First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini | Hacker News Reader

First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

starlinkhardware.com

204 pointstosh196 comments

The headline should say "mini dish". Currently it can be confused with "mini satellite".

wouldn't call it satty mcsatface.

Is there a way to make a Starlink dish that is viable for backpacking (i.e. 5kg at most, but preferably 0.5-2kg, including the solar panel and battery needed to power it) or is the satellite LTE service the only possibility?

If they made it possible to disable the heating element (ie. require a human to wipe snow off it) then it would be a lot more viable for hiking.

The large version draws 45-70w so a airplane carry-on legal USB-C powerbank could power it for 1-2 hours.

Fairly sure the heat is just a byproduct of the phased array antenna no?

I think you may be right, I read a HN comment a long time ago saying that they had a heater but it seems they do not.

They do have a heater in some versions - uses another 30-50 watts and is for melting snow.

It's just running the chips hot.

previous HN thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29943898

I guess any sufficiently inefficient computer is indistinguishable from a space heater.

I thought it was for comforting cats.

They have it.

This is from the official docs [1]: Snow Melt Capability: Up to 25mm / hour (1 in / hour)

[1] https://api.starlink.com/public-files/specification_sheet_mi...

It's not just a byproduct. There's a definite mode it switches into, that can be disabled, that draws additional power in order to heat the dish up. There is no heating element, but the community understanding is that the radio elements are themselves used to do the heating.

You already can disable the heating element from the app on the current models

This new dish should be under 5kg.

It weights 1.16 kg (2.56 lb) with Kickstand. It's quite impressive.

Source: https://api.starlink.com/public-files/specification_sheet_mi...

This is under 2kg

I wish “mesh” WiFi was more standardized. I don’t think there’s any good reason that a device like this should require specifically a Starlink mesh mode instead of an industry standard WDS device.

There was a standard a few years ago IIRC, EasyMesh. I even bought a kit that supported it.

https://www.netgear.com/au/home/wifi/mesh/mk62/

I was most pissed off when I bought another (orbi?) kit from the same vendor a couple of years later and it didn't support easymesh, and wasn't compatible at all. Does seem to be a mess!

Mesh is a mess because the government, mobile device manufacturers and cellular carriers all want you on a centralized cellular system. Money is made selling cellular plans, cellular data, cellular carrier based device distribution (especially in the US, where most devices are carrier-acquired IIRC). Google in particular don't want to encourage non-centralized models, because their whole Android-shall-prevent-Apple-from-taking-the-mobicake play ("commoditize your complement"[0]) was to preserve their cloud kingdom. They're using lawyers and doublespeak to lock down what they've got, for example through ensuring no app can be distributed on Google Play that supports non Google Play store based payments (eg. carrier payments), and no app can be sideloaded without great effort (and there you were thinking it was your device!) At certain levels of their organization they are actively refusing to make mesh work in new Android versions as a first-line use case in Android, even though the hardware has supported it for eons (since ~2011[1]), as well as fiddling with the Android security model enough to make it a pain to use even if it theoretically works. This seems to be a dual layer strategy to frustrate any non-edgecase popularity of mesh. They do claim to support it in home networking products but probably only because they want to take over, monitor and surveil the rest of your house to understand more about your family's behavior, presence and so on. People even leave the bloody microphones on all the time, knowing it's spying on them. It's insane. This is why we need open devices.

To be fair, the security model for mesh is hard. Even FirefoxOS couldn't get mesh working properly. I think someone needs to just bring out an open device with mesh as the default use case. If anyone wants to pile on and do it, I'm down to contribute.

[0] https://gwern.net/complement [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11s

Mesh is a mess because meshes do not, in fact, work very well.

You set up a mesh network to provide community internet access to an underserved community? 99.9% of traffic will be going to or from the node that connects to the internet at large.

That means that although notionally adding a node to the network adds more bandwidth to the network, in practice that's only true if the new node happens to add extra bandwidth at a bottleneck.

And if everyone aims their directional antennas at the egress node, to avoid this? You've just reinvented the centralised network.

Yeah, with current consumption being "everyone wants a global DNS and global network access" it's semi-pointless. But that's just a chicken and egg problem. All of Wikipedia, libgen, thingiverse, open source packages, etc. can be locally cached somewhat trivially. Most oldschool games will run P2P fine over arbitrary networks. That's quite powerful indeed. Now we just need some localtalk apps (reinvent 'talk' and BBSs and get people off Failbook) and there will be users. Also, piracy can be normalized in a social way instead of the current situation so people can actually, you know, discuss and appreciate art. A killer app may be sharing your CCTV with people, so the community as a whole can more readily resist bad actors. Perhaps a starter node could be a bit of media to pick up wirelessly on your way to your commute, so you have a kind of protected local distribution that's censorship free and surveillance costs substantially more than with centralized networks. Next, bring back Fidonet! Haha. Maybe one too many red wines...

