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Starlink Is a Big Deal

sneak.berlin

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Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#41

Post by cperciva »

rsync wrote: post #34

"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…

It might be if you're arbitraging markets against each other. Starlink orbits are at 340 km, i.e. 1.1 ms altitude; if you're sending data between London and New York, you can afford 2.2 ms of uplink/downlink if it allows your signals to travel at c instead of 0.7c.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#42

Post by mech1234 »

rsync wrote: post #34

"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…

A couple things:

1. Signals travel faster through the air and vacuum of space than they do fiber optic cables or electrical cables. 2. If there is an HFT trader based in the U.S. looking to trade based on events happening in Spain or Japan, they still want to get data across continents in the fastest way possible.

EDIT: Apparently other posters traded on the information arbitrage opportunity of replying to your post several seconds faster than I did. gg.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#43

Post by fooqux »

modeless wrote: post #16

Just going to plug my Starlink tracker here: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house. It's a cool sight to see because there are up to 60 of them crossing the sky at the same time in a line.

That is a beautiful website. Great job.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#44

Post by cmarschner »

Retric wrote: post #33
Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "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…

They have approval for up to 42,000 satellites, most internet connections are shared at homes and businesses, and broadband is over subscribed anyway. 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, tha…

What entity give them this approval? Isn‘t airspace over countries to be approved by these countries? Did countries opt out?

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#45

Post by bisby »

dls2016 wrote: post #24

> the hard work of SpaceX to make cheap, reusable rockets an everyday reality Are they a reality?

The launch today happened on the 3rd flight of the booster. They have a few cores now which have flown 4 times.

At this point, prices are a coming down, and it is effectively assumed that any SpaceX core will fly at least twice. That covers cheap and reusable. Cheap at least compared to the market (I still can't afford it), and 2 flights is re-use.

"Everyday" might be a stretch by the literal definition. But "commonplace" wouldn't be. No one gets super excited about re-flown cores anymore.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#46

Post by ynniv »

modeless wrote: post #16

Just going to plug my Starlink tracker here: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house. It's a cool sight to see because there are up to 60 of them crossing the sky at the same time in a line.

Could you add dates and time zones to the events? I want to manually add one to my calendar correctly.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#47

Post by 4043D »

pkolaczk wrote: post #11
chrispeel wrote: post #5

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.

There are huge swathes of rural Australia with non existent or very spotty mobile reception same with broadband band other than sat that is geo stationery which are frankly garbage.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#48

Post by nordsieck »

learn_more wrote: post #36
mgiampapa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With enough people in once place, Starlink will suffer from congestion just like a cellular network. I don't think it's fundamentally different in that regard. But great for boats indeed!

> Starlink will suffer from congestion just like a cellular network.

It's even worse than a cellular network. With a cell network, one can just build more towers in a particular city.

With LEO satellites, the only way to get more coverage over a particular city is to get more coverage over the entire world.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#49

Post by njarboe »

cmarschner wrote: post #44
Retric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have approval for up to 42,000 satellites, most internet connections are shared at homes and businesses, and broadband is over subscribed anyway. 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, tha…

What entity give them this approval? Isn‘t airspace over countries to be approved by these countries? Did countries opt out?

I don't think there is a treaty about it. These satellites are in space, not in the air. Around 100km usually is used as the boundary or, more practically, as high as your anti-aircraft missiles can go. It does not really make sense to claim everything up in a cone from your country to infinity. Multiple countries claiming different planets at different times would be weird.

SpaceX got approval to launch these satellites from the FCC.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#50

Post by xoa »

rsync wrote: post #34

"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…

>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 ...

Really? Just some rough napkin math here, but only photonic bandgap fiber reaches near light speed (~99.7%) and I'm not aware of any large real world deployments of that or even near future ones. Regular fiber is only around 70% c. Transmissions through air (and obviously near vacuum as it exits the main atmosphere) are very nearly c. So from a latency perspective Starlink should in principle have up to a 42% inherent raw transmission speed advantage right? So that then has to go against the extra RTT to get up to a satellite and back. It looks like the lowest V-band shell is planned to be at just 210 miles, with another shell at 340 mi, and a final Ku/Ka-band shell at 710 mi. I don't know if the lowest shells are supposed to have any point to point mesh capability or must go to a higher shell first, but if they can that's only about a 420 mi inherent RTT penalty. For a link over 1400 miles, that seems like it might give them an advantage. Of course, there will be other routing factors, but then again on the fiber side only a few links (NYC to London for example) are actually really point to point optimized, most routes around greatly separated parts of the world have their own extra distance penalties due to transmissions having to take the legs of triangles rather then the hypotenuse.

I'm not an HFT person, but I assume there is probably arbitrage to be done between, say, NYC/London and Tokyo or other Asian exchanges and the like too. A lot of those are 6000 to 7000 mi, something like NYC to Sydney (ASX) approaches 10,000 mi. At those kinds of distances even if the signal has to go all the way up to the outer shell to mesh it looks to me like it could still beat a conventional fiber transmission right? I don't know if HFT firms will be that core as customers or how important they are in the scheme of things here, but a rough check certain seems to indicate there should be potential there in terms of the physics and what infrastructure is current deployed.

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