Starlink for RVs
starlink.com
starlink.com
[1] https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSdXwqGrP/?k=1
[2] https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSdXwbq2b/?k=1
Happy to answer any questions.
Looking for my parents to get it in FNQ daintree. Should be no surprises.
Whats wrong the the DSL out that way ( IIRC most of central queensland has DSL2+ ) ?
Nothing, other than we're never going to be in one place for long, and being reliant on whatever Wifi happens to be wherever we are staying is a bit of a pain. And LTE chokes and dies with the sort of bandwidth I need from it for work, sadly
I suspect that the "while stationary" text is just lawyerspeak so they don't get accused of violating the license. If too many people post videos of using it while driving down the highway, they might have to add technical restrictions so they don't get fined for violating the license.
Also, does it need to have a completely unobstructed view (i.e. can it be set up right beside the RV if the area is a little sketchy?) How much do overhead trees interfere?
Price wise, the kit is now about 700 EUR and service is 100 EUR a month.
So yes, it's answered.
Btw, the quote I got is
Hardware €644.00
Shipping & Handling €75.00
Service €124.00 /mo
Due Today €719.00
That's for an address in Italy. Four times as much as I'm paying for a truly unlimited 4G connection (some 30 Mb/s maximum, I'm far away from the base station.) I'm paying 7.95 for the 4G SIM in my phone, capped at 90 GB per month, similar speed at home, different base station.
If you don't need starlink, then don't get it.
But if you have a cabin in the Italian alps where its either Starlink or else, then 124 / month seems like a much better deal than having no internet at all. Particularly if with those 124 / month then one or more people can live there and work earning multiple thousand euros per month of income (vs zero income living there without Starlink).
A logical conclusion to this is that, if you begin the order flow, you will discover the price before finally submitting your order.
> Deposit Due Today $99.00
Midwest.
Costs are not even worth discussing. It’s how I earn income. As such portions are tax deductible and loss of a days productivity due to bad internet (let’s say you are only using 4g) at a campsite you haven’t been to before is disastrous in comparison to cost of multi homed internet.
In my experience in New Zealand, a doof is a private party in a rural location that you need an invite to or contacts, usually with music DJs and drugs involved. I wouldn’t call large festivals Doofs, as the Wikipedia article does, although perhaps the word has been co-opted by larger events, or has a different meaning from the little I have used the word. I would guess the word derives from doof doof music, named after a heavy bassline sound.
Rhymes with boofhead, or poofter, or woof in NZ (sorry, I couldn’t think of better words with the correct sound, Aussie & NZ English have some unique vowels, and English dialects have wayyyy too many different vowel sounds to easily cross reference). Someone says doof in this Aussie vid, which has the right atmosphere to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iavVc_23-NM
Doof rhymes with German luft[1] although maybe the vowel is stretched more than in luft. Doof doesn’t rhyme with roofie.
I.e. If my area is in waitlist , I shouldn’t be able to go and buy in an easy location and then just use it in roaming in mine .
So my question to Starlink would be, what’s the difference? If I want to get an RV and work remotely using Starlink, why wouldn’t I just get the standard service, and avoid these restrictions on the RV service? I suppose the more flexible monthly billing & the ability to pause service on demand are the killer features?
The language of that TOS is quite concerning to someone thinking of using this in a professional setting.
Price.
People talking about using it while roaming currently also say they are switching their service address in their account for each new location.
I’m not sure how it ties in with roaming capability but they do have a Business offering for those needing higher reliability and allocated bandwidth.
Fairly expensive, but it will allow me to work remotely from a very beautiful, remote location, and I intend to take full advantage of that.
As long as you're nowhere near a tree.
Do you plan on using generators? Setting up solar farms (assuming you're the first one to pull into that spot and can claim the sunny area)?
Most tech-job setups seem fairly electricity intensive.
And hey, if your tech job is just typing along on your Macbook, you're actually not pretty high in energy usage! They're machines that can run on tiny batteries, after all. Same as a fridge, basically.
Dunno how much you can get out of RV solar panels on a good day though.
As much as any other solar really, it just depends on how many panels you can put up there.
Flush ones are way easier to install, basically glued on, while rigid ones need some sort of support system.
An M1 Mac Mini max power draw according to Google is ~40W. Google tells me a 24 inch monitor is 20-60W. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong numbers, but that looks like a 100W thing? Perhaps that's totally off base though, or not comparable numbers. But I have to imagine that a laptop (or laptop-based infra) is gonna be better for you (even if you need the power in theory).
Just a 1kW battery should easily be enough to power an M1 Macbook for a week's worth of work.
An M1 Macbook will draw an average of about 30W under load.
Starlink dish is about 50W.
80W * 8 hours = 640Wh
With a 100W solar panel generating 200Wh total throughout the day, you would use up 440Wh of your 1000Wh battery.
These are conservative estimates. My M1 pulls less than 20W at most times and you can get well over 200Wh from a 100W panel in a day. Tweak the numbers just a bit and you get indefinite power for a 40 hour work week.
Sure you're not using data while you're sleeping, but you might want to be able to get a call from someone if they really need to get in touch with you. Or other passive tasks where you want to at least take a call/message/email if required.
Even in a residential environment, I've toyed with a timer that cuts my ISP modem and router overnight (and kills smart devices from trying to phone home...) because falling back to 3g/4g saves me ~15 watts, but it's honestly dollars/year of savings.
If you just need a way to stay in touch, one option is to use a satellite SMS service, like the Garmin inReach.
Though, if you really want to run that setup 24/7, 600W of panels and a 2kW battery should do it. Bump that up to 800W and 3kW and you won't have any worries.
You can also add a small gas generator to the mix for emergencies.
You aren't very adventurous with where you take your car. There are large swathes of the west with no cell coverage and passable forest roads.
Then add in all the amazing places you can camp in northern BC, the Yukon Territory and Alaska and the list of coverage-less camping destimations grows even longer, though many of those areas are outside the latitudes where Starlink works right now.
There are also quite a few established , non-dispersed campgrounds in the weat that I've been to that had no cell service. The other Crater Lake (the one in northern California) is one example I can remember off the top of my head.
