Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
starlink.com
starlink.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174915&p=2
(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)
My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka band geostationary satellite services (hughesnet, viasat in the USA, xplornet in Canada), and any WISP that can't keep up with a 150 Mbps figure.
And eventually for really hard to reach places in the developing world, and much of the same offshore/aviation/maritime industry that right now pays tons of money to Inmarsat.
Also, what is their IPv6 support like? Can I get a routable /60 or similar? Static IPv4/IPv6? And do you need to use their router or can you hook in anything you want? Bandwidth limits? Any other restrictions, either via their TOS or through some kind of firewall? Is this experience ever going to approach something like fiber or even cable?
Keep in mind that on something like a DOCSIS3 cable coax last mile segment can have a minimum latency of 12-16ms from just the cablemodem to the local CMTS in the neighborhood, so that's actually really good. It's not as good as fiber but it's significantly better than many other options. One has to account for the need for the antenna/modem to modulate and apply FEC on the Tx at both my CPE antenna and the spacex earth station on the other end (at least a few ms).
b. no ipv6 yet. They have people who know what they are doing for neteng so I am sure it is planned.
c. all IPs are in cgnat IP space right now. Nobody is getting a discrete dhcp-assigned public ipv4 /32 yet. You can hook up whatever router you want, anything you plug into the PoE injector that is an ordinary 1000BaseT 1500 mtu DHCP client will be given an address. The router they hand out is a very bare bones 802.11ac 2x2 MIMO thing that is based on openwrt.
restrictions, you can't move it from your designated service location. That's part of the beta TOS.
Using it, it is a real 150 Mbps down x 16.5 Mbps up. I have put non technical guest users on it doing various things and from their perspective it cannot be distinguished from the separate terrestrial connection at the same location.
heh, my assumption when I hear that people who know what they're doing are involved is the opposite ;)
Thank you for the detailed report! I'm very excited for the tech, especially once the lasers are up and it doesn't rely on the base station (i.e. I can take my uplink on a road trip)
I've read multiple tutorials on IPv6 and it's so complicated that I still can't grasp how it all works in my head. For some context, I've personally written an Ethernet IPv4 network stack with DHCP from scratch. I also worked on Ethernet switch firmware, coincidentally for SpaceX...
Most people who would know how to set up port forwarding could probably set it up. I think even some routers support it built in now.
Of course, today IPv6 only can't be considered full internet access, so providers usually need both – and given that CGNAT gets consumers 99% of what they want/are willing to pay for, providers sometimes can't be bothered to also implement IPv6.
I used to have GCNAT + IPv6 on my provider, but the v6 part of their CPE was worse than useless – no option to open ports since "port forwarding is not needed on IPv6" (nevermind the mandatory firewall that doesn't allow inbound traffic unless completely disabled).
I have seen too many people that have the same excuse. The advise I gave them is to forgot all the things learnt from IPv4 and study IPv6 as a totally new IP stack.
The problem is people look at it from IPv4 view, which is a currently a mess with IPv4 exhaustion.
Also getting an entire public prefix assigned instead of just a single address is amazing too. On my public servers I let my ssh service listen on a randomly generated static IPv6 address from my prefix, which is not used for anything else. On that same machine I can have dozens of other public services on their own IP each (they can even all run on the same port because they're using different addresses), and when someone then decides to scan the IP of my website for interesting ports, they won't find anything.
To be honest, if someone doesn't understand IPv6, I doubt they really understand IPv4 either. Many issues with IPv6 today come from the fact that everyone and everything is so used to V4 concepts, that most products focus on IPv4 first and then half-ass IPv6 support (if they implement it at all).
Address asignment in an IPv6 world is more complicated - you can do DHCPv6, or your can do stateless auto-config. Which should you choose and when? Many other aspects of the stack require more knowledge.
And THEN you ALSO need to understand how v4 and v6 interacts so you can provide suitable compatibility - the various different methods of tunnelling and negotiation.
In my opinion you shouldn't really bother with compatibility. Just do dual stack and maybe NAT IPv4 if necessary.
For my personal use cases IPv6 just proved to be much more versatile than IPv4. It did take some getting used to since it's approached differently, but learning it is very worth it and also helps using IPv4 better
SLAAC is only a drop in replacement in the (typical) home.
At night it's something like 10ms.
The ISP network and node is oversaturated and they plan to do nothing about it (Cox).
So I'm actually excited if Starlink can provide 20-30ms stable latency, I have an option which is not tied to the regional operators.
Pinging 8.8.8.8 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=115
Reply from 1.1.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=60
Some sort of local caching going on.
Even my ISP's next hop is 2.5ms, 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 are both at 4.7ms.
It is a fairly simple design.
To Stockholm, which is only 80 or so km away if you measure straight line, is 3.5 ms away.
Iv'e always been curious as to what adds so much latency and what I did read was that its the network equipment itself mostly. The inherent latency in the fiber should be on the order of much less than 1 ms as far as I understand. 3.33 us per km, and 3,33 * 104 (more realistic distance) is only 346 microseconds.
Its weird though, using mtr its very clear that its the "long" hop that most of the latency, or at least 2.8 ms. So is the figures for speed of light in fiber wrong, or is there something else that adds up to a lot of latency in fiber connections? Is it the optical components?
Signals in fiber do not travel at c. They travel at lightspeed in glass. Light speed in a material is c/(the refractive index of the material). For commercial glass fiber, 1.5 is a reasonable estimate for it's refractive index. So the actual time for 1 km is ~5 us.
Then you’ve got the buffers - you could feed 5x100M streams on 1G carriers into a 1G uplink port and have plenty of bandwidth, but if all the packets of those 100M streams arrive in 100ms, then have no packet for the next 900ms, your outbound traffic will have to either delay your packets upto 900ms, or drop them.
Interesting, this is more like an internet proxy than connecting devices to the internet. Hope they fix it soon. Does the TOS forbid running eg ssh or remote desktop services? Or VPNs?
Eventually the Comcasts of the world will sell off the majority of the IPv4 they hold to the AWSs of the world.
citation needed
https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/are-you-sharing-...
