Earlier quoted context omitted.
An effect on what?
Gaming, voip
With voip at least, you can use a jitter buffer to get decreased jitter at the cost of increased latency. If latency is good to start with, that's definitely an option.
SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
81–90 of 102 posts
Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
#82Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
#83I'm in a busy city so I don't think I will have a Starlink option, but I'd gladly pay twice as much to fund this than keep paying money to our evil overlord Comcast.
Have they announced any plans at all?
Given the capacity of the network, it is more likely that you would be paying 20x-100x as much, per byte, and would get perhaps the same factor, as the denominator, in terms of data cap. Comcast has several times the capacity of the entire Starlink global constellation in each real PoP.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still have to orient the whole antenna into the direction of the right part of the sky. From then the phase antenna will be able to track the individual satellites.
Would gyroscopic mount help, or is it too hard/expensive to make such a system to cope with waves at sea?
That sounds like it'd still wobble a lot, compared to a land mount. Maybe a later version will have beefed-up phased array controls to cope, but that'll be much later, they have easier wins first.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
#85I will confess that I don't get it and I would appreciate thoughts on why this is a good idea instead of a FOMO kind of thing (and especially AWS Kuiper), The total switching capacity of the entire __planned__ constellation is around that in a _single_ large switch chassis or internet core router and the individual satellites have the capacity of a beefy enterprise Wifi6 access point; however the geographic area each…
Can you point me to your source on the planned constellation total switching bandwidth? I haven't read about that anywhere.
I have read that they don't expect to be able to provide high levels of service in dense urban areas. Which does make me question the business model...
I think you nailed it that the military and government will be a big customer. Iridium has ~1300ms+ latency and very low data rates, very high costs and the government is their largest customer from what I understand.
Airlines are another likely market that would be a significant amount of business (post-covid19).
If Starlink can compete against Iridium and the other existing satellite providers on price, they could at a minimum take most of that business.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
#86I will confess that I don't get it and I would appreciate thoughts on why this is a good idea instead of a FOMO kind of thing (and especially AWS Kuiper), The total switching capacity of the entire __planned__ constellation is around that in a _single_ large switch chassis or internet core router and the individual satellites have the capacity of a beefy enterprise Wifi6 access point; however the geographic area each…
Can you point me to your source on the planned constellation total switching bandwidth? I haven't read about that anywhere. I have read that they don't expect to be able to provide high levels of service in dense urban areas. Which does make me question the business model... I think you nailed it that the military and government will be a big customer. Iridium has ~1300ms+ latency and very low data rates, very high c…
Per satellite max bandwitdh, per SpaceX, at commercialization will be a max of 17gbps [1, sorry for the lame source but it's what I could find at the moment].
Depending on how they're measuring that, the actual throughout could be substantially less than that. Given that their FCC filing was 20gbps per satellite, I think that's the raw, uncorrected bit rate, not the corrected bitrate which will be lower.
A coworker and I did a back-of-envelope guess based on their power budget (switching capacity in bandwidth and pps and power are basically directly tied, ditto capacity and spectrum) and that's about what we arrived at as their upper bound (imho, not even half of that will be achievable). Note that this is a double-counted metric (bps total is bps_in+bps_out) for actual traffic volume.
So let's go with that.
The current SpaceX fantasy business model is to build out a constellation of 30,000 satellites, but near term not even close to that. Being very generous, let's credit them with an incredible 10k satellites, pretend they are not power constrained and use the full 20gbps allotted to them, and you get a total of 200k gbps total capacity for the constellation, uncorrected, assuming ample power, or on a good day 125Tbps for real data.
Using a somewhat older core switch, the Juniper QFX10016, can do line rate switching for 480 100GE ports; 48Tbps in a single 21RU chassis from 2017. [2] These are commonly deployed in pops. The next generation will be doing that for 400GE ports in the same form factor, 192Tbps. A Cisco 8818, which is shipping right now, does 260Tbps per chassis in a 33RU form factor.
The point is, anyone claiming we could serve even a large metro with a single one of these switches, let alone planet earth, would be laughed at, yet here we are. A given nation-scale network will have hundreds of routers with these kinds of capacities.
I also don't think Starlink will get anywhere near the estimates I'm using here.
[1] https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-upgrade-...
[2] https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/release-independ...
[3] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/80...
edit: moved the [2] to the right place. edit damage.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon’s Twitter is very much marketing. He not only has over 30M followers, but also each of his statements and companies get disproportional media coverage. Marketing isn’t only buying ads.
jlaporte said marketing spend . Elon tweeting from his personal account is free.
If Elon is the author, I'm sure that's still very expensive.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you point me to your source on the planned constellation total switching bandwidth? I haven't read about that anywhere. I have read that they don't expect to be able to provide high levels of service in dense urban areas. Which does make me question the business model... I think you nailed it that the military and government will be a big customer. Iridium has ~1300ms+ latency and very low data rates, very high c…
Per satellite max bandwitdh, per SpaceX, at commercialization will be a max of 17gbps [1, sorry for the lame source but it's what I could find at the moment]. Depending on how they're measuring that, the actual throughout could be substantially less than that. Given that their FCC filing was 20gbps per satellite, I think that's the raw, uncorrected bit rate, not the corrected bitrate which will be lower. A coworker a…
Thanks for the data points :)
I think something to consider here is that there is an iterative development process taking place with the satellites. Given the stated lifespan of the satellites is 3-4 years, they likely expect to see additional innovation over time and are gambling that the network will be improved over time, and may one day actually be capable of serving urban areas.
This seems like a wise approach and appears to work well for both SpaceX and Tesla.
The most viable use case in the near term is clearly to serve remote and rural areas which is admittedly a small market. There is a chance you might see governments subsidize service to rural areas that are underserved. I also imagine there will be a number of marine and aviation customers - though that's likely even smaller than the rural market.
But yeah, I'm not one of the people who will claim it will serve urban markets any time soon... That's rediculous - as rediculous as saying Tesla will achieve level 5 autonomous driving this decade
Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
#89> In addition to getting the satellites in orbit, SpaceX will need to build a vast system of ground stations and affordable user terminals if it is going to connect consumers directly to its network. Why are ground stations required? I thought you were connecting from your dish to the satellite and therefore could be anywhere with a view of the sky.
Eventually you'll want to talk to a computer that isn't directly connected to starlink. The ground stations are necessary to bridge that gap (and run the constellation)
You typed "the same satellite you are connected on" wrong.
Starlink satellites don't talk to one another at this point.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Per satellite max bandwitdh, per SpaceX, at commercialization will be a max of 17gbps [1, sorry for the lame source but it's what I could find at the moment]. Depending on how they're measuring that, the actual throughout could be substantially less than that. Given that their FCC filing was 20gbps per satellite, I think that's the raw, uncorrected bit rate, not the corrected bitrate which will be lower. A coworker a…
Thanks for the data points :) I think something to consider here is that there is an iterative development process taking place with the satellites. Given the stated lifespan of the satellites is 3-4 years, they likely expect to see additional innovation over time and are gambling that the network will be improved over time, and may one day actually be capable of serving urban areas. This seems like a wise approach a…
I don't think the iterative nature actually helps SpaceX. Whatever use case they're targeting, and like I said, I don't know, and would like to know, isn't likely to be made more viable by bandwidth that changes substantially by the hour, and the total cost of getting a satellite into orbit makes generational turnover doubly challenging.
I just do not get the business model. It makes no sense for commercial internet access, even in rural areas. I think perhaps temporary access in undeveloped areas, where the total capex is lower than that needed for a temporary LTE deployment, for example, might be it, but that is not a big market.