Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map | Hacker News Reader

Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

satellitemap.space

398 pointsrvnx227 comments

Frequently Commented Questions:

Yes, space looks crowded in these visualizations. But the size of the satellites is exaggerated here by thousands of times. Space is huge and the collision risk is extremely low. If displayed at their true size the satellites would not be visible, and indeed the vast majority are not visible in the real life night sky. The exception is recently launched satellites that are still in transit to their final orbits, but even those are only visible sometimes and generally only within an hour or two after sunset or before sunrise.

No, Kessler Syndrome is not a realistic concern for satellites in these orbits. Satellites here experience atmospheric drag and fall out of orbit in five years or so. Collision debris has a higher surface area to mass ratio due to the square-cube law and deorbits faster than that. And it takes a lot less than five years for debris to fall below the orbits of other satellites where it no longer poses any threat of a chain reaction. And no, a collision between two satellites in circular orbits cannot throw debris into much longer-lasting orbits, due to how orbital mechanics works. And even if Kessler Syndrome did somehow happen despite all that, it wouldn't trap us on Earth even for the five year period; a debris cloud would still be quite sparse and launching rockets through it would be no problem since the time spent in the cloud and thus probability of collision would be negligible.

I took a screenshot of the default view on my web browser. The satellites appear to be around 100km in diameter, but they are in reality 7m wide, so they are 14,000x larger on the map than in reality. The entire constellation would fit within 0.2% of one of the white dots as they appear in the map.

Then you need to remember that the space is 3D, unlike road surfaces (ignoring bridges etc.)

Put another way, it is like there are 10,000 fish equally spaced around the ocean. One could swim 100 lifetimes and never see another fish.

As the surface area of a theoretical 3 dimensional spherical shell at earth diameter plus 550 km is considerably larger than the oceans, more like having 10,000 tiny anchovy sized fish, swimming a hundred lifetimes and never seeing one.

Space is not really 3d in the intuitive sense from a packing perspective, because satellites take up orbits rather than stationary points and orbits don't pack densely. It's more like an embedded 2d space, the intuition for that being that a ring, think Saturn's, is 2d and intersects any orbit.

Bullshit. Space is definitely 3D and has 3D packing. Starlink is at about 550km. That has an orbital period of 1.5917hrs. Satellites are 7m (as suggested above, but this sounds large). So let's space the next group by 10km. Now the orbital period is 1.5952hrs. We have to go to 580km (+30km) to get to 1.6hrs, which is a difference of 37 seconds. So you got 60km (520km-580km) where you have an error rate of under 1% (0.65%). That drift per day is easily accounted for and you're not going to have a destructive resonance event during the lifetime of the satellites.

For comparison, the ISS (~420km orbit) has a natural decay of 2km per year. It's safe to say that you can pack these satellites <1km in orbital height without realistic risk of them running into one another. The real problem is tracking everything and we often have large margins of safety. Sure, you won't pack them like you would oranges, but even several kms apart that can create a pretty dense coverage map. Gravitational orbits aren't electron orbits and don't need to be quantized (at least on the tens of km level).

I'm not considering such concerns at all; my comment holds even considering perfect orbits followed by frictionless point objects of zero mass. You can of course pack into the height-dimension trivially when using circular orbits; the issue then is how many orbits you can pack into an orbital plane. I contend it scales with radius, not radius squared.

Also, it is kind of like an extreme version of the risks of flying cars. One hubcap/collision can mean catastrophic downstream effects.

The problem with your model is all orbits at a given altitude intersect. You can orbit at the equator, or orbit above and below the equator thus crossing the equator. There’s nothing special about the equator here. All polar orbits meet at the poles, and any non polar obit is forced to cross all polar orbits etc.

In practice this is not be a significant problem because you can pack a great deal of satellites at a given altitude and moving to a slightly lower or higher orbit works just fine.

> The problem with your model is all orbits at a given altitude intersect.

> In practice this is not be a significant problem

Which is really why I didn't bring it up. We didn't even talk about eccentricity. My model is simple but this is HN, so I added magnitudes of error.

Huh. I wasn’t worried before reading this thread. Now I’m a little more worried.

1. We don’t need to worry about Kessler syndrome, as the orbits of Starlink will decay in five years (from 550km). 2. ISS is at 420km.

Has anyone else ever worked with something dangerous dangling over their heads? It’s kind of nerve wracking, even if you know that there’s very little chance of it falling and hitting you.

The moon seems pretty stable up there. Doesn't rattle my nerves on iota that it is overhead.

The moon is slowly getting farther away. Starlink satellites are expected to relatively quickly return to earth.

The moon is gaining velocity from earth’s rotation which is a finite energy source, given a long enough timescales it would collide with earth. However, the sun is going to consume the earth before that happens.

I'll put $10 up against that bet. In a few billion years, one of us is going to look pretty stupid!

There's no real chance of starlink satellites falling and hitting you.

They're designed to fall out of orbit at the end of their lifespan (or whenever something goes wrong), and fully burn up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground.

I'm talking about them hitting ISS.

(Main body) Size matters a lot. That 7m estimate above is with a solar array unfurled and is much larger than the main body, which is about 3.2m x 1.6m x 0.2m[0]. These will burn up in the atmosphere, and actually are designed to do so.

Are you afraid of airplanes flying overhead? Probably not. These don't burn up in the atmosphere and when they fall they do a ton more damage than satellites that don't. A big reason you're not afraid is because the chance of you (or any person) being hit is pretty small because the object is so small compared to the potential falling area. Now we're talking about objects that are significantly smaller than airplanes and with a potential "falling area" (if somehow something doesn't burn up) is magnitudes larger and into an area that is basically empty (humans don't even occupy 15% of the surface).

You shouldn't be worried. Even if parts of these things were hitting the ground they wouldn't be that dangerous just due to the statistics of being hit. Odds get even better when we talk about typical orbits.

[0] https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-dim...

The point isn't that I should be worried. The point is that folks in ISS should be more worried than if they were, say, at 600km...