If only the users were better and didn't want to stream video, or talk on Facebook, or video call each other, I could run a brilliant service!

It seems to me an approach would be to purposely deoptimize such a P2P network for these applications. Optimise for time-insensitive best effort delivery like the internet of old. Still plenty of applications can work to that model and it is “good enough” for doing business.

Keep the bandwidth heavy applications on different channels with a different QoS guarantees and cost structure.

Just need a decentralized system where people could be rewarded financially for providing network access.

Imagine a plug and play system where people with a satellite link could sell network access to their neighbors without a headache. Clients would just need to specify how much they are willing to pay for GB and nodes how much they want to get paid in their routers.

There are many great things that could be done but AFAIK nobody is investing in making that a reality because governments and those that benefiting from the established status quo would definitely get in the way. So Starlink is the way as there's not much that governments can do to get in the way of thousands of satellites controlled by company outside their territory.

I don't understand how anyone would expect to gain more bandwidth from a mesh. What you gain is coverage, as in distance from uplink.

And at least with earlier meshes, you decrease bandwidth even if you use only one device, because now in laptop<--wifi-->AP<--mesh-->router both links compete for the same airtime.

> I don't understand how anyone would expect to gain more bandwidth from a mesh.

Well, if you had an hourglass-shaped mesh network which was congested at the narrow point of the hourglass, and you recruited an extra node that gave you a second link across the narrow point, by adding the node you've doubled the bandwidth between the bulbs of the hourglass - and improved the redundancy.

The problem is a lot of people imagine this will happen every time they add a node, making the whole thing infinitely scalable. Whereas the reality is any time you add a node that isn't crossing the narrow point of the hourglass, the congestion gets worse.

You're talking about a world of P2P and local use.

The reality is that practically everyone is using "wifi mesh technology" as range extender for their own singular internet connection, and the internet connection is the bottleneck for practically everything.

I put “mesh” in quotes for a reason. I mean the wireless backhaul ability that basically every major WiFi AP manufacturer has, not a bunch of unaffiliated users forming an ad-hoc, dynamic mesh.

Don't assume a conspiracy where the underlying mathematics are a sufficient explanation! Centralized systems use RF bandwidth MUCH more efficiently.

Yes quite right, I don't doubt it's the organizational behavioral paradigm at play, not necessarily an organized conspiracy. A key quality of an established bureaucracy is that it can arrange, design, deliver and entrench bad outcomes without being aware, certainly without actively conspiring. However, the personas that float to the top (or even the middle) of these things are pretty off-putting, and they're also aware regulators will be on them if they get too explicit, so I wouldn't like to place sustained, conscious, premediated decision making out of the realm of possibility.

For long-distance, high-power communication, sure! For local communications, one big counterexample is Wi-Fi – it's centralized on a topological level, but decentralized in terms of spectrum assignment.

And even for longer range, that reasoning can't explain the absence of anything at all from Google or Apple in off-the-grid situations. Why can't I text (iMessage, WhatsApp etc.) a friend sitting a couple of rows away in an airplane without Wi-Fi, when I can airdrop them gigabytes of data just fine?

I thought this was part of wifi 7?

The new first non-cellular 5G standard DECT NR+ does support mesh. You can use this portable Starlink mini as a backhaul access link to the Internet in remote or rural areas together with DECT NR+ [1].

[1] DECT NR+: A technical dive into non-cellular 5G:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905644

For anyone wondering, these are the sizes in modern units:

Starlink Standard: 59.5cm x 38cm, Starlink Mini: 29cm x 25cm

For those familiar with DIN paper sizes, that going from A2 (60cm x 42cm) to almost A4 (30cm x 21cm).

That's a large reduction. Do they mention weight difference anywhere? (couldn't find it in the article)

1.1 kg

I think a great use case for this would be as a backup for when the regular ISP goes out in a rural area.

But I don't think they have any subscription plans priced for that? And there might be issues after a storm if everyone started using it at once.

The Garmin inReach (and others like it) is probably the nearest readily-available solution for that use case. Not broadband internet obviously, but it provides access to basic, essential communication methods. It does so at a much, much lower price point than Starlink/HughesNet/etc can offer, making it more palatable as an "emergency backup" product.

Well Starlink here in Spain costs 40€ per month. That's a lot less than the unlimited Garmin inreach plan (74,99€!!) that only allows you to send short messages!

And that's the regular plan. Deprioritised Starlink costs €29/month! Still way way more useful service than inreach.

I have inreach and for €19,99 I get 10 SMS per month (i don't subscribe every month) and I also have to pay a €39,99 yearly fee. Starlink is undoubtedly cheaper here.

Of course it's not really the same kind of service. Inreach is a rugged 100 grams device for hiking with its own battery power that can stay connected for days. It can stay connected even in my bag and has a button to call for emergency services.

