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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Not so impressive. All they have to do is ping-pong packets from the first satellite, via other marine subscribers' terminals, to other satellites in range of those, until they get to a satellite in range of a shore hub. I.e., "it's only software."

It will mainly depend on having enough marine subscriber terminals in place, scattered around the world on shipping routes, to ping-pong the packets through. Presumably they already have authority to route other subscribers' traffic through "your" terminal.

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Aside from the fact that I would consider that pretty impressive, it's not at all what they're doing. They're using lasers between the satellites to get the data back to/from the ground.

That, of course, requires that they have lasers on all the necessary satellites, a hard hardware problem.

They've got something like 1200 laser equipped satellites in orbit already with 800 of them already operational (the others aren't in final orbits yet I believe). That's about 45% of all the Starlink satellites in orbit. So I would say it's a solved hardware problem.

An alternative approach would be to relay the signal on the surface, perhaps using a fleet of aquatic animals with the same communication system mounted on them.

You know, sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.

You could imagine floating ground stations to bounce it between sats, but that would be huge amount capital to cover all the oceans.

Won't work, there are way too many areas where there aren't enough ships for that.

Yet. There are a hell of a lot of ships. They just need for them to be subscribers.

There are a lot of ships, but there are also a lot of places on the ocean where there will never be a second ship close enough to forward your packets (areas of south pacific for instance), and they are still painting those areas as having coverage.

I understand you are enamored with the idea of using ground repeaters. It is, however, not what SpaceX is doing. They have been very open from the start that they intend to move the entire transport layer to orbit, and they have launched more than a thousand satellites capable of doing that with laser links. That's what they are using.

I absolutely do not care one way or the other.

Starlink can get full ocean-wide coverage with software today, or hardware after they have lofted enough of it, their choice. Immediate practicality depends on how fast they deploy marine and aircraft terminals. Full coverage of course depends on having lots of such terminals. They could speed that up if they care to.

It's not going to be routed through other marine subscribers' terminals, but instead directly between satellites (using laser links).

How is what you just described "not so impressive"? That sounds remarkably impressive.

Routing is impressive. But we do routing already.

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