Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Note, it says you cannot take your Starlink to a different address (or I suppose, put it on a boat, plane, RV, etc):

https://www.starlink.com/faq

"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.

Beta users have indicated service cuts of 90 miles from the home address

One thing they don’t mention is the size of the cells. If it is anything like what I’ve seems in some satellite visualization sites, they could be huge. I think there is a difference between moving this from a home in the city to a vacation house in the woods and traveling the country in an RV.

I think this will be an interesting distinction.

That kind of sucks, maybe in the future they will allow you to move about. I don't see why you couldn't travel with the array. I can understand if the dish were moving but if you just have your RV parked it seems like you should just be able to just jump online.

I'm sure very soon you'll be able to pay a premium to use any cell.

There are almost certainly always going to be restrictions, because the bandwidth density on the ground is going to be limited.

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.

Exactly. I know Iridium has this problem, e.g. it's very popular to use their satellite modems to track cargo containers while they're being shipped: when a big container ship pulls into port and they all wake up and report their position at once, the network suffers a fair amount (and this is with far lower bandwidth).

Not sure that the LA marina would be the bottleneck, but it totally makes sense to limit customers to one cell in the early phases of the software. On the one side there are capacity concerns, which will lessen as they have more satellites up. On the other side, it can be quite simple software limitations, like implementing the hand-over between cells. By limiting the system to fixed cells initially, a lot of complexity is removed.

Maybe it has to do with regulation, don't think states and nations would like a company bypass this.

ICBM telemetry, spy stratosphere drones, emmm... russian sumbarines!

I will test this.

Thank you. I suspect this is more of a CYA clause in practice

I’d be really interested to know how much motion the current terminal can tolerate? Does it lock at the slightest vibration or only if moving at vehicle speed?

I’m thinking about putting it on a boat at anchor or at a dock.

Thanks

People have tested it. It’s about a 90 mile radius. It’s a hard limit of having limited satellites service a large (90 mile) radius.

That's a shame, I really loved the idea of working from a boat and sailing somewhere else when I wanted to.

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