10Gb Starlink for Royal Carribean Ships

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16 points·paulsutter··8 comments

Pretty impressive. What is the laser link bandwidth between starlink satellites? Can any starlink node also be a relay station? I don't know much about the network, I guess I didn't really realize that links between satellites was a thing now, I thought it required that a node have LOS to you and a base station for the system to work.

(Edit) According to this (old) link there's something over 40pb of laser link traffic every day.

https://hackaday.com/2024/02/05/starlinks-inter-satellite-la...

Isn't 10Gbps for an entire ship kind of very slow?

A ship will likely have multiple uplinks, not to mention a lot of on board caching.

It's not amazing. Assuming 3k people are using the connection simultaneously (I think these ships can have like 9k+ in practice), that is ~412.5kilobytes/second.

that never happens tho. run a speedtest on a starlink airplane, nominally what like 400Mbps shared among 200+ passengers, and you'll get at least 40Mbps ish

Probably not 3k simultaneously, not even close, but it only takes a few hundred people streaming 4K videos or downloading something for the whole network to slow down to a crawl.

> but it only takes a few hundred people streaming 4K videos

The modern compression techniques can do wonders. See youtube for details. /s

I’m not sure 30% of people pay the $30 or whatever daily fee for wifi

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