SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
> Can I travel with Starlink, or move it to a different address?
> Starlink satellites are scheduled to send internet down to all users within a designated area on the ground. This designated area is referred to as a cell.
> Your Starlink is assigned to a single cell. If you move your Starlink outside of its assigned cell, a satellite will not be scheduled to serve your Starlink and you will not receive internet. This is constrained by geometry and is not arbitrary geofencing
When they have laser links widely deployed, you will be able to move about.
They are already testing Starlink on planes and those are clearly moving.
A dedicated product for boats and planes is certainty on its way. Understandably to do capacity planning, they are focusing on stationary at first.
Seriously I have sites running 5 figure data bills every week.
Yes, mechanical adjustment for big waves, but that's a simple passive 2-axis gimbal and having the center of mass slightly below the gimbal axis crossing.
[0] https://fcc.report/ELS/Space-Exploration-Holdings-LLC/0955-E...
And no, putting it in a passive gimbal as some of the other commenters are suggesting is not enough to fix this as the direction of the antenna beam is not even close to being parallel to ground (like it is when a gimbal is used with a marine radar).
Plus there is the fact that it does not appear to be sufficiently waterproofed to begin with and the motor mount is rather flimsy (both a problem if you want to use it at sea instead of lakes...).
Marine antennas for Starlink will come, no doubt - but the current home user terminal one is not it.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1323691195239960579
I reckon the current restrictions will ease up when more sats are deployed, especially with more laser interconnects.
Trains might have more issues with vegetation and geography obstructing clear view of the satellites.
Bring 2 square meters of solar panel, an inverter and some batteries and hope for sun.
Whatever, your present PC, Monitor, printer, Router, and Internet wireless will already be using more than 100W.
A ~15 watt Macbook Air M1 seems suitable when living on a boat.
You could just turn it off.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/i9w09n/list_of_co...
It's decent early indicator, but hard to say long term if it's useful.
Due to blatant corruption there’s zero competition for broadband here, just resellers of the same system.
If Starlink can even sustain 20mbps+ and rolls out to rural Australia they’ll pretty much own the market, let alone similar stories across the entire globe.
Considering it doesn’t require any infrastructure, I can’t see how our tech-illiterate decrepit government can stop it. Just sell the modems online and ship directly worldwide.
Make unlicensed operation of the dishes illegal, detect violators using an AWACS plane if detector vans are not sensitive enough to detect beams formed directly to the sky. Even if a country's government can't touch SpaceX directly, the users are still a good target.
Can you tell us more about this blatent corruption? Are you saying corruption has stopped multiple players entering into the highly profitable internet market of the sparsely populated rural Australia?
Unfortunately in 2013 the coalition government won power and immediately set about to destroy the NBN.
It has since has been widely reported that this was at the behest of Rupert Murdoch who saw that his Cable network would be threatened by a high-speed broadband network.
Whatever, do your own research. There have been thousands of words written on this.
Here's just one: https://theqlder.com/2019/05/11/how-the-liberals-sabotaged-t...
And here's the very detailed Wikipedia version:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_National_Broadb...
Is it not ok to ask people making bold statements to backup their claims?
The wikipedia article (which I admittedly only quickly scanned) doesn't appear to mention corruption, murdoch, or newscorp. The other is a hyperbolic opinion piece that doesn't provide any references whatsoever.
Regardless of all this, you completely missed my point. The grandparent was complaining about lack of competition whilst being in a semi-rural (read low population density) and there being only one real option, with multiple resellers. Corruption isn't stopping rollout of companies from rolling out multiple competitive networks to rural australia. There is not going to be any return on investment.
For a country like australia we need internet as publicly owned infrastructure, with "zero competition...just resellers of the same system".
The coalition really ballsed-up what should have been a great resource for the so called "clever country". However, if starlink lives up to the marketing promises "our tech-illiterate decrepit government"s opinion that it would be a waste to provide fibre coverage to 93%* of our population, and their decision to instead to wait for technological advances to provide solutions better suited to australia is suddenly not a bone headed as people make out.
* Australian urban population is 86.2% https://knoema.com/atlas/Australia/ Australi
To be issued frequency allocations within each country, the satellite communications must be routed via multiple ground stations within that country.
