SpaceX plans Starlink broadband for cars, boats, and planes
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Cheap connectivity could be incredible. Current sat systems are expensive and coverage is interesting.
IoT and autonomy offer the potential cost saving measures to get the investment from some of the most frugal operators.
I mean, besides providing better connectivity for people on ships, what will/can change? What was blocked in building out by current satellite offerings?
However I have no idea of good it is at wave and currents.
For fleet owners, no matter if for ships, cars/trucks or planes, management becomes way easier if they have global high bandwidth data uplink: you can detect stuff like engine or other part wear early by running big data analysis on telemetry, and in disaster case you have way better logs to operate on (both post mortem and during troubleshooting).
This by the way also is relevant for car manufacturers - with the exception of Tesla, the only way classic car manufacturers get information on how their cars are used in the real world comes from test drivers, accident reports and shop visits. Consistent data uplinks allow for a lot more telemetry that can be used to improve their products.
Surprisingly, even scientists can benefit from this - have ships transmit real-time data about air pressure, sunlight, wave height etc. and suddenly you have a global network of floating data buoys.
Shipping is one thing -- the company still owns the goods. But keep this out of my cars.
There are already temperature and tamper devices for sensitive freight. There are devices that will show if orientation has changed or if shock occurred etc.
Sensitive freight is an entire industry that has already innovated around the lack of connectivity.
That's not to say there isn't further innovation to be made.
Tiltguard stickers or how were they called... about the most useless bullshit I've seen. Back when I worked in stage lighting, many cases had these affixed... and you can guess what every shift leader had in their pocket: yep, a load of replacement ones.
Why wouldn’t it be?
Right now data sizes of an email are industry standard. As you go into 100s of Mb you start to see people really struggle.
I would look at BIM systems for a parallel with ships. Ships are incredibly complicated and often self reliant. Shore based monitoring is hated by the crew but vessel operators see return from it.
A simple example would be an extension of the IoT devices already on board probably around engines. Anything with tangible benefits to Efficiency and safety would see investment.
At best, it might be cheaper than what is currently on the market, but that expense is largely driven by durability requirements for equipment exposed to heavy amounts of moisture and inclement weather. Durable products are not something that any of Musk's companies are known for (especially Tesla), so they enter this market with the disadvantage of that reputation.
Shipping already does everything that Starlink proponents claim Starlink will enable, i.e., track ships, track cargo, track temperatures in containers. And this data isn't like video, so you don't need a lot of bandwidth for it.
Starlink might make things cheaper than current satellite communications offerings, but this is evolutionary not revolutionary.
Improvement for sure, and I'd bet on StarLink making a lot of money on this by volume, but it's not going to radically change shipping.
On a ocean going cargo ship, that is not that much relative to the other costs.
Starlink is not Tesla, and from my study of the /r/starlink subreddit, there have not been any significant complaints about the dish reliability, even in the bitter snow and cold
The other part of me will mourn the days when a plane flight was one of the few places you could be expected to be totally unavailable.
Maybe depends on what kind of tech is installed on plane, but there is definitely space to improve it.
It's different for every airline, but I believe the system for Southwest just uses signals from cell towers, which is spotty at best.
Most of the major US airlines have been migrating from cellular to Ka- or Ku-band satellite internet over the last few years. (Including Southwest.)
There's some individual aircraft that haven't been upgraded yet, since installing the satellite antenna is a major upgrade. But at least on my flights, most offer it now.
For international longer-haul flights satellite coverage can be rough for airlines - at least a few years ago when I was familiar with it airlines had either global coverage, but slow, or smaller coverage but fast.
It'll be interesting if Starlink can solve this for fast-moving planes for airlines like Qantas that fly from Aus to Europe, Asia, and America.
if you are only sharing opinion, then my opinion is that you're wrong and that neural links are already here and will be accessible to all within our lifetime.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13690514319032688...
