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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP.

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.

View on HN

I expect a fair bit of interest from latency-sensitive markets (eg finance) here in Australia.

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.).

in terms of raw capacity, I do not think that the intersatellite laser links (if/when they do get that working, which is a long ways off, 10 out of the 1050+ satellites right now have them, and none in production use), will approach anywhere near the capacity of a 40 or 80 channel, coherent 100/200/400GbE DWDM submarine line terminal. it's a whole other order of magnitudes.

Do the markets need lots of bandwidth? Or just-enough with the lowest possible latency

A lot of serious HFT has moved to HF radio bands with giant aimed yagi uda or dipole antennas, already... London, new york, chicago, tokyo. It's very low bit rate but lower latency.

So Australian FinTech will definitely appreciate Starlink, then?

I suspect Australian FinTech would be more interested in colocating near exchanges instead of trying to beam their orders through space, but I don't work in the sector so I can't say for sure.

Totally different use cases.

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.

It's true that total latency is what matters, and minimising latency by sitting near one of them and taking advantage of low-latency connections between exchanges sounds reasonable.

Does this have a name? Something like "a race to ridiculousness?" It's so bizarre that it matters that someone places an order a few ms before someone else. And it's probably ns now. No time to stop and think,... just be faster than someone else.

Capitalism? :P

Markets don't, but, GP said:

"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.

I’d guess that high speed data transfer competes with overnight shipping a hard drive in most current cases. In my day to day life, for most cases I’d rather has 10 Mbps with 10 ms latency than 1 Gbps with 250 ms latency. Generally speaking I’m looking for a snappy user experience and fast enough for Netflix streaming to a non-premium television. But high bandwidth and low latency would be super nice!

Many wired leased lines that connect data vendors to exchanges are only ~2Mbps even in 2021.

You tend to get bandwidth spikes on most feeds at market open and close, but intraday rates are low

It's not exactly a long ways off if a dozen satellites are already using it (there were 2 previous ones).

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.

Musk does tend to achieve his goals eventually although the timescales are generally 2-7 years too ambitious:

www.bloomberg.com/features/elon-musk-goals

Damn that doesn't bode well for me getting a Cybertruck any time soon.

Why couldn’t intersatellite laser links have similar capacity to fiber? In principle, if not practice?

Is it because ISLs will require more powerful lasers because the light is focused through a lens instead of guided through a fiber?

probably less (literal) bandwidth, lasers are expensive

That and because the atmosphere is not clear (this is why 1Gbps free space laser network bridges have very limited range), the links from satellite to earth in any rf band will be very small in capacity as compared to a singlemode fiber cable. Space to space lasers, sure... Much clearer.

Starlink ground links are RF

That's what I said

oops my bad

High end fibre routers use multi-spectral bandwith, effectively allowing for multiple data streams to be transmitted on one fibre cable, and re-broken out at the other end. This significantly increases bandwidth.

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.

>> Why couldn’t intersatellite laser links have similar capacity to fiber? In principle, if not practice?

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.

I'll start by saying my understanding of the laser connection on the satellites is virtually nil.

Could you just add more beams on each satellite?

No. The beams would overlap, which is fine of they are on different frequencies, but eventually you run out of frequencies to use. Fiber confines the beam to inside the fiber. No overlap between one fiber and another means you can run multiple down the same pipe.

Why would they overlap?

Because a beam in an open medium always diverges due to wavefront errors and diffraction. A very good laser system might possibly have a divergence of only 1 microradians. For reference a typical laser pointer has a divergence angle of 1 to 2 milliradians. With the 2000km or so between satellites for Starlink the laser "spot" on the receiving satellite with the very good laser will be about 2 meter. Not enough to receive multiple beams on one satellite without overlapping.

Thanks for explaining. Would it work if they put receivers on a long pole, spaced 3m apart? Maybe they could mount them on the edge of the solar panel array, which is ~30m long [0].

[0] https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-dim...

The link estimates the surface of the panels to be 30m2. Since the panels are 3.1m wide the length would be 9.6 meters. But even at 30 meters it would be very very hard to engineer a system that can keep a laser beam aligned on a moving target with sub microradian precision. I'd guess Starlink laser are more divergent to make hitting the target easier. Keeps the exit pupil a manageable size too (narrower beams need bigger optics).

Ok, but I was asking about a single space laser vs a single fiber, not the theoretical limits of many of them.

Space is pretty big, lasers are pretty narrowly focused, and not many people have lasers in space yet.

