been curious how feasible it would be to mount this dish to a van (when stationary), and specifically what the power requirements would be. I don't know a whole lot about off-grid power setups but it seems like it should be fairly feasible at 100 watts, which is awesome!

Depends if you're running it 24/7 and what your power generation is.

Elon has said more than once it will work perfectly fine, even when the van (or yacht, or train) is in motion.

In the Starlink Engineers AMA on reddit the team said they're working on reducing the power requirements. My current vehicle has 200W of solar, but a 100W draw would be a lot.

> "Power over Ethernet is usually limited to about 30 watts, but new standards allow for greater power delivery that can meet Dishy's need for about 100 watts"

100 watts? Is that for real??

On powerline meters of the dish + router input AC power, yes that's correct, but that's also factoring any inefficiencies in the power supply.

The Power over Ethernet injector supplies 56V/1.6A 2x power (namely all 8 lines energized).

See: https://imgur.com/JpVZ6Uy

Output 1 is for the dish, output 2 is for the router.

It’s probably 95 watts of radio and 5 watts of compute. If we could see radio waves, that thing would look like a 95 watt spotlight.

It has a heater to melt snow.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25220589

I actually submitted it some time before, but evidently the original title and a direct link to youtube weren't as appealing to HN readership.

UPD: If it isn't obvious, I was making a comment about the effects of the original title policy. If the original title is confusing / unappealing, the submission wouldn't be noticed, but someone's "repost article" with a better title would.

I'd much rather read an article than watch a video.

There isn't much of an article to read. Personally would rather listen to the author who actually did the job. Also I submitted it 6 days ago.

That video was great, thanks.

Anyone wondering where the name came from, look up the story of Boaty McBoatface.

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