Those qualify as cars. Just not Tesla cars. At least until the Tesla Semi is out, I guess.
But before this moment, I personally would've definitely classified semis and RVs as "cars".
> A car (or automobile) is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transportation. Most definitions of cars say that they run primarily on roads, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport people rather than goods.
An RV would seat more than 1-8 people, and a truck is designed to transport goods rather than people (despite what they may actually be used for).
https://twitter.com/astrajamz/status/1369051953523744773
Seems like you could definitely fit one in the family minivan. Maybe skip it for the Porsche.
Tesla cars are already connected through 4G/5G (when there's coverage) and they also store video feed in their memory, which they upload when the car connects to Wifi.
Starlink is an easy way to make oodles of money, which they can redirect toward getting to Mars.
They can launch their satellites at cost (or less, if they sell ride sharing). No other telecom can do that. And their customer cost is already fraction of everyone else's.
Add to that their mass-production optimized satellites, and no one else can even touch them. There is a very good chance that Starlink will achieve its goal of printing money.
Update 6 pm EST: Although a SpaceX filing said that Starlink terminals could be deployed "on passenger cars," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk indicated on Twitter today that passenger cars are not in the plan. "Not connecting Tesla cars to Starlink, as our terminal is much too big. This is for aircraft, ships, large trucks & RVs," he wrote.
I just miss the days before screens
Everything above 25 degrees needs to be clear. With even more satellites, it may start to tolerate individual tree-size obstacles, but right now the requirements are harsh.
The dish consumes about 100 Watts when in use.
Perhaps this is the best use for it - locations which could never get wired (or stationary wireless) internet.
EDIT: Key words: Highly Degraded Performance. This isn't the occasional disconnect or lag spike. It's frequent disconnects and lag spikes.
> There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.
Most articles or videos about the Beta has mentioned just that as a limitation (along with being geo-locked, both due to lack of coverage right now).
By the way as an Indian I have always been attracted to your country, but it's just the cold that stops me from even attempting. (And I don't mean the "immigration" attraction, I had my chance in NL and after a backpacking trip I realized it was not my cup of tea). Same with Europe. Australia seems too far and in the middle of nowhere disconnected from every other place. I imagine it will be too lonely there.
Coming back to Canada I also think we outsiders know very little about the place compared to say your neighbours and a place like the UK. I am heavily into watching cinema. Would you please recommend some filmmakers that show Canada in a way that people get to see how and what the life is there?
Something smells foul.
But I will note that normal copper wires are not good for this. You can't get usable speeds past 2-3 miles on telephone wires.
This house is wired to cable television, but that doesn't carry any internet.
I work from home as a developer and no longer have to drive into town to install windows updates and compilers.
This is definitely still beta, and with only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of sats planned in the end, only beta intersat optical links for polar orbits, performance is more variable then would be hoped by general release. Latitude matters a lot in terms of density for LEO sats too. Polar orbits only just barely got going, if your colleague is far enough north to need that the lower density and version 0.9 sat links could explain some of that oddly high latency. Nevertheless the promise is there as a matter of physics, and they also very clearly advertised that this is still early stage stuff. They even had a groan inducing but highly memorable pun for it, "beta than nothing" (badum tish). It still beats the wired internet available at my client's location however. I'll probably transition the DSL from failover to static VLAN usage soon.
Single biggest beta issue right now is their IPv6 support still sucks, which means heavy CGNAT all the time. Not a huge deal to solve via reverse tunnels but still feels retrograde for something otherwise so cutting edge.
unfortunately that was shown not to be the case since at least 2010.[0]
The worst case is potentially much worse than a bricked head-unit. The worst-case is potentially a sizable loss of human life.
Note : I don't have a solution. The industry is obviously trending towards connectivity; I just wish to elucidate that it's far from solved from a security & liability standpoint.
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220713691_Experimen...
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-17/thursday/us-17-Nie-Free-...