And so died what was knows as "Internet" and AOL was resurrected…
I don't see why not in an IPv6 world.
Some individuals in /r/starlink have started reporting being assigned globally routable ipv6 addresses. So right now it's probably being tested.
Or I guess more generally, as an existing user of the service who is seeing dashboards I'm not seeing, how do you think this would play out for "occasional" users.
there is no seasonal 'pause' service plan offered yet.
Any discernible pattern for the hops through the constellation?
Any general thoughts about the topology?
I appreciate it. My family got into the beta today, not just the pre-order but it sounds like it won't ship for a few weeks. Thanks again.
nothing obviously satellite related shows up at layer 3. There's a few hops of stuff with no rDNS, and then the edge of the AS36492 network and whatever transits or peers your traffic is going to.
You can clearly discern from pinging your first hop (15.9 to 30ms away) that it's something on the other side of the up-and-back satellite link.
topology at present is logically a bent pipe. satellites need to be simultaneously in view of your terminal and a spacex earth station. The ten satellites they launched into a polar orbit last month are the first with inter-satellite laser links.
Does that mean that there is no connection between satellites?
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/starlink-packe...
It's unlikely that anyone's traffic is passing through multiple satellite links at this time, but that may change with higher elevation orbits serving states like Alaska.
the current terminal has motion sensors in it and is not designed for a moving vehicle, it will turn itself off. the same 6-axis sensors that are used to orient and tilt it to the proper angle can also tell it when it's being moved.
Except then this thing were they assign you to a single cell and the vessel may pass the boundaries of said cell? Do you expect some sort of protocol for automatic handoff to the next cell in the future?
The limitation with the cells is that currently not all cells have the same amount of sats above them so they will not claim that guarantee anything.
Some people have tested that and it worked fine if you move it.
They will likely have a different terminal or plan for mobile service, would be my assumption.
A few years ago when I was in the WAN optimisation space, IIRC Sydney/Singapore latency was ~150ms, partly raw distance, partly because the route was physically quite convoluted.
There's some expectation that once Starlink's mesh comms ramp up, it'll be significantly faster to go up to a bird, across through one or more at close-to-c, and then down into the local base station.
The fiber cable they ran from Perth up to Singapore a few years certainly won't be abandoned - it'll still be much cheaper / wider - but I can't imagine much appetite for any future under-sea cabling out of Australia (f.e.).
If you want to observe events at one exchange and send orders to another, all that matters is total latency. For that use it doesn't matter whether your servers are in the same room as one of the exchanges or 200 miles away from either one.
"I can't imagine much appetite for any future under-sea cabling out of Australia"
And the reality is that satellites can not compete with the bandwidth of subsea cables for bulk data transfer, HFT is a whole other world.
You tend to get bandwidth spikes on most feeds at market open and close, but intraday rates are low
Every time SpaceX makes a goal, someone claims it's really far away until it is completed.
If there was a need for Terabit/s laser capacity for Starlink, there's no particularly good reason it couldn't be developed.
www.bloomberg.com/features/elon-musk-goals
Is it because ISLs will require more powerful lasers because the light is focused through a lens instead of guided through a fiber?
I doubt the laser links support this, and I wonder if any could, when in a non-encapsulated environment. EG, spectral pollution from sunlight/etc.
Because laser energies, signal paths, traveling through free space must literally share that space with each other. It is effectively one wire. An underground cable can have hundreds, thousands, even millions of wires lying beside each other without interference.
It is comparable to the difference between a wifi connection and bundle of ethernet cables. One can scale and one cannot.
Could you just add more beams on each satellite?
[0] https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-dim...
Space is pretty big, lasers are pretty narrowly focused, and not many people have lasers in space yet.
I can imagine being able to do this when you control both sides by letting one type of data flow over one IP and the other over a different one with different peerings. But I wonder whether this is generally available.
You would probably have to configure your own routing table to direct traffic for each application through the appropriate link, but that's completely doable as long as you can write rules to distinguish the packets (for example based on destination).
I can imagine that it would be beneficial for the internet experience if we could segregate low latency traffic (human/hft) traffic from hulk traffic such as video. Although this goes against net neutrality I suppose.
I expect some ISPs will end up using differential routing over Starlink and fiber. They could have the routers on each end automatically switch large one-way TCP transfers from the Starlink connection to the fiber connection after the first 2MB.
They could even make the transition smooth, by buffering data transferred over Starlink and slowly adding delay to match the delay of the fiber connection. This would require some RAM, but only during the transition period for each TCP session. The client would see the throughput go down during the transition period.
If the remote server could increase the data rate, then the ISP could perform the transition with no drop in throughput seen by the client. The sending router would send fake ACKs to the server to get it to send data faster. The sending router would send the burst of data through the fiber link and also buffer it and send it through Starlink at the original rate. Once the receiving router is receiving the same data at the same time over both the fiber link and Starlink, the sending router can stop sending over Starlink. The client's TCP ACK packets would continue to flow over Starlink.
By your lightsped math, Starlink won’t ever be able to compete on latency except in the most rural of areas with poor connectivity since low earth orbit has far more travel distance than convoluted surface routing.
Since I moved on from that last gig, I note that Telstra completed their Sydney-Perth re-cabling project, and the Vocus Perth-Singapore undersea link came online (2018-04).
(I believe east coast traffic routes through Perth to get to Singapore, which was/is/will continue to be part of the problem.)
"lightspeed math" means LEO may well offer performance improvements over terrestrial cabling in many non-obvious scenarios.
But they don't seem to be selling that capability to consumers just yet - presumably to avoid issues with too many subscribers congregating in one place. See the faq answers on "Can I travel" and "Can I change my service address" https://www.starlink.com/faq
I like how technical they still are. Probably a matte of time before they have to dumb-down everything there.
There's no way you are crossing borders with it and transmitting from a country where it's not approved.
I noticed this:
https://www.canadasatellite.ca/Satellite-Phone-Limitations.h...
"While satellite phones work essentially anywhere on earth, there are some physical and political limitations."
one limitation was not what I expected:
"Cuba restricts the use of satellite phones because they’re seen as tools for subversive purposes"
Back to starlink - I think distributed living is a wonderful if not the most wonderful application of this.