Fascinating, which treaty or 'law'?
My understanding is that Starlink is authorized to operate in Australia: https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/australia
I was one of the first to set it up, and since then haven’t noticed any decline in average/peak throughput or latency.
They also mention “thousands of customers”, so I guess that reading may be correct.
Also, as to economics, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink) says there will be up to 30,000 of these satellites. Even if (from https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1020316268311/Starlink%20Servic...) “hundreds of thousands of individuals spread over diverse locations across all 50 states signed up to register their interest at Starlink.com even without any formal advertising” turns into a million paying customers, that’s about 30 customers per satellite. Can 30 families in rural locations (so, presumably, not in the highest income brackets) really afford to pay for launching and maintaining a satellite in low-earth orbit? (Real number of satellites probably will be lower, initially, but so will the number of paying customers)
Edit: thinking a bit more about it. These satellites weigh about 260kg. That would be 10-ish kg/customer. They fly, mostly, at 340km, or 30-ish as high as jets. Not trying to model this precisely (to say it mildly), let’s guess, with highly reusable rockets, it’s as expensive to move a kg up a km as with a commercial jet. If so, it’s 30 times as expensive per kg to bring such a satellite in its orbit as it is to use a jet airplane to take a kg to cruising height. So, each customer would have to pay the equivalent of moving 300-ish kg by long-distance jet. That’s 3 personal flights with luggage. Guessing at a satellite lifetime of 6 years, that’s ½ a flight a year. Seems affordable for many in the USA, even taking into account that the satellites have to be built and managed.
I believe this is to do with the difference in speed of light in the cable and also indirect path that light takes as it bounces along a cable. Over inter-continental distances, the benefit is magnified.
Some governments would be happy to let a foreign company run internet services for their people if they can guarantee the data must flow through a ground station within the country. If the satellites have lasers though, the government cannot guarantee that, and therefore may ban the service entirely.
30 paying customers over the 5-year lifetime of a satellite is $180k. This is more than the estimated cost of a satellite plus the cost of lifting it into orbit assuming they have a fully reusable launch vehicle.
However, even if they don't achieve that you are ignoring a rather important point: that is, most of the time the satellites are not over the US, and there are paying customers elsewhere, too. Even though the profit is not going to be as great elsewhere (generally, in most of the world you have to pay for spectrum, and the customers probably can't support as high a price), each Starlink satellite will spend roughly 50% of it's time within reach of a populated area it can serve. (Even over the southern pacific, with a low angle to the horizon the satellites will be in range of a populated island quite often.)
Is there some sort of mental block on americans? Do you think that other countries don't exist?
Our impression: it’s fast, latency is awesome, but “downtime” is common and disruptive. Having the internet go offline at random intervals through the day, often for 10+ minutes, is a thing. We expected some of this given it’s currently in beta and it should get better as they make improvements and add satellites.
If you create all this infrastructure (with the impact it has) to then just serve a couple million people then this service will be unaffordable for mortals and limited to the wealthy and most likely the military. [0]
[0]https://spacenews.com/u-s-army-signs-deal-with-spacex-to-ass...
Practically the presence of Starlight satellites already has an impact on the work of astronomers, an issue that will only get worse as more of them are sent up [1].
That's not to belittle how cool the whole thing is, but it's kind of disheartening how we've already managed to pollute pretty much every place on the planet, and are now on our way to even polluting the space around our planet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
[1] https://teachingkidsnews.com/2020/02/03/are-too-many-satelli...
Kessler syndrome would destroy SpaceX, so they're more aware of it than random internet people.
As for light pollution, see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26036269
They are hoping to launch roughly 600 per Starship launch with the launch itself eventually costing roughly 2M. Don’t know how much each satellite costs.
If they doubled the number of base stations in a new area (with satellite coverage) they would double the number of customers they could serve right now. So the constraint at the moment is mainly the number of base stations. The thing is once they have the sat-to-sat laser links working, they will be able to scale up with a lot fewer base stations, so there's no point deploying masses of base stations right now.
Most of the users are in the northern US at present. Satellites passing over that area will be supporting far more users.
