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SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

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Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#111

Post by hnarn »

tonyarkles wrote: post #96
clon wrote: post #51

As an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer, I'm biased against the massive cost of the StarLink pollution fleet to our ability to gaze at the wonders above. I think the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a much higher priority project for humanity, than StarLink. That said, I think Elon needs to travel the world a little more. Several of his attempts to solve purported world-relevant issues may be founded in limitation…

> ...jungles of Cambodia, trekked across Myanmar, stayed in villages of central Iran, driven across the deserts North Africa. Never have I felt deprived on good connectivity, even in the deserts of Iran. That makes me even more grouchy about my current situation :D You don't have to get too far off a major highway in rural Saskatchewan to have miserable connectivity. You can generally connect to an LTE tower, but bet…

> It's just really really uneconomical to build out wireline service.

Presumably these people are hooked up to the electrical grid, and if that is the case why isn't that equally uneconomical? Do they have phone lines?

Having people hooked up to fiber or at least DSL is in my experience often mostly a political issue.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#112

Post by sempron64 »

solarkraft wrote: post #56
kilroy123 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I mostly agree with you, as I too have traveled a lot (I've been to all 7 continents). I've been to many places with very poor internet. Still, I think you're missing one very important point. The likely biggest user of this system will be the US military and Department of Defense. Just how they use the iridium constellation, only phone calls aren't enough in the 2020 and beyond. They need the same system but w…

One customer I weirdly haven't seen mentioned is high frequency traders. Shouldn't Starlink's latency be lower than that of cables?

Probably not too useful for high speed traders as they can afford and are technically sophisticated enough to relocate their systems closer to the exchange, but I know that enterprise software that suffers heavily due to latency in APAC regions. Lower-latency connectivity from those regions to EU/US datacenters will be a small game-changer for many businesses.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#113

Post by ixfo »

mrkstu wrote: post #86
ixfo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10,000 * 20Gbps = 200Tbps, and that all assumes that the traffic is going in and out directly from customer to internet with none of that capacity used for anything else like groundstation-to-groundstation hops or anything like that. 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 s…

Note that the cost of an MX2020 likely exceeds Starlink's cost of building and launching one of their satellites. Now there is likely to be an relatively few MX2020s in a mid-size carrier (conceding that Starlink will be launching many more satellites) but Starlink has essentially 0 cost infrastructure for last mile deployment other than the satellites themselves. But lets say Starlink gets to your upper limit of cus…

Sure those big routers are costly but they're maybe the cost of a dozen satellites and serve half the total constellation size. Buried infrastructure has a 20-30 year guaranteed lifespan if built with fibre. Routers tend to last 10 years minimum. The opex cost of constantly replacing satellites is going to be pretty substantial.

Also Starlink doesn't have last mile costs as such (they just push that to the consumer) but they do have ground station requirements which will grow linearly with demand. It'll be interesting to see how they manage that as they grow. And of course, they're going to need those big routers too...

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#114

Post by bryanlarsen »

oseityphelysiol wrote: post #44
japanuspus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From what I gather beamforming operates only in limited range, i.e. tracking satellites as they move small fraction of a degree per second. For bigger adjustments the dishes turn mechanically. It's not clear if beamforming could handle relatively small waves, but for big ones mechanical adjustment would be needed. I'm speaking out of my ass, but if I had to guess moving the antenna mechanically would not keep the lin…

They've demonstrated 650Mbps connections between Starlink and a jet plane. Sailboat & wave motion will be trivial in comparison.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#115

Post by bryanlarsen »

freeflight wrote: post #36
csomar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 even LEO ain't "unlimited" space, theoretically an oversaturation of objects in LEO could lead to Kessler syndrome [0] 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 pre…

Kessler syndrome might start to be a problem once they reach a billion satellites or so. Space is big, all of these satellites have active control, and if a couple lose active control the orbit is so low they will deorbit in a couple of years.

Kessler syndrome would destroy SpaceX, so they're more aware of it than random internet people.

As for light pollution, see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26036269

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#116

Post by rakejake »

MrLeap wrote: post #76

A lot of these comments read kind of like the ones when dropbox did a ShowHN. "Why not just use rsync?" I suspect starlink will change the course of human history in substantial ways. It already stands to be the most positive technological development for my life since I've been living. At the very least, until the market adjusts, it will provide a verdant field of lifestyle arbitrage.

I know this example gets brought up many times but then, did the HNers get this completely wrong? Steve Jobs/Google/MS were right to consider remote storage as a feature and not a product. I see the comments from that time about rsync as a more technical variant of the same argument. Basically the argument is that remote storage alone is not going to cut it.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#117

Post by seniorivn »

rkangel wrote: post #106
bloopernova wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RE: Starlink changing the course of human history. Exactly. We've already seen Russian authorities say that people will be arrested for using Starlink. All of a sudden, governments have lost the ability to shut off the internet without some serious jamming. Just thinking of the post-disaster communications potential is pretty staggering. (I feel compelled to mention that I'm not a "fan" of Elon Musk.) I'd love to see…

> Exactly. We've already seen Russian authorities say that people will be arrested for using Starlink. All of a sudden, governments have lost the ability to shut off the internet without some serious jamming. I'm not sure that's the case. I believe you have to licence spectrum in the same way that you would if you were offering a terrestrial based service, and if you don't have a licence then you'd have to turn off t…

And what happens when you(the owner of satellites) don't turn it off? legally you are out of reach, so it becomes politics

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#119

Post by new_realist »

wahern wrote: post #24
ogre_codes wrote: post #4

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.

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...

10K users, one ten users per launched satellite, is not "mass market" as defined by the FCC. Latency issues are queuing issues at the scale (and thus load) of users needed to achieve breakeven.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users

#120

Post by mrkstu »

ixfo wrote: post #113
mrkstu wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the cost of an MX2020 likely exceeds Starlink's cost of building and launching one of their satellites. Now there is likely to be an relatively few MX2020s in a mid-size carrier (conceding that Starlink will be launching many more satellites) but Starlink has essentially 0 cost infrastructure for last mile deployment other than the satellites themselves. But lets say Starlink gets to your upper limit of cus…

Sure those big routers are costly but they're maybe the cost of a dozen satellites and serve half the total constellation size. Buried infrastructure has a 20-30 year guaranteed lifespan if built with fibre. Routers tend to last 10 years minimum. The opex cost of constantly replacing satellites is going to be pretty substantial. Also Starlink doesn't have last mile costs as such (they just push that to the consumer)…

Will any one ground link station actually require the big routers though? The traffic will be distributed through each connection point to possibly push the throughput per ground station to a lower level of cost hardware.
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