Check out this analysis of starlink ground relay routing vs fiber https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY

Australia min latency from Singapore is still 125ms for me. Maybe it's lack of peering from my providers side but it's definitely an issue.

It's ~50 from perth though.

I get 75~ ms average on Aussie Broadband from Adelaide (FTTP) pinging Valve's Singapore game servers

Is there any mechanism by which we (in general) or a client specifically could use an expensive low latency for say browsing and a high latency but wide/cheap pipeline for bulk transfer?

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.

If either your ISP exposes that ability or if you maintain multiple outbound connections, then yes. But I don't think this is commonly implemented today, however.

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).

Yes I can imagine using iptables to work but it was my understanding that this would only be able to determine the next hop and I couldn’t get it to force the decision higher up the chain. This would mean that every party along the chain has to play ball.

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.

If you want it to be done externally without setting up a routing table then the next best option would be some kind of traffic tagging to indicate what you want to go over which line. That would start looking like a network with multiple VLAN:s.

If you use TOR browser, you're already doing this. Requests from TOR browser go over TOR, if you have a regular browser open in another window your internet-routable requests there go over the internet. Of course the first hop goes via your ISP in either case, but it's easy to imagine it doesn't.

In 1998, I lived in Ghana and used the Africa Online ISP. They ran a transparent HTTP proxy that routed through a high-bandwidth high-latency satellite connection. All other traffic went through a very low-bandwidth low-latency fiber connection. I used to proxy my browser through SSH to a US server and enjoy very fast text-mode browsing.

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.

You can do this with a Linux box that has multiple internet links and/or VPNs, using fwmark for routing decisions. You can also e.g. launch a browser in a network namespace that is routed as you please.

Isn’t the current latency between Sydney and Singapore 15ms or less by now? No one who is latency sensitive should be using Starlink unless they are in some incredibly remote location. (And they should move if they are 150ms is a cosmic age in low latency trading)

Sydney to Singapore is 6300km as the crow flies. At light speed completely directly best possible round trip time would be 42ms. Light moves more slowly in glass(fibre) and the submarine cables are definitely nowhere direct route, add also routing/switching overhead and the you end up in the hundreds.

Just looked it up. 94ms. Starlink has far more latency.

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.

Redo your math, in space the speed of light is at it's max. On fiber or cable the speed is cut almost in half. Result, Starlink with lasers can be faster.

Yup, we might be down to 100ms now -- certainly still a long way from your initial 15ms guess.

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.

> My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services.

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.

One of the big issues I’ve had with anything but wired ISPs is latency. They specifically talk about 20-40ms latency being expected in most locations, but don’t specify to where. I currently get about 20 +/- 4 ms from me to 8.8.8.8 consistently. Is their latency to my first hop?

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?

a. absolute lowest latency I've seen to a major IX point in seattle is about 15.8ms. More often it's 22-23ms. On a longer term, averages between 20-30ms. That's for the combined total of four 550km paths through space plus terrestrial latency from their earth station to seattle.

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.

> b. no ipv6 yet. They have people who know what they are doing for neteng so I am sure it is planned.

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)

Lol, the fact that they just went with IPv4 supports the theory that they know what they're doing.

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...

Going through the trouble of implementing CGNAT and skipping IPv6 seems like a partially degraded service for the end user though. It's becoming common practice for ISPs to slap all the users between two layers of NAT and calling it a day. You can't run essentially anything on your network (not even an SSH server) without having to have a server on standby and reverse tunnels. I know there are not enough IPv4s but at least let me having the option to pay for one. Or, you know, give me an IPv6. Otherwise it's practically a networked content consumption service at this point. It's 2021, the "IPv6 is complicated" excuse must stop at some point.

Honestly, it's not that complicated to set up a L2TP or VPN tunnel to a server with routable inbound IP traffic.

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.

That is additional latency, especially if you can't find a VPS near your ISP.

Fair point but starlink ground stations are all near major PoPs where you won't struggle to find one.

IPv6 really isn't that complicated compared to CGNAT!

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).

It can’t? I at one point messed up my firewall rules and didn’t notice that IPv4 wasn’t accessible for a few days. Nobody complained. I eventually noticed something was amiss and fixed it but really most places seems to be running dual stack. I am starting to run some IPV6 only services.

It would be great if offering public IPv6 only services was viable, but according to Google statistics (https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html) you're still cutting off about two thirds of potential users.

> it's so complicated that I still can't grasp how it all works

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.