The satellites can't just fall out of the sky suddenly like something hanging above your head. That's not how orbital mechanics works. ISS would have warning of any threat long in advance, plenty of time to make an avoidance maneuver or return to Earth in their lifeboat.

Is ISS between satellites that are expected to de-orbit and the Earth, or is it not?

I'm well aware of tracking and avoidance mechanisms, but, up until now, I hadn't considered the orbital planes in use.

The satellites are expected to control their deorbit, just as they controlled their ascent, and neither controlled ascent nor controlled descent pose any threat to ISS. If a satellite failed in orbit and was unable to control its deorbit, it is still very unlikely that it would come anywhere close to colliding with ISS on the way down. And in the very unlikely event that it did, again there would be plenty of advance notice for ISS which could do a maneuver to avoid it.

Comparing our terrestrial notion of 2 or 3d space with orbital positions doesn't solve much. Low orbit is a very different area requiring we drop traditional notions of size and speed.

You could just have left out the word bullshit, you know?

Yes, the key is that all circular orbits at the same altitude must cross, and if the orbits cross there is a potential collision. Satellites at the same altitude can only avoid collisions by controlling the position in the orbit.

Also, mean free path in a particle cloud depends on number density, cross sectional area and speed. The cross sectional area is small, but relative speed is also very high, which makes collisions more likely than one would think just based on their number density.

Though note: SpaceX does exactly that. They passively position the positions of the satellites along their orbits so that Starlink satellites don't need to avoid other Starlink satellites in orbital operation.

I found this helpful, to illustrate how massive the orbital 'spheres' are

https://i.imgur.com/zGaLWDg.jpg

There's several more startups filing to launch their own 10,000+ satellites.

The sky is going to be trashed like the scooters littered across every major city's sidewalks, seemed like an acceptable idea on paper by the eager governments beforehand but in reality it just makes an absolute mess that no-one seems to take responsibility for or ever fixes.

100%.

> no-one seems to take responsibility

No profit oriented corporation will ever take responsibility for downsides of their business that can be pushed onto others as externalities. The answer is to force them with regulations.

(This is the general rule, exceptions do exist like brands or product lines that cater to the niche of people especially conscious of a particular issue. The food sector is a good example. Note how those who do tend to create self-regulation with certifiable standards and that, strictly speaking, they can not externalise that specific issue so they don't)

It’s worth noting that the only reason that megaconstellations even work as a business model is thanks to telecom giants refusing to develop infrastructure everywhere it’s needed, despite making promises and taking government handouts to do so for decades, as well as being monopolists and obstructing competition where competitors were trying to make good on development promises.

This left a vacuum which is now being filled since LEO is a place where incumbent telecoms have little power to obstruct (though this hasn’t stopped them from trying).

So in my mind, if we want to curb megaconstellations, the best way to do that is to strip telecoms of their monopolist powers and mandate development of fiber infrastructure in the ground, which even the best LEO constellations don’t have so much as a hint of hope of competing with. The economics will cease to make sense and the constellations will be canceled and decommissioned.

We can’t just leave that open vacuum.

It does seem like we need a term for a civilisation that decides that serving internet is more important than its ability to observe the universe.

Then, in that pursuit, they completely miss an otherwise easily detectable near earth object and become extinct, but the satellites will continue happily beaming internet to a user base that no longer exists.

Then again, it's probably a non-issue. Not because the satellites impede our ability to observe, but because we observe so little to begin with.

That and our current ability to detect and do anything about a civilization ending asteroid is pretty nonexistent at the moment.

> a civilisation that decides that serving internet is more important than its ability to observe the universe

It's slightly worse than that. Starlink is only viable because of huge gaps in planned provision of what is now a basic utility (even government services in many parts of the world are hard to access without the internet).

We're actually giving up our inalienable and multimillenial rights to a real night sky in order to leave gaps in utility provision for greedy wanker billionaires to make money and gain power filling.

Starlink sats don't stick around for multiple millennia. Their orbit degrades quite fast. You need much higher orbits for such longevity.

No wasn't suspecting nuisance-satellite of being near-eternal!

I mean we have had a real night sky for millenia, and now a handful of men are being permitted, with hardly any communal discussion or decision, to expunge it. Many won't notice, of course, having been denatured by suburbia.

Let's ban commercial aviation at night too. Though I'm not sure why the night sky enjoys special status over the day sky. The rich people wouldn't be getting paid money if lots of people who couldn't otherwise get it weren't happy to pay for Internet.

Ah now I understand. Sorry for my misunderstanding.

Not at all. I phrased the comment clumsily in a quick fly-by way, so it was very easily misunderstood ;)

You can't see the satellites with the naked eye when they are in their target orbit.

You can occasionally see them as they are advancing to their orbit, and they look no different than an airplane at night looks. Except cooler.

They're more-or-less invisible in all but the darkest skies.

I've seen a freshly-launched train of the very early ones from a quite light-polluted city sky in Glasgow, but even going deliberately looking for Starlink sats in properly dark skies I've never seen any.

If we allow billionaires to just chuck up what happens to suit their whims, there won't be night skies for long.

This is such a bad take. How would you get internet to the deep Amazon or the middle of the ocean without satellite?

How will you get access to a real night sky, if there's no democratic control over billionaire's actions?

You just assume (without argument) that the internet has to be absolutely everywhere (and all high-bandwidth). You can argue it, and then figure those arguments into pros/cons. If you see none of the cons, you are not even part of the debate (you're just an ideologist). To assume one side, without interrogation or thought, is to be a decerebrate plaything of the billionaire's momentary whim.

I don't even particularly like the notion of a 'take'. As if it's just an opinion about one minor supermarket choice. It's not. I see it more as a fundamental attack on my planet and species, by a self-appointed colonising elite.

This sounds backwards. Inside the atmosphere is a shitty place to observe from, and the cheap launch capacity here can throw up hundreds of Hubbles and James Webbs. We could also fit optics and radar on the Starlink constellations.

The idea this cheap satellites will somehow restrict our ability to observe anything seems odd.

just dont look up

Extremely short-sighted opinion.

