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As someone who lives in the mountains of Puerto Rico and has to rely on "unlimited" cell phone coverage that data caps me and satellite internet that also has data caps.... I can't wait until starlink is up and running and we may have an option for high speed, low latency, internet for us who hate cities and love nature :)
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Googling this suggests we are seeing 100gbps per satellite... at 100mbps that's enough for 1000 saturated connections per satellite and a decent multiple of that number of users by oversubscribing/multiplexing. It's still not enough bandwidth to compete with city-ISPs in cities. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/duw4o4/starlink_1...
That reddit comment doesn't go into much depth, do you know if that 100gbps number is actually the sat to ground budget? IIRC, the majority of the starlink satellites' bandwidth is for sat to sat transmissions (routing data from other sats to the nearest ground station). Edit: also IIRC, SpaceX said that Starlink will offer up plans up to 1Gbps
Sat to ground and ground to sat use different frequencies so I would guess it can do roughly that speed in both directions simultaneously. There are also separate frequencies for ground stations and for user terminals, and I believe the implication was this was for user terminals. The number was just obtained by someone implying around 20gbps on the 0.9 sats and later on someone else saying something about 4-5x the speed on these sats. It's not official or likely to be particularly accurate.
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It will work from anywhere after about 90 more launches and thousands of ground relays being installed, and the antenna is the size of a watermelon. So "anywhere" would be limited to vanlife on up, in a place that doesn't have trees, in the markets initially served, which will likely be rural US. But starlink v2? I'll be on a cute Panamanian island :)
Do you know if being able to use it on a boat in the ocean will be part of v1 or v2? I sail a bit, and I've always wanted to sail the world, but giving up a decent internet connection has always been the main deal-breaker.
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We lived for a year in some mountains in Mexico in an off-the-grid cabin. We became accustomed to everything (energy starvation, driving 30 mins to the nearest village, 2 hours to the nearest city, etc) except the lack of connectivity. I bought one of those huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away. It was empty after 2pm so we had 4Mbps just for ourselves all afternoo…
> huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away That's impressive, but how did this work from the school's side? Wouldn't they need a huge wifi antenna too?
So one can "hear" signals further away and "speak" softer than would.be normally necessary.
As someone who lives in the mountains of Puerto Rico and has to rely on "unlimited" cell phone coverage that data caps me and satellite internet that also has data caps.... I can't wait until starlink is up and running and we may have an option for high speed, low latency, internet for us who hate cities and love nature :)
We lived for a year in some mountains in Mexico in an off-the-grid cabin. We became accustomed to everything (energy starvation, driving 30 mins to the nearest village, 2 hours to the nearest city, etc) except the lack of connectivity. I bought one of those huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away. It was empty after 2pm so we had 4Mbps just for ourselves all afternoo…
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Like the Space Shuttle.
i suspect the cost to refurbish a shuttle + tank + boosters is more than the start-to-finish cost of a brand new Falcon9 let alone re-flying a recovered Falcon9.
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I'm more concerned about the space junk aspect of it. My understanding is that as satellites collide they produce millions of tiny deadly particles. If we have enough of those in orbit then it will effectively trap us on earth. I'm all for faster internet, but not at the cost of making space travel impossible.
SpaceX moved the satellites to lower orbits, so any broken satellites or debris will fall out of the sky within a few years due to atmospheric drag. And they are specifically designed to burn up completely in reentry. The real concern is in higher orbits where debris would persist for millennia. This is not a concern for Starlink.
As someone who lives in the mountains of Puerto Rico and has to rely on "unlimited" cell phone coverage that data caps me and satellite internet that also has data caps.... I can't wait until starlink is up and running and we may have an option for high speed, low latency, internet for us who hate cities and love nature :)
If it becomes available i buy or restore an 18 century cannon-ship, over the day i sail and play captain sparrow, and in the night i play StarTreckCrew-VR in my captain quarter's ;-)
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i suspect the cost to refurbish a shuttle + tank + boosters is more than the start-to-finish cost of a brand new Falcon9 let alone re-flying a recovered Falcon9.
The per launch cost to refurbish the shuttle + new tank + refurb boosters was more than five separate fully-expended falcon 9-heavy launches.
I don't know how Loon [0] (graduated Google X project) can look at this and justify their continued existence. Low earth orbit satellites with global coverage seem like such a better approach than balloons that you have to handle in the air assuming the following is true: - Latency difference between the two is negligible - Satellites are not uniquely affected by weather - Balloons are not better in some other unknow…
I don't think that Loon has all of its eggs in the balloon basket. They're interested in satellites as well: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/31/18200879/alphabet-project...
Should be a fun few years watching this industry try to establish itself.