SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up with 1M | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX projected 20M Starlink users by 2022–it ended up with 1M

arstechnica.com

15 pointsthunderbong18 comments

This is a weird headline. The prediction was in 2015, and Starlink has been growing at a very fast rate. A couple year delay is enough to account for the difference.

They thought Starship may be orbiting by now, but it has been delayed so they have been launching the next Gen constellation on Falcon 9. But Starship isn’t going away, it’s delayed.

A 20-50% time delay sounds a lot less dramatic than the 20x difference in the headline, tho.

If you check the profile of the author, Jon Brodkin, https://arstechnica.com/author/jon-brodkin/ — roughly 100% of his headlines are political: anti-Musk, anti-GOP, pro-Biden, pro-gov. Disgusting how this goes under the once-respected brand of Ars.

Prediction from 2015 was insane success, instead they only have pretty good success? News!

Starlink performance is really struggling with only 1.5M customers so 20M customers would be crazy. IMO they should even slow down on adding customers until the network can catch up.

They have. Look at the starlink availability map

They should slow down even more than they already have.

This is hockey stich growth right now. India will soon approve.

An early video I saw explained that with more customers they can have more base stations and more satellites. I’d imagine it’s a balancing act whilst they are growing.

Surely, coverage is top priority initially, then performance can be improved as the growth slows.

Starlink is very cool tech but it will always be a rather niche service given most people live in cities. Looking at https://satellitemap.space/ they currently have about 8 of their 4700 satellites over California. Each is basically a cell tower in the sky.

Napa, CA has a population of about 80K and has 135 antenna towers registered with the FCC. https://www.city-data.com/towers/cell-Napa-California.html

So even when they 10x the capacity it'll only be a small town's worth of cellular bandwidth across a state the size of California.

A single cell tower could easily (factor of 10-20x) handle the average bandwidth of all of Napa (residential computing too, not just cellular). Are the extra towers there for something other than geographic coverage?

The infrastructure has to be sized to handle the peak bandwidth rather than the average bandwidth though. From what I've read backhaul capacity tends to be the limiting factor now. 10GBPS backhaul only provides 5000 x 100 Mbps connections at 50:1 home internet contention ratios. There's a reason you see cell towers on the top of most of the taller buildings walking around an urban area. More towers mean that bandwidth is shared among fewer people.

To get another read on the ratio there are "142,100 cell towers and 452,200 outdoor small cell nodes" in the US. That works out at one cell tower per 2300 people. https://www.lightreading.com/digital-infrastructure/us-cell-...

The Starlink satellites reportedly have 20 Gbps of bandwidth, half of which will be backhaul. http://www.satmagazine.com/story.php?number=1026762698

Ukraine and US govt. are providing a lot of funding to Starlink. However, these customers also now realize that Musk is erratic and unreliable. Sooner they can find an alternative, the better.

if the US is sending billions of dollars worth of stuff to ukraine, why would ukraine be paying for starlink? I agree that the US is providing some funding

Theya aren't funding StarLink. They are paying for services. SpaceX has delivered what they were paid for.

Realistically, they are constrained by how many birds they can put in the sky. More people would sign up if the performance was better.

They've been overly optimistic about launch capacity. Typical Musk company optimism. Still, it's a success at building out a new market.

The problem is the latency, of course. Nobody wants to deal with the latency. And the fact that Elon Musk has no clue what he's doing. He's probably putting the satellites at the bottom of the ocean instead of outer space. I doubt he's actually sent anything to space.

The latency's about 30-50ms, I really don't think that anyone is complaining that's too much for whatever they're doing

Obviously because the satellites are at the bottom of the ocean.

That guy is far too concerned with the popularity of his Tweets than being bothered where space actually is.

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