With this capability we can observe better than ever before, and soon regular people will be able to afford at least a ride to LEO via ICBM-turned-airline

Space is huge and the collision risk is extremely low.

See also: "We'll never run out of IPv4 addresses."

"The bubble is never gonna pop!"

No.

We all know that we can fill it up.

But every launch the FCC requires you do calculations to show that the chance of collision is below some threshold. I.e. that it (the orbit you are in) isn't full yet.

Yes, space is huge, however offsetting that a bit is satellites in LEO orbit at something like 20,000 MPH, so reaction time for collision avoidance is lower than you might expect, and impact velocity will result in a very large debris field.

But the question is who gave this one guy right to surround our earth like this? As the power of individuals grow is there going to be any oversight to ensure a consensus is reached collectively before someone decide to do something like this? I agree that technically it may not be as bad as it looks but just in principle one cannot fathom the level of reach that modern civilization allows to just one person that this map demonstrates.

Do you think China or Russia would ever agree to a global satellite internet connectivity initiative that allows anyone to easily bypass their information control mechanisms?

Even without notoriously disagreeable players like China and Russia at the table, reaching consensus becomes almost impossible past a certain number of parties involved. If global consensus were required for anything almost nothing would ever get done, and what little did happen would be design-by-committee’d into ineffectiveness.

That’s not to say that individuals should necessarily be able to do whatever they please on things of this scale, but trying to make everybody happy is a great recipe for endless stagnation.

Do you really think Spacex required no permission at all for this? It certainly required approval from the FCC & FAA to launch this so I think you could say that US government gave him the right to do this.

Then you could ask: "Why does the US government have the right to do this?" I think the answer to that is probably the Outer Space Treaty which is signed on by most countries including all major spacefaring nations.

This may have been stopped (and still can be) if there was major uproar among the US populace or by other countries. I don't recall hearing much about that.

In any case, I'm not sure there is a sufficient reason to stop it. The biggest issue that I have heard about is the potential for a negative impact on ground-based astronomy. That's obviously not good, but I'm not sure it's a sufficient reason to stop this.

Over all of Germany there where 6 when I looked just now. So yeah, not really crowded :)

Thanks for posting this!

I see a lot of people getting riled up about "space junk" and how we have filled the space with tons of junk.

Humans are really bad at understanding things that are really big, and the amount of space is incredibly larger than they realize, to the scale where these satellites are literally like a gallon of water in the ocean.

There's a bunch of Starlink coverage maps like this; the most useful one (IMHO) is Mike Puchol's at https://starlink.sx/

The nice thing about that Mike's is you can see exactly where you are in relation to nearby satellites and base stations. And get a pretty good guess as to where your packets are going to go. It is all guesswork - SpaceX only shares what they are required to by the FCC. But it's been pretty accurate in the way I can test it.

(Also try clicking the little ringed planet icon in upper right to get an orbital chart.)

In the early days there would only be 1 or 2 satellites in range of my house sometimes and I could feel the lag as the dish switched. Back then it only switched every 15 seconds whether a tree was about to block the view or not. Now there's regularly 10+ satellites to choose from and a smarter algorithm for switching to maintain signal. There's still significant problems compared to a wired connection or even fixed wireless but Starlink has definitely been a big improvement for my life.

The big problem with this one appears to be that it doesn’t load.

Works great in the current firefox.

It loaded after about 5 mins for me, but runs extremely slow still, and seems less intuitive than the OP.

> Mike Puchol's at https://starlink.sx/

With an 8 core cpu, 2060rtx graphic card, 32gb of ram, this thing runs at like 2.5 fps (if even) on chrome and firefox

What we did with web tech is truly amazing

I really like Mike's version. If anyone has perf tips, I'm happy to pass them on. It's a little out dated, we have a big update coming in the near future to add support for E-Band simulation, etc.

As impressive as the number of Starlink satellites is, the service has become unusable for me in Southern California, particularly for video calls. I’ve been told that the bottleneck is land stations, not satellites. Either way, I’ve had to cancel my Starlink service both at home and work.

SpaceX have sought approval for 12,000 satellites, with a possible extension to 42,000. Right now they have less than 4,000. I think they have substantially fewer satellites than they believe they require, and the service is probably doomed in the long run if they can't get Starship flying.

It's not really a service meant for SoCal, but I'm sure they see it as a valuable stress test.

Every time Starlink comes up it’s the same argument. “It’s not meant for high population density areas”

Without the “high population density areas” it is simply not economically viable

Based on what? What user count do you think Starlink needs to be economically viable?

Napkin math time because the economics for satellites are not intuitive compared to stuff where density is better.

10% of the surface of the earth is inhabited by people. 510 million square kilometers * .1 is 51 million square kilometers. At a service density of only one user per square kilometer, that’s 51 million users for regular service.

Setting that aside, do you care to guess how much an oil rig in the North Sea will pay for Internet? And that user will put roughly the same load as Ted in SoCal will on the network.

Satellite Internet is not for people in cities, period. Starlink, viasat, whatever.

I have no idea, but this company has subsea cables across many North Sea oil rigs. Maybe they are laid as part of the pipelines.

https://www.tampnet.com/oil-gas

I agree with you, and your 2nd point about the b2b areas being important.

However I think the general math you do needs a bit more nuance. You'd want to exclude all people living in cities so you'd need to exclude the land mass taken up by cities to get a more accurate estimate.

Also I'm not sure where you get the 10% number from for people inhabiting the world. From this report they talk about humans impacting 15% of the landmass https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-human-impact-on-the-...

Again, I agree with your point but I'm skeptical about your back of the napkin math.

> You'd want to exclude all people living in cities so you'd need to exclude the land mass taken up by cities to get a more accurate estimate.

No you wouldn’t. The entire point is that Starlink works fine in cities for a small count of users.

it's probably economically viable without selling to consumers at all. if they get planes boats and military, that on it's own would be plenty to sustain it

I doubt it. The ongoing operational costs of a mega constellation like this is huge and I doubt they will be able to sell their services to maritime, aviation and military sectors at a much higher price than existing operators.