For internet backup I have a 4G modem right now, connected to my unifi router with auto failover and a script that adds credit to my prepay card over SMS. It serves me ok. But I'd love to have a starlink mini for backup. Just the regular one is a bit big so I didn't get it yet.

WTF? Entry price for starlink is £75/month in UK! ADSL is typically ~£25-30 for unlimited 80/20 for comparison

I think the pricing is based on coverage, usage density and demand. The UK probably has enough terrestrial coverage of amy sort that they figure they can upcharge anyone who still wants/needs Starlink, since it's mainly setup to be internet service for those who have essentially no other decent choice.

Alternatively, maybe the meaningful coverage areas are so small and dense that the price should be higher. Since Starlink's biggest limitation is that performance suffers in more densely populated areas.

If you can get 80/20 ADSL, you're not buying Starlink.

Some people underestimate how much hate we can have for our legacy ISPs.

I’d be happy to pay a premium to never give them another dollar ever again.

Everyone hates their ISP.

What are your current expectations around price and bandwidth as the Starlink service becomes more popular in your area?

If you have the opportunity to have a fibre or copper connection directly to your unit, it seems like a crazy decision to consider Starlink.

> Everyone hates their ISP

Not really, I loved a local new independent provider that strung its own fibre around, but moved out of that building :(

They were particularly great because they didn’t (at the time) do phone or tv, just pure solid internet. No legacy industry to protect by limiting torrents or gb/month limits (fuck you Bell Canada).

€50 in Ireland, down from €65 in the last year, down from €99 in 2022. Because they know where you are, and how much money your average target customer in a country has, and how saturated their satellites in that country are, they can be very specific about pricing.

Average disposable income in Ireland is a lot higher than in Spain (source: I moved to Spain from Ireland myself). So there must be more at play there than just purchasing power. If it was purely based on that it would be more like 70 euro compared to Spain's 40.

Could be saturation indeed, as Ireland is very sparse in rural areas. And so is Spain, outside the few urban centres.

The Republic Ireland is rolling out fiber to all properties. The standard rate for gigabit fiber is ~60 euro at the moment, less if you just want 500mbs, so SpaceX was just responding to competition as fiber got to more and more properties.

Getting Starlink a few years ago was the first time we had reliable internet at our family farm, and we were stoked. We also started getting better and better service as fiber rolled out across the country, but we never got above 250mbs. Now that fiber is here, it's no longer necessary except perhaps as a backup.

I'll grant that Spanish people are on a bit less than the Irish, but please don't be misled by GDP Per Capita numbers. Irish people are hurting, especially in the parts of the country beyond greater Dublin. Dublin is well-served by €20/mo all you can eat 5G that seems to hit 300Mbps without effort, so there's no reason to compete with that. But out in the Cork mountains, where the broadband readiness date has now slipped two years to "Jan-Dec 2026," most people I know are hand to mouth or on assistance or at least not earning Dublin bucks. €50 is a stretch for such, but €20 for LTE was barely getting me 2Mb when I finally gave up on it, despite having a baller antenna.

I know, I lived in Galway for a while. The best I could get for a long time was this "ripwave" crap from Irish Broadband. Which wasn't actually broadband, on a good day it would approach dialup speeds. On a bad day it wouldn't actually work at all. It was ridiculously bad.

It was no wonder that people started rolling their own WANs with point to point wifi connections until things finally picked up.

But starlink would be a good option there, right?

$80 in NZ while fibre cost around $110.

VDSL is being phased out.

"For internet backup I have a 4G modem right now, connected to my unifi router with auto failover and a script that adds credit to my prepay card over SMS. It serves me ok. But I'd love to have a starlink mini for backup. Just the regular one is a bit big so I didn't get it yet."

Is 4G a good backup? I am also in Spain and in my neighborhood we often suffer from power failure under heavy rain, I guess a local transformer is shorting as it impacts just a few streets around my house. But when it happens I also lose phone connectivity. The nearest antenna seems to be located in the few streets impacted and smartphone seemingly cannot reach another one nearby. This made me realize the short radius of mobile network range around a single antenna.

It sounds more like a building material or geography issue. I've used LTE upwards of 10km off shore. In areas where there isn't good line of sight or if buildings tend to interfere with signal, the access points need to be positioned more densely

Well home 5G wifi has trouble covering all rooms at decent quality, I guess because the walls are thick, so building material may be an issue. I obviously never tried going on the roof to check because it happens when it is raining.

If you have good service anywhere in your house, the issue is WiFi

Interesting. It sounds like you're referring to Garmin's "Safety" plan, which in the States is $15 per month, and the unlimited plan is $65. Meanwhile, Starlink starts at $120 per month.

At this iPhone with sat messaging provides same functionality and is free.

yeah they don't force you into some weird shitty contract. you can buy the hardware outright, and then not pay for a subscription until you actually want to use it for the month of Outober.

Paying for a full month if your main ISP is down for a day or two sounds quite expensive. How long does it take to activate?