But yes, if you're talking about Alaska/Canada, that's a whole other story. I am mainly referring to the US, especially the Western part of the US.
I live in my vehicle full time and work remotely while driving around the West Coast and prefer unpopulated areas. I understand the context completely. You are simply wrong and unwilling to admit it.
> the idea that you will be in these places for extended periods of time, working and taking calls, is nowhere close to reality for even the most adventurous
I can say from personal experience that you are wrong here. I would not even class myself as the "most adventurous" and my rig doesn't have 4wd.
There are absolutely places that I have chosen not to stay because I couldn't get reliable service to make work calls. I have also stayed places with really dodgy cell service and had to do work calls over the phone rather than via slack.
So yes, there are absolutely many places where I and many other Boondockers want to go and stay that have no cell coverage. Boondockers that need to be reachable around the clock in those areas will need to have enough solar and batteries to leave their Starlink array running overnight. Personally, I am fine with dropping off the grid overnight, though I suspect that I would occasionally fall asleep without remembering to turn off the internet and then spend days getting my batteries back to full.
My limited solar capacity currently is why I am still hesitating on buying Starlink. While I have a 4kwh battery, I only have 200w of solar and running a Starlink for me would require some more careful power management unless I also significantly upgrade my solar capacity.
> Alaska/Canada, that's a whole other story. I am mainly referring to the US, especially the Western part of the US.
Alaska is part of the western US, but not relevant to the point I am making since it is (mostly) outside the current starlink supported latitudes.
That's not what we are talking about.
We are talking about running Starlink 24/7 vs just during working hours. I'm saying that you can get away with just running it during work hours. You don't need 24/7 cell access when you're boondocking. That's the discussion here. Not whether you can always get cell service at all times when you need it. You can just plan around when you will be working. Sometimes you camp in a place with cell service, great. Other times you don't, no big deal, use other solutions (Starlink, satellite phones, etc).
Yes, if you're living out of your car in remote places and need to be reachable 24/7 you are a unique case and should plan accordingly. But for the vast majority of people working on the road, that's just not the case.
> the idea that you will be in these places for extended periods of time, working and taking calls, is nowhere close to reality for even the most adventurous
Go back and re-read the thread. You gave the availability of cell coverage everywhere you can drive as an explicit reason why those who need to be reachable don't need to run Starlink 24/7. Then, when I pointed out that was factually inaccurate, you shifted to saying that those places exist, but nobody would want to stay there for extended periods. That I was also able to contradict through personal experience. I've only addressed topics you directly brought up yourself.
> Yes, if you're living out of your car in remote places and need to be reachable 24/7 you are a unique case and should plan accordingly. But for the vast majority of people working on the road, that's just not the case.
This I agree mostly agree with (except the hyperbolic "unique case"). Pager duty isn't that uncommon for software developers so it is not an unrealistic use-case and is worth discussing on a platform like HN and doesn't deserve to be dismissed out of hand.
I think you have a tendency to make hyperbolic claims, (e.g. "nowhere close to reality for even the most adventurous") when you would have been better served by just relating your extensive experience with how easy it is to find good places to boondock that do have enough cell service to not require starlink for 24/7 contactability.
Edit: I would also have been more effective if I had left out the first sentence of my original reply and instead provided examples of the areas I was talking about in the initial comment rather than in a follow up.
Obviously there are many places where there isn't cell coverage, but the vast majority (of even very remote places) has some type of coverage. I've been hours from the nearest asphalt road, in the middle of the desert and still have coverage. This is more often than not the case. Use a cell booster with an antenna on a pole, and you can extend this range even further.
My point is that you will not need 24/7 satellite connection just for taking calls, the vast majority of the time you will be near a service area. If taking calls is important to you, you can almost always find a place to camp with service (or carry a satellite phone). I also don't find many people in the truly remote areas camping out for extended periods of time. Most of the time, people want to be relatively close to services, for many other reasons.
And from personal experience I can tell you that this is not true. It is not hard to find remote places with no cell coverage.
So you either aren't that adventurous, or you haven't explored very widely yet.
> I also don't find many people in the truly remote areas camping out for extended periods of time.
You don't find them, because they're in places you don't seem to go yourself or are not aware of.
> If taking calls is important to you, you can almost always find a place to camp with service (or carry a satellite phone).
Yes, there are other options and people have been making it work since before star link was available.
While I agree that most people won't need starlink on 24/7, it simply isn't true to say that you can count on some sort of cell service in the vast majority of places you can reach with a car.
I've explored CA, NV, UT, and CO very thoroughly, and WA, OR, WY, and AZ but not to the same extent. I've had many rigs throughout the years (Tacos, 4Runners, ADV bikes, vans, campers, roof tents, I've tried it all), currently building out an E350 (retired ambulance). I've done week long moto-camping trips through-out CA and OR (week is my limit for moto). I've been at it for about 15 years now and have camped many hundreds of nights, mostly outside of developed campgrounds. My Google maps is filled with hundreds of markers for great boondocking spots that I've found over the years. You're not talking to someone that goes out to Moab once a year and stays in a yurt.
> While I agree that most people won't need starlink on 24/7, it simply isn't true to say that you can count on some sort of cell service in the vast majority of places you can reach with a car.
It is factually correct since just Verizon's cell coverage is something like 70% of the US land area. But of course, I can get in my 4Runner right now and find a place within a 30-mile radius that doesn't have cell coverage.
2/3rds isn't what I would call a vast majority and the coverage for the western states is much lower than that. If you only include places where boondocking is legal, I think the coverage drops significantly below 50%.
It is certainly feasible and can be satifying to only boondock in areas where you can get cell coverage, which I think was the point you were trying to make.
That said, yea - no second monitor, I close a lot of apps when i'm not using them (looking at you docker and chrome), and have a setup where I ssh onto a machine or use ci-cd agents to do a lot of my work.
edit: that said, this is a lot easier in sunnier places (you don't need to use electricity for heat) which I tend to prefer. I got close to needing a campground after a week or two in WY/MT near winter.
I have found I use 60-90watts AC to power my starlink.
I can easily go all day even with 2-3 laptops and external monitors (150 watts or so). The solar keeps up and even does a little charging during the day.