They will also meet hefty competition the next few years from Amazon Kuiper, Oneweb and I assume existing operators are scrambling to meet the competition. Interesting times.

They already sell it to maritime and aviation sectors at significantly less than existing operators, though significantly more than the regular service.

Most operating costs estimates assume that sending up more satellites is an expensive proposition.

For starlink, its not. Maybe for the first time in history.

But at this point in their plan it doesn't matter if they undercut existing providers. If the marginal cost of the extra client is small enough then it is just extra revenue. And you get the clients operations dependant on that extra bandwidth that they won't want to give up.

But it doesn't necessarily need high subscriber rates in any one place to make lots of money. If you just focus on those high population areas, 1.7 billion people live in cities. If you can sell to a few in a thousand then you will have several million subscribers across the world and they will likely be wealthier people. And then there are cruise ships, airliners, oil rigs, ski chalets, military compounds, backhauling WiFi for musical festivals, and millions of people living in the woods with rubbish DSL.

Furthermore, a lot of people seem to think the world is divided into Manhattans and log cabins in the woods someplace. In fact, a huge number in the US and presumably elsewhere live nearby small cities etc., have electricity and maybe other utilities, but don't have what most people would consider decent Internet access.

Yea, there are hundreds of thousands of tiny tiny towns all across the US with terrible internet service. You could run a perfectly good ISP for a village of a few hundred people off of one Starlink dish.

Yeah, I guess "it's not meant for high population density areas" argument would work if rurals didn't also have garbage service on Starlink.

I have used it regularly in a rural area, it works amazingly better than what was available prior, and keeps improving as more satellites are launched.

If nothing other than 1 Gbit fiber will satisfy you I guess Starlink isn't that great. But, honestly, my wired broadband 50 miles outside of one of the largest cities in the Northeast isn't 100% reliable and near-infinitely fast either.

As in your case, my brother's house basically didn't really have Internet before though was finally get able to get a Verizon hotspot which "worked" but you couldn't really stream video, for example, because of data costs. Now, it's completely practical to work from there as well as have access to Internet entertainment etc. options which simply wasn't the case before.

compared to what?

pigeons

> Without the “high population density areas” it is simply not economically viable

That's their headache, and does not negate the previous point.

I never realized how many of these buggers there are. It's just impressive of how much a quasi-disposable-commodity small satellites these are.

What is the data source?

NORAD publishes orbit element data for everything launched.

https://www.google.com/search?q=norad%20tle&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-...

idk any sources but i've always seen it as a weapon

enemies of the us will not be able to turn off the internet in their own countries if the us wants it, giving power to rebels to coordinate outside of government-controlled connections

I’m curious about how can they ensure connectivity for a particular area. Is it just that they place a bunch of satellites in orbits and hope that they have enough density? Or is there a method to the madness?

I am assuming a single satellite covers very small area, in this case a single hexagonal area

The satellites are in constant high speed motion, this is not like geostationary at all. Coverage is a factor of simultaneous density of satellites over an area at my given moment in time, beam forming, and trunk link to earth station capacity.

The orbits are designed to maximize coverage; it's clearer if you look at the orbital parameters instead of a globe, where you can see that satellites are evenly spaced: https://imgur.com/a/aReh0EQ The details are complicated, but each satellite can see quite a large area and any given spot on the ground is within range of 3-4 satellites.

This makes sense. Thank you for the image

That's not what that chart shows. The satellites are not evenly spaced over the globe. Most of the satellites are in 53 degree inclination orbits: those orbits have zero coverage at greater than 53 degrees latitude, and they have non-uniform coverage of smaller latitudes. (To see this, consider a constellation of 90 degree inclination polar orbits: the poles clearly have a higher density of satellites than the equator. Similar is true for lower-inclination orbits, albeit to a less extreme degree.)

those orbits have zero coverage at greater than 53 degrees latitude

That's not actually true -- the horizon distance at those altitudes is several thousand km, and one degree of latitude is about 100km, so the satellites are actually visible quite far to the north of there. Of course, they'll be increasingly far away and close to the horizon, so not optimal for reception.

Agreed

The orbits are designed in such a way that the satellites are uniformly spread across the earth, with each part of the earth having at least one sat covering it at all times. That's the easy part: just launch enough satellites for your orbit altitude.

The tricky part is ensuring sufficient bandwidth. You either have to launch additional satellites so that there are 1/2/3/4 sats above every location at the same time, or increase the per-sat bandwidth. The former is probably a good idea anyways for redundancy, but costs a lot of money.

Increasing the bandwidth per sat is reasonably easy. They use phased antenna arrays to send a highly directional signal back to earth, which reduces congestion between different areas covered by the same sat at the same time. The limiting factor is probably the downlink back to earth via a ground station - there is only so much data you can reliably pump through a single connection. Their initial set had a 20Gbit downlink[0], but their newest ones can do 4x as much[1]. This bandwidth has to be shared by all people covered by the same sat.

So yeah, launch more sats and upgrade the downlink as required.

[0]: http://www.satmagazine.com/story.php?number=1026762698 [1]: https://www.satellitetoday.com/broadband/2023/02/27/spacex-s...

So, I guess it would become a tricky thing for Starlink if there are a high number of customers around the same location and network congestion becomes a real issue similar to mobile data networks.

It never stops surprising me how quickly satellites in LEO move

If they didn't move so fast then the Great Filter would catch them.

#downvoteswelcomethestupidjokeisworthit

Asking a redditor to abstain from shitty jokes is like expecting Pavlov's dog to not drool at the sound of a bell.

How long does Dishy communicate with one satellite before switching to another one? It looks like they move across quite fast.

They move across the sky faster than an airliner, so not long.

Roughly 30 times faster than an airliner.

In central Louisiana, between 15 and 60 seconds. It might be slightly longer but I have a tree in the FOV to the east, so I get drops on that timescale.

Can someone explain what is the point of having long lines of satellites traveling on the same path?

The closely packed dots you see are a train of satellites just after launch. They'll spread out over a couple of weeks.

The ones really close together are freshly launched and still being moved into their final position.

