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Starlink Is a Big Deal

sneak.berlin

141–150 of 365 posts

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#141
post #117

To me the article misses the bigger deal: SpaceX launched 60 satellites in a single launch & ~250 in ~8 months! Under 9000 satellites have ever been launched in 756 months, since 1957. That’s a launch rate increase from 12/month to over 31/month.

As someone with very little background (but a lot of interest) in space tech, could you share a little about what results that growth in launch rate will have?

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#142

> "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…

No ISP actually allocates enough upstream and peering connections for every customer to use their connections at full speed at the same time, just as no cellphone provider build their network out so every customer can be on the phone at the same time.

In both setups, there are multiple levels of bottlenecks. The bottom line is that a properly configured network makes sure they can cover their usual peak usage easily, and has enough spare capacity that special events don't impact much of the customer base, and those it impact it doesn't do so much.

Consider that ISPs that offer gigabit speeds can't easily put in individual (or even paired) networking equipment that can serve thousands of people at that speed, because such equipment doesn't exist or is far too expensive to be using all over the place in the network. What you really see is that 100 people on gigabit circuits during peak usage (likely Netflix prime time in the evening) will use less than even a fiftieth or h undredth of their allocated capacity (unless you're steaming 4k all the time, and then you'll probably use about a fortieth of a gigabit sustained). As usage goes up, ISPs allocate more resources and shift traffic around to make sure they can supply for the demand. If done well, you don't ever notice.

You can also see this in highways and freeways. No highway is build to serve all the possible people that could use it at the same time, it's built to service what the number of people expected to use it in a specific time period is. This is also a good idea of what it's like when planning fails, as these works require a long lead time and a lot of accurate forecasting that's hard, so you often see vastly under-provisioned systems, and even by the time they upgrade them, they are sometimes already under-provisioned at the new size (or the time until it's under-provisioned is relatively short).

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#143
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're conflating optimisation of latency within a colo - how quickly can you send an order in response to seeing an event on that exchange - with latency between colos - how quickly can you send a…

4.13ms is one way, fwiw, RTT is 8.3ms or so.

> Some random source here has 4.13 ms for New York - Chicago

I (sitting in the Bay Area, at home, with Sonic fiber) am getting 5.122ms RTT ping times to MIT's CSAIL server. That's way further than NY-CHI.

Edit: oops, I forgot basic physics. 1ms =~ 300km. It should take at least ~10ms each way. I must be hitting a CDN.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#145
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something is off with your analysis. At any given time, the vast majority of the people in a given city aren't all using 100 Mbps 24/7/365. For instance, my typical monthly mobile data consumption is around 4 GB, which is .0015 MB/s -- a far cry from 100!

Can you share what has led you to believe that you're the average rather than just an outlier?

lol at getting downvoted by asking for evidence that a highly paid technology worker who browses hacker news represents "the average" and isn't just an outlier.

Do the people on this site understand that they are not the average? A lot of the hackernewses seem to enjoy the idea of being an outlier in medicine, knowledge, etc. but reject the rather more likely idea that they're an outlier with regards to their usage of technology and internet.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4.13ms is one way, fwiw, RTT is 8.3ms or so.

> Some random source here has 4.13 ms for New York - Chicago I (sitting in the Bay Area, at home, with Sonic fiber) am getting 5.122ms RTT ping times to MIT's CSAIL server. That's way further than NY-CHI. Edit: oops, I forgot basic physics. 1ms =~ 300km. It should take at least ~10ms each way. I must be hitting a CDN.

That is physically impossible (min RTT is ~40 ms[1]). You are probably hitting a CDN.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=San+Francisco+to+Bosto...

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#147
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share what has led you to believe that you're the average rather than just an outlier?

For the average bandwidth usage of a city to be 100 MB/s per user, the average monthly total per user would have to be 263,974 GB. Obviously the real figure is much, much less than that.

Sure not everyone is always going to be using it at the same time, but streaming times are going to be around the same because most people will clock off at around the same time, and new technology such as Google Stadia, the introduction of 4k streaming, etc. mean that it's very likely that people will start needing more bandwidth soon, no?

Also the target audience of this, the people that will be able to afford it, are going to be highly paid people (assumption: it's going be charged higher than 30£/month, or even £60/mo) who will be more likely to do those sorts of activities due to having more free time.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#148

> "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…

There are scant details about what the launched product will look like in practice, but keep in mind that urban and suburban areas are spoiled by high-speed 4G LTE and wired gigabit. The vast majority of the US, by land area, has to chose from dial-up and very expensive pre-Starlink satelite Internet service. Even 1 Mbit is a huge improvement over 56 kbps. I'm haven't looked into the economics of running fiber everyw…

You are all missing the forest for the trees.

Yes, "rural internet" is expensive because there's no profit there.

Do you think elon "popular priced tesla model available tomorrow" musk will go for the no-profit regions or advertise a $999/mo premium-plan killer that wins the US-telcos marketing pissing contest of "largest coverage"?

The post you are replying to states a fact that regardless of the reach of the satellite signal, it is a very limited capacity in number of subscribers if it will offer decent bandwidth for the good-profit market (let even ignore the certain claims of ludicrous gb/s that will show up on twitter eventually...)

they put in $10bi on this? Remember 3G and 4G expansion happened with the regular $?bi invested by the telcos plus $5bi for free by benevolent taxpayers. And even with all that free money nobody cared about these regions.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#149
Yeah! Let's give internet access to everyone! Let's do that without thinking on the consequences like widespread misinformation and screwing scientific research. But hey, it's good for the business!

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#150
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

Yes this was my immediate thought. Especially if I want to check multiple locations for e.g. family. When I declined to share location I got an exception. ...suddenly I'm shy about listing my finger printable browser details online. I'll tell you I'm using brave. I still can't use the app because the location denial is permanent, so I'll have to clear something in the browser...might be a bug worth addressing. Edit 2…

The address is used to show you a google street view pointing in the exact direction and part of the sky the satellites will cross. It's a super useful feature because it would otherwise be really hard to tell what angle or what part of the sky to watch. And accusing the guy of harvesting PII? Get a grip.
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