Every other day when it’s cloudy or rainy I will need to top up with the small generator but that is easy to do with lithium batteries since they charge at the full 120amps unlike lead acid that taper the current significantly.
I’ve actually made a simple calculator[1] for this, but you don’t really need it.
What you want to do is get a good picture of your actual usage per day in kWh. You can use a Kill-a-Watt plug or similar (a device that kWh that pass through it).
Once you have your daily kWh use, you can multiply by however many days you want to run without charging the battery. A lot of off grid solar people go for 2-4 days.
That gives you the useable battery size in kWh you need.
LiFePo4 batteries (arguably the best for this setup) typically have 80-90% useable capacity. Lead acid (the more traditional kind) have around 50%.
Adjust for that and you know what size of battery to buy.
A lot of batteries are defined as Amp hours and voltage. Multiply them together to get watt hours.
Max_kWh = (Ah * V) / 1000
Useable_kWh = Max_kWh * useable_percent
I mean some people will be using the RV for work, so will be present a lot but for the folks that park and go hiking or fishing a lot, what then? Some folks will handwave this away but we've had a lot of break ins at local boat landings. I can only assume the primitive camp sites are similarly vulnerable
Cameras would help too, and if you have either a very strong router (like a Ruckus), or cellular service, you could even potentially get notifications from the camera, prompting you to walk back because someone is attempting to unmount your stuff. Even just talking through one of those doorbell cameras will probably make them scurry off.
Even if you just slapped a simple chain bike lock on everything before you walked away that's probably going to stop most if not all attempts at stealing your stuff.
Battery theft is definitely a real thing these days, too, especially with expensive lithium batteries, so mine are in a lockbox to deter casual theft.
Starlink does add a lot of draw (~100w)
Combining a few backpack solar panels does the trick for me
But even if it weren't that way for me, I don't think I'd worry that much about someone accusing me of skipping out on taxes I should pay because I parked my RV in another state. It's not a permanent address.
So, even getting it doesn't necessarily fix things.
I know the system is fairly complex (tons of TI frontends building a big steerable phased array antenna), but the current hardware is awful for RV and really any use. There's a motor-oriented rectangular "dish" with a mandatory 1+ foot mounting arm, which stows in only one vertical orientation. Then, there are proprietary micro-HDMI esque connectors on both ends of a vendor provided fixed-length CAT5e from the dish to the router. For RVs, all of these are awful - the dish can't lie flat and must be brought inside for transit, and wiring is an unnecessary hassle.
As a Starlink user, my take is pretty much that the core technology is revolutionary in specific areas, but the product itself is mediocre in both cost and implementation. I wish they'd "unchain" the system with less bizarre hardware.
they're not interested in competing on cost, because they have no real competition.
implementation will improve I'm sure.
This is really their current service, but not strictly limited to only one location cell. So, you can use it whenever you reach your destination, but it isn’t designed to be used while you’re in motion.
The units that exist right now are meant to be relatively low cost and compete with consumer geostationary vsat terminals.
See: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/22/elon-musks-spacex-looks-to-r...
It's going to be interesting to see in what shape Space X survives the end of the "free money" era.
You're probably right that they would be fine as a company if they couldn't get any more money. SpaceX could operate at a decent profit and still do either Starlink or Starship at reduced pace. The "free money" just allows them to get to their goals a lot faster.
Cable and DSL networks renting you a shitty 50$ modem for 5-10$ a month or charging you 5$ for the privilege of using the shitty wifi AP are worse in that regard.
Musk has said that for Starlink to be successful they need the launch capabilities of Starship.
I mean, read what little official commentary is available from them. You can practically hear those guys salivating at what they’re seeing: unjammable, indestructible, untappable communications infrastructure with high bandwidth and 5 min setup time in the field, man portable if necessary.
Go compare it to what you will get for $150 per month from consumer grade geostationary based highly oversubscribed services. Viasat/Hughesnet/wild blue/etc.
I could pull out my checkbook right now and start a contract for $6,000 per month on a 36mo term of dedicated SCPC geostationary capacity (requiring about $8500 of equipment at my site with a 1.8 meter dish, moderately powerful BUC and new modem) and not be able to come anywhere near matching the speeds and capability of my starlink terminal.
Heck I about bought a schoolhouse in rural Michigan until the WISP got back to me and told me they couldn’t provide me service because of the trees in the yard.
Still, there are lots of cottages and other rural homes we can't get to and are trying to get Starlink at. The entire region I'm in has been stop-sell for a long time, yet there are zero uplinks anywhere nearby. I'd be more than happy to host an uplink for where we have dark fibre back to a data center to help increase capacity in the region, but nobody ever answers emails at Starlink. It's kinda awful how bad they are at customer service.
The level3 Prosser, WA hut site and starlink equipment there is a good example.
Aside from "it's not a good deal just because it's cheaper than a bad deal" - your point is completely irrelevant to terrible design choices that have little to do with cost.
A permanently-attached cable on a very expensive outdoor device is mind-boggling levels of asinine, to the point that it seems done purposefully to help subsidize the service by making money off returned units with damaged cables.
Or guarantee that units will eventually die; it sounds like Musk wants to shift to being a satellite backbone, not providing interwebs for plebs - and one great way to shift to that is to simply stop selling dishes to consumers and wait for the existing units to die of cable failure.
(And before you jump all over me: yeeeeees, I'm aware that implementing a connector for the cable has costs. Starlink chose to cut those costs.)
It's completely up Musk's alley to pull this sort of blatantly anti-consumer nonsense. His entire life he's been profiting off exploiting his customers. For example, in the case of paypal, blatantly stealing money from people's accounts for "suspicious" activity, and getting away with it because "paypal isn't a bank, neener neener."
Whatever the means he has used, he kickstarted (in the minds of consumers) at least three industries.
Would I willingly give him money? No. Unless I had an RV :)
In reality he didn't.
> "at least three industries"
He bought other companies that were already started. Bought, not founded and not invented technology himself.
Somehow, when it comes to billionaires, "I paid a writer" becomes "I wrote a book".