However, all satellites are by design placed into a small number of orbits, see [0]. For example, phase 1 consisted of 72 different orbits with 22 sats each, so each sat would be 1/22th of an orbit behind the previous one - and the orbits are shifted in a similar fashion around the earth. This ensures that there is a uniform global coverage, as a new sat will move over an area right when another one moves out.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#/media/File:Starlink_...

Now do live map with latency measurement through Starlink

New York City - New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NASDAQ Stock Market

Tokyo - Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE)

Shanghai - Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE)

Hong Kong - Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX)

London - London Stock Exchange (LSE)

Toronto - Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX)

Mumbai - Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National Stock Exchange of India (NSE)

Frankfurt - Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FWB)

Paris - Euronext Paris

Sydney - Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)

Seeing this visualized makes it more impressive...

I'm not a user though, so I can't testify to the problems people have been having.

https://orbita.terrestre.ar

That's a site I've made to track satellites. Yet another one! It's a 2D map, where you choose / fast-forward time, see the ground track prediction, and horizon radius.

Does anyone have experience streaming with Twitch using Starlink?

I have a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) that works fairly well with occasional issues.

I’m consisdering Starlink but heard there may be issues with latency and dropped frames, and it is around 60% more expensive.

Not Twitch, but it seems to work pretty well with video in general. Not as reliable as my wired connection at home but pretty good. Can't really speak to latency (though looked OK on a connection test) but I don't really do anything that's especially latency sensitive.

Thank you!

Note to self and others considering this:

The dynamic bitrate setting in Open Broadcaster Studio could help smooth things out: https://obsproject.com/wiki/Dropped-Frames-and-General-Conne...

The bitrate won't be a problem with Twitch since their maximum bitrate is super low. Just depending on where you live there might be outages every now and then if all the satellites are behind trees or buildings.

Can someone tell how to interpret this global coverage map?

The legend and the help sections are not very helpful.

the one thing i think I figure out, is that you right click and set a home, and that will give you real time triangulation as to how many satellites your signal is bouncing off as they move in orbit at any given time.

The more satellites linked to your home base, the better your latency and/or bandwidth. So with this you can see your location's service quality ahead of time.

I did something similar for my SpaceX interview:

Website: https://threejs-earth-satellites.vercel.app/05_equatorial_pl...

Github: https://github.com/amir734jj/threejs-earth-satellites

Beam Planner: https://github.com/amir734jj/beam-planner

Pretty neat - did you get the job?

I didn't like the company culture but loved the engineering behind the scene. Awesome company.

No one in Asia or Africa or India seem to be using it. Are we just polluting LEO for the sake of a handful of Americans? I feel like in the US it's not even widely used...

I believe so - its a very small niche. If I understand correctly, the target audience is:

- remote places, with

- people who need internet but dont have a wire or fiber running to them, and

- who can afford a super expensive starlink (have disposable income), and

- for who 3G/4G isnt good enough

Thats not a lot of people outside the US

There is no reason why they would necessarily need to charge such high monthly prices in poorer countries. If the marginal costs can be kept low enough then it would be stupid to miss out on the revenue. A key to that is probably the inter satellite links to avoid needing so many base stations.

Also, parts of Africa have pretty good cell coverage. So it may not be needed in a lot of areas.

It’s a lot of geographical Australia.

Which isn’t a lot of people. A million, perhaps. Two at most.

That's pretty ideal for satellite services. It doesn't cope well with large clusters of customers, having them spread out is pretty ideal.

You don't need to be in "remote" places for Starlink to be a big benefit. My brother lives about a 10 minute drive from about a 10K person city in coastal Maine and he could not get wired Internet at all and the other wireless options are poor and data limited. There are a ton of places like that. You could argue that there should be a program at the national level to get wired Internet to anywhere that gets electricity but, given the existence of Starlink, I'm not sure a many many billions of dollars program to do that makes a lot of sense and would have at least some people here throwing a fit about subsidizing rural residents.

My topic was originally about users OUTSIDE the US. Everyone I meet in Asia is pretty OK with 4g, also home based internet is pretty good. It's important to understand the US is behind the rest of the world in many things, including this area.

You forgot:

- who have reliable electrical power

- who need low latency in particular

- who do not need internet access while outside wifi range of their base station

I honestly can't think of more than a handful of applications for which Starlink makes sense. And even then, it would make more sense as a backhaul for a cellular network.

They've only just started expansion into those areas (so far 2 countries in Africa). Here's the service map: https://www.starlink.com/map

> No one in Asia or Africa or India seem to be using it

from my understanding in order to provide internet services in any country you need to register with the authorities and get approval for providing those services.

their map shows where they got approval so far and where they're still in the process: https://www.starlink.com/map

They will. This technology will do a lot to bring the internet to low index of development countries.

It's pretty cool to think about the impact of all the kids who will go from no access to having the world at their fingertips.

Which is? Most of these countries have really strong 4g already...

More than a third of the world has never used the internet according to the UN.

In India satellite services are illegal except Inmarsat because they have a deal with them for surveillance. That's probably why. You can get in serious trouble there for carrying a satellite phone too.

That's interesting-- I didn't know this.

I just know because I used to own a sat phone and I would bring it on business trips.

China's another one that doesn't permit them. Which, together with India, means that the majority of the world's population lives in countries where they are (mostly) banned.

I wonder what's going to happen now that sat features are becoming ubiquitous on mobile phones. Apple has it (with Globalstar), Motorola/Bullitt is introducing it right now (with Inmarsat), and Qualcomm is introducing the features in Q3 this year (with Iridium)

This means that banning sat phones will no longer be as easy as it once was, as most visitors will carry one right in their pocket.

https://blog.telestial.com/2017/11/countries-where-satellite...

It's only launched in a few African countries, see starlink.com/map

> Are we just polluting LEO for the sake of a handful of Americans? I feel like in the US it's not even widely used...

It is quite popular in Ukraine. Granted, Ukraine is neither in Asia nor in Africa.

True, although their circumstances now might be quite exceptional?

> their circumstances now might be quite exceptional

They might be.

Also, even if "the house is on fire" might be quite exceptional circumstances, this is not an argument against fire brigades.