That said, I think Elon needs to travel the world a little more. Several of his attempts to solve purported world-relevant issues may be founded in limitations present in the US.
1) I have been to the jungles of Cambodia, trekked across Myanmar, stayed in villages of central Iran, driven across the deserts North Africa. Never have I felt deprived on good connectivity, even in the deserts of Iran. Everyone glued to their smartphones like everywhere else. And I had a pretty strong case of FB-itis myself back then. Where there is a human settlement, there seemed to be a connection. As an anecdote, I recall having Skype calls with my folks from the Shwedagon Pagoda - it had excellent wifi ~7 years ago. Walking across a salt lake one can and should expect to drop our for a while. The only exception I recall is some village in Tunisian Sahara where locals made a point of not being connected (mostly expats). Ksar Ghilane, perhaps?
How is it that in rural US there is no alternative to satellite internet? There seems to be some local systemic failure. The rest of the world will be left holding the bag, so that people do not have to dig down some cables in Arkansas.
2) Building the self-driving car. It already exists everywhere. It is called the metro, tram, bus, tuk-tuk, rickshaw, whatever. It exists, and works great, servicing billions and if you exclude the latter options, safe. But not in N.America, where you cannot even cross a street without a vehicle. Thankfully, this seems to only use up VC money, without any externalities for the rest of the world.
Still, I think you're missing one very important point. The likely biggest user of this system will be the US military and Department of Defense. Just how they use the iridium constellation, only phone calls aren't enough in the 2020 and beyond.
They need the same system but with broadband speed _internet_. They can not be dependent on some other nations infrastructure and there are a lot of boots out at a sea and places where there isn't a cell tower.
The math just doesn't add up. Mark my words, the StarLink system will never work or be profitable without the US Gov being a major customer.
The TLDR is that there is a lot of room for Starlink to beat existing terrestrial options IF they can get the laser links working on-orbit. This video[1] shows estimates using what was known about proposed configurations in 2018
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-k1j7M2-hBfXeECd9YAQ_g
Cables run relatively straight under the sea. If they are optic fibre, they run at a lower speed than light in vacuum.
Satellites are in space, so communicate pretty much at speed of light, but probably not in a straight line, depends where the satellites are.
HFTs are indeed great at gaming such things, will be interesting to see what happens.
Can you demonstrate that math in a comprehensive manner? I've seen this kind of claim repeated frequently and it's never supported.
> The likely biggest user of this system will be the US military and Department of Defense.
The biggest user of Starlink by an extreme margin will be consumers. It won't be a close comparison.
There will be at least a million consumers eventually using Starlink around the world. The network has capacity to handle that globally. The military is going to push that much data through Starlink? No they're not. A million consumers pushing HD video streams through it will rather comically outweigh anything the military will be doing.
I'm pretty sure the US military will be paying more $'s than any other country's people.
And it'll be used for being able to fly drones with weapons to kill anyone in the world in 30 mins. With that ability, you can decommission a lot of aircraft carriers and spend that cash on decent connectivity for your drone fleets...
But I think the DoD billing would be different than you describe. Specifically, even if they're not pushing GBs of video all the time, they'd be paying a lot for guaranteed bandwidth at any time. Pure speculation on my side though - mostly based on seeing overinflated requirement docs.
That makes me even more grouchy about my current situation :D
You don't have to get too far off a major highway in rural Saskatchewan to have miserable connectivity. You can generally connect to an LTE tower, but between the distance to the tower and how oversold they are, it's a total crapshoot as to whether you'll actually be able to use it. Because the towns are too far away from the switches, the only wireline connectivity you're going to get is 56K dial-up (maybe only 33.6K...).
When they announced the "Better Than Nothing" Beta, I was very excited because "Better Than Nothing" is "Better Than What I've Got" at our rural spot most days.
Edit: I missed your comment in the middle there:
> How is it that in rural US there is no alternative to satellite internet?
Well, the RM (~= county) we're in has a land area of 336 sq.mi. and a population of 275 people (0.8 people/sq.mi.) I have no idea what the population density is like in the Cambodian jungle, but looking at a table in Wikipedia suggests that the least-dense province has about 6 people/km^2 compared to our 0.3/km^2. It's just really really uneconomical to build out wireline service.