Musk and his network team are not that dumb. They know about the Shannon limit in rf microwave and millimeter wave and the multi terahertz channel width capacity of basic 9/125 SM fiber.
Anything RF based has incredibly tiny capacity compared to modern 100/200/400GbE 40/80 channel dwdm systems. The capacity of two strands of fiber on a long haul path is incredible.
Internet backbone links carry far too much traffic to handle through even the most optimistic starlink sat to sat laser links.
I 100% concur with you on the foolishness of the cable. It should be some kind of ip68 rated twist lock Ethernet connector.
Like, literally, twenty or thirty individual full duplex 400GbE circuits in two strands of fiber, if you have enough money to throw at the problem.
The only way you could approach matching the same capacity on a sat to sat link would be if you had a massive array of 30-40 separate laser tx and corresponding massive array of 30-40 rx receptors on the other side. It's easier to understand if you've seen a DWDM mux and demux in person in a telecom facility.
I'd like to be proven wrong if somebody can do multi Tbps of capacity on a sat to sat laser link, that would be awesome, but the challenges are very high.
This does sound like the sort of thing Musk would try, especially post-Starship, if the rest of the setup was physically possible.
Two sats in the same shell are not moving relative to each other.
I think this must have been done due to either weatherproofing (RJ45 is awful for this, you can make it waterproof with weird enclosures but it's painful) or some kind of issue with the excessive power requirements from the dish. The cable is just CAT5e. I cut it and put RJ45 in the middle (through a gas discharge surge arrestor) to avoid needing to drill another hole in my house, and my system works fine even in snow melt mode, so... shrug.
The weirdest part about the rectangular Dishy system is that the router doesn't have an Ethernet port, and, to add one you have to buy a proprietary dongle because there's no Ethernet PHY for an additional port in the router itself. Plus, there's no official way to eliminate the router hardware - you can put it in passthrough mode and eliminate the actual routing part, but the proprietary PoE injector is fully integrated into the router hardware.
Things are improving slowly, though - at least there's now a "remote management" function in the Starlink app, so passthrough mode users have (proprietary) access to their connection's vitals. Previously, enabling passthrough mode eliminated all telemetry from the connection, so you couldn't see if the link was obstructed, for example.
Getting a phased array antenna with a gain enough to get range of more than 500km for $500 is mediocre in cost? I've got curious and googled Starlink antenna teardown - man, that looks like a fighter radar hardware, may be not of a 5G fighter, yet definitely not every 4G fighter has such a radar. There is no way it costs $500 even in BOM. The BOM itself must be several thousands at least. Starlink is basically giving away its hardware in order to get customers.
2) As a customer I don't care if the product has a $5000 COGS to the provider or has unicorn blood in it, I care what it does. Compared to most WISPs, LTE/5G, or using the Internet access provided by a commercial campground or RV park, it's extremely expensive and really inconvenient. For example, my parents chose not to redeem their Starlink invitation as at home, they'd get similar performance to their existing WISP for over 2x the price and a really inconvenient installation process, and for the road, the cost just didn't justify the rare occasion they were at a campsite without LTE or commercially available Internet nearby.
Compared to geostationary and existing constellation satellite solutions, Starlink is a massive winner, and competes well. But, those markets were already shrinking and IMO Starlink will eventually have to compete with terrestrial wireless solutions as well. To do that, they'll need a better cost and CPE model.
Though I did see one clever installation under a cover on a spare tire on the roof (for the round Dishy). You could leave it up there and pull it down as needed to avoid obstructions when parked. The cable would even coil up nicely in the tire.
i.e starlink can get much lower latency between say London and NY than terrestrial links.
That's the thing, the speed of light in fiber is actually significantly slower than the speed of light through air, which itself is slightly slower than the speed of light through a vacuum.
Over long enough distances this adds up to the point that high frequency traders already have built radio relay networks between New York and Chicago. You can't easily build radio towers across oceans, but a satellite relay network that could follow a nearly line-of-sight path is almost the same thing.
Also fiber isn't run as the crow flies, sometimes it has to take a winding path which adds even more distance to the run than you might think, on top of the reduced speed of light.
If Starlink manages to get their satellite to satellite laser link tech working, which is a MASSIVE if, they're in a very good place.
( It doesn’t matter as the boost from not using glass as medium for light makes it no contest anyway)
It's been a while since I watched them, but I recall that even without laser links, they can beat any of the terrestrial links over a certain distance - because the terrestrial links can't get direct-LOS.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-k1j7M2-hBfXeECd9YAQ_g
It will not be faster than fibre for Manhattan to Princeton , but it would be faster for London - New York or London-Frankfurt
What SpaceX shared is that they plan to be "fiber cable" except via space. They'll carry a backbone traffic e.g. between Australia and U.S. via laser links.
Companies that currently pay for undersea fiber cable to carry traffic will pay Starlink for the same service.
Also, a backhaul for 5G operators (see https://www.telecompetitor.com/starlink-update-musk-sees-mob..., https://www.zdnet.com/article/japanese-telco-kddi-to-use-spa...).
Also airlines.
I used to work for a company doing microwave backhaul and they liked us as the speed of light through air is faster than fiber, and they could get more direct links. It was important enough that we had special low latency builds of our firmware with some features removed.
Big ass yagi uda antennas in certain locations with totally custom rf chains and modems.
Do you have any sources/further reading? I'd be curious what type of licensing that operates under etc.
Edit: Turns out there's an article on it on the very same blog [2]!
[1] https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/hft-in-my-ba...
[2] https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-tr...
All FCC fines are public info (called a notice of apparent liability and published in their daily data dumps), I've yet to hear of one getting fined.
Offshore oil and gas, cargo ships, Cruise ships, coastal vessels, medium-distance ferries such as in Greece, business jets, airliners, portable military applications, data links to offshore scientific applications for buoys and weather, all sorts of stuff.
Verizon and AT&T built multi billion of dollars a year of sales from cookie cutter DSL (simplistically). All these crazy edge cases…are they material? Does it make sense to shoot thousands of satellites in space for ferry boats in Greece? Financially that is.
