- FlexSolar 40W panel: 1.35kg
- Nitecore NB20000 ~75Wh battery: 300g
- Starlink Mini: 1.1kg
- Smartphone: 250g
For 3kg you have something that should give 2-3 hours of Internet usage on an average EU/USA good weather day (assuming 20% solar panel for 10 hours = 80Wh/day, 25-35W power usage of Starlink Mini + smartphone).
For each extra 1.65kg you get an additional 2-3 hours, resulting in 7.95kg for 8-12 hours, 11.25kg for 12-16 hours.
Not bad, but not good either.
If you can live without Internet when backpacking, enjoy the outdoors! If you need it for whatever reason, this just cut the cost per megabyte by about 95% and the cost for the terminal by 99%. You'll probably also not hate LEO latencies compared to GEO.
From an individual perspective, if you want Internet access and don't have to be in a specific place, the current alternative to Starlink is to simply limit your wilderness living to places with or near areas of cell phone coverage (which potentially results in tradeoffs, of course).
As someone that has explored a lot of Australia, Alaska, Yukon, Africa and South America, I'm having trouble parsing your statement.
I've driven more than 1,000 miles for 10 days with absolutely nothing. No town. No people. No cars. Nothing.
I've canoed for 15 days well over 3,000 miles from the nearest town, road, building or electricity.
The idea you could cover the globe in LTE cell towers is unfathomable.
The remaining 70% are ocean, and people sometimes go there too! Some densely traveled oceans actually do have LTE coverage, e.g. parts of the north sea, since it has existing infrastructure in the form of wind parks that make adding a base station fairly easy, but that's the absolute exception, globally.
A single direct-to-cell satellite can cover a circular area measured in hundreds or thousands of kilometers. Due to the Earth's curvature, that's simply not feasible using terrestrial base stations.
It'll probably get used on boats, where people actually do kinda want to watch netflix at night and don't have to personally carry every gram every day. The current options are very expensive and power hungry.
And probably a bunch of other outwardly similar but culturally distinct groups that could use it. Remote wilderness hunters, ice fishers, who work out of a seasonal camp but otherwise are pretty cut off.
In fact, they almost don't do any marketing at all, and they probably don't need to, given how far ahead their service is at this point.
- Car campers, vanlifers or people living in a place permanently, which can just use the heavy Starlink version or go where there is LTE coverage
- Thru-hikers who hike every waking hour and want to be as light as possible and for which this system isn't even remotely light enough
- Casual weekend hikers for which it's going to be too expensive and also unnecessary since they'll have Internet access on Monday again.
It's only really a consideration for those who regularly go on multiweek trips or live long-term in the wilderness and move camp on a weekly/monthly frequency (rather than daily or never), and these people seem to be relatively rare.
Don't get me wrong, this is cool and emerging tech, and I support it (I pray it doesn't ruin the wilderness). Just saying there IS a comparison
Iridium does offer voice and data services too, but terminals for that are significantly larger and draw more power, and the price per megabyte might bring tears to your eyes for recreational use. (Iridium Certus gets you 88 kbps at around $5/MB, and devices start at around $1500.)
The 630g Anker 737 PowerCore 24K might be a good option, and also the 765g HyperJuice 245W.
So this adds 0.3-0.45kg to the estimate.
But yeah, options like the Anker 737 24K should work great (which supports 20V/5A and 28V/5A). I happened to pick up a few of the 737s recently, so I'll be curious to try them out with the Mini soon. Just waiting for Starlink to actually add the usb-c to DC barrel adapter to the online shop.
It is insanely good. Out of this world.
A few years ago I spent 3 years driving around Africa and looked into satellite internet options from all the existing providers. Any plan that offered anything remotely close to 1GB per month was 5x the cost of the entire 3 year expedition.
This WILL change the world.
What I'm saying is Starlink in general is a complete world-changer compared to just 5 years ago.
This mini just continues that trend.
I realize that some people don't have that luxury due to work or family obligations, but for these, doesn't affordably connectivity actually open up the possibility of spending extended time outdoors that they just didn't have before?