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Starlink Is a Big Deal

sneak.berlin

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Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#61

Post by ac29 »

EpicEng wrote: post #22
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…

>So assuming you offer everyone a 100MB/s connection... It's ridiculous to assume that everyone will be using 100MB/s at all times.

Even at 100-1000x oversubscription, this doesn't seem like a solution for the "half of humanity" that the article claims this will affect (~3.9B people as of today).

I certainly find Starlink interesting, but I think its impact will be a lot smaller than the author does.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#62

Post by saganus »

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.

It would be nice if I could select the location manually, since I don't like sharing my location directly by a prompt.

When I got the location permission request I denied it and then it says there were no sightings available for the next 5 days :(

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#63

Post by SuoDuanDao »

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…

I suspect it will be an exclusive internet for Tesla customers at first.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#64

Post by Trombone12 »

fooqux wrote: post #59
genzoman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving up some of the night sky for the billions of humans that live in rural areas, or live in countries where the physical internet is controlled by oppressive governments hellbent on withholding information from its citizens is worth it. The trillions of dollars it would take to build out infrastructure (and maintain) in Africa and India is worth it. In fact, even 20 Mbps would be life changing in bringing informa…

I'm glad you think it's worth it. I'm not as sure, personally. Especially since your examples don't hold water with me. Oppressive governments that don't like the internet aren't going to just allow the transceivers. They need line of sight to the sky and even if you hide them, detecting them would be trivial. Super rural areas and 3rd world areas have their own set of problems. I'm thinking of the OLPC type issues h…

Yeah, all that talk about free internet for all the poor and oppressed sounds pretty suspicious set beside the claims that starlink is supposed to make money too. How will a rural Guatemalan farmer that cooks on a three stones fire provide any sort of profit?

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#65

Post by randyrand »

EpicEng wrote: post #22
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…

>So assuming you offer everyone a 100MB/s connection... It's ridiculous to assume that everyone will be using 100MB/s at all times.

I think he meant 100 Mb/s, which is much more reasonable but still pretty high for a single person. The average bitrate of a youtube video is about 6mbps.

An average constant bitrate per person in the evenings is perhaps around 10 Mb/s. So 25 million people could use this assuming 100% satellite use.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#66

Post by wahern »

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…

These aren't geostationary satellites. There's no opportunity cost to selling service when flying over poorer countries. Of course, the price has to include the backhaul, and even poor countries have rich residents, but in any event it would be silly to fly over whole landmasses in silence.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#67

Post by pwthornton »

allears wrote: post #2

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.

I don't think the purpose is to battle fiber and copper being laid on the ground. There are a lot of places where that is too expensive too do or the situation is not politically stable enough to do so.

Land-based solutions are going to be cheaper and faster for many situations and people, but this gives us another tool to expand connectivity.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#68

Post by garaetjjte »

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?

Sovereignty doesn't extend to space. It is one of points of Outer Space Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

Some countries attempted to claim sovereignty over geostationary orbit, but failed http://djilp.org/the-bogota-declaration-and-the-curious-case...

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#69

Post by modeless »

saganus wrote: post #62
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.

It would be nice if I could select the location manually, since I don't like sharing my location directly by a prompt. When I got the location permission request I denied it and then it says there were no sightings available for the next 5 days :(

If you deny the location permission it uses geoip instead. If the geoip location is incorrect there's a "Change Location" link you can use.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#70

Post by wahern »

cyounkins wrote: post #9

Even in small areas we have CSMA (listen before talk) collisions in 2.4/5G bands that create high latency variance [1]. You can only have one transmitter per channel. With Starlink there will be many ground-based transmitters that can't do CSMA (because they are directional). How many channels are available could depend on the dedicated bandwidth, but I have a hard time believing we won't see significant transmit col…

Starlink will use something like OFDM. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-division_...

From the famous IEEE article at https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-end-of-spectr...:

> Moreover, interference is not some inherent property of spectrum. It's a property of devices. A better receiver will pick up a transmission where an earlier one heard only static. Whether a new radio system "interferes" with existing ones is entirely dependent on the equipment involved. Consequently, the extent to which there appears to be a spectrum shortage largely depends not on how many frequencies are available but on the technologies that can be deployed. Many regulations intended to promote harmony of the airwaves have instead, by putting artificial limits on technology, created massive inefficiency in spectrum utilization.

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