I can imagine in a number of years having a tesla pull a trailer with fold-out solar panels. Have a little self-sufficient base camp with power for climate, cooking, transportation. And now internet.
But i think that they would have to become ISP and comply with local law with most jurisdictions if they want to have local ground stations. Not sure how that will go.
Maybe a few people in Asia, Africa, South America can afford it, but it is very few, and in the places where people can they are likely to already have better service.
If you split between 5 houses, you still get decent bandwidth (you wont be watching 4k, but then again if you can afford 4k screens ...), and the price is 100 USD + 20 per month.
If you don't have any other option this might be decent alternative
This is something to keep in mind and not obvious to people living in 1st world countries.
Netflix says you need 25 Mbps for "Ultra HD Quality"[1], so yes, you could watch a different 4K stream in every house simultaneously. And have 25 Mbps left over for other traffic.
Edit to add: Netflix is right.
If you can't get reliable 4K with a 25 Mbps connection, the most likely reasons are:
- First by a wide margin, is that you are using Wi-Fi to connect your display device. Don't do that. Use ethernet (at least until you have 802.11ax everywhere).
- Second, you have a flaky connection to your ISP. Misconfigured, marginal (e.g. DSL more than 2.5 kilometres from the cabinet) or in poor electrical condition.
- Third, you have neighbours regularly operating very large electric motors or electric arc welders.
- Fourth, your ISP doesn't know what it's doing, or is deliberately monkeying with your service to try to upsell you.
Anyway, even that number alone is a sizable market, and even Comcast would be happy with a fraction of it. I know some parts of the world are better off than the USA, but I also know many parts are worse off.
About 3.5 billion people don't have reliable access to the internet[1]. That's a large market.
The satellites are orbiting anyway.
For household customers in OECD countries, Starlink will charge OECD retail prices.
Customers in developing countries represent extra revenue for negligible extra cost, so Starlink can practise geographic price discrimination to maximise net revenue.
Or Starlink could permit "village WISP" bandwidth reselling arrangements in specific geographic areas. A video call needs no more than 2 Mbps down and up, so you can probably serve up to 50 undemanding households plus a one-room school and a medical clinic on one connection (with appropriate rate limiting and local caching).
Starlink can also price-discriminate by latency tier for high-frequency traders and arbitrageurs. They can price-discriminate by QoS for organisations that demand a guaranteed minimum bandwith (e.g. militaries). And then there are shipping lines and air lines.
1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/coronavirus-covid-19-...
("weforum" is the World Economic Forum.)
Today every where in the poorest parts of the world are connected with cell phones.
How often do packets get dropped? Have you given it a try with quake or counterstrike?
Mine is averaging about 0.5% packet loss over a 3 hour period. There will be very brief periods of slightly higher loss. I don't play a lot of fps but most realtime lag, loss and jitter sensitive applications work just fine.
That's extremely impressive, all things considered.
But do you think it would still work in a fixed configuration like that?
And how much do you think tree coverage would affect service?
Trees cannot be in the way. 11GHz+ doesn't like trees.
The ability to align itself allows for mildly to moderately improved reception. It's more cost-effective than improving the beamforming, and easier for the user. It's a good feature. But the terminal doesn't need it to work. (On a hardware level. Any possible software lockout is a separate issue.)
I think the key word here is properly. I put my pre-order in Feb 9th and I'm in the Perth hills in Western Australia. My wired link is ~35Mb down and ~11Mb up. Whilst StarLink will be more expensive I'm expecting a tripling of download speeds and a doubling of upload speeds for less than double the price. That math works for me, especially when you consider my link is as fast as it can go (I pay for a 50/25 service) due to my last hop being a twisted pair cable that was run half a century ago.
$499 USD for the dish, $99 USD per month for service (no data cap.) Price seems to change to local currency if your country is not USA.
Is it though? Perhaps it's because it's not available in Croatia, but there is nothing on the front page that mentions price, and it's not in the FAQ either.
I really dislike this kind of (almost dark) pattern. TIDAL also is not showing you the cost until you start down the sign up process, it's quite frustrating if what you really want to do is compare service costs.
Besides, it's not like if you click that Order Now button that it instantly places an order and a SpaceX kit drops from space in your front yard seconds later. There's a few more steps before that happens, like payment info.
Doesn't change to Rupees in India despite being able to find the address. Still shows 99$ for me.
Like North Hollywood, CA.
https://abc7.com/att-internet-fiber-man-takes-out-wall-stree...
So how does it handle the switch from that satellite to the next one without losing signal?
I will be using it and doing some tests in an area that actually has cable Internet (though spotty, and until very recently was limited to less than 20 Mbps up, no matter how much you paid).
But you have to realize, when you look at the $600 initial cost and $100 monthly fee—this will bring 100+ Mbps down and 15+ Mbps up to so many places (even in suburbs) where people couldn't get more than 10/2 or so for any price.
I already know a few people who don't even live in rural parts who would happily pay triple just to get off their junk DSL or flaky Cable connection, even with Starlink in beta. They are already used to spotty Internet, so Starlink is a massive improvement even if it's spotty (which it hasn't been, according to these users).
Serious Question: So are the early adopters subsidizing the masses down the line?
i.e. so at $100/mo + $600 start-up/set-up fee -- thats for early adopters ... so the "african farmer who can pay <$1/mo for the service can afford it... and corporate subscriptions are obv going to be big bulk data contacts?
And the encryption policy? The Privacy policy? The data-mining-of-location-history policy?
Yeah, it's a Nope from me dawg...
And I folow Elon closely, and I like a lot of what he says and stands for - but he is at the behest of the USG - Starlink must not be trusted.
What's the difference between this and any other ISP?
If not that, you can usually bypass this by setting your router (or computer directly) to use 8.8.8.8 (Google dns) or 1.1.1.1 (cloud flare dns) as a resolver.
I’ve only heard of a couple of cases where ISPs sniff all dns and rewrite NXDOMAIN responses, and the answer for those is some kind of unpleasant tunneling.