I used a friend's when I went to see the eclipse in Texas. Didn't time how long it took to activate service on their end because it takes a few minutes for starlink to connect/boot up in the first place and when you're out camping there's other things going on. Less than 30 mins so all I can say. Also, it was $150 for the month.

You can actually create an account, pay for one month, then pause it.

Then just unpause in the starlink app to instantly have access and resume billing

This is what I do. I carry the dish in the equivalent of a pelican case [1], and only activate for months I have no other option.

[1] https://www.caseman.com/product/starlink-mount-case/

Can you sign up using Starlink itself? It would by annoying if you needed another ISP when your ISP is down.

Yes

Yes, if you just turn on the dish with no account there's still limited "internet" access that lets you access Starlink billing services.

> But I don't think they have any subscription plans priced for that?

As a former owner of a WISP, this idea of a "backup service" doesn't really work (read: I make no money from you).

Sure it does! I’m rural and our phones/ISP went out last week.

I activated our Starlink roam (you can access the captive portal while service is disabled) & all the remote working neighbors came over and shared the connection. It worked great!

What do you mean? Can I just buy a dish, don't activate any subscription and just when necessary enable roam?

Rome has a 'Pause service' option https://www.starlink.com/service-plans

""Pause and un-pause service at any time. Billing is in one-month increments, allowing you to customize your service to your individual travel needs."

Yes you can indeed. The equipment is your property and there's no contract

there’s a less advertised monthly/mobile mode that you can turn on when you need it. $150/month but only when you use it

The lack of DC power is rough for boats, vans, and RVs. If someone wants to put this in a backpack they really need to get a DC power supply version. There are solutions out there at this point for the standard dishy but the flat high performance has a crazy power supply with it.

Do we know it's not DC?

Page 7 of the linked FCC application says:

> Power requirements: 30 V DC / 2 A via 100-240V AC/DC adaptor

Presumably, when people talk about "running it from DC power" they mean a standard 12V automotive power supply, which would require a 12V to 30V step-up converter to replace the supplied AC adapter.

I wonder if that's what the adapter supplies, and the device can actually do 12-30V or whatnot.

Not many devices that run off 30V will run off 12V too. It's too big of a difference.

But 12V to 36V boost converters are readily available and very cheap.

I imagine most of those devices have a buck converter inside, no?

If you're drawing 30V 2A (60W) through a connector rated for 2.5A, and you try to draw the same 60W at 12V i.e. 5A you're in trouble because the connector's not designed for 5A.

And not every DC-DC converter is sized for a wide range of input voltages. A DC-DC converter with a "2:1 input voltage range" might accept anything from 18 to 36 volts, whereas a converter with a "4:1 input voltage range" might accept 9 to 36 volts. The wider input voltage range generally costs a bit more too.

No sure about vans, but aren't lots of cars moving to 48V?

Yeah because higher voltage reduces the cost of wiring, and 48V is still under the 50V legal limit for "low voltage".

Not sure what your point is though.

if the are power electronics chip they use is rated to handle 12 VDC to 48 VDC, which 30 VDC happens to be in-between, then they could just use that chip and you could give it 12V or 48V, whichever you had handy. If all cars are moving to 48V, that makes that more likely.

That's a very wide range and to build a gadget to take that range would cost more, and thus it's not done.

Most "12 V" gadgets only accept the rough range of what a 12 V battery might give them, which is usually only up to 15.4 V while charging.

USB-C 3.1 PD does 240 watts by raising the voltage to 48V, so the chips to accept that already exist, even if they're expensive right now.

> Not sure what your point is though.

If it runs off 30V all you need is a cheap resistor to run it (with 40% loss), or I believe boost convertors are less efficient than buck convertors so it is a win there.

Some manufacturer RVs and DIY builds are 48VDC now with stepdown converters for the legacy stuff that expects 12V. The problem with that is that practically every RV gadget on the market assumes 12V. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.

It isn’t necessarily implied, but if this thing is pulling a nominal 30W-40W (assuming considering the 60W PSU) then I don’t know how much use this would be for a portable device, even for RVs. That’s a pretty significant load, even for an amplified antenna, I would have thought?

Did some quick research on a major American car parts retailer's website. The biggest batteries they sell are rated as high as 188Ah (though they use a weird industry-specific unit to say that). Many are closer to 25-50Ah. Definitely enough juice to power a terminal for several hours.

This lines up with my personal experiences. I have personally used a car battery to keep a big gaming laptop charged for an entire weekend, and it was being used (if not under heavy load) for about 10 hours a day.

Those big batteries are extremely heavy and very expensive, but we're talking about people who want broadband internet service on their boat. Money is not a concern here.

I'm sure Starlink has different power modes for these things, but the average consumer is likely far more interested in optimizing for connection speed and latency.

You likely wouldnt be running this off a lead acid car battery.

You’d have a lithium battery and an additional power source, like solar or generator, to top that battery off.

