Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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."

> it sounds like Musk wants to shift to being a satellite backbone,

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.

Why do you think 100gbps+ is not feasible for sat to sat lasers? The vacuum of space is a better environment than 500km of glass with a bunch of inline repeaters.

Because a few discrete OOK lasers in a single frequency aiming at another moving target, while they will have a lot of capacity compared to an rf link, will have a minuscule amount of capacity in Gbps compared to a whole DWDM based, coherent 100GbE+ optical transport system operating on singlemode fiber.

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.

> 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.

This does sound like the sort of thing Musk would try, especially post-Starship, if the rest of the setup was physically possible.

One of the other problems is that the ultimate last hop for data would still have to be an rf link satellite to earth station through atmosphere, where lasers don't work well at all (there's a rain and junk in the air reason the telecom industry has given up on free space optics lasers for 1-2km, 1 to 20Gbps data links roof to roof and uses millimeter wave fdd radios instead)

I think it might be more about latency then pure capacity.

> Because a few discrete OOK lasers in a single frequency aiming at another moving target

Two sats in the same shell are not moving relative to each other.

Two satellites from the same launch, in the same orbital inclination, following each other in a conga line of starlink satellites are still slightly moving relative to each other, considering the narrow beam width of a laser shot at distances of 50 to 80 km or more between satellites.

The cable isn't permanent on the rectangular dish. It's got weird proprietary micro-HDMI esque connectors on both ends (and each end is different!) This at least isn't completely out there, since the cable can be replaced, but certainly isn't as good as an off the shelf cable that can be replaced in almost any town.

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.

Far from me to defend Musk but assholes have a place in society -- they just need to be monitored.

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 :)

> he kickstarted (in the minds of consumers) at least three industries

In reality he didn't.

He didn't kickstart the stagnant commercial space launch industry? Really?

Kickstarted is a strong word here, but revolutionized is perfectly adequate. If starship works out, he’ll monopolize it.

No, he's not an engineer or a scientist. He paid others to do the work. They did the work.

> "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".

The cable isn't permanently attached on the new square dish, iirc

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