Not that I want to give anyone ideas.
But who is your DNS provider? If it's your ISP then they know who and where you are, when you're home, and what you browse...TLS or not.
The data they collect is either necessary for them to keep (your name, address, payment information, etc.), diagnostic (IP address, HTTP headers, etc. ONLY on their own websites, plus quality of starlink connection e.g. latency and throughput), or optional (survey responses). They don't sell the data or share it with anyone unless necessary for legal or business reasons (payment info shared with payment processor and such).
"Subsidizing"? No, they're paying for a service. It may or may not get cheaper over time... but that's rather irrelevant. SpaceX isn't a charity, they are in this to make money. It's also not like SpaceX is making a ton of money off of the early adopters. The satellite dish almost certainly costs the vast majority of those 600 dollars to produce, and the $100/mo service fees from the small set of early adopters aren't going to pay for the satellites and launches any time soon.
> the encryption policy
They don't prevent you from encrypting your traffic... just like any other ISP. What more do you want?
I don't know if they further encrypt traffic inside their network, but I rather assume not because that would be rather pointless. The traffic you send out should be considered more or less public because the internet will send it to malicious third parties regardless of what SpaceX does to it, see all the BGP highjacking attacks that have taken place for instance. SpaceX is obviously unable to encrypt things once they're out of their network into the internet at large... that's just not how the internet works.
> The Privacy policy
Is quite good for an ISP really https://www.starlink.com/legal/privacy-policy
Unless SpaceX has made a huge unannounced breakthrough in phased arrays they're actually taking large losses on the up-front cost at this point.
More seriously, the phased array antennas seem to be a big part of Starlink’s innovation. Launching tons of satellites cheaply by itself isn’t a super protected moat because if they block competitors from using the launch platform at a reasonable price, they risk antitrust action.
(I say this as someone who 100% wants market regulation that actually reinforces the natural market efficiencies - including sane, forceful antitrust legislation.)
You’ll suddenly see it change when it’s a powerful company (Amazon) upset that they get boxed out of the only US launch platform.
Exactly - but what are the EXACT revenue streams they expect?
How are they going to make money off the largest continent on the planet; Africa which also has the poorest population on the planet?
And you're suggesting the encryption, privacy and data mining of location history policies exist and are diligently followed by current ISP's?
Neither of which is even remotely close to Starlink's offering.
1 - https://promo.viasat.com/plans/standard-30-715T5-11796UC.htm... 2 - https://www.hughesnet.com/get-started
Your response directly refutes that, so I don't know why you are asking for a source. I didn't say either of those are competitive with a non-existent service offering from starlink. Wait until they have a real service that is oversubscribed, then we can discuss what plans they'll offer.
If my internet provider had 100mbs symmetric but I got that kind of ping I wouldn't even consider it a functioning internet connection, let alone 100 mbs, even if in some theoretical tuned workload I could actually move data that fast (UUCP with tuned TCP window sizes? UDP with some sort of custom packet loss recovery algo?)
20gig/sec is not a lot of capacity for many thousands of square kms. It's 1-2k users at peak times watching Netflix for example on 1080p or 4K streams, nevermind everything else. It is probably not far off many DOCSIS CMTS allocations, which get horrendously overloaded being only a few city blocks.
My guess is after beta they will get rid of the unlimited aspect pretty sharpish, and probably introduce aggressive traffic shaping.
It is likely to work very well in very rural areas with no major cities or towns in line of sight of the satelite. However, for suburbs/exurbs close to cities and towns which have poor internet I think the experience will be pretty poor once it has more customers (especially in Europe. There are basically no truly remote areas).
I would love to get Starlink just because it's awesome, but I'm in a city and can get 350gbps broadband for £50 a month so it would be kinda pointless.
"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."
Although, whether this is a technical limitation of the bandwidth/footprint, or an operational strategy is someone more knowledgeable's guess.
Does it have to do with how many beams they choose to / can create from the satellite antenna array? And only certain cells with concentrated users are "enabled" for service? Until more satellites come?
Do they actually lock your subscriber ID (?) to the particular cell and would deny it if it appeared an an incorrect cell, or is it as they say literally, as long as a cell is served, you could be one of the "all users" within the cell?
So many questions.
I’m thinking about putting it on a boat at anchor or at a dock.
Thanks
For example, a lot of recreational boaters are likely to get a terminal, which will work well over the open ocean. However, when all of those boaters tie their boat at the LA marina, there is absolutely no hope that the system can provide anything even approximating good service to them. So mobile starlink connections will almost certainly come with some language about how they work so long as you stay away from other people.
I think this will be an interesting distinction.
> For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.
However if this is not suppped to be a joke then this is absolutely insane. There is no way humans, other then maybe a few austranouts will make it to mars in the next 20 years by which this service will be obsolete or no longer exist.
Edit: If HN is still around in 20 years I will be asking you to reconsider your down votes.
I'm not sure how to interpret it as anything other than a joke. Humans might make it to Mars in the next 20 years, but the idea that we will have established a colony there along with an array of Starlink satellites to provide internet service and, presumably, a means of connecting the Martian internet back to Earth's... well, that's over-ambitious even by Musk's standards.
That being said. Guns on mars! GUNS ON MARS!!! They have a rIGHt to hunt space deer!
However, I think we should wait until there are enough people on Mars that there can be a small representative government (or other form of government that they would choose).
Mars shouldn't be independent when the first 10 people land on the surface of the planet.
This tos item has always been my biggest complaint about Starlink. I shouldn't be forced to take a position on premature Martian independence just because I hate Comcast.
We really do live in the future!
Let's say you're in the _first_ colony ship that lands on Mars. 12 people disembark from the vessel.
There are resources available for 5 years on the planet from prior cargo runs.
All future cargo will be launched from Earth, and very likely from territory controlled by large and powerful governments. All those flights require mission approval to launch and resupply.
Are you _sure_ there's no enforcement mechanism that Earthbound authorities can apply to the Martian people?
I actually think independence for Mars quickly (but not immediately) is important exactly _because_ the Martian people will be able to be so easily held hostage by the whims of a few Earthbound governments.