I was operating under the assumption that the system would be wired into the boat/car's existing electrical system, which in most cases will use one or more lead-acid batteries.

Edit: a vanlifer showed up and informed me that Lithium conversions are a thing. Turns out you can have your Lithium and eat it too. Cool stuff.

Needing to add an extra battery to an off grid power supply just to power a “portable” router designed to accept grid power and not 12V is a huge fail on starlinks part, regardless of the cost of the battery to power it.

For reference 60w is similiar power draw to a Dometic fridge or a laptop.

Also adding a huge heavy battery to a boat is a non-negligible consideration in a lot of cases.

Pretty much all of us in the vanlife/overland space run Lithium batteries now, the smallest of which is basically 100Ah. I'm just about to put either 300Ah or 400Ah into my new Jeep camper to run an induction cook top, water pump, hot water, lights, charging and a lot more.

I also just mounted 600W of solar on the roof.

The power needs of Starlink is a tad annoying, but certainly not a deal breaker for anyone living in a vehicle that actually needs internet anywhere on the planet.

Yep, on my boat, I converted the original square dish to run off my 12v lithium batteries.

I have plenty of solar and batteries to run starlink 24/7.

Even if you don’t have a lot of amp hours, starlink allows you to set a sleep schedule where it would use way less power.

But ditching the starlink router and converting to run off 12v isn’t that hard

Interesting. How does the cost of the lithium conversion compare to the Starlink terminal?

With sat, the power needs are mostly a physics problem. You can't generate a 30 watt signal unless you draw 30 watts from somewhere. It's just the nature of the beast. It's also why lower-power sat systems like Iridium or Apple's thing have relatively limited functionality.

Normal car batteries really hate if you discharge them anywhere close to their capacity. You can get deep-cylce lead acid batteries built for that, but at that point just get lithium iron phosphate batteries.

That's the whole thing, though - shove a large enough lead-acid battery into the boat/car's electrical system, and you won't need to discharge the battery very far at all. 60W on a 100Ah 12V battery is nearly a full day's worth of battery life.

Now consider that the real power draw is probably well below the supply's rating, so it's actually 40ish watts on a 1200Wh battery. Now we're pushing 30 hours.

Now consider the real sickos of the "rich boat owner" class. These people have large engines in their boats, and those engines have alternators. All cars have those, too. That's a power source already integrated into the boat itself. A simple DC step-up regulator wired into the boat's existing electrical system is a much more elegant solution than a second set of batteries and a second power source to charge those batteries.

I designed the 12V electrical for my F-150 camper (and some friends’) and I could easily do 2 straight days of 40W with no recharge.

My fridge pulls 50W when cycling the compressor and my current 5G modem/router pulls 15W. Indoor lights draw over 20W alone on full tilt.

I have 200W of solar on my truck and my alternator does 400W and realistically I charge at around 550W on a good day so 40W is a drop in the bucket.

RVs can have much beefier systems than my setup. I don’t full time or anything — just long time camper for 10 years before van life was a thing, so my setup is relatively low capacity.

I mean, I doubt it was your intent to cast this unfavorably, and I certainly don't want to suggest you don't know what's best for you, but I read this as a receiver/router that pulls more power than all of your internal lighting, nearly as much (maybe more at peak) than your refrigerator, double that of a similar 5G device, and all of that strikes me as a really poor implementation. But I work a lot in embedded devices, so maybe I'm just overly sensitive...60W seems absurd for a set of radios and an SoC.

It's DC with support for USB

Most van / RV setups have an inverter but I agree, DC is best.

The other disappointing thing (correct me if I'm wrong) is that it's not quite portable in a true sense; if I take the Starlink equipment I bought in United States to.. say, Argentina or Germany, it won't work there. I wish it could work like that, without a lot of hassle, but it doesn't appear to be the case.

“Global roaming” is the plan that allows that and it costs twice as much IIRC

And asking for more money in return for completely ignoring their capacity planning seems fair to me.

It works perfectly fine crossing any borders.

it even (currently) works in all the countries in Africa where the governments have requested for it to stop working. It is unknown if SpaceX will disable it in those specific countries.

With Elon’s general attitude towards rules, hopefully they’d only do it if someone was silly enough to put an address within the country in the account and ignore the physical location hah.

Buy a $50 inverter. They are tiny and it's not like this thing is using enough power for the efficiency hit to make a difference.

Iirc the hit from ac/dc conversion is 10-20%? So excluding ac from the equation saves 20-40% power use

It's absolutely significant in at least some of the situations where you'd use this. A friend and I are planning on taking a small sailboat across the atlantic next year and were looking at communication options.

We had decided the normal starlink is just not feasible on a small solar-only boat so this caught my attention. It's still too high though. It would take slightly more power than all the other systems combined if it were DC. With an inverter it pushes it over and there just isn't that much prime panel space on a sailboat.

