31–40 of 365 posts
the world is already using and building such technologies
americans think they are the first, and the best
the rest of the world is aware of their lies
when will america wake up?
probably after being nuked, wich should happen soonish
I have heard wildly differing estimates of the potential bandwidth Starlink will offer to individual consumers, at what prices, and how efficient/effective their mesh networking and ground station strategy will be. I'm taking a wait and see attitude, but it would be very cool if they actually came up with a telecom killer.
> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…
One way to look at it is up to 42 million 4k streams at the same time. But, a significant fraction of the constellation will be over the ocean or other minimally inhabited regions so something like 25% of total bandwidth is likely utilized at any one time. However, that’s spread around the globe with some areas like Hawaii having much better than average available bandwidth.
I am not sure this is a good prediction ... the shaving of milliseconds that has been pursued by HFT firms (and other such actors) has progressed to the point where they are measuring cable lengths inside the datacenter.
Even at a greatly reduced orbit, I can't believe that bouncing up and down via satellite as part of your link could be any part of a time-arbitrage recipe in 2020 and beyond ...
I have heard wildly differing estimates of the potential bandwidth Starlink will offer to individual consumers, at what prices, and how efficient/effective their mesh networking and ground station strategy will be. I'm taking a wait and see attitude, but it would be very cool if they actually came up with a telecom killer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that rich people live in areas that have good mobile coverage, and Starlink won't be very attractive to them. LTE can offer transfers better than 600 Mbps with lower latency today , and covers 99% of population (in the developed countries). 5G will get over 1 Gbps per sector and it's coming soon.
Rich people have boats, by definition these are people with too much money to spend and is a huge market. Airplanes? This will revolutionize coverage on long haul non-polar flights. Trains? Buses? These both have density issues with the existing cellular network. How many times have you come to a halt in a traffic jam only to have horrible cellular coverage due to the local cell site being overwhelmed? 5G doesn't sol…
I am skeptical of anything like 600Mbps being offered to anyone at anything like an affordable price, but overall, sure, globally-available internet seems like a good thing. Too bad we have to give up the night sky for it, though.
I'm also skeptical. A single LTE node can have a total bandwidth of 1+ Gbps. In Poland there are probably over 20k such nodes. Yet, the average speed you get is about 25 Mbps. With Starlink we're talking about covering the whole world, not a 40 million country. So I believe it may be usable for rich people in rural areas, but in densely populated areas it stands no chance to LTE (and 5G is coming and promises lower l…
I imagine usage is not evenly distributed between those nodes!
Also LTE connections are limited by the speed of the connection running to the base station. even worse, if that base station is on a microwave link to another tower that then has fiber running to it, expect slower speeds.
Also there is the phone hardware. Take Wi-Fi for a minute, which is a more controlled environment, the performance difference between different chipsets rated at the same speed can be huge! Firmware, drivers, and just how the chip is wired up. Plenty of opportunities to screw things up, sometimes even with the same chipset between different laptop manufacturers.
https://www.speedtest.net/insights/blog/samsung-galaxy-s10/ is a nice overview of how carriers cap speeds, though I have to say 50Mb/s isn't exactly shabby for a phone.
And finally, there is going to be a power trade off, I wonder how inefficient those LTE chips are when running full bore! Now I am curious as to what that graph looks like. :) Some sort ∩ shape I imagine where it starts being more efficient as you download faster so the radio is on for a shorter period of time, and then getting less efficient as you try to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the chipset.
> the hard work of SpaceX to make cheap, reusable rockets an everyday reality Are they a reality?
The "cheap" part is somewhat questionable because current prices are lower but still comparable to those of traditional providers. This is likely because fixed costs are high and there is limited demand from satellite operators.
A big part of the reason SpaceX is jumping into the satellite business is to create demand for itself and fully exploit Falcon 9 technology.
I'm not convinced that Starlink will provide access to the "half of the human beings (who) are not online yet." Of course that would be good, yet my guess is that Starlink will target people in developed nations who are in rural areas, or people who want low latency. Maybe Starlink could serve people w/o internet if a whole village buys a subscription, or if a cell provider uses Starlink as backhaul for voice? Still…
Unless you mean a village with just two houses, typical villages are covered by cellular networks just fine. Starlink looks like a system for people in deserts or people in third world where LTE doesn't exist. Not sure if this is big enough market.
This might put more pressure on national firewalls.
"HFT firms will be the first customers, seeking a few-millisecond reduction in the transmission of realtime data between markets. Starlink has already said as much, and I think they rely on this as their first and primary source of revenue." I am not sure this is a good prediction ... the shaving of milliseconds that has been pursued by HFT firms (and other such actors) has progressed to the point where they are meas…
Consider that the distance between New York and London is ~5500km, and these satellites are only ~500km up, that gives you quite a bit of margin to be faster.