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Comment by nevi-me | Hacker News Reader

The cell grouping is interesting. A colleague likes the outdoors, so he's preordered one for his Suzuki Jimny, to mount on it. I wonder if Starlink are considering this use case.

I haven't been able to preorder mine, because we're planning on moving out from the city to a small village next year, but the Starlink website requires a street address.

Our villages are quite primitive, no street names (I think it's cos nobody's thought of it). So, the nearest town where there's street names, is quite far.

I was feeling uneasy about using it as an address, this article sort of cements that concern.

I have 50/50Mbps fiber, but reckon we could still be served by 20 down if needed. Exciting!

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Starlink has said that they're planning on offering a roaming use-case, but they aren't there yet (https://www.slashgear.com/spacex-starlink-cell-location-limi...).

Part of the issue is that Starlink cells are going to be very limited in capacity for the foreseeable future: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/09/analyst-probes.... Cowen suggests that Starlink "should eventually be able to serve 485,000 simultaneous data streams in the USA with 100Mbps speeds or 1.5 million streams with over-subscription." That's in late 2026 or 2027 when Starlink has deployed around 12,000 satellites (they're at about 10% of that now). If a bunch of people decide to bring Starlinks to a popular area, the cell for that are simply won't have the bandwidth to support all those users. Imagine people going to Burning Man with lots of Starlinks or bringing their Starlink when they go on vacation. It's not meant to be a portable WiFi hotspot. I'm guessing that portable use might cost more since Starlink has to assume that you might be taking up capacity in places where bandwidth is more scarce.

In terms of preordering, you can order without a street address. Starlink's website says, "Can't find your address? Try a Plus Code with City" (and links to https://support.google.com/maps/answer/7047426?co=GENIE.Plat...).

One thing I would also point out about Starlink is that they only guarantee that you'll be able to use the $500 dish (plus $50 shipping) for 12 months before being forced to replace it. Starlink is new tech and I'm guessing SpaceX wants to be able to upgrade things without maintaining support for less-efficient, older equipment. I don't expect them to force upgrades on people on a whim, but they do spell out that the $500 dish might not be allowed on their network a year after your purchase. I don't think they want to make customers unhappy, but I think they want to make sure they can upgrade their network without getting sued for not supporting expensive customer-purchased equipment forever.

> Imagine people going to Burning Man with lots of Starlinks or bringing their Starlink when they go on vacation.

I deeply hope people aren’t going to those to download OS updates and watch Netflix. Might have some crazies that feel the need to livestream the whole thing, but should be okay if only a handful at a time.

A neat way to prioritize users is to give priority to whoever has downloaded least in the past 24 hours.

Then those who abuse the data get slow service and nobody else.

You could imagine a handful of starlinks providing the backhaul for public wifi at an event.

> Imagine people going to Burning Man with lots of Starlinks or bringing their Starlink when they go on vacation.

That is exactly why I would be interested in it. :) Not just Burning Man, but other events. We do special event medical and having some reliable roving internet access like Starlink would be absolutely magical for us.

> they only guarantee that you'll be able to use the $500 dish (plus $50 shipping) for 12 months

I would guess that if they disconnect your dish from the network, they'll give you a new one for free. I know that isn't what their terms and conditions state, but it would be bad business to do anything else.

They'll hope that most users choose to upgrade first (for more speed or other features).

$500 is pretty much free for this equipment. Production price is currently around $3000 according to SpaceX president Gwyneth Shotwell [0].

[0]: https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1379457265435078665

That tweet says <$1500. ("less than half the original $3000")

33% of the manufacturing cost isn't nearly free, in my opinion, but it is definitely a loss leader product.

Since the antenna can't be used for anything other than receiving starlink service, it isn't really logical not to consider the cost as "$500 + $100/month forever"

"he's preordered one for his Suzuki Jimny, to mount on it. I wonder if Starlink are considering this use case."

It sounds like they don't support a roaming base station for now. From the FAQ: 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.