There are poe injectors that also fit the weird plug on the dishy and work well (48v). That said, you’re still talking 50-80 watts which is significant on a battery. It takes awhile for the signal to stabilize too, so it’s not the type of thing that does well turning it on for 15 minutes of usage.

> for the signal to stabilize too

Weirdly analog expression, considering a device that hops from satellite to satellite very frequently.

It takes ~10 minutes for Dishy to get a GPS fix and to do a wide beam slow-bandwidth download of exact satellite location data.

It also takes some time to build high resolution obstruction data. If you have perfect views, not an issue, but that is rare.

Until that happens, you’ll experience unpredictable short loss of signal when it can’t talk to a sat it expects to be able to for a second or two due to a branch, building, etc.

Usually 30 mins to a couple hrs and you’re fine, depending on the site and how much traffic. The more traffic, the faster it can find the ‘dead pixels’ and route around them.

Remarkable tech!

So is this device any less capable bandwidth wise? I noticed a price cut in the current flat dish and was planning to pull the trigger to swap with my home ISP but if this will suffice I'd rather have the portability factor too.

I believe Kuiper said their portable dish would be about 1/4 the speed; I'd imagine this is similar. Probably fewer transceivers given the size and lower power consumption.

Yes, if not it would be worse reception wise

This starlink mini dish isn't available yet. So the pricing and exact capabilities are not yet known.

Is this meant to supersede starlink roam [1]?

[1]: https://www.starlink.com/ca/roam

Roam is effectively the data plan, this is a new hardware dish, but I suspect it will be the preferred dish for most Roam plans.

Except if it's 1/4th of the bandwidth, in which case it won't be the preferred dish for many who actually work in remote places.

It would be interesting to know the average Roam user profile - I suspect that most don't need multiple simultaneous HD streams or the ability to transfer massive files quickly. I suspect many are RVers or people who just want to check email, make a video call that doesn't need to be high-res, and maybe browse social media.

But point taken that many users will want an upgrade option

Lots of people working on the road say the upload speeds are already problematic for them in certain areas, as the usual mobile plans are deprioritized.

Feels like this is a direct response to the Amazon / Project Kuiper 7” terminal announced last year: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/heres-...

This much more likely to be something that had been in the long term plan for many years.

Amazon is announcing stuff because they are spending 10e of billions and have nothing to show for it, and wont have anything for years. They need to show progress to the quarter to quarter investor.

Frankly the idea that Starlink is passivly reacting to Amazon annoucments is a bit silly. The difficult part is to actually produce these terminals at high volume cheaply, not releasing a few renders.

They have at least three Kuiper launches booked in mid-2025, that’s not far off! It’s awesome that they have the flexibility to choose different launch partners and can use the most reliable and flight proven technology.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazon...

A year away might as well be a decade in vaporware terms.

> It’s awesome that they have the flexibility to choose different launch partners and can use the most reliable and flight proven technology.

Except that likely is Falcon 9, and SpaceX gets launches at cost.

3 launches in mid-2025 isn't really all that promising an indicator for a constellation that needs to launch thousands of satellites. They'd need signs of an extreme ramp up in launches coming, particularly since so many of these earlier launches will have to be on external providers like ULA and ArianeSpace, who are already running delays, need to build entire rockets each time and have little experience with high launch cadences. At least whenever Blue Origin finally gets to flying New Glenn, they'll be able to avoid having to build a brand new booster each time.

The most reliable and flight proven launcher, F9, usually gets in a launch every 3 days and it's still going to have to keep that pace up until Starship is ready to dump hundreds of starlinks into orbit in one launch.

They indicated previously they changed their mind about using Falcon 9 and Starship.

By 'they' do you mean Amazon?

Yes. See https://spacenews.com/as-clock-ticks-on-amazons-constellatio...

Oh, interesting!

> a constellation that needs to launch thousands of satellites.

If I were the folks at Kuiper or any other would-be LEO RF communication constellation:

  * Starlink is proving the value prop to investors and consumers
  * This is an early stage this sector--there will be tech improvements
  * Improvements in satellites mean competitors can enter at vN+1
  * SpaceX/Starlink has some anti-trust risk--they might throw a bone to a weak "competitor" a la Apple/Microsoft 1997 [0]

0. https://youtu.be/WxOp5mBY9IY?t=44

SpaceX satellites have a designed lifespan of approximately 5 years. They'll sustain their launch pace just to keep up the constellation. There's no real vN+1 advantage for competition.

> SpaceX satellites have a designed lifespan of approximately 5 years.

I wasn't aware of that lifespan but I knew it was finite. Let's say 6k sats at 20/launch is 300 launches to refresh the fleet over 5*12 months makes for 5 launches a month [0].

If the first v1's were launched November of 2019 then they will drop out of orbit later this year. SpaceX started launching the v2 minis about 9 months ago. Wikipedia claims 300/Starship. Let's round down to 200 to account for Elon-time and maybe launching a mix of Starship and F9. That would bring the needed operational cadence down to .5/month [1].