That being said it’s really cool what a “catch all” solution we’re getting as a humanity for basically free. This feels like Google Maps / Gmail / WhatsApp where all humans get like value for free (especially in the developing world) due to one company creating a massive positive externality due to their business strategy. So cool.
Is it, though?
Can you share the pricing details of managing 4G towers vs. Starlink's small sats.
And yes, I fully expect that you have no idea what either of those costs.
4G serves an entire nation of cell phones, using generally similar wireless technology and limitations LEO satellite comms have. 4G towers are closer to the users than LEO satellites, meaning the power requirements are lower, this is a desirable thing for the people in terms of both battery life and radiation power levels.
5G takes it even further in this direction using more towers; shorter distances and lower power levels, AIUI.
Unless I'm utterly mistaken, LEO satellites are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to competing with the cell network for handheld mobile customers.
Satellite connectivity has its place, and it's basically where you won't have cell service, since that's obviously the preferable option if it's available.
I have a pretty rural property and there are areas nearby that get 5G UW with speeds in excess of 1Gbps. Most of the area is covered by 4G with download speeds of over 40Mbps.
5G is already replacing wired home internet for many people. Give it a few more years to expand coverage and I bet 5G will make Starlink obsolete for most of its US users.
This is wrong. Years before they have a full constellation they will already have started needing to replace previously launched satellites. It's not like they just launch them once and they're done and those satellites last forever. Just to maintain a constellation they'll need to be replacing something like 20% every year.
Anyway, for spacex to make bank off of this they need customers. Extreme rural living areas are not that common, and when they do become common more cost effective methods such as cell towers make more sense than starlink.
I worked for a Telco installing 4G (and 3G) towers in some of the most remote locations on Earth (the Arctic).
I can assure you, they ARE that expensive to manage.
Some of my code is in the arctic vault though a piece of crap Todo List.
What's special about satellites (and how much caching are they gonna do) and why are you worried about data you have chosen to send in the clear over a network you don't own?
Don't worry I'm not an Elon hater
The satellite is like a piece of debris/wreckage which someone pointed out it would have deorbited anyway at some point.
The videos "has an agenda" but it seems a bit easy to accept the idea that constantly launching satelites into space is pretty expensive. Infrastructure on the ground is expensive, but most people tend to not move around so at one point just building out lots of wires everywhere can work pretty well.
Having great coverage across the globe is great! But especially after seeing that (super crappy!) satelite internet providers getting the same shit done with 3 satelites.... you're looking at the intersection of people needing access to fast internet who can't somehow take advantage of existing infra, _and_ who won't eventually get covered by ground infra (and I guess don't have trees around their house).
You don't need to worry. Every angle for making the comparison unflattering to SpaceX, including taking screen grabs of Elon Musk with funny faces and making character attacks on him on the basis of his face looking funny, are more then covered in that cesspit designed to radicalize and monetize the gullible.
To get a sense of the scale for overcounting elsewhere in this thread someone pointed out we could do the calculation ourselves. They determined a reasonable number of satellites. Their estimate of the needed number of satellites was 37,000 less than CSS's estimate.
Whatever lie, whatever unflattering take, whatever deception - this video tries every angle. If you want to be delusional, this is your video author. He will help you get there.
The video lies about the connection speed. The video lies about the latency advantages. The video lies about the costs (by several orders of magnitude). The video lies about a government conspiracy (claiming one exists). The video lies about the ability of women to make effective decisions (implying they can't).
Ground infra can suck. It will probably be stuck at 6Mbps down forever since it is not economical to upgrade it. I would literally cut down trees by hand if it meant I could have fast internet.
Having competition changes the economics, at least somewhat. Look how fast AT&T rolled out fibers to all the cities Google announced they were going to do fiber in. It's still expensive to do new runs everywhere, but it may be worthwhile to keep some business. In some areas, as some customers leave, staying customers may be able to have better access to bonded lines. In other areas, the carrier just needs a kick in the pants to use more flexible/generous profiles to let customers use the speed that's available.
The idea is to use starship which should be really cheap.
Reused Falcon 9 launch: $15M[1] in the best case, but let's double it just to ballpark the average, so $30M. Falcon 9 can loft around 50 satellites per launch. 30M/50 = $600k/satellite.
Starship: Aspirational goal of $2M cost to launch. Let's just round that up to $10M for whatever might be more expensive than expected. Starship has been predicted to be able to launch around 400 Starlink satellites at a time, the last figure I saw was that Starship launches would carry "100 plus" Starlinks[2]. $10M/100 = $100k/satellite. This is assuming Starship is launching v2.0 satellites though, rather than the current v1.5, which are way heavier (1 metric ton vs ~290kg)[3].
1: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-elon-musk-falcon-9...
2: https://spacenews.com/ksc-to-study-potential-new-starship-la...
3: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/version-2-starlink-wit...
I guess the overall thing would be to break things down and figure it out. I'm skeptical mainly from a "possible market share" perspective ($99/month works well for some, way less for others, and honestly the competition is not wired broadband but cell networks). But I am here to be proven wrong!
Basically, cost calculations assuming traditional launch economics are incorrect. That's pretty much the whole point of SpaceX as a company - their business proposition is massive reduction in kg-to-space costs.
Surprisingly not that bad. The real cost could be double and they would still have enough capacity to serve high speed internet and break even.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l20j2c/total_thro...
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
To just restate that to try to get across how extremely different your estimate is from his. If you convert to percentage and round at two decimal places... your estimate is 0.06% of his estimate. To try and make this different a little more real for people lets try to convert it into more familiar figures. If were talking about a house rather than rocket launches and cp thought the price was $100,000 for a house then CSS would have an estimate more than three orders of magnitude different. Something more like $100,000,000. Translating this level of difference in evaluation means the disagreement in 'real object' terms is roughly equivalent to this much difference in cost estimation: $120,000,000 home https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/329-Albion-Ave-Woodside-C...? versus $125,000 home https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/31235-Manton-Rd-Manton-CA...
The difference in estimates is absurd. The reason it is that absurd is that CSS tries to argue that SpaceX couldn't work because it would cost more than the entire economy in the world. It's like a comedy thing where he tries to use rhetoric about how stupid SpaceX must be to strengthen his argument that they could succeed without an overarching conspiracy helping them lie about everything. This is absolutely a conspiracy video, not a factual video.