Why do you think so? Wouldn't it be better for them to be Earth dependent?
Mars very likely would be dependent on the Earth for trade and resources for a long time. It will be a long, long time before it becomes totally self-sustaining.
But, in terms of their government, I generally believe broadly in the principle of local self-determination. I think that will and should apply to Mars, once the population is sufficient.
Starlink is great, and people are right to be excited about it as an option for signal in truly rural areas. But it simply won't have the capacity necessary to serve a meaningful number of users in any kind of semi-dense application.
Starlink is like a 4G/5G cellular network except there's no way to increase capacity in a specific area. That makes it great at covering areas with very low population density, but absolutely terrible for even medium-density zones.
If you're stuck in a suburban or exurban area with terrible options for broadband, your best option is likely a 4G or 5G router. There a number of different truly unlimited plans out there (e.g. Calyx). If signal isn't good enough indoors, you can purchase outdoor MIMO antennas to get better results.
Starlink is great if you're in area with very low population density. That's a lot of the US, but not a lot of the US population.
I'm hoping some time soon that the fixed location requirement is lifted, or at the very least they allow users to sign up to it as a sort of mobile service. I know it isn't handheld, but for people who move around a lot and especially who work in remote outdoor situations, the ability to move around with this service would be amazing.
I'm sure at some point, when they do have the satellite to satellite links in the sky and there aren't ground station bottlenecks they will. High speed internet on the oceans or for travelers in rural areas is an untouched market.
And of course a GPS receiver is useful for timing.
I suspect FPGAs wouldn't be fast enough to do the RF magic. I figure they likely partnered with a company like Qualcomm to develop some custom silicon, or adapted some existing cell tower silicon, since those chipsets are largely "software defined" these days anyway.
The quad-code A53 CPUs with FPGAs sounds like Xilinx's RFSoCs, which are explicitly designed to basically give you a custom high-performance base station on a chip (though they can't directly convert to the frequency range Starlink is using).
Instead the satellite steers towards an arbitrary area on the ground, and the users must be within that area to work.
And they don't have that many satellites. Each one needs to have a pretty large active area.
I would think the radio technology in starlink should more closely resemble modern LTE and 5G cell networks, whether you want to call that CDMA, OFDM, or whatever the specific techniques these days are called.
And it does not. Starlink satellites do active switching unlike BSS satellites which only transmodulate and redirect.
If part of the reason for the current location restriction is managerial overhead then I suppose SpaceX could justify an extra charge for this feature.
Edit to add: It may also be that supporting moving terminals is much easier to implement when the terminal is traveling along a known route vs on something like an RV that can pop up on the network anywhere.
1. Officially confirmed that moving to a different location is currently locked due to sparse coverage. As soon as this improves to a point it makes sense and starlink has logistics of this figured out it will be allowed
2. Officially confirmed that putting terminal on a car (or even a plane) will be possible, but this only makes sense with much denser coverage and requires separate, stricter (vs fixed terminal) certification from FCC.
I'm about 250km north-west of Sydney, Australia, currently limited to a 25/5Mbps satellite circuit, with 600+ms RTT. I'm paying AUD$80 pcm, and have a data cap of 80 / 150 GB (peak/off-peak).
Between 17:00 and 23:00 the effective service drops down to about 5Mbps down.
Starlink in AU will cost ~ AUD$140 pcm, 30ms RTT, and likely give me 100 / 20 Mbps, with no cap (at least until the heavy-feeders come in and ruin that arrangement for the rest of us). (EDIT - plus AUD $700 once the order is processed later this year, for the equipment.)
I believe some regions - eg, Norfolk Island - have already max'd out their pre-order quotas though.
EDIT: fixed typo of MB -> GB
>data cap of 80 / 150 MB
So if you had the full 25 mbps available, you would hit your peak cap in 26 seconds? Do you only use it for email/text based applications?
I meant 80 / 150 GB -- I'll correct my earlier post.
However, I do agree that Starlink could be the answer to impoverished areas not having readily available internet. This is something I hope to see change as a result, as it would really reinforce some of the early sentiments Elon put out a long while ago.
I was thinking that better politicians because of conciousness of the community towards its own governance, we already do that but very poorly. I don't even know who the politicians are in my own county. No idea what they do and I don't know if we have a local newspaper in our county. May be I should engage in town halls and local politics.
Plus, not many politicians in the US at least really seem to care about the thoughts or even the well-being of their constituents.
If anything, it's the access to information that would result in better education which would thus (hopefully) result in more informed voters. That would be the real win, in my opinion.
(1) More competition for local immigration, which creates selection effects whereby the better run locales attract the largest populations and survive
(2) Small local elections aren't subject to partisan MSM outrage coverage or social media virality. Local politicians more likely to emerge organically through legitimate community relationships and reputation, instead of how effectively they're able to stoke the national outrage. Local journalism is also more healthy and fact based, so perhaps more likely to get an informed outcome instead of an outcome driven by partisan tribalism.
If the remote working and education trend continues, location will be more or less irrelevant.
We've been seeing the slow death of rural communities for decades so the status quo doesn't seem to be of much help to them. Some reverse migration back into these communities and a trend away from increasing centralization into a few rich cities should only help their economic prospects.
That said, I just signed up for Starlink because it’s faster and cheaper than my WISP, and hopefully more reliable. Right now we get a few minutes of dropped connection a few times per day.
My parents live in a town where the local franchise agreement allows the cable company to cover whatever they want. The company opted to cease maintenance of cable on their road. So their options are spotty 4G service or rolling a DIY wisp with a friend across the valley in a more civilized town.
First you need your Starbucks. Then your brew pubs. Better roads and sanitary services. Amazon Prime two-day delivery.
Suddenly these rural small towns start looking a lot like exurbs in large metros. Not a total negative. A lot of small towns are in desperate need of economic infusion, but I don't believe you can transplant wealthy city dwellers into rural American without irrevocably changing the way of life in those places.
Basically unless everyone is plugged into the net all the time in some massively fulfilling way or rearranges perfectly every generation to avoid cultural bubbles, small towns suck and people leave them for a reason. They head to cities and those cities become thriving multicultural hubs of new ideas that slowly make their way back to the smaller towns.