Could a well capitalized competitor start at vN+1 or vN+2, build out while Starlink air-ground combination is stalled at vN due to encumbancy, and make progress in high margin geographies proven out by Starlink already? I think it could look like the cell market with a few major players that either get squeezed out or created during any technology refresh.

Would it be more difficult because whatever that gets created is not a mutually supportive vertically integrated enterprise but fragmented? Sure.

0. 6000/20/5/12=5

1. 6000/200/5/12=.5

Regarding the anti-trust risk, SpaceX has been very clear that they'll launch competitor's satellites just as fairly as they do any other payload. They only serve to benefit from it, as the profit from every commercial launch helps offset their costs on building out Starlink and on Starship R&D (which is also why Amazon didn't buy F9 for building Kuiper until New Glenn is ready).

IIRC there's even an ongoing lawsuit from some shareholders against Amazon for not acting in shareholder interest by paying for other much more expensive and less proven launch services rather than flying F9.

3 launches don't make a constellation.

> It’s awesome that they have the flexibility to choose different launch partners

In theory yes, in practice it isn't because they can't really use SpaceX (fully) and the other options aren't nearly as good.

> can use the most reliable and flight proven technology.

I'm not sure if you know anything about rockets. They bought some old Atlas 5s, but those are finished production. After that they have to buy unproven new designs.

And again, Falcon 9 is the most reliable and flight proven rocket in the world and they are simply not gone use Falcon 9 beyond the minimal.

Starlink just had launch #173 and like 70 of them was only in 2023:

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

> It’s awesome that they have the flexibility to choose different launch partners and can use the most reliable and flight proven technology.

Does Starlink not have that option? Do you think other launch providers would refuse to take SpaceX's money?

Also this isn't a situation where you need reliable and proven. If option A has 99.9% reliability and costs $80M to launch $20M of satellites, and option B has 95% reliability but costs $60M to launch $20M of satellites, then you should go with option B for your fleet.

> Does Starlink not have that option?

Starlink already uses "the most reliable and flight proven technology" (imho) so, yes, they have that option.

And yes, I should have added something about cost effective.

When you said "It’s awesome that they have the flexibility to choose different launch partners and can use the most reliable and flight proven technology." I thought you were listing that as an advantage they have compared to Starlink. If every competitor has the same flexibility, then why bring it up?

It was a tongue in cheek comment that was maybe a wee too subtle. To the extent that Amazon launching Kuiper is tied to (maybe still?) majority owner Bezos' interest in building supportive business for Blue Origin, then Kuiper launching on SpaceX is an irony that cannot go unobserved. One might even say Blue Origin as an orbital launch provider is more "vaporware" than Kuiper itself given the latter's test existence in orbit.

> It’s awesome that they have the flexibility to choose different launch partners and can use the most reliable and flight proven technology

Heh, Amazon was going to forgo that for petty/corrupt reasons, but were sued by their shareholders.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/a-bitter-pill-amazon-c...

Capitalism at its finest. Tell that billionaire he can't blow all the vapor all the time.

The major difference being the Starlink mini terminal has 6,078 satellites to connect to today to provide functioning internet, vs the Project Kuiper terminals that can connect to a grand total of zero satellites.

The Kuiper proto-network came online in November last year with two satellites [1][2]. If you live near their Denver office you can pick them up on Ka band or just look up their id’s on CelesTrak or NORAD (2023-154A and 2023-154B).

Having had one of the first 1,000 dishy V1’s (at least by MAC address) I’m as big of a fan of Starlink as anyone if not more so, but even I have some reservations about cheerleading a low-earth orbit communication monopoly. Yes these other guys are behind but it’s intellectually dishonest to call it vapor ware or “zero”.

I plan on supporting both networks and more if possible just as with GNSS.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazons-prototype-kuiper-...

[2] https://youtu.be/K34ch_L_YxY

I mean Elon has mentioned the laptop sized dish for the past couple years.

Kuiper doesn't exist

A direct response to vaporware?

I plan to work and travel in Europe for 1.5 months this summer and I hope they will release it soon. Hotel/AirBnB wifi is often unstable and unreliable - you never know if Zoom will work or not. With Starlink I will have backup and at minimum will be able to take calls in the car.

We will have rental car so planned to get regular Starlink but this one will be much better option.

Where do you plan to place it while staying at a hotel?

Depends on where you're planning on going, but if you're talking Airbnb/ hotel it's probably Urban or suburban, you could probably just get a local SIM card and use the hotspot feature on your phone.

We traveled around Columbia for a month this year, and was able to work from 90% of the places we were in using the hotspot. And we were pretty rural a lot of the time.

I would think in Europe even on the top of Jungfraujoch you will have better performance from a 5G link.

Not in Scotland it won't.

Where in Scotland? There’s 5G almost everywhere.