Sounds like some sort of authorization comes down from the satellite, and they don't want to have to push all authorizations from all satellites. Which is odd for a full duplex service. Searching around google suggests a "cell" is roughly a 4.5 mile radius circle, and you probably aren't in the center. So movement would be pretty restricted.

I wonder if you can schedule changes to this.

This is changing soon. SpaceX filed with the FCC for approval for mobile ground stations on vehicles like RVs, boats, and planes. It's coming! https://fcc.report/IBFS/SES-LIC-INTR2021-00934/3877177.pdf

I’m guessing roaming clients is how they are actually going to make money.

I imagine they'll eventually have more expensive plans available for mobile/roaming applications, but obviously you want a well spread base load to avoid saturating any one area. It sounds from some of the other posts like they also do a bunch of active assignment/handoff stuff as the satellites pass, and that gets a lot more complicated once you're also accounting for moving ground stations.

You don’t need an address. I’m in the preorder queue for a small island with no streets, much less addresses.

whoa. Is it your island? What region? How large is it? I need more details.

You can put a google plus code (like coordinates) into the starlink address finder for places without street addresses.

Why not just coordinates? Talk about overcomplicating.

Probably because a plus code is harder for someone to screw up.

Find the place on Google Maps, copy the plus code.

Rather than entering lat/lon coords... except did you get the sign right, or maybe you flipped lat/lon, or got a significant digit out.

Clicking on a map location in Google maps shows a context menu where the first entry is the latitude and longitude, click that and it copies it to the clipboard. No need to use a Google specific encoding.

I'm not sure that using Google Maps to demonstrate copying a single way of encoding coordinates vs using an open standard is a terribly convincing argument.

Having a field that takes lat and lon has all sorts of ways to enter data either incorrectly, or in an unexpected format - if someone has coordinates from some other source they might be typing it in, rather than copy/pasting.

Also, as others have mentioned - plus codes (or Open Location Codes) are an open standard that can be implemented by anyone under an Apache 2.0 license with a whole bunch of example implementations on github[1]

[1] https://github.com/google/open-location-code

Interestingly, the plus code for me is almost working. It's sending me to another place once I've put in the location on the site.

It's a good start though, I'll try other close plus codes until I get it right. Would still have been better to use coordinates.

… or you used minutes with a decimal minute, or minutes and seconds, or maybe decimal degrees.

There comes a time when a format has so many confusable variants, it’s best to make a new unambiguous format.

I prefer “three words”. You get three words and they identify a location suitably accurate for navigation. https://what3words.com/

If only 3 words wasn't a proprietary black box, which demands that you use their service / api and that you are not allowed to reproduce it without their assent. Plus there's a bunch of other drawbacks to w3w if you just search a bit online.

At least the algorithm for plus codes is known and can be reused even if Google decides to drop it in the future.

A system that depends on a functioning proprietary API to resolve coordinates is idiotic. That’s so unreliable that it can’t be used for anything more than an ephemeral exchange. At that point you might as well have a 3 word url shortened link.

I prefer an unambiguous and open way of communicating locations on the surface of the Earth, to a proprietary service from a company with a long history of pulling the plug on products.

"Plus codes" are also known as "open location codes", and they are open source, not proprietary, nor do they rely on a central service.

You appear to be conflating other proprietary systems with this open one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code

https://github.com/google/open-location-code

> Probably because a plus code is harder for someone to screw up

Probably because a plus code is harder for someone to use with non-Google services and open source map tools

It's open source... anyone can encode and decode plus codes: https://github.com/google/open-location-code

TIL!

Interesting edge case of no street names (which in retrospect is not an edge case at all given the use case for remote users!). Wonder why they haven’t allowed GPS coordinate input?

they do when you sign up in a geographic location as a "available to ship now" beta customer, after putting in your address, it brings up a view of a satellite/google maps view of your area and asks you to zoom in and click on the map on the precise location where the terminal will be installed.

Yeah man strapping this puppy on my camper was my plan. It will be interesting to see how it works out

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