The trick is to be somewhere AT&T refused to build out to back in their heyday. Those places sometimes have local telephone cooperatives.
Fiber optic cable has been dirt cheap for decades (cheaper than a dirt road, in fact). Gigabit to the home in tiny communities is basically free these days. You don’t even need to dig a trench, since there are inexpensive machines that bore tunnels as they lay fiber behind themselves.
Starlink would make no sense if we simply broke up the ISP duopolies.
Alternatively, people could organize enough candidates to take over their city and county governments, and have those people force right-of-way for local ISPs to be approved.
Even without that, WISP’s are a thing, don’t require right of way (but do require line of sight), and compare favorably to starlink.
Having said that, there are still places where only starlink can reach; it should be a much smaller percentage of the population than it is though.
You can calm their fears by reminding them that Starlink is rolling out _nationwide_, so remote workers are going to move to lots of different places.
[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/diu/story/more-than-400-internet-l...
It'll be interesting to see what China does.
On the other hand, I believe this kind of connectivity will be extremely beneficial for cities such as Kolkata which suffer due to lack of proper infrastructure (and of course, lack of political will). I would love to see a future when I can move back to Kolkata and work with the same latency to servers in NorAM.
0:https://www.spacex.com/updates/starlink-update-04-28-2020/in...
But I think that we as a race should not cater to them for a few reasons:
1) there is no precident for "owning" the sky above you to infinity, it's an odd position legally
2) there is another cohort of people that want to expand consciousness who are impeded by this NIMOP (Not In My Orbital Plane) crowd. We can fit a quadrillion humans comfortably on rotating space habitats. This seems like a better goal under most moral systems than retaining the right to take pretty pictures.
3) any loss of "science" due to the loss of ground based sensors would be more than offset by having a robust space presence.
There is a big difference between delivering some hardware to 10k people vs. 400mio people. I will not be surprised if Starlink manages to be price-competetive within the next 3 to 5 years.
Surprisingly TMobile’s 5G on the iPhone 12 is giving my dad 60Mbps download and he’s on a cheap unlimited data plan so I’m wondering if that’s what is going to put more pressure on existing ISPs. 5G adoption has probably been kind of low so those speeds may not hold.
Goodness! I really need to learn more about satellites! For some reason that statement really strikes me.
I wonder what the ‘band’ of distance from earth most satellites fall into. The range of area a satellite can orbit earth must be pretty wide if this is the case.
Now I need to look up what is the closest & furthest distance a small object can reasonably orbit earth. I mean, now that I think of it, the moon is a satellite. How far is the moon?
Dang it, I’m realizing I really take all these things for granted. I just realized my reading TODO list for the weekend :)
This way you can have a simple, pointed antenna and not an obscenely expensive phased array like Starlink. That being said, GEO is only 36000km,so I'm not sure where the "60 times" figure comes from...
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink -- in the table of launches there's a column for orbit height.
You’re saying these and other satellites are planned for this ‘shell’ and maybe others at different distances? Could this be partly due to congestion and the problem of ‘space junk’?
Also, won’t satellites in an orbit this close to earth eventually be ‘sucked’ in to the atmosphere and burn up?
The Wikipedia pages on low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, geostationary orbit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_Earth_orbit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
Interactive 3D visualization of synthetic satellites in orbit around earth (including the ISS, rocket bodies, debris):
I wonder how many people would switch over if it was priced ~$10 higher than a Comcast plan, just to avoid having to deal with Comcast. I hope this ubiquitous competition will force prices for wired Internet down and customer service quality up.
And if it is able to scale, this will be a VERY attractive offer in underdeveloped countries like Germany. (Germany may be a first world country, but the Internet access options sure don't feel that way.)
Will Starlink offer mobile solutions? I could see this being a game changer for Internet on ships or for temporary use in extremely remote locations where a sat phone at eye-watering prices were the only options right now.
Right now service is locked to the cell you purchase in. The intent is to allow mobility eventually.
So the current estimate published in business insider means you are about four times off based on the contract with ST, who we now know builds the chips inside of it. Please show your sources of a $500 phased array terminal.
To just take that number an convert it unit cost like that doesn't make sense. SpaceX will need many more then just 1M terminals, what matters is the marginal cost per terminal.
And if these numbers are accurate is also questionable.
And though not a competitor to Comcast for the reasons you point out, I'm probably not the only person who's very happy to finally have a decent alternative showing up. Just a shame it didn't come in at half the monthly cost.
Part of me wonders if the price is artificially high in order to reduce the initial rush. You know if they were to offer high speed Starlink for half the typical land-based internet, there would be so many orders it would be pretty problematic.
I currently have Comcast, but I really despise them. Starlink will be a small step up in price, and a small step down in speed for me, but I'm going to do it just to be away from Comcast.
Fortunately for Starlink, there's not much worry about Comcast having any of those things.
If the military was really the primary target, why would they do it like that?
Not launching it until you have laser link would also made more sense if you wanted to sell to the military primarily.
The military and other commercial have run some trial test but they are not close to ready to adopt them. The military also doesn't need nearly as many sat to get the coverage.
Launching 12k+ sats just for the military makes no sense what so ever.
So please, substantiate your claims with something other then speculation.
Keep in mind, that searching for sources for military stuff, doesn't make a lot of sense. They are mostly classified.
But yes while the project was initiated for military purposes, they also want consumers to reduce the amount they have to pay.
I'm convinced that the primary purpose of Starlink is funding SpaceX's R&D for eventually going to Mars. Providing internet service to the public helps, providing internet service to the military helps too. I don't think the really prioritize one above the other.
And we do actually have sources that military have test Starlink, these contracts are not super secret. We also no that military has contracts with other sat providers already.
Yet there is no such contract with Starlink.
You just have opinion based on nothing that the consumer market is not worth it and nothing to back it up with, and it contradicts everything said by SpaceX and what many analysts believe.