IIRC, he moves on from this topic shortly after that to talk about how since Shotwell is a woman she isn't worth respect. It hits harder, if you believe him, because he just made a 'strong as long as you are delusional' case that anyone who thinks SpaceX might ever be profitable is insane.
If I were to state my actual opinion on him on Hacker News, I would be downvoted. If I were to try and express how I feel about someone else finding him at all reasonable, I would be downvoted. So in the kindest possible way let me direct your attention to the kind of techniques he uses.
At 7:16 in that video he posts a screen capture of an article headline. It is a screen capture? Honest right? Great data. Not so fast. The screengrab was photoshopped. He edited out part of the title. In particular, he edited out the price for SpaceX to launch a satellite to orbit. Why, you might wonder, would he do something like that? Well... he was lying about the price just before that, so it would be kind of inconvenient to let people see the truth, wouldn't it? Here is the article whose title he photoshopped: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satell...
This isn't an uncommon thing for this liar. He regularly and willfully does things like this all throughout the video. You should be taking every number he gives with an enormous amount of salt. Dump the entire fucking salt container on this meal. He lies about the cost for SpaceX to launch, a material fact, but he also double counts the number of rockets they will need to launch, another material fact. He lies about the speed test results for SpaceX (by using numbers from months before the video, rather than the actual numbers). Since he lied about that, his reported numbers didn't agree with, ya know, reality. In particular they didn't agree with the reality of SpaceX qualifying for various government funding initiatives for rural internet. So if you want to believe him you're going to need choke down a helping of "enormous conspiracy" in order to get onboard his hate train. He also lies about the cost of competitors. And... it's bad. It is so bad that I have 0% confidence that he operates in good faith and I assume anyone who trusts this person is truly lazy, because he isn't trustworthy. Not even close to it, at all, whatsoever.
https://littlebluena.substack.com/p/common-sense-skeptic-deb...
Viasat offers 30mb/s download for $199/mo with a 150GB data cap. HughesNet offers 25mb/s download for $159/mo with a 75GB data cap. Starlink offers ~100mb/s download for $110/mo with no data cap.
Viasat/HughesNet have geostationary satellites which results in almost unusable ping (300-600ms), compared to the 50ms ping from Starlink.
But, hilariously, despite the channel being called "Common Sense Skeptic" (thought it might be a science-y channel), every video is an Elon Musk takedown.
"Has an agenda" indeed, haha!!
The videos produced as a general rule will cherry pick information and also use outdated pieces of information and then mash them together to produce the illusion of something being much worse than it is.
- Starship will further reduce SpaceX's already low launch costs.
- Economies of scale by producing 10,000+ satellite.
- Industries willing to pay a lot for truly global coverage (maritime, aviation, oil, military)
- With the laser network, high frequency traders willing to pay a massive premium for the lowest latency connections between financial hubs.
- A "fully and rapidly reusable" Starship, if achieved, will change the economics even more. Not only will it further reduce the initial launch cost, but you could imagine potentially servicing/refueling or recovering aging Starlink satellites.
- Starlink (plus increasing work-from-home opportunities) has the potential to (slightly) redistribute where humans are willing to live to more sparsely populated areas.
Additionally the US and NATO would see an act like that as barely one step below declaring nuclear war.
If anyone in NATO considers blowing up satellites to be one step below killing hundreds of millions of people, I want that person fired. Because they have completely lost touch with reality, and should not be allowed anywhere near a weapon, or a job where they manage people with weapons.
The reason taking out spy satellites is taken so seriously is it is considered a likely prelude to an attack.
I'm sure people are wargaming this.
> The consequences for SpaceX if we can’t get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1 by itself is financially weak, whereas V2 is strong.
I very much hope they both do work but let's be clear there's still a lot of risk to get through before that's clear.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/30/22809720/elon-musk-space...
This looks like it's just $25/mo more than normal service? Is that it, or is there a difference in the hardware?
Plus they'll launch more satellites, build more ground stations, improve the software and potentially also improve the antennas so that they can get more real bandwidth from the same available spectrum.
Are there reports, for example, that the mass movement of these things into Ukraine is causing significant issues?
There is a limit per cell how many customers can be serviced. Satellites can only handle so many connections .
However humans tend to concentrate in few areas and those areas will have higher demand.
If they allow us to buy in a light demand area and use in roaming in a heavy demand area constantly with same network quality, it would become a problem, people would do that to bypass waitlists
To solve that they are allowing roaming but giving traffic/QoS preference to local users over roaming users
I just bought one to bypass the waitlist. The magic number for them to beat is worst case 5mbit down, 3 up and 66ms, <1TB cap.
Our current internet is as expensive as these starlink plans. The waitlist here is 2+ years, and this area is full of rural nerds. I'd guess they just got 1000 "RV" orders from my county.
My guess the tolerance is lot lesser than 10:1 . SpaceX likely did some load tests before opening up roaming, so must be confident to some extent.
They are also adding satellites every week so capacity is likely also improving.
The dish manufacturing constraints and base stations could be other limiting factors for duration of waitlists
https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-becomes-movable-with-new...
So this seems like basically just that, branded as "for RVs"
The satellites they are launching now do have satellite to satellite laser links, but this is not been implemented in production yet, and there are nowhere near enough polar orbit highly inclined orbit satellites in operation. 95% of what's orbiting is in about a 53.2 degree inclination.
The satellites certainly are not full featured routers such as the capability you'd find in a modern 1U height ISP carrier router with enough CPU/RAM/FIB/RIB for full BGP tables.
https://sync.cobham.com/media/1299/71-127967-sailor-500-flee...
The better solution to keep a small flat panel phased array stable may be some sort of mass produced low cost weatherproof Stewart platform.
Moving the dish would then only be for optimal array alignment with the "target cone", not for tracking individual satellites.
This seems very different from the movement of e.g. a boat in high seas, which can roll or pitch by up to 30 degrees over the course of very few seconds.
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2022/04/22/spacex-signs-jsx-fi...
https://newsroom.hawaiianairlines.com/releases/hawaiian-airl...
