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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

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Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#101

Post by walrus01 »

daveevad wrote: post #94
walrus01 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter. You can initiate whatever connection you want from inside the cgnat, but there's nothing externally accessible yet. Mine has a few different openvpn tunnels (clients at the starlink side, servers in datacenters elsewhere) going different places.

Thanks - what does a regular traceroute look like? Any discernible pattern for the hops through the constellation? Any general thoughts about the topology? I appreciate it. My family got into the beta today, not just the pre-order but it sounds like it won't ship for a few weeks. Thanks again.

Traceroutes are all going out to the world through this google AS right now. Using the hurricane tool as a convenient GUI presentation of what it is: https://bgp.he.net/AS36492

nothing obviously satellite related shows up at layer 3. There's a few hops of stuff with no rDNS, and then the edge of the AS36492 network and whatever transits or peers your traffic is going to.

You can clearly discern from pinging your first hop (15.9 to 30ms away) that it's something on the other side of the up-and-back satellite link.

topology at present is logically a bent pipe. satellites need to be simultaneously in view of your terminal and a spacex earth station. The ten satellites they launched into a polar orbit last month are the first with inter-satellite laser links.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#102

Post by quux »

betwixthewires wrote: post #5

This is great. I'm glad this project is coming along fast. I'm hoping some time soon that the fixed location requirement is lifted, or at the very least they allow users to sign up to it as a sort of mobile service. I know it isn't handheld, but for people who move around a lot and especially who work in remote outdoor situations, the ability to move around with this service would be amazing. I'm sure at some point,…

Wouldn't surprised me if this is offered as a premium service in the future. Maybe first for enterprise customers like airlines or shipping and then later for consumers.

If part of the reason for the current location restriction is managerial overhead then I suppose SpaceX could justify an extra charge for this feature.

Edit to add: It may also be that supporting moving terminals is much easier to implement when the terminal is traveling along a known route vs on something like an RV that can pop up on the network anywhere.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#103

Post by AlexDanger »

I'm a big believer in Starlink and SpaceX generally.

It annoys me that I can not invest in these big bold innovations directly. Has anyone thought about how to invest indirectly on the belief that Starlink will succeed? For instance, are there satellite equipment suppliers or other upstream supplier who stand to profit with Starlink's success?

Likewise, who might fail based on Starlink's success? Should I be shorting Satellite based ISPs?

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#105

Post by walrus01 »

mcculley wrote: post #96
walrus01 wrote: post #40

I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP. My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka ban…

How well would this work on oceangoing boats? I have tugboats in the Caribbean that could use cheaper connectivity.

theoretically, great, and I would be shocked if they did not release a product functionally equivalent to the iridium and inmarsat aviation and maritime terminals, because of how much potential revenue is there. it will also be much better and faster than a multi-axis motorized tracking geostationary maritime terminal ($40,000+ things you can find in radomes on large ships, operating in various ku and ka band networks). there has been no official announcement on that sort of thing yet.

the current terminal has motion sensors in it and is not designed for a moving vehicle, it will turn itself off. the same 6-axis sensors that are used to orient and tilt it to the proper angle can also tell it when it's being moved.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#106

Post by dvdbloc »

walrus01 wrote: post #64
IgorPartola wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the big issues I’ve had with anything but wired ISPs is latency. They specifically talk about 20-40ms latency being expected in most locations, but don’t specify to where. I currently get about 20 +/- 4 ms from me to 8.8.8.8 consistently. Is their latency to my first hop? Also, what is their IPv6 support like? Can I get a routable /60 or similar? Static IPv4/IPv6? And do you need to use their router or can you…

a. absolute lowest latency I've seen to a major IX point in seattle is about 15.8ms. More often it's 22-23ms. On a longer term, averages between 20-30ms. That's for the combined total of four 550km paths through space plus terrestrial latency from their earth station to seattle. Keep in mind that on something like a DOCSIS3 cable coax last mile segment can have a minimum latency of 12-16ms from just the cablemodem to…

Just curious, how do you know it’s based on openwrt?

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#107

Post by CrazyStat »

gpm wrote: post #63
samstave wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UH??? Serious Question: So are the early adopters subsidizing the masses down the line? i.e. so at $100/mo + $600 start-up/set-up fee -- thats for early adopters ... so the "african farmer who can pay And the encryption policy? The Privacy policy? The data-mining-of-location-history policy? Yeah, it's a Nope from me dawg... And I folow Elon closely, and I like a lot of what he says and stands for - but he is at the b…

> So are the early adopters subsidizing the masses down the line? "Subsidizing"? No, they're paying for a service. It may or may not get cheaper over time... but that's rather irrelevant. SpaceX isn't a charity, they are in this to make money. It's also not like SpaceX is making a ton of money off of the early adopters. The satellite dish almost certainly costs the vast majority of those 600 dollars to produce, and t…

Estimates for the satellite dish from people in the industry are well over $1000 (see e.g. [1] https://spacenews.com/news-analysis-spacex-has-a-lot-riding-...)

Unless SpaceX has made a huge unannounced breakthrough in phased arrays they're actually taking large losses on the up-front cost at this point.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#108

Post by Jedd »

walrus01 wrote: post #40

I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP. My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka ban…

I expect a fair bit of interest from latency-sensitive markets (eg finance) here in Australia.

A few years ago when I was in the WAN optimisation space, IIRC Sydney/Singapore latency was ~150ms, partly raw distance, partly because the route was physically quite convoluted.

There's some expectation that once Starlink's mesh comms ramp up, it'll be significantly faster to go up to a bird, across through one or more at close-to-c, and then down into the local base station.

The fiber cable they ran from Perth up to Singapore a few years certainly won't be abandoned - it'll still be much cheaper / wider - but I can't imagine much appetite for any future under-sea cabling out of Australia (f.e.).

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#109

Post by Spooky23 »

fomine3 wrote: post #55
systemvoltage wrote: post #22

I am not sure if this is wishful thinking but can Starlink lead to growth of smaller communities that are self-sustaining (produce their own renewable electricity, food, etc) that cannot simply exist due to connectivity constraints? I have a dream of the world where we live in 1-10k population small towns littered around the globe, connected through starlink and public ways, and the idea of cities would become obsole…

A fiber and 4G/5G station won't work for such scale community?

There aren’t any mandates to provide service, so it’s hit or miss.

My parents live in a town where the local franchise agreement allows the cable company to cover whatever they want. The company opted to cease maintenance of cable on their road. So their options are spotty 4G service or rolling a DIY wisp with a friend across the valley in a more civilized town.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#110

Post by walrus01 »

Jedd wrote: post #108
walrus01 wrote: post #40

I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP. My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka ban…

I expect a fair bit of interest from latency-sensitive markets (eg finance) here in Australia. A few years ago when I was in the WAN optimisation space, IIRC Sydney/Singapore latency was ~150ms, partly raw distance, partly because the route was physically quite convoluted. There's some expectation that once Starlink's mesh comms ramp up, it'll be significantly faster to go up to a bird, across through one or more at…

in terms of raw capacity, I do not think that the intersatellite laser links (if/when they do get that working, which is a long ways off, 10 out of the 1050+ satellites right now have them, and none in production use), will approach anywhere near the capacity of a 40 or 80 channel, coherent 100/200/400GbE DWDM submarine line terminal. it's a whole other order of magnitudes.
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