5G almost everywhere? In Scotland?

I respectfully beg to differ. There are massive chunks of Scotland which have no cellular reception at all. There are many places where there is service from some-but-not-all providers. Of those places, there are a few where the service is glacial in performance.

Example: if you stop at The Green Welly Stop in Tyndrum (FK20 8RY), you'll have coverage from only two of the mobile networks. Vodafone and o2 have a coverage patch there. Have a look at the coverage maps (bidb.uk aggregates them all). It's absolutely patchy, and certainly not contiguous.

Europe's cell phone qualities vary a lot by country. Even in western Europe, some surprising countries(1) have absolutely terrible networks. As a Canadian we have some very expensive mobile plans, but our network speeds are mostly very usable in 95% of the places I'll ever end up (I routinely stream netflix/youtube/etc on the train between Toronto and Montreal).

(1) I'm looking at you Germany, where my connection between Hamburg and Berlin was mostly edge and my LTE connections in the cities were barely useable. I even switched local SIMs from T-mobile to Vodafone because it was so terrible, but was the same result.

The German mobile network is a joke. Many developing countries have better coverage.

I travel in a campervan a lot and Germany's 4G coverage is the reason I had to buy Starlink.

Depending on what you mean by "Europe" (Madrid? Waldhufen? A bunch of cabins in the north of Sweden? A random beach on Rhodes?), 4G/5G coverage is pretty good. Local SIMs are usually affordable, and thanks to the EU, roaming comes with a lot of things included.

As a reference, I have a 20eur/month pay as you go plan from Free (France) that gets me unlimited 5G, calls, messages in France, and unlimited calls and messages + 30GB internet in the whole of the EU + a bunch of other countries. Cheaper, more reliable, more useful, faster.

I can confirm Free offer is pretty good. Just keep in mind that after some time outside of France (like 6 month?) sim will stop working, but you can of course always register new one.

Also anyone can buy and activate Free esim outside of France.

Need a system where I can put my physical SIM card into a serial convertor and it “plugs” into a phone located in some other country so it can ping elsewhere every once in a while.

Dunno if providers will pick up on me teleporting around.

Maybe the better way is some kind of 700mhz repeater-over-IP.

That's what I did last summer and sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. If you are on 5G, in 20% of cases it works really well, in 60% of cases other people on the call can tell that your connection is not fiber but overall it's ok, and in 20% of cases Zoom just does not work and you can't have productive conversation.

Hotel wifi is 50/50 - sometimes works, some times does not regardless of the price. I stayed in $400/day Mariott with crappiest wifi imaginable (after paying for Premium internet I got unstable 5MB).

The Wi-Fi all-in-one isn't exactly a great thing if you have any tree cover.

For starlink to work well you need to find a section of the sky that doesn't have any tree blockage.

I run my starlink cable probably 100 ft from the house in order to find that.

I wish they would release a dc low power version. If it does any more than 22kbps than its already beating certus and that costs $7/mb for the devices we use them in.

I wonder if it can use ethernet instead of wifi?

There have been reports of starlink dishes being located on the ground because of their wifi access points in ukraine.

They've always been instructed not to use WiFi.

The reports have to to with Apple mapping

but will this access point require wifi?

We don't know if WiFi can be turned off but it comes by default

This is really cool. I would probably buy one and give starlink a go once this comes out

What would be better to take on a work vacation? The original or the mini?

Um obviously the mini? The original is huge, comes with a big router box too.

Do you have a vehicle/boat/airplane for your work vacation? Or are you walking. If I had a vehicle I would rather the bigger one.

If it's a rainy place the original, else this

Would be better if round.

why?

From the headline, I had hoped that they were smaller Starlink satellites that no longer spoil the night sky so much.

I haven't heard from this topic for a long time. Except that there is a darker coating for the newer satellites. Does anyone know how long the individual satellites are in operation before they are sent back to the Earth's atmosphere to have hot fun there?

Have you ever actually had the night sky spoiled by a Starlink?

I've seen a chain of satellites flare with the naked eye once, but as I'm not much into astronomy it was just a curiosity I looked up after the fact. I suspect astronomers don't care for Starlink "photo bombing" their observations.

> I suspect astronomers don't care for Starlink "photo bombing" their observations.

Quite the opposite:

- A call for scientists to halt the spoiling of the night sky with artificial light and satellites(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01864-z)

- Let there be (natural) light(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01935-9)

- Bright satellites are disrupting astronomy research worldwide(https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03610-5)

- Satellite swarms are threatening the night sky—and creating a new zone of environmental conflict(https://www.science.org/content/article/satellite-swarms-are...)

- ‘Unsustainable’ how satellite swarms pose a rising threat to astronomy(https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01420-9)

Yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40704761

For backyard astronomy, light pollution is far worse than starlink satellites - and I live in a rural area!

5 years is the stated lifetime, but some old ones were deorbited early since they became redundant.

To clarify:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40704761

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