Presumably these people are hooked up to the electrical grid, and if that is the case why isn't that equally uneconomical? Do they have phone lines?
Having people hooked up to fiber or at least DSL is in my experience often mostly a political issue.
BPL (Broadband over Powerline) also requires heavy investment [0]:
- Only low and medium voltage power cables can be used for access BPL. - Signals need booster equipment to make them travel long distances. - Transformers, circuit breakers, and surge protectors can interfere with broadband signals.
[0] https://www.explainthatstuff.com/broadbandoverpowerlines.htm...
Again, can't the exact same argument be made for why some citizens shouldn't be connected to the electrical grid?
While I don't dispute that electricity is more vital than a fiber connection, the point I'm trying to make is that this is primarily a political issue and not an economical one.
I don't think anyone was suggesting BPL as an alternative.
But again, no NA carrier I'm aware of is pushing out new DSL DSLAMs anywhere in the country or even building out copper capability at all in new neighborhoods. Its a legacy technology that isn't being invested in, for good or ill.
Yes, the first Starlink satellites were horrible for light pollution, especially during orbit raising. However Starlink has taken measures to mitigate this. They've added an shade to darken the satellites and they've modified their orbit raising path to avoid reflecting as much sunlight back to earth.
Starlink's goal is to be invisible to the naked eye when in final orbit. They're not quite that dark during orbit raising, but they're a lot better than they were 6 months ago. Orbit raising takes a couple of months for 1/3rd of the satellites in each launch.
Another advantage of Starlink is that they are in super low orbits. This means that they are shadowed by the Earth except for the half hour after sunset and the half hour before sunrise. There is so much refracted sunlight during these times that they aren't useful star gazing times for most.
Starlink's competitors (OneWeb, Kuiper) have none of these advantages. Kuiper may add some, but none are announced yet. They have no sunshades, are cubical so orbit raising perturbations don't help much, and are in higher orbits so are visible during the darker periods of the night.
https://humantransit.org/2017/07/the-dangers-of-elite-projec...
geosynchronous satellites (~35,000km) have an inherent speed-of-light latency of ~250ms. that means even if every other link along the route imposes <1ms latency, you've still got that absolute minimum quarter of a second on every single packet.
Starlink is in LEO (~500km) with a corresponding reduction in the minimum possible latency. that lower altitude also requires much more complex antennas and other ground hardware, compared to just pointing your antenna at a (relatively) stationary point in the sky.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Hist...
You'll find a *lot* more than 200Tbps of usable bandwidth in even a moderately sized national operator. At a small ISP (~90k users) we have about 25Tbps of capacity in our equipment.
A single mid-range carrier router can easily handle a dozen terabits; something like a Juniper MX2020 has 80Tbps capacity. A Nokia 7950 XRS-20e has 96Tbps. These are single racks worth of kit that deliver half the entire constellation's capacity.
Headroom is particularly important for usable high speed services as traffic becomes burstier. Statistical multiplexing gets you so far.
Now bear in mind that's with 10,000 perfectly working satellites and no degradation from 20Gbps based on spectrum availability and I'd be surprised if SL carries more than a million or two people - maybe 10 at the highest level.
Don't get me wrong, service for the hardest-to-reach million or two places on Earth with good latency and throughput would be awesome, though I think they have a lot of work to do on their impact on ground based scientific astronomy if they really want to launch and maintain 10,000 sats. But a mass-market service it ain't.
Now there is likely to be an relatively few MX2020s in a mid-size carrier (conceding that Starlink will be launching many more satellites) but Starlink has essentially 0 cost infrastructure for last mile deployment other than the satellites themselves.
But lets say Starlink gets to your upper limit of customers (which I assume they will, eventually, assuming they aren't already up against a Shannon limit on their bandwidth,) that is a billion dollars a month at $100 vs ~1.2 billion in launch revenues total in 2020, not even counting high revenue customers like the Department of Defense.
This is going to be a money printing machine for SpaceX once their main cost is just replacing deorbiting satellites and bandwidth on the ground.