Obstructions should be limited. But this requires overlapping sats in-view.
It’s something I do many times a week, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
without laser links communication between satellites becoming active the amount of coverage of satellites won’t help as there is no downlink for the satellite to talk to from you.
The best they could in theory without laser links today is intermittent connection (due to switching) WAN . Basically a very expensive LAN party with your friend’s boat say 100 miles away.
Unfortunately it's quite expensive for a backup internet plan. Being able to cancel and activate it at will with this new RV plan would help a lot with that. And while Starlink speeds are nice for what it is, I'd prefer to use my 1Gbps cable modem most of the time.
Sadly for me, I tried putting the Starlink dish in several spots on my roof and deck, but I just have too many trees around my house. 100 foot tall jeffry pines all around the house. Starlink was always reporting about 12% obstructed, so it expected a drop out every 45 seconds or so. It was usable, but packet loss here and there.
I don't think that was going to work well for any kind of video calls, etc.
So I ended up returning the Starlink dish. It really needs too much view of the sky for heavily wooded areas. They aren't kidding when they say that.
My fall back plan is to use a 5G/LTE hotspot with an outdoor antenna to make up for my usable but fairly week cell service in the area, and use that for my backup internet.
Although the EU now has 'no roaming charges' there are no providers that let you freely roam to other countries and use your plan exactly as you would at home without restrictions. At home I can get a plan with unlimited calls, texts and data for 15€/mo, but I can only use 10GB of data in other EU countries. After that I need to pay 3€/GB - which will get expensive quickly with the number of Zoom calls I need to be on.
Buying a prepay local SIM is often still a smart choice, but in some countries that's difficult (to actually get the SIM) and prepay plans don't always have unlimited data options. If you need to travel a lot between countries where that's the case, or just want less hassle, the price of Starlink starts to seem a lot more affordable.
Excuse me, what?
kinda stupid question: (not meaning to sound as an asshole question) Isn't the mmWave part of 5G itself ? Or what would you define as 5G ?
Of course, all reports on it will emphasise the new stuff, so it's easy to get that impression.
Their standards committees agreed on certain bands of frequencies, some with more capacity than others.
I'm not an RF engineer, but given 5G can operate on frequencies higher and lower than 2.4Ghz, then I don't suppose there's any reason you couldn't if you were hacking up your own transmitters/receivers. A regular phone wouldn't, though, as they don't have 5G radios that can talk on those frequencies (or they've got hardware filters of some kind to ensure that they don't).
If you have 4G or better, I'm not sure. Here's a map of 5G from ATT in Colorado: https://www.cellmapper.net/map?MCC=310&MNC=410&type=NR&latit...
For those of you outside Silicon Valley, yes, that Sand Hill Road. Interstate 280 is the best access (driving through/around Stanford is a pain).
That said, dead-zones can be convenient excuses.
Much of Australia has great 4G LTE, but when there's no signal, there's really no signal.
So there are two obvious key advantages to StarLink:
1. Full coverage in the Outback
2. No Data Caps
Despite having a great 4G LTE / 5G network in Australia we still have data caps on mobile plans. Home Mobile Broadband plans without data caps do exist, but usage policies prevent use outside of registered premises!
Also, our NBN has been a disaster in many places, and unusably bad.
I always forget about that! :-)
Be interesting to see which way and how fast the NBN updates to FTTP happen now Labour is back in power!
Honestly if your serious about reliable access you want multiple ways online so Starlink + Cellular + WiFi wan would be a good way to go, maybe even two cellular carriers.
Consider Yosemite. It's visited by plenty of tech people, but Highway 120 through the park has almost to cell coverage from Groveland to Lee Vining.
So in rural areas, you'd be more interested in range/penetration, but there's only so much you can do with trees, hills, etc. in between you and the transmitter. Starlink has no obstacles between you and the satellite, and it runs at 10+Ghz giving more bandwidth.
Meanwhile T-mobile purchased the 600 Mhz band that used to be used for broadcast TV for their 'extended range LTE/5G'.
Starlink requires 100 degree cone free from any obstacles, 25 degrees up from the horizon.
Yeah, but that's not really a tall order, particularly in the kinds of places where 4G/5G coverage is bad or nonexistent. Maybe not where you're deep in a gorge or under a tree canopy, but lots of the wilderness is open space, or at least has open space accessible.
I live in Toronto, where I have solid 5g for maybe 30km in any given direction (except probablyLake Ontario, lol…though I do still get 5G on Toronto Island…) - but I travel out to Palmerston, Ontario, and in some places along the way I’m shocked to see the ‘E’ for EDGE or 2G status on my iPhone. My grandparents still have dial-up with no option for Cable…in southern Ontario…
I used to farm in rural Illinois. Same deal. I don’t think people in less agricultural areas really get it.
https://www.starlink.com/map?source=rv
My first guess would be military and/or science, but I don't think this holds true.
Theoretically though, it should continue to work while in motion right? Perhaps with a bit more latency than if the unit was stationary?
It probably won't work great. The Starlink unit has a phased array forming narrow beams of reception and transmission to the satellite, and assumes it's on a stable platform.
It's possible to build a system that is robust to bounces and yaws, but that doesn't mean that they have.
They are already selling commercial service for airlines.
So yeah, it'll work at the speed of a van.
https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/starlink-x
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/spacex-signs-hawaiian-airlin...
Actual recordings in motion of normal end-user terminal in motion. It works OK-ish. But a lot of packet loss (completely lost packets) and latency spikes (from retransmits).
Of course, with ground hardware built for in-motion, you could do significantly better.
Source: https://www.tuckstruck.net/truck-and-kit/geekery/starlink-mo...
I'm guessing utilization is rather high with retransmits, etc-- which is probably a driving factor of Starlink prohibiting in-motion use in EULA.
Note it's not really the speed that matters. It's suddenly having a much different bearing to the satellite because you have begun a turn or hit a dip in the road that matters.
I know a few airlines contracted with them to provide in-flight internet. My assumption is that different hardware would be needed given both the vehicle and the satellite are moving simultaneously. I could be wrong.
I love this typo.