That is quite a bit more than people pay for their Internet access around here. I'm out in the countryside and I pay 20EUR per month for unlimited download LTE (15-25Mbps - I have a diy directional antenna to get the service where I am, without it I would get 1mb).I sure miss my 150MBit (soon to be upgraded to gig) fiber Internet I used to have when I lived in a city, but I wouldn't pay 5 times more for 5 times the throughput. It is not like the faster connection will actually be that many more times useful to an average remote worker/home user.
When reliable, low latency uncapped 10MBit cheap Internet is available it is very hard to justify paying many times more for faster access.
I'm glad they are developing this network so people who have no other connectivity can use it, but I wish they offer something comparable to rural LTE in price (and consequently speed probably).
You're simply not the target market. I live in the American countryside, where cell service of any kind is a distant memory several miles before I make it to my driveway. I pay $900/month to rent a second house in town because I'm fully remote but my current slow GEO satellite internet at home isn't suitable for remote work. $100/month for broadband internet is a phenomenal deal for me.
I was able to order one for Slovenia. It says it will come in 2022. I generally have 2 questions.
1) Will there be local ground stations all over the world ? Or will it depend on laser interconnect only?
2) A lot of countries have local laws about ISP's. Our politicians are currently too busy making us look like idiots on world stage, but other countries generally expect ISPs to comply. Not sure how they intend to handle that.
For everybody else, you can assume the satellites will aggressively dump packets to the nearest downlink terminal to feed into fiber. After they get laser links going, when there is no downlink terminal in view, packets might move to the next satellite ahead or behind on the same orbit, and then, if possible, down, or repeat. There will be no attempt to send packets to satellites in other orbits. They might sometimes delay traffic so as not to match performance of their premium tier, if it would otherwise be reliably fast.
For future super-high-premium tier accounts, packets will step through satellites to get to a terminal near the destination, and downlink there. Packets sent via this route will arrive whole milliseconds ahead of terrestrial fiber. Despite small amounts of traffic bouncing between orbit tracks, these accounts will constitute a substantial fraction of Starlink's total revenue.
In the eventual future, we can expect satellites to carry a few TB of on-board storage to proxy blockbuster media properties; and, to broadcast select real-time traffic, e.g. World Cup video. These will be done mainly to free up bandwidth.
Those are my predictions. If yours differ, explain.
"Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.
"The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
Essentially, it's not aimed at people that live in cities and have access to other alternatives.
I live in a remote, medium-sized city and need an internet link that constantly works. Comcast usually fills that need, but there are occasional outages. T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T's fixed internet offerings are not available where I am.
Starlink is what I've been waiting for :)
People are, u know, people. They will defy the "not designed for you" clause. Still, is there a number for one sat bandwidth?
For me in my big city i can get 360mb down unlimited lines for the equivalent of around $50 per month.
Anyone choosing the Starlink option in that scenario probably shouldn't have financial independence in the first place.
I know, rich bastards, right?
It annoys me that I can not invest in these big bold innovations directly. Has anyone thought about how to invest indirectly on the belief that Starlink will succeed? For instance, are there satellite equipment suppliers or other upstream supplier who stand to profit with Starlink's success?
Likewise, who might fail based on Starlink's success? Should I be shorting Satellite based ISPs?
https://observer.com/2021/02/spacex-secret-funds-starlink-ip...
Every existing satellite operators stands to lose from Starlink’s success. Maybe not SiriusXM. Crazy that their net income is still increasing every year.
Intelsat’s cost per bit is much higher than Starlink’s. They also have much less system capacity.
EchoStar owns HughesNet. NASDAQ: SATS
Eutelsat: same as Intelsat, but with less debt on their books.
SES: Wild card among legacy satellite operators, as they have a new, high capacity (O3B mPower) system in the works.
Viasat’s 3-terabit GEO system should be competitive from a cost-perspective, but latency will be much worse. If price is the same as Starlink, they will lose on quality of connectivity/latency.
Iridium, GlobalStar, Orbcomm. Public companies that focus on narrowband/low bitrate/IoT communications. Much of the use cases can be solved with a Starlink terminal and an IoT hub/gateway, rather than going directly from a small sensor to a satellite.
There are a few public GEO operators in Asia; they’ll have the same problem as the European and American operators.
There’s virtually nothing that these companies can do to compete. They are all procurement specialists, rather than being engineering-led/driven. Most importantly, they all pay full price for launch, whereas SpaceX gets it for not much more than gas-money.
And SpaceX can get way more cash than anyone else at a much cheaper price. It’s tough to fight against that kind of war chest.
Are you aware of the players in Australia? There is Skymesh (owned by a UK company) but I'm not aware of other players in the Aus market.
Of all of the providers on your list - are any of them doing LEO constellations that are able to provide low latency in the way that Starlink can offer?
One might quibble about cost efficiencies and system capacity, but in the consumer market I cant see how you can argue with the physics advantage of being 50x closer to your customer!
They are now moving to charge us a monthly fee per station, not as much as starlink yet, but it seems an odd choice. Perhaps a final squeeze of their customers.
Bgans still have a benefit - smaller than starlink, battery powered, movable, but this latest move has made us reevaluate our satellite strategy, and that’s never a good thing for incumbents.
I had trouble getting fast internet at a rural location and ended up going with T-Mobile Home Internet for $50/mo and no setup fee. They claim 50mbps but ours typically exceeds 100mbps with unlimited data so no complaints so far.
I’m not affiliated with either company, just interesting to see the new internet offerings available to rural homes.
1) what is the theoretical capacity near term of the network in terms of # users per unit area and bit rate per unit area? What do you think the maximum single connection speed using the spectrum they have available?
2) is there potential to increase that capacity in the future? To what level? Perhaps they can develop multi-dish base stations which connect to many satellites at once? Beam forming? Multiple frequencies?
3) is there potential for starlink to offer more density by linking to space in one location and installing a cell phone tower to spread the connection locally? This has potential to drastically cut the cost to the user (standard hardware) and also increase density, but it requires fast single location connectivity to space.
4) has there been an analysis done of which existing telco customers starlink could potentially steal? Which telcos are most exposed? How many customers are in the group that would switch?