Also Starlink doesn't have last mile costs as such (they just push that to the consumer) but they do have ground station requirements which will grow linearly with demand. It'll be interesting to see how they manage that as they grow. And of course, they're going to need those big routers too...
The beauty of a five-year lifespan for the satellites is that when, for example, multilayer PV panels (i.e., more efficient/higher output) get cheap enough, it'll be simple to roll them out.
Likewise with more power-efficent routing chips, and everything else.
It's not 10,000 satellites. Starlink has FCC support (with the ITU) for over 40,000 satellites.[1]
With a steady-state demand of about 10k/year, Starlink will be able to get fairly good prices from semiconductor fabs for ASICs. Is the market for Juniper MX2020s the same size? (I honestly have no idea.)
No doubt Starlink will be researching furiously to optimise transmit power, modulation schemes, antenna design, et cetera as well.
A final point is that Starlink's markets are additive, not mutually exclusive.
They can do low-latency links over the North Atlantic and North Pacific for HF traders/arbitrageurs, and when the satellites are over other parts of the globe, they can serve village WISPs, or individual consumers (and the US military if you insist). The one market Starlink can't serve well is exactly that which is best served by fibre: urban areas in the developed world.
Looking at the business case, the risk is all upside for Starlink.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
On 15 October 2019, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) submitted filings to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on SpaceX's behalf to arrange spectrum for 30,000 additional Starlink satellites to supplement the 12,000 Starlink satellites already approved by the FCC.
I suspect starlink will change the course of human history in substantial ways. It already stands to be the most positive technological development for my life since I've been living.
At the very least, until the market adjusts, it will provide a verdant field of lifestyle arbitrage.
Video streaming? Smartphones? Wikipedia? Google maps? CRISPR? mRNA vaccines?
video streaming, Smartphones, Wikipedia, Google maps, CRISPR, mRNA vaccines
everywhere
Starlink is going to enable me to own a home without a mortgage. It will allow me to make good money while living in one of the cheapest places in the country. This lets me move the goalposts on success so I have to do significantly less just to feed myself and my family. Suddenly retiring by 35 seems conceivable. I can do work I want instead of what's available. Nothing else on that list comes close for me.
There are 3 billion people without internet. It's not a human right, but it's the next tier.
There's a clear path to hooking many of these people up. For instance aid organisations. Unlike installing the scam computer labs where they can just forget upkeep and training, it's known upfront costs they have to be accountable for. And better, small businesses like cafes.
But the 1% are worried it might make their stars look less authentic and their bored ultrarich reddit life needs drama.
Because in reality they don't want to actually go to space and be with the stars, screw that tech of cheap launches and using space, it's just about the books and TV and the appearance.
People are both awful to others and so uninspiring as a default setting.
[edit] For the Flagged reply, it's not logical. The now is a mass of high entropy. The battle forward is already reducing that. This is about caring about their healthcare as human beings for instance, not their crappy Facebook posts. We are about to be hit by AI to mass spam us all, can't you see that? I understand the 'I like real stars' and 'nice conversations', but this is bigger than that. They are people.
Exactly. We've already seen Russian authorities say that people will be arrested for using Starlink. All of a sudden, governments have lost the ability to shut off the internet without some serious jamming.
Just thinking of the post-disaster communications potential is pretty staggering.
(I feel compelled to mention that I'm not a "fan" of Elon Musk.)
I'd love to see a multi-link mesh appear across the world, with Starlink stations, wifi, 4/5G, fibre and cable, etc etc. I honestly think that basic low-broadband speeds should be free to everyone in the world, and so should the ability to serve up content from a cheap Raspberry Pi.
I'm not sure that's the case. I believe you have to licence spectrum in the same way that you would if you were offering a terrestrial based service, and if you don't have a licence then you'd have to turn off the beams as the satellites passed over that part of the ground.
The current status quo (as I understand it) is that the US Gov is unlikely to allow a private company to breach international law by making unauthorised transmissions into another country. It would be a brave foreign policy decision for the US Gov to decide to permit that.
A logical response from Russia or China (or any other nation with the capability) would be to start shooting down satellites. They would have reasonable grounds to do so, and I think it very unlikely that anyone wants to start a space war.