Is this accurate? Starlink has since a while back offered service in most of Sweden, but that doesn't align with this map.

Starlink’s own map of world coverage availability is at https://www.starlink.com/map

Wow, this is incredible. Why the GPS satellites are far away from the planet, compared to the other ones?

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

I thought the same, but they're actually below geostationary orbit. They have 12 hour orbits. Also, they don't orbit the equator, which is required for a geostationary orbit. See my comment above with more details.

wow that is cool! Thank you for that clarification looks like geostationary used for stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_System

I think this article, that most here have probably read or heard about considering how popular it was on HN, explains why quite well! It is a very long article though (which is awesome, imo!). The whole thing is an incredible primer on GPS .

Geostationary orbit wouldn't work for a GNSS: all satellites would be in the same plane, so it would be impossible to distinguish between the northern and southern hemisphere. This would render it inconvenient in most countries and unusable anywhere near the equator.

Related: an inclined geosynchronous orbit uses similar altitudes to GEO, allowing focussed coverage on specific longitudes, as seen with QZSS - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Zenith_Satellite_Syste...

(albeit these are slightly elliptical)

I thought the answer to this would be simple but it's pretty complex! From a Quora answer:

> They are in 12 hour orbits because that is the result of optimizing the number of satellites needed to cover the Earth, plus having at least 4 satellites visible at the same time from a spot on the earth, with the satellites being spread out across the sky. It also helps that they move fairly slowly, so the Doppler is changing slowly during the PN code acquisition phase. Remember that this system was basically designed in the late 1970s, and we didn’t have 2 GHz processors in wristwatches - a GPS receiver had to acquire and process the signals to get a fix, and it had to be something that a single person could carry.

> If you go lower, you need a lot more satellites (see, e.g., Iridium or Teledesic with 77 and hundreds, respectively), and they move faster across the sky. Each GPS satellite carries an atomic clock (Cesium or Rubidium, depending on the batch) and they’re not cheap to build. The fast motion also makes acquisition harder, and low orbits are more affected by the imperfect Earth’s gravity - in order to calculate your GPS position, your receiver needs to know EXACTLY where the satellite is - that’s harder in a low orbit.

> If you go higher, 3 satellites in GEO will cover the equatorial earth, but you also need satellites in inclined orbits - you want your satellites to be spread across the sky, so your position accuracy isn’t degraded because they’re in a line or a clump. I think it actually takes more satellites to get the required coverage from GEO height (think about needing to cover the polar regions) - you could probably do some Molniya orbits, but that makes things more complex for other reasons.

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-GPS-satellites-placed-below-ge...

As far as I know, the GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, etc) satellites needed to have more of Earth visible at all times, so they are farther away. Not an expert, just very interested.

No better explanation on the planet than Bartosz Chiechanowski's: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/

This guy! Nerd sniped again.

In South Africa we have the Square Kilometre Array in the Meerkat National Park; I sincerely hope it doesn't come here. We don't need it polluting our skies. Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream

That really isn't how orbits work... At any given time, there are as many starlink satellites overhead at Meerkat National Park as there are at any other point in the world around 30* north or south.

There's currently one in the vicinity. It would get worse as demand rises

Yet starlink is available where broadband sometimes isn't, so the insensible dreams seem to be coming from those who expect broadband to be deployed even in the most remote parts of the world (not necessarily talking about the place you mentioned, but I certainly wouldn't expect broadband in places like a remote cabin in the woods here in Quebec, or in a lake hunting station).

Who cares if Elon is beyond this? I remember thinking how ridiculous it was that everything he did was overhyped and treated as the next revolution. But in a lot of ways discarding an amazing technology like starlink and being against it to own the musk is somehow even weirder to me. It's such a profoundly... online (terminally online perhaps?) outlook at things.

Like some people are unironically not buying Tesla's and openly saying that they went for a car they liked less just because the guy is a clown on twitter. Reminds me of conservatives who spite themselves just to own the libs in a weirdly self defeating way

Why are you framing it as a hate Musk endeavour? So weird. It's pollute the sky because some people are on the hype train. The answer is already radio towers, they can be installed anywhere.

We have cheap fibre rolled out throughout South Africa, but now the Square Kilometre Array (which previously had complete radio silence) must deal with this nonsense flying overhead.

But it does not pollute the sky. I don't think my issue about people hating Elon! That's more than fine. It's just that he is polarizing, so it seems like misconceptions and immaculate info about stuff he is involved in are believed very fast and spread very wide. In this case I don't think starlink satellites ever caused long term light/space population and even first gen sats (that didn't get any "cloaking" to avoid reflecting light) aren't visible after they reached their long term orbit.

Even for space debris, I've not seen any credible source that argues the satellites won't easily re enter the atmosphere when they reach their end lives. Leaving little space junk behind.

Fwiw for the most part, i don't really care about the cool stuff Elon gets to put his "brand name on" I just find starlink super neat! Especially since they actually managed to get the inter satellite laser "fabric" working well which which is a concept that I find extremely neat. That's probably the extent of my biais.

Radio towers are at much lower altitude, so you need way more of them than satellites to cover the whole planet. Also you need permission on land and you need a boat in addition to the tower on the sea. Plus always having line of sight to the tower is harder unless you make them extra tall. I assume that makes them much more expensive and is why cell phone coverage is not global.

Starlink is already wreaking havoc on the night sky for every part of the planet inhabited by humans and it is only going to get worse. Unfortunately this is not getting much attention from anywhere besides the astronomy community and they are largely ignored because their funding is dwarfed by venture capital funds.

The main reason it's mostly astronomers who care and they're being ignored is that it's not even close to "havoc".

I grew up near Portsmouth in the UK. Most nights, the stars were hidden by the kind of orange glow that a political cartoonist would use for Donald Trump's face, thanks to all the sodium vapour street lamps.

Things are so much better than they used to be (also I've moved) but that childhood memory? Most don't even think of that as "havoc".

No, they're ignored because people who can't otherwise get decent Internet want it.

Bad news, it’s already over “your sky” because it’s how LEO works.

> Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream

You want to roll fiber through national forests and parks to serve a few rural people? How do you prefer the ocean faring population to get access?

Why does it have to go through the parks? And radio towers work just as well, it doesn't have to be a satellite hundreds of kilometres up in the sky. Ships already have access to internet through satellites already, there doesn't have to be even more

EDIT. I meant why does the fibre have to through parks as a reason for having starlink

The constallations are spread for coverage and are in low earth orbits for signal strength, like sharks they have to stay in motion .. and many of the orbits are "precessing" .. they go about the earth and that great circle "ring" itself is turning - physics dictates that they go over all the surface sooner or later.

The SKA proposal is that comms constellation satellites switch themselves off (stop transmitting) when over the S.African and W.Australian SKA exclusion zones.

Other satellites and ground-based radio towers do as much damage to the abilities of the Square Kilometre Array and other radio astronomy as Starlink.

People who claim the satellite internet on ships now is good enough are as ignorant as people who claim dial-up is good enough.

> How do you prefer the ocean faring population to get access?

Just get one of those big rolls of fiber they use to lay undersea cables and let it unwind as you sail. Mmm, terabits per second!

Also here in Western Australia - as the SKA is a widely distributed radio array and sits here in the Murchison exclusion zone [1].

The hope is that all constellation satellite operators (not just Starlink) will adjust their reflective profile to reduce the visual spectrum noise pollution and honor an agreement to shut down all comms when passing over radio astronomy exclusion zones.

[1] https://www.industry.gov.au/science-technology-and-innovatio...

Dominican Republic has coverage, but doesn't appear in the visualization

It's incredible to see how many fresh groups of satellites there are around the world (the solid lines), apparently all less than a day or two old?

Once China launches it's own 13000 satellite in the coming year then we will start hearing about Kessler syndrome.

Till then it's a beautiful sight to behold.

Why? Are they going to use higher orbits?

First, I assume SpaceX Falcon 9 is the only large resuable rocket in the world. Without reusable rockets, how could any massive array of satellites be economical? (If for military, ignore this post.) Look at all the other big satellite arrays owned by private industry. The return on investment is awful.

Not much coverage for the Nordics which is interesting.

How come there are so many satellites all over the world but so little coverage?

(I'm assuming the green hexagons it's the service coverage)

I believe the current implementation of the network requires the satellite to see both you and a ground station at the same time. So ground stations are the limiting factor.

It was this way until very recently, google "starlink lasers". The newer satellites have satellite-to-satellite laser links which can form a chain until they reach a satellite that is presently overhead of an earth station. SpaceX has now started selling the global ocean maritime product version of starlink which specifically advertises full ocean coverage worldwide. I recently saw a person's first hand experience of successfully using Starlink on a cross ocean voyage from Polynesia to Ecuador.

Most starlink traffic still is "up and back down again" to a satellite that's moving while simultaneously in view of the CPE and a starlink-run earth station.

Is the Starlink service geofenced to cutoff where Starlink doesn't have a telco license? Like if the maritime product finds itself sailing within the EEZ of a country that hasn't issued a telco operator license, will the service shut off?

Starlink is live in all of terrestrial Iran right now if you can smuggle a terminal in, and have an accepted foreign method of billing. Whether they choose to geofence certain areas seems arbitrary right now.

There is Starlink Residential which only works in approved countries and can’t move. There is Starlink Roam which works anywhere on land. They supposedly restrict it far from land but not sure if acutally limit it.

That's neat. I remember that being the original intent, but it wasn't quite working yet. I think there was a tech demo where they were talking about transatlantic FPS gaming, and how ground -> satellite -> straight line to satellite -> ground had less latency than the great circle path on the ocean floor? I never ran the numbers to see if that's true, but is that something customers have access to today? Or are they just using the intersatellite links to provide coverage to oceanic regions that are a couple of hops away from a ground station?

This maps coverage is not accurate.

Would polar coverage require satellites that move north to south from pole to pole?

Yes it does. Most of the Starlink satellites are in 53-degree inclination orbits, but there is a shell of satellites in polar orbits to ensure polar coverage. (The commercial market for polar internet access is minimal, but the military is willing to pay a lot for it.)

Iridium uses that kind of orbit so they have excellent coverage over the polar areas. With the few customers in that area (all commercialor institutional so they can afford it) they pretty much have that market covered.

Ps talking about the real polar areas here, not Alaska, Nordics etc.

check more stuff here:

https://github.com/thedoubler/awesome-maps-data

Very cool visualisation, but my phone is getting very hot!

Alaska isn’t in the mesh, how is it in the coverage zone?

Seems available: https://www.starlink.com/map

The connectivity was pretty terrible in Alaska, at least as of November of last year when I cancelled and returned Starlink.

They have a certain number of near-polar orbit satellites. There's not yet the same level of coverage as inside 57 degrees, but they do have ground stations and offer coverage, though it seems to be of the "just barely" sort. The polar orbits are rapidly filling in, however, so it should get better before too long.

Before the Dyson sphere, the Musk sphere ?

This looks beautiful.

The future is now!

That's a lot of junk orbiting earth.

Those are functioning communication satellites, not yet junk. At the end of their (fairly short) planned lifetimes, they will use their maneuvering thrusters to de-orbit. And even if that fails, they're in a low enough orbit that they'll naturally fall out of the sky and burn up in the atmosphere about a decade after launch. Do you have any further objections?

They are still junk, their only purpose is military.

I think you would be surprised if you saw how much debris there is up there. These satelites are at least providing value to people.

Like a planetary rash ... over the long term, the fever will get rid of this.

> $120/mo for service and $599 for hardware

Noope. no thank you.

https://www.starlink.com/

This service is not for you if that is your reaction. Until recently I lived in a location where there is literally no other option capable of supporting Teams calls. Before Starlink I rented a second house in a "nearby" (49 minutes each way) town to use as an office. Comparatively, Starlink is a phenomenal deal.

