What is the theoretical limit of the system they have planned? How many people can it support? I’ve added my email to the waiting list. :)
Each satellite is said to have ~20 gbit/s usable bandwidth, and they're launching tens of thousands of them. The answer should be "a lot"
SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
31–40 of 149 posts
Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure benchmarks on an unloaded beta system are extremely useful. Once they add more satellites it may go down, but more users counter that... It's decent early indicator, but hard to say long term if it's useful.
The latency numbers are useful because lots of people, including the FCC, doubted the ability to achieve sub-100ms latencies at all. See https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-has-serious-doubts-about-space...
Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure this is for you, if you plan to move your boat: https://www.starlink.com/faq > Can I travel with Starlink, or move it to a different address? > Starlink satellites are scheduled to send internet down to all users within a designated area on the ground. This designated area is referred to as a cell. > Your Starlink is assigned to a single cell. If you move your Starlink outside of its assigned cell, a sat…
Also a sailboat (even a big one) is not stable and from experience satellite receivers can lose connection on slightly strong winds. So I guess this wouldn't work even if Starlink allowed it.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
#34Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
#35I'm in the (slow) process of acquiring and fitting a sailboat for living at remote places. While I acknowledge that the cheapening of satellite internet will be nice, practical, and make my plans more realizable money-wise, I'm also a bit sad on what this implies to the taking a real distance to the information overloaded society.
I'm not sure this is for you, if you plan to move your boat: https://www.starlink.com/faq > Can I travel with Starlink, or move it to a different address? > Starlink satellites are scheduled to send internet down to all users within a designated area on the ground. This designated area is referred to as a cell. > Your Starlink is assigned to a single cell. If you move your Starlink outside of its assigned cell, a sat…
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1323691195239960579
I reckon the current restrictions will ease up when more sats are deployed, especially with more laser interconnects.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
GP is not questioning the feasibility of Starlink, yes you can make it work, yes you can provide 60Mbps links. But there is physical limit per satellite, so all of this goes out the window beyond maybe a few million users? If you create all this infrastructure (with the impact it has) to then just serve a couple million people then this service will be unaffordable for mortals and limited to the wealthy and most like…
There is (practically) no limit to how many satellites you can put in place. You just position the next satellite a bit up-north and the dishes adjust their position.
Practically the presence of Starlight satellites already has an impact on the work of astronomers, an issue that will only get worse as more of them are sent up [1].
That's not to belittle how cool the whole thing is, but it's kind of disheartening how we've already managed to pollute pretty much every place on the planet, and are now on our way to even polluting the space around our planet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
[1] https://teachingkidsnews.com/2020/02/03/are-too-many-satelli...
Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure this is for you, if you plan to move your boat: https://www.starlink.com/faq > Can I travel with Starlink, or move it to a different address? > Starlink satellites are scheduled to send internet down to all users within a designated area on the ground. This designated area is referred to as a cell. > Your Starlink is assigned to a single cell. If you move your Starlink outside of its assigned cell, a sat…
Also a sailboat (even a big one) is not stable and from experience satellite receivers can lose connection on slightly strong winds. So I guess this wouldn't work even if Starlink allowed it.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
#38This is only a dozen users per active starlink satellite. I wonder how many customers each satellite can actually support in terms of both available bandwidth and the ability for the phased arrays on the satellite to target the customer. I can't really see how Spacex will scale their system to reach the millions of customers they need to cover the costs of launching and maintaining all those satellites.
If they doubled the number of base stations in a new area (with satellite coverage) they would double the number of customers they could serve right now. So the constraint at the moment is mainly the number of base stations. The thing is once they have the sat-to-sat laser links working, they will be able to scale up with a lot fewer base stations, so there's no point deploying masses of base stations right now.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
#39This is only a dozen users per active starlink satellite. I wonder how many customers each satellite can actually support in terms of both available bandwidth and the ability for the phased arrays on the satellite to target the customer. I can't really see how Spacex will scale their system to reach the millions of customers they need to cover the costs of launching and maintaining all those satellites.
Most of the users are in the northern US at present. Satellites passing over that area will be supporting far more users.
Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users
#40I'm in the (slow) process of acquiring and fitting a sailboat for living at remote places. While I acknowledge that the cheapening of satellite internet will be nice, practical, and make my plans more realizable money-wise, I'm also a bit sad on what this implies to the taking a real distance to the information overloaded society.
I'm not sure this is for you, if you plan to move your boat: https://www.starlink.com/faq > Can I travel with Starlink, or move it to a different address? > Starlink satellites are scheduled to send internet down to all users within a designated area on the ground. This designated area is referred to as a cell. > Your Starlink is assigned to a single cell. If you move your Starlink outside of its assigned cell, a sat…