I guess I don't have as much low level experience as you do, but in my eyes IPv6 is literally just IPv4 with more bits. Due to the increased number of possible addresses, IPv6 is used with some different (better) concepts than IPv4. For example having (very likely) unique local networks (ULAs) is amazing when you happen to merge previously independent networks together or do some VPN stuff. You pretty much never have to calculate subnets because you'll likely never run out of addresses. And even if you somehow manage to do the impossible and fill up a /48 ULA (at which point you would have died from NATing billions of entire IPv4 address spaces with multiple layers to somehow make it all one network on IPv4), it takes just two seconds to generate a new one.

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).

That's just the addressing/subnetting though. Ipv6 and 4 for that matter also have a lot more going on in the packet handling and specification. and Ipv6's packet handling stuff is way more complicated than Ipv4. I was reading through just the ICMP parts and the difference is significant. I imagine the rest of it is the same.

The thing about IP and therefore with IPv6 is it's not just an address format - it's a set of protocols and practices so a lot of it changes.

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.

Using SLAAC is the way to go in most cases. DHCPv6 should only really be used when you have a network that is for some reason smaller than a /64.

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

Look at all the additional optional bits DCHP offers in terms of being able to communicate additional information to clients to configure themselves. Two big ones that stand out are timeservers and network booting parameters.

SLAAC is only a drop in replacement in the (typical) home.

I regularly get 12ms latency to google over my DOCSIS3 cable coax connection.

This will vary greatly depending on how loaded your particular cablemodem segment is, how the channel bonding is set up, how enthusiastic your neighbors are about downloading things like 65GB torrents of 2160p60 movies. If there is an 8.8.8.8 anycast node somewhere in your city, and you are kinda close to downtown, less than 1.5ms of that could be the fiber path from your ISP to their peering with google and back, and 10.5ms of it or so would be accounted for by the cablemodem part.

It will also vary greatly once starlink is loaded. The variation you're seeing is purely due to slant range. Those numbers will increase once the satellites are oversubscribed.

Very true. I'm seeing an average of 100ms to the first hop (and about the same to 8.8.8.8) during the day on mine, with lows of 50-60ms, and the occasional 10 second peaks.

At night it's something like 10ms.

I regularly get 25-250ms latency (average is maybe 60ms) to google or 8.8.8.8 over my DOCSIS3 cable coax connection in addition to 2-5% packet loss.

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.

Latency or RTT?

I just checked mine. I get about the same.

Pinging 8.8.8.8 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=115

8.8.8.8 is 13ms , but how does Cloudfare (1.1.1.1) get to 1ms ?

Reply from 1.1.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=60

Some sort of local caching going on.

Whoa, do you live in their data center? ;-)

Even my ISP's next hop is 2.5ms, 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 are both at 4.7ms.

Google probably have servers in your ISPs data center

Yes, this. I know they do with Videotron.

Just curious, how do you know it’s based on openwrt?

People have torn it down and messed about with it, I believe I recall seeing some found the test pads on the pcb and were able to watch its bootloader through a serial connection.

It is a fairly simple design.

https://youtu.be/ObCTB8ol3Ng

DOCSIS 3 latency is 8ms in my experience; fiber is 1.5ms.

I had to try my fiber connection. I get 0.6 - 0.8 ms within our town which is not that big, < 10 km from me.

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?

> 3.33 us per km

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.

Traceroute work by routers decrementing the ttl as the packet passes. If a router doesn’t decrement, or if your packet gets bundled into an mpls, the hops may be hidden.

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.

And of course everything depends on the implementation. On my home fiber, the minimum latency to anything IPv4 is 20ms since the PPPoE concentrators are all on the other side of the country. IPv6 on the same line (which uses IPoE instead of PPPoE) gives me 5ms to a friend in the same city.

yes, 8ms sounds more correct than 12ms for best-case cable modem. It's 9-12ms for me.

> b. no ipv6 yet. > c. all IPs are in cgnat IP space

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?

It is a consumer internet eyeball service. Having an assigned routable address is not a thing in many countries, and you really shouldn't expect it as a "feature" in the future.

Eventually the Comcasts of the world will sell off the majority of the IPv4 they hold to the AWSs of the world.

> Having an assigned routable address is not a thing in many countries

citation needed

> increasingly uses CGN technologies (90% for mobile internet and 50% for fixed line)

https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/are-you-sharing-...

I's 50%, i would not call that "not a thing in many countries" For mobile, it does not usually matter, you have a smartphone, where you would not host something.

