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This 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.
It's literally still in testing?
Earlier 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.
When Verizon 4G first launched I had a 45mbps connection all over silicon valley. Then adoption spread and my data rates on the same device dropped to 5mbps. Loading matters!
Earlier 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.
When Verizon 4G first launched I had a 45mbps connection all over silicon valley. Then adoption spread and my data rates on the same device dropped to 5mbps. Loading matters!
Due to blatant corruption there’s zero competition for broadband here, just resellers of the same system.
If Starlink can even sustain 20mbps+ and rolls out to rural Australia they’ll pretty much own the market, let alone similar stories across the entire globe.
Considering it doesn’t require any infrastructure, I can’t see how our tech-illiterate decrepit government can stop it. Just sell the modems online and ship directly worldwide.
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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.
The starlink antenna may look like an ordinarry satelite dish -- but it is a super-advanced phased array antenna which uses a lot of signal processing to electronically steer the beam. This electronic beam steering should have no problems keeping up with boat motion.
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I can imagine this is only in the beginning. As more sats go up ships can easily be a lot of customers.
Would you like to upgrade to the roaming plan for $99.99?
I see comments on latency every so often when Starlink come ups. I would love some clarity on how satellite connectivity is expected to perform. Example: Streaming services will be great, but syn ack dependent SAAS apps have to be optimized for local cache and data retrieval? What ways are they looking to overcome latency? I could soap box, but this community is much smarter than me.
geosynchronous satellites (~35,000km) have an inherent speed-of-light latency of ~250ms. that means even if every other link along the route imposes every single packet.
Starlink is in LEO (~500km) with a corresponding reduction in the minimum possible latency. that lower altitude also requires much more complex antennas and other ground hardware, compared to just pointing your antenna at a (relatively) stationary point in the sky.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Hist...
They also mention “thousands of customers”, so I guess that reading may be correct.
Also, as to economics, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink) says there will be up to 30,000 of these satellites. Even if (from https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1020316268311/Starlink%20Servic...) “hundreds of thousands of individuals spread over diverse locations across all 50 states signed up to register their interest at Starlink.com even without any formal advertising” turns into a million paying customers, that’s about 30 customers per satellite. Can 30 families in rural locations (so, presumably, not in the highest income brackets) really afford to pay for launching and maintaining a satellite in low-earth orbit? (Real number of satellites probably will be lower, initially, but so will the number of paying customers)
Edit: thinking a bit more about it. These satellites weigh about 260kg. That would be 10-ish kg/customer. They fly, mostly, at 340km, or 30-ish as high as jets. Not trying to model this precisely (to say it mildly), let’s guess, with highly reusable rockets, it’s as expensive to move a kg up a km as with a commercial jet. If so, it’s 30 times as expensive per kg to bring such a satellite in its orbit as it is to use a jet airplane to take a kg to cruising height. So, each customer would have to pay the equivalent of moving 300-ish kg by long-distance jet. That’s 3 personal flights with luggage. Guessing at a satellite lifetime of 6 years, that’s ½ a flight a year. Seems affordable for many in the USA, even taking into account that the satellites have to be built and managed.
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"
You'll find a *lot* more than 200Tbps of usable bandwidth in even a moderately sized national operator. At a small ISP (~90k users) we have about 25Tbps of capacity in our equipment.
A single mid-range carrier router can easily handle a dozen terabits; something like a Juniper MX2020 has 80Tbps capacity. A Nokia 7950 XRS-20e has 96Tbps. These are single racks worth of kit that deliver half the entire constellation's capacity.
Headroom is particularly important for usable high speed services as traffic becomes burstier. Statistical multiplexing gets you so far.
Now bear in mind that's with 10,000 perfectly working satellites and no degradation from 20Gbps based on spectrum availability and I'd be surprised if SL carries more than a million or two people - maybe 10 at the highest level.
Don't get me wrong, service for the hardest-to-reach million or two places on Earth with good latency and throughput would be awesome, though I think they have a lot of work to do on their impact on ground based scientific astronomy if they really want to launch and maintain 10,000 sats. But a mass-market service it ain't.