Any word on whether or not they'll come out with a roof mountable dish or at least a radome to cover the dish?|
They may have gone GA with the RV dish today, I've been waitlisted for over a year for a home dish, and got the RV dish email today.
This service has been out for weeks - not sure why it's only getting publicity today.
Do you have a link to the DIY permanent installation? All the Youtube videos and other guides I've seen mount it on the roof while parked, and take it down while driving.
Well, for one, I'm not a satellite communications engineer. I don't know how to source or fabricate the materials to create a custom radome that's transparent at the frequencies needed, nor do I know the thermal emissions of the dish and whether or not any of it needs to be heat sinked or fan cooled.
Plus, I'd feel better with a commercial radome at 70mph on the roof than some home made enclosure I glued together myself.
You don't really need to be. You just plop it down anywhere with a big section of the sky clear and it figures out the rest. As long as however you DIY it, it's sitting roughly flat, then it figures out the rest.
No one's talking about building a radome.
That's literally what I wrote in my post above - I want to protect it while mounted on the roof of an RV. Is the bare dish rated for 75mph+ wind and driving rain?
Any word on whether or not they'll come out with a roof mountable dish or at least a radome to cover the dish?
As someone that grew up on the internet of yesteryear it is really frustrating when, e.g., some google site is once again buffer overflowing all over my browser or some website of low content quality is a bloated 100-200 MB disaster. Does AirBnB really need to be 200MB just to load the homepage (note saying airbnb is the disaster)? I'm just saying.
There is always this lamenting about climate change, while very many types who lament that issue, are often heavily in one way or another involved in an extremely wasteful and inefficient sector ... the internet. What is the energy cost of a 100MB website over a 10MB website? How about GB of wasteful and unnecessary data being served up every single month. I suspect a lot at scale.
To pick on AirBnB again; sure, offer the 200MB site, but how about also making a big deal about offering a low power consumption version for repeat visitors. We are trying to save the planet and such, aren't we? Or is that just for those without private jets?
Just my two cent.
You also used to be able to interact with Twitter solely through SMS. I think there are two big reasons why this sort of design philosophy is uncommon:
* Addiction to heavy JS frameworks and libraries.
* More bandwidth = more ads.
The worst case estimates seem to be 7kWh/GiG (2012) (the best case much less than a 0.1 kWh/Gig, but only including network), which is ~60 km in electrical cars or 15 km in petrol cars. (The latter two only including the incremental energy usage).
The additionally induced trips by AirBnB (especially flying) are going to be so much worse than their website could ever be.
Energy usage data is from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jiec.12630 (with very old & high estimates disregarded). In 2022 the internet will probably be more efficient, the study estimates a halving every 2 years. So naively (very naively) extrapolating the 7kWh/Gig figure from 2012 to now is less than half a kWh/Gig.
Thinking of RVs reminds me of the cruise ship I was just on. I actually liked the cruise much more than I had guessed but even the premium service was terrible. I would think the cruise ship would be happy to shell out for better internet - could actually see remote working from a cruise if so.
I had Starlink for a short time but had to send it back for a refund. I desperately wanted it to replace my 20Mbit DSL, but I could not place the dish anywhere that was not blocked by trees. Even with a small portion of the sky blocked, I was getting constant drops that made me unwilling to make the further investment of switching over all of my infrastructure to use it.
Ultimately, my issues stemmed from the required field of view being oriented in a northerly direction, whereas my southerly view from the same location is completely clear of obstructions. I occasionally pull out the app to check whether they have removed that limitation, but it still looks to the north as of this writing.
Will starlink ever have a competitor or will they be free to slowly crank up prices as being become "hooked"? Even a duopoly may not keep prices in check.
Wondering when we might see global coverage including the open ocean… I guess you’d need a gimballed antenna for boat use maybe ?
Stats here: https://planet4589.org/space/stats/star/starstats.html
> Users can expect high speed, low latency internet in areas marked "Available", and notably slower speeds during hours of peak usage in areas marked as "Waitlist" or during events with many collocated users.
It's good for rural areas it seems.
* There's no waitlist for Starlink for RVs service (jump the line)
* Costs as much as Residential + Portability add-on ($135/mo)
* After the first month, you can suspend/restore service at will (unclear if it's prorated or if you pay for a full month when you need any service; I'm betting the latter)
* You're always in deprioritized mode (in congested areas during peak time, your service is degraded compared to Residential customers)
I'm leaving next month for 3-4 months cross-country and then returning to a place with decent Comcast (a rental where I have no choice but to pay for Comcast), so this is perfect for me. I'll suspend service when I get home, and maybe pay for it if I do any short winter trips.
https://support.starlink.com/?topic=76371e8a-d994-e9d1-f96d-...
They just recently finished construction of an earth station in ketchikan, which is quite public and obvious. Almost certainly there will be something for more Northern latitudes, when there is a sufficient number of satellites to actually make it usable without significant gaps.
Tourists: stop coming to Alaska. The mosquitoes will eat you.
This wiki section has info about each section. The "inclination" section basically sets the maximum northern latitude that the service will work to (plus a little bit as the signal goes further north than the satellites are). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Constellation_design_...
The capital equipment cost for a oneweb terminal is much too great for anyone except maybe a very wealthy person with a private island. It's a big set of two motorized tracking antennas in radomes with their own RF chains.
> Also remote northern towns I believe still have network connections and I doubt a wisp will help much
in many cases these are connected by existing geostationary satellite links which are at minimum 492ms, and the $ per dedicated Mbps cost is quite bad. If oneweb can beat the geostationary operators on $/Mbps ratio, they will win a lot of business. Just as o3b beat the geostationary operators for high capacity links into places like pacific nation islands with no submarine fiber.
George Bush: Sorry I killed 500,000 people for absurd reason in Iraq. "hahahaha".
Russia: we dont want missiles on our door step and we will invade.
"russia hur durr, putin eats babies, has cancer , rabid shriekings"
Since there is no support, I don't think I would want to bother with this.
And no it's not designed to work at high speeds. People keep confusing "designed to work at" with "possible to use outside of recommended conditions".
The system being deployed on airplanes is somewhat different than the one being sold to consumers.