For a huge percentage of the developing world the only internet connection people have is a smartphone, and dedicated residential internet at a fixed address is only for the upper middle class and the wealthy.

It matters for smartphones too (think video calls, IoT applications, and home/office networks that have mobile network as uplink) but fortunately IPv6 is common there.

IME operators startefto do CGN for legacy IPv4 when they started offering v6 by default to mobile & consumer fixed lines.

Fixed line ISPs who use cgnat typically have ipv6, tho.

> Eventually the Comcasts of the world will sell off the majority of the IPv4 they hold to the AWSs of the world.

And so died what was knows as "Internet" and AOL was resurrected…

Hopefully only IPv4 Internet will suffer.

> Having an assigned routable address is not a thing in many countries, and you really shouldn't expect it as a "feature" in the future

I don't see why not in an IPv6 world.

> b. no ipv6 yet. They have people who know what they are doing for neteng so I am sure it is planned.

Some individuals in /r/starlink have started reporting being assigned globally routable ipv6 addresses. So right now it's probably being tested.

I am on DOCSIS (TPG NBN) and www.google.com is 8ms, 8.8.8.8 8.5ms (actually seems long as the family is watching netflix). Docsis modem bridged to a linux box. 22mS sounds more like mine + wifi.

What is the term of the contract? I have a family cabin in an area that is not served by cable, it's not a place I am going to spend 12 months or whatever and at $100/mo I am probably not going to pay for 12 months out of the goodness of my heart. But I would love the ability to go up for a couple weeks or a month and just work from up there. Could I sign up month by month, or for say a quarter at a time?

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 contract for the beta, it's month to month, you can cancel whenever you want. unknown what they will do in the longer term.

there is no seasonal 'pause' service plan offered yet.

Can Starlink travel with you? My wife and I are discussing purchasing a tiny home on a trailer and the ability to get a decent connection _anywhere_ would be an amazing amenity.

Not in the beta, no, they have not officially released plans for mobile terminals. I'm sure eventually there will be. It's in the faq on the website.

In principle, yes. They've demoed it on fighter jets.

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

"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."

I like how technical they still are. Probably a matte of time before they have to dumb-down everything there.

This seems very much like a beta-only limitation though.

> beta-only limitation though

There's no way you are crossing borders with it and transmitting from a country where it's not approved.

That's an interesting point.

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.

I believe you can get into a metric ton of trouble if you try to import a satphone in India as well.

As a side point, Cuba’s internet is also filtered and such, but was remarkably easy to get around with an SSH tunnel. Was handy when I was there!

Who is responsible for a regional law like the Cuban one mentioned in this thread? Would Starlink be held responsible, or would it be the one moving a receiver across the border?

Usually is the person smuggling it or installing it. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Gross

Sounds like combinatorial explosion peeking from backstage

This is the point where Starlink will be interesting to me. As a stationary service it just isn't interesting for any use case I have personally.

> really hard to reach places in the developing world

Like North Hollywood, CA.

https://abc7.com/att-internet-fiber-man-takes-out-wall-stree...

Or rural Wisconsin

I'm considering a cabin deep in the mountains. What should I be aware of when it comes to limitations of Starlink? For a cabin that is likely to be off grid, where I'd like to have relatively stable, relatively usable internet, what should I expect?

The dish currently draws around 100W steady state. For many off grid installations this can be a significant addition to the power budget.

Clear field of view of the sky is necessary, which may be a problem in the woods. The field of view will narrow with more sats; now it's quite large. Apparently they have an app to visualize it.

Walrus01, from a user POV, do you have consistent, reliable service for streaming, large file transfer, virtual meetings etc? Is it akin to having, say, a 100 mb/s connection through a cable service company? Is there anything that particularly irritates you about the service? Thanks for being willing to share your experience. I am in the mountains in Colorado and some neighbors envy my 10 Mbps down/0.5 Mbps up connection. Seems like a nobrainer that this will be better, but at least my DSL doesn't cut out very often.

How well would this work on oceangoing boats? I have tugboats in the Caribbean that could use cheaper connectivity.

theoretically, great, and I would be shocked if they did not release a product functionally equivalent to the iridium and inmarsat aviation and maritime terminals, because of how much potential revenue is there. it will also be much better and faster than a multi-axis motorized tracking geostationary maritime terminal ($40,000+ things you can find in radomes on large ships, operating in various ku and ka band networks). there has been no official announcement on that sort of thing yet.