5) have you guys considered starlink from the perspective of zero marginal cost per customer acquired, Vs standard cable is high marginal cost per customer acquired? Said another way - all of starlink costs are upfront whether they have 1 customer or 1m customers, but standard telcos need to decide on investing in cable spend on a per customer basis. From this viewpoint have you guys thought about which customers normal telcos will decide to let go to starlink and not invest in new infrastructure in the face of starlink competition?
6) is it likely that Musk is sandbagging the potential capabilities of starlink in order to put cable/Telco companies at ease of the threat in case they look for regulatory protections?
7) have you guys compared starlink services to software services and what the implications of this might be? Software is all upfront in development and then zero marginal. Sounds like starlink may be quite similar. The other telcos are not in this position however (see #5 above).
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
All this talk of uplink on the roads...for what? Uploading cat vids? Going into the wilderness and not cord cutting? Spying on people? So your phone has an excuse to be on more often?
There are no real justifiable applications to this tech, and it comes at real cost, to our scientific understanding of the universe, to our general ability to appreciate nature, and even arguably to our ability to transition to new tech (what's the realistic upgrade scenario here, so far nobody has successfully safely pulled a junked satellite out of orbit, not to mention the issue of space junk), all so some geeks can play vidya games in the woods?
Fuck. That.
I tried random places near me to see if they show up on Starlink
The nearest one to me is Stornoway (the main town on Harris)
I am about 50 miles away from it
Would this solution work? Currently I am happy with my 4G internet but always interested to try something else.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/57%C2%B038'54.0%22N+7%C2%B...
Also the Satellite doesn't look like it would do well in a coastal area with saltwater.
The plus code for my area returns nothing, however for a satellite that is ~500km above me, surely subscribing to a location that is 27 miles away from me won't make a difference?
As an aside, plus codes should be wonderful things but the tooling isn't particularly well built out -- this is the first application I've seen using them that's not Google Maps, and it's not worked as well as I'd hoped it would :(. In this case, the geocoder for the area hasn't done what it ought to have done. And I fear that while the full codes don't need a geocoder, short codes might be generally susceptible to incompatible geocoders leading to incompatibilities between implementations. Which is what we seem to be seeing here.
I work remotely, so a quality internet service is a big concern for me when looking for a new home. Once Starlink is available, I don't have to worry so much about that.
It also provides many ISPs with much-needed competition, even at that price point. Even though my parents live in a suburb which should have good connectivity options, they pay almost as much as a Starlink subscription for lower bandwidths plus a data cap.
i think they said 50mbps - 150mpbs
It's a little on the pricey side but at least, as far I know, it's not comcast or at&t.
So if you use a lot of bandwidth, you still get full speed at night, but during peak times, other users get priority and your connection becomes slower.
Bonus points if they only take bandwidth usage during peaks into account, incentivizing customers to move bulk transfers to off-peak hours when the traffic is effectively free.
They likely have to price it a bit above wired connections just to keep load manageable in dense areas, but it puts an upper bound on how badly monopolist incumbents can treat their customers.
While I don't think it will actually replace cable/fiber, I think it will drive prices down and service quality/customer treatment up, so its existence is a huge benefit even for people in populated areas that will never actually use it.
That puts an upper limit of 1.2 million worldwide simultaneous 100 Mbps streams, and that's probably being too generous. In a given region the limit is much smaller. The numbers I saw said 500k simultaneous 100 Mbps streams in the US.
Overselling can push those numbers up, but I don't think they can oversell enough to take them to a trillion dollar company.
You’re vastly underestimating how much you oversell as a consumer ISP. Fiber companies with dedicated lines to your house can’t even handle all of their customers pulling 100mbps at a time because the bottlenecks are the IXPs.
The AMS IXP is one of the largest exchanges in the world, and it only hits about 10,000 gbps max per day.
You’re also forgetting that $100/mo is a cost offered to consumers on the ground. Commercial shipping and military won’t bat an eye at paying $1000/mo for a measly 10mbps to a ship in the pacific. Oil rigs, mines, military bases, etc, etc.
trillion dollar??
it seems WAYYYYYYYY too much for
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1607004-charter-cost-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast/comments/9ytg25/comcast_wan...
https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r9512648-TWC-TWC-wants-want...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/want-...
This is for those people.
After 9 months and a call to the City Council, I finally got a quote from Comcast: $37,000 for copper. They laughed when I asked what it would cost for fiber.
Did you tested/used anything like Zoom, Google Meet, Face Time, Signal, Whatsapp ? How is the beta experience ? Usable ? Can you comment please ? Thank you
Why? Light travels from Berlin to SF in 30 milliseconds. That is absolute minimum you can do. This is not even roundtrip time.
So when Starlink tells you it will be 20 ms, just think about 20 ms to where? To the nearest satellite? Sure.
These satellites are at an altitude of 560km, so it's not hard to imagine there are some places where it could be faster to use Starlink (say Spain - Turkey). You also need to consider the speed of light in the atmosphere is faster than fibre optic cables by around 40%. However if there is a need for something like that, then it's probably already going via satellite.
For the average consumer these will probably be faster for Western US - EU just because there are less hops and less companies involved (as I understand the backhaul isn't yet going between satellites).
Online gaming is mostly where this matters. I don’t know much about this but I assume most games have geographically diverse set of game servers so no matter where you are (within limits) latency isn’t terrible.
I guess they won't be launching anytime soon in India, but I guess it can used in remote parts of India where there is no internet connectivity for miles. Still rather expensive though.
> THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN ORDERING STARLINK!
Starlink is not yet available in your area but as we launch more satellites, we continue to expand our coverage area. Please check back for future availability in your area.
To keep track of future Starlink launches and other SpaceX news, sign up for updates at spacex.com
:-(
I'd love to have Starlink for camping excursions this summer in areas where I can't even get cell service.
(Guessing they're prioritizing places with few other options.)
Or how much of Indonesia in remote places is dependent on satellite.
Remote hills/jungle may not have any coverage but feasible market in those areas is miniscule.
I could see addresses in Poland and Slovakia, but I didn't try order there since I don't live there :)