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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

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Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#131

Post by starpilot »

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…

Musk said that Starlink won't work in dense areas. This is a broader business question, but do you think there are there enough remote villagers and oil rig workers that can subscribe and eventually give Musk enough money to fund a trip to Mars? He has said that is the endgame for creating Starlink.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#132

Post by GoOnThenDoTell »

walrus01 wrote: post #110
Jedd wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do the markets need lots of bandwidth? Or just-enough with the lowest possible latency

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#133

Post by walrus01 »

GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #132
walrus01 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do the markets need lots of bandwidth? Or just-enough with the lowest possible latency

A lot of serious HFT has moved to HF radio bands with giant aimed yagi uda or dipole antennas, already... London, new york, chicago, tokyo. It's very low bit rate but lower latency.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#134

Post by voldacar »

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…

What is the total power consumption of the system when in use?

How often do packets get dropped? Have you given it a try with quake or counterstrike?

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#135

Post by kyleblarson »

I live in a remote town in the North Cascades in Washington State in the US and know about a dozen folks who have had Starlink for a few months now. I'm lucky enough to have line of sight to a tower on a mountain 6 miles away so I can have consistent service from a local ISP and haven't had to rely on sats. But it's a game changer for those who aren't as lucky as I. It still drops a lot which obviously causes problems for those on VPN's but it's so much better than Centurylink, the only previous non sat option. Areas that were previously only weekend homes for skiers and snowmobilers are now feasible for remote workers, which is a double edged sword given that our area has boomed significantly since COVID hit. A lot of local folk are now worried that our area will turn into the next Jackson Hole or Sun Valley as real estate prices skyrocket and longtime locals are priced out. I've seen the Starlink satellite train in the early morning sky a few times while walking the dog and it's pretty trippy.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#136

Post by Jedd »

gibybo wrote: post #124
Jedd wrote: post #80

I put a pre-order in a week ago, after the status changed a couple of days earlier (from 'please give us your email address so we can advise you' to 'we have a limited offering per region' - which is what's showing now). I'm about 250km north-west of Sydney, Australia, currently limited to a 25/5Mbps satellite circuit, with 600+ms RTT. I'm paying AUD$80 pcm, and have a data cap of 80 / 150 GB (peak/off-peak). Between…

>25/5Mbps satellite circuit >data cap of 80 / 150 MB So if you had the full 25 mbps available, you would hit your peak cap in 26 seconds? Do you only use it for email/text based applications?

Yikes, and thanks for picking that up.

I meant 80 / 150 GB -- I'll correct my earlier post.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#137

Post by celsoazevedo »

nuker wrote: post #98

Whats one satellite bandwidth? If a sat flies over a city with, say, 100k subscribers, and 10% is watching 4k video on Netflix? There gonna be limits, right?

> If a sat flies over a city

"Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.

"The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

Essentially, it's not aimed at people that live in cities and have access to other alternatives.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#138

Post by blackoil »

walrus01 wrote: post #130
blackoil wrote: post #123

It seems people getting most value of it are rich people from developed countries with dysfunctional monopolies. People in developing countries (my exp. in India/China and SEA) already have access to decent 4G at much better prices. Most people without not covered will not be able to afford it anyway.

You clearly have not seen how much of Nepal is currently dependent on very costly geostationary satellite. Fiber and terrestrial point to point high capacity microwave isn't everywhere. Or how much of Indonesia in remote places is dependent on satellite.

What will the percentage, in terms of population? I have been to big cities in both countries and small villages in India and never had a major connectivity issue in last 2-3 years.

Remote hills/jungle may not have any coverage but feasible market in those areas is miniscule.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#139

Post by syedkarim »

AlexDanger wrote: post #103

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…

There are dozens of custom ICs from STMicroelectronics in each terminal. ST is a public company; NYSE:STM The terminal is also using a large amount of high-frequency substrate. That could be Rogers, but maybe one of the much cheaper Chinese materials. But I don’t think a position should be taken based on what’s inside of a terminal. The real play is in shorting the entire satellite industry.

Every existing satellite operators stands to lose from Starlink’s success. Maybe not SiriusXM. Crazy that their net income is still increasing every year.

Intelsat’s cost per bit is much higher than Starlink’s. They also have much less system capacity.

EchoStar owns HughesNet. NASDAQ: SATS

Eutelsat: same as Intelsat, but with less debt on their books.

SES: Wild card among legacy satellite operators, as they have a new, high capacity (O3B mPower) system in the works.

Viasat’s 3-terabit GEO system should be competitive from a cost-perspective, but latency will be much worse. If price is the same as Starlink, they will lose on quality of connectivity/latency.

Iridium, GlobalStar, Orbcomm. Public companies that focus on narrowband/low bitrate/IoT communications. Much of the use cases can be solved with a Starlink terminal and an IoT hub/gateway, rather than going directly from a small sensor to a satellite.

There are a few public GEO operators in Asia; they’ll have the same problem as the European and American operators.

There’s virtually nothing that these companies can do to compete. They are all procurement specialists, rather than being engineering-led/driven. Most importantly, they all pay full price for launch, whereas SpaceX gets it for not much more than gas-money.

And SpaceX can get way more cash than anyone else at a much cheaper price. It’s tough to fight against that kind of war chest.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#140

Post by walrus01 »

blackoil wrote: post #138
walrus01 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly have not seen how much of Nepal is currently dependent on very costly geostationary satellite. Fiber and terrestrial point to point high capacity microwave isn't everywhere. Or how much of Indonesia in remote places is dependent on satellite.

What will the percentage, in terms of population? I have been to big cities in both countries and small villages in India and never had a major connectivity issue in last 2-3 years. Remote hills/jungle may not have any coverage but feasible market in those areas is miniscule.

Look at the combined annual revenue in billions of intelsat, eutelsat, ses, arabsat, yahsat, russia's geostationary gazprom, amos spacecom and other geostationary satellite owners. plus the revenue of the various latin america geostationary sat owners. The market is there, worldwide.
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