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.

> theoretically, great

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?

That already works fine, the dish is switching sats incredibly fast and is tracking multiple sats at a time.

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.

Can anyone comment on how much motion the current terminal will tolerate? I’m wondering about a boat at anchor.

The service has been demonstrated on fighter jets so a boat at anchor should be no problem. Of course the $500 antenna they currently sell probably isn't quite as capable as the one they used on that fighter jet...

Mentioned in the FAQs [1] you cannot take it with you if you move area, you are assigned a "cell" and it won't work for you outside of that. I spoke to someone who has it and he said he it is quite a big area maybe up to 100 mile radius.

[1]https://www.starlink.com/faq

What is the total power consumption of the system when in use?

How often do packets get dropped? Have you given it a try with quake or counterstrike?

It's 100-140W.

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.

Thanks.

Check out Linus Tech Tips for a review of gaming on star link: https://youtu.be/Fh1a2K9ZgNA

I'm interested in mounting it laying flat (no stand) to the top of a van. I don't expect it to work while on the move.

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?

It needs to be able to tilt and angle itself.

Trees cannot be in the way. 11GHz+ doesn't like trees.

It tries to give itself an optimal angle but it doesn't move while operating and the satellites are zipping in and out of its beamforming cone all the time anyway. The technology is capable of running with a flat mount.

Right now a terminal even at 48.9 latitude angles itself somewhat north, because the greatest simultaneous density of satellites at any moment in time is around 52.5 to 53 degrees north. If you mount it flat and don't allow it to move, who knows what starlink will change in the future architecture. They included the servo motor geared pan and tilt mechanism for a reason. Maybe later it will reorient itself differently as network density and satellite population changes. I'm not saying they won't ever release a flat non motorized cpe, but that is very much not the configuration now.

I don't think that disagrees with what I said.

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.)

It should work while on the move. It has a beam steering capable antenna array. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1316255322835759105

How has it performed on cloudy/rainy/harsh weather days?

No discernable impact on rainy days. During heavier snow speeds will be more like 55-60Mbps.

> During heavier snow speeds will be more like 55-60Mbps.

That's extremely impressive, all things considered.

If i understand correctly the antenna tracks a specific satellite as it transit above it.

So how does it handle the switch from that satellite to the next one without losing signal?

Seems like once its found the optimal pointing it stays there, the rest is done with phased array steering, so very rapid tracking / switching possible.

the patent for the antenna shows dual simultaneous beamforming. some form of make-before-break. how exactly they're doing it is quite opaque to the end user, and part of their secret recipe.

Can you ssh into it or would one need to reverse tunnel?

The latter. You can initiate whatever connection you want from inside the cgnat, but there's nothing externally accessible yet. Mine has a few different openvpn tunnels (clients at the starlink side, servers in datacenters elsewhere) going different places.

Thanks - what does a regular traceroute look like?

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.

Traceroutes are all going out to the world through this google AS right now. Using the hurricane tool as a convenient GUI presentation of what it is: https://bgp.he.net/AS36492

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.

> satellites need to be simultaneously in view of your terminal and a spacex earth station.

Does that mean that there is no connection between satellites?

Correct. The intersattelite laser link is still vaporware at this point, and I’d wager always will be. It turned out to be a much more difficult problem than they originally anticipated, and so they’re basically not doing it. I will be very surprised if it ever happens.

https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-laser-test/ ahem

Why do people keep betting against Elon's plans, they always lose in the long run.

That they had a successful “test” of it a year and a half ago does not mean it’s in use now. Current starlink is just receiver -> satellite -> ground station, there is no lasers in use.

While some of the satellites do have point to point laser links for communicating directly with other satellites in the constellation, it's not widely utilized yet, and all communications are ground station to satellite and back to base station.

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.

Wow, they rolled it out without IPv6?

Right? At this point why would you even design the system to carry anything other than IPv6 natively? You can always get IPv4 via a tunnel if needed.

Musk said that Starlink won't work in dense areas. This is a broader business question, but do you think there are there enough remote villagers and oil rig workers that can subscribe and eventually give Musk enough money to fund a trip to Mars? He has said that is the endgame for creating Starlink.

yes, if you look globally. Just usa ? Not sure.

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.

Who do you imagine will buy it on a global scale? Rural NA areas, rural Australian areas and a few places in Europe. At the price point offered it is insanely expensive unless your only other option is satelite or a very crappy DSL.

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.

I mean, you can get several houses together.