What does competition look like for Starlink? Will competitors have to launch their own mesh of satellites? If you want to actually have your own IPv4 address you will have to pay $250 per month + $2500 for the terminal. This is despite the fact an IPv4 address only costs them a one time cost of about $40.

I think the closest they have to a competitor is oneweb, which hasn't completed the roll out for their first constellation yet. They are surprisingly close though, and could've been able to actually have an operational internet service if it wasn't for a scrapped launch related to the Russian invasion.

I remember thinking they were basically dead, but they have recovered surprisingly well. Though their satellites are more likely to remain in space since they don't deorbit as easily as starlink. Otherwise the "traditional" satellite internet providers don't really even count as actual competitors.

Also, I thought starlink didn't provide customers with IP addresses and that the whole thing was going through a CGNAT and the sats themselves used private internal addresses. Even starlink business users don't get a static IP, just a publically addressable one through DHCP that could in theory change at any time more or less. That means that the premium is most probably due to the added complexity that comes with making some of their network publically addressable rather than having anything to do with IPv4 costs. From what I'm reading they also seem to be working on ipv6 support (soon™), which is hopefully going to make IPv4 pricing matter a lot less for users. Until then they are probably limited by their CGNAT architecture.

I'll look it up since it could've been just some launch date speculation.

IPv6 is not a solution when there still is a lot of people whose networks don't support it. Making the network publicly routable shouldn't be any more complex than any other ISP which seem to do this just fine.

Wait, I don't know tons about networking but my impression was rhat CGNAT basically does not allow your users to be publically addressable? Have I misunderstood what CGNAT does, or it just that they should've used a publically addressable architecture in the first place?

CGNAT has multiple users share a single IP address which means that there needs to be some logic to know which user an incoming packet should go to which is why they are normally not publicly addressable. Not all ISPs use CGNAT though.

>just that they should've used a publically addressable architecture in the first place?

I would be okay if there was a way to get assigned a dedicated, though not necessarily a static one, IP address that was not at a massive margin.

IPv6 is 24.5 years old.

When there's enough time for you to conceive a new child, send them through school, then university, then most of a PhD program…

If your network equipment supplier doesn't support the tech, demand better of them rather than blaming the ISP that's specifically intended for people who weren't being properly served until now anyway.

>IPv6 is 24.5 years old.

And Chinese is hundreds of years old and I still don't know it. People don't invest into supporting things the instant they release.

>If your network equipment supplier...

In this hypothetical my network supplier would, but someone who is trying to connect isn't. IPv6 isn't even at 50% support in the US. That means if you want your friend group to all connect to your server there is a very good chance that some of them will not be able to. What are you supposed to tell them? That they should complain to their ISP?

> People don't invest into supporting things the instant they release.

Virtually every other aspect of the tech world, including networking, has managed to update multiple times in the intervening years.

We don't (mostly) use dialup; we switched from 2G to 3G to 4G and now to 5G mobile telephony since then; HTTP has been mostly deprecated for HTTPS and the cryptography standards for the latter have changed; etc.

> What are you supposed to tell them? That they should complain to their ISP?

Yes.

I mean, what, is their ISP also using Windows 98 on a 486 chip running at 75 MHz with 8 meg of RAM and a 500 meg hard drive, and software patches being passed around on floppy disks? Because that's what the tech world looked like when we should've started refusing to buy products and services that were IPv4-only.

Today?

Today, this kind of nonsense has gone on far too long. It was obvious even during my degree ~20 years ago that IPv4-to-6 transition should have already been finished by the time I even learned about it. As there are now far more devices on the internet than IPv4 addresses, I would go further and say that normal ISPs should be banned by law from using IPv4 — if we're going to do that for which type of USB connector personal electronics use, why not this?

>has managed to update multiple times in the intervening years.

Not fully though. There is typically some amount of people who still haven't updated and at name point you just end up ending support for them.

>we switched from 2G to 3G to 4G and now to 5G mobile telephony since then; HTTP has been mostly deprecated for HTTPS

These solves real problems for consumers. IPv6 doesn't. CGNAT has turned out to be good enough for most people.

> These solves real problems for consumers. IPv6 doesn't.

Apart from the problem of "we literally can't have all of you online at the same time in v4, y'all have too many devices".

Not that normal people should have to care about CNAT vs IPv6, but you act like the correct solution is an unacceptable horror story and the sticky plaster is panacea.

>"we literally can't have all of you online at the same time in v4, y'all have too many devices".

CGNAT solves that problem. The issue is more that all of your devices can't act as servers on the internet. Most people on the internet don't have a desire to run a server. So really the 4 billion cap of IPv4 is more about 4 billion different servers than 4 billion client devices.

>but you act like the correct solution is an unacceptable horror story

No, I am acting like the correct solution doesn't have any incentives to be implemented.

I lost where someone mentioned ipv6, but I get a 2605: ipv6 address on starlink, so it already exists and works fine.

For a slight latency cost, you could always VPN to an endpoint in the cloud with a routable IP address.

It's ridiculous to need to add that many hops just to do something as basic as receive a packet from someone else on the internet.

Well, as was said, you could just pay more for the service that includes a routable IP address.

I'm pointing out that there is a market inefficiency if I have to pay over $100 a month to be able to lease something that is worth only $40.

It seems like it would cost about $10/month to set up a public IP address through a service like NordVPN. You would take a bit of a latency hit, but presumably on the order of milliseconds.

If you're serving something latency sensitive, you can run your server in the cloud closer to the trunk of the internet, or you can pay SpaceX $100 month to shave off the latency.

It seems like SpaceX probably doesn't want people running servers on the starlink network for no good reason. So, their pricing doesn't seem like market inefficiency to me. It just seems like them charging a fair price for their service.

Hopefully they get IPv6 working soon? Then you'll at least be able to route your own personal stuff without NAT punch-through.

Frankly, Starlink seems underpriced for the people whose alternative is long latency, limited data, and itself expensive options.

$120/month is about what I pay for wired Internet about 40 miles outside of a major metro in the US) and about half what I pay for electricity.

It hardly seems excessive to get Internet where the alternative for a lot of people is nothing or at least nothing that lets you stream video, music, etc.

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