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

Yeah, lots of small villages in Africa or other poor countries will have shared Starlink connections.

That remains to be seen. As it stands, these regions don't have the ability to pay for the service (no matter the price - they simply don't have access to bank accounts and credit cards).

This is something to keep in mind and not obvious to people living in 1st world countries.

They can pay with crypto. Obviously there are some hurdles too and they have to earn it first.

> you wont be watching 4k

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.

1. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

I can't speak for globally, but a quick search online says that around 43 million people in the USA don't have broadband. "Broadband" meaning 25/3 service. I'm willing to bet the true numbers are significantly higher than that, and I don't really count severely data-capped wireless service as being broadband like the FCC does.

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.

> Who do you imagine will buy it on a global scale?

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.)

I work with an animal rescue. They're out in a somewhat rural part of TX, just beyond a major metro. Only available network is LTE or bad p2p microwave that's crazy expensive. This is 1/3 the price of the microwave and about the same as the LTE plan. I signed them up and I'll pay for it. The resident who lives on site has never had a decent network. Then I can finally setup the wireless perimeter cameras too.

You do realize you could have tried the same argument about cell phones when they first came out. No-one in those poorer countries would buy the same cell phone my dad (real estate agent) had in his car, the cost would run up to $1000 a month, but he made good commission selling factory properties.

Today every where in the poorest parts of the world are connected with cell phones.

Is it awesome?

Yes and even more so if you have the past viewpoint and perspective of having previously lived on geostationary satellite for months at a time, and could imagine using starlink in a really remote area.

Do you think it is practical for the rapidly growing recreational vehicle/boondocking/overlanding crowd due to the hardware and installation requirements? If your camper moves every couple days or so, seems it might be problematic.

Can we use it as a WAN device? Can we initiate PPPoE or whatever on our own routers?

Can you say what type of average bandwidth and latency you are seeing? And how does it compare to the data plan or tier you are beta testing.

How much does it cost?

(I am not OP, but this is pretty easily found on the site.)

$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.

> this is pretty easily found on the site

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.

In my experience, if you enter the desired service address it is the very next thing that's displayed.

thanks, after putting in the service address all I see is a $99 deposit and no mention of a monthly or annual fee...

Ah, that explains it, the button says "Order Now", which scared me off as I wasn't interested in actually ordering but was curious about the price.

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.

Since they use regional pricing, doesn't it make sense that it would require a service address before they can show you the price?

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.

Valid points. I do think something like "Enquire" would be better though. With regards TIDAL they knew enough to tell me that I can't get it in Croatia based on IP (so I signed up using a UK debit card via a VPN to circumvent that nonsense).

£439 for hardware, £89/month service, £54 delivery in the UK. The equivalent of US$611, $124 and $75 respectively at today's rates. Our prices include sales tax (VAT) though.

Ooft, that's pricey.

It really isn't in a lot of european countries. For this speed, you'd be paying 60-90€ at any ISP in Germany, if it's even available to you.

>Price seems to change to local currency if your country is not USA.

Doesn't change to Rupees in India despite being able to find the address. Still shows 99$ for me.

I don't have any insider info but there is absolutely no chance that the dish is costing them even <2x what they are charging for it. I don't really see how their business model pencils out even assuming massive oversubscription, perfectly geographically distributed customers, and the new laser links. It's just hard to make it work when your satellites fall out of the sky and need replacing. The technology certainly works and is really cool to see as an engineer, don't get me wrong, but even Musk businesses will eventually need to make money. For Tesla, their path to profit was steep, but feasible; here I just don't see it at all.

Why? It will take less than two years, maybe one year subscription to pay for the dish, and calculation show $10 a month pays for the satellites. It looks like pure profit for any customer who uses their service for three or more years, and there are a lot of customers out there.

It's not pure profit because, a) you can only oversubscribe 20GB/s so much without data caps and speed limits b) a small fraction of the constellation will be over inhabited land and wealthy enough countries at any moment c) I am assuming they lose money the first ~1.5 years to recoup the dish cost and R&D, d) ground link opex e) sats fall out of the sky and need replacing f) subsidized launches via rideshare only work if there is enough demand into inclined LEO, otherwise its $30M per launch at per sat costs go way up g) Customers are not uniformly distributed over earth's landmasses

What's the actual upload speed in good conditions?

15.5-18Mbps

How fast the speed do you think they will settle for normal operation? I mean 1Gbps sounds cool, but the limitation and economics are there.

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