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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

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Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#171

Post by aero-glide2 »

nuker wrote: post #163
celsoazevedo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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://arst…

> it's not aimed at people that live in cities People are, u know, people. They will defy the "not designed for you" clause. Still, is there a number for one sat bandwidth?

Around 20 Gbps per sat or 1 Tbps every launch (60 sats).

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#172

Post by sgtnoodle »

walrus01 wrote: post #49
junon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that limitation is mostly technical and managerial at this point, to help manage things in the early stages. I would too imagine this being eliminated later on.

They intentionally need to populate a certain number of terminals into specific geographic areas to test, measure and refine how time-sharing contention and the equivalent of TDMA is being setup. Each terminal has a GPS receiver in it and reports home with its location.

Do you think it's TDMA? I just assumed it would be whatever the latest CDMA technology is. The download probably doesn't really matter much one way or another since there's so much space between receivers that there's no practical chance of collisions. The satellite certainly must be able to receive multiple uplinks simultaneously, even in order to maintain a modest 15Mbps for multiple customers.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#173

Post by aero-glide2 »

kyleblarson wrote: post #135

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 problem…

They are launching new sats every 2 weeks, so by the end of the year there should be no drops.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#174

Post by sverhagen »

walrus01 wrote: post #105
mcculley wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 network…

> theoretically, great

Except then this thing were they assign you to a single cell and the vessel may pass the boundaries of said cell? Do you expect some sort of protocol for automatic handoff to the next cell in the future?

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#175

Post by walrus01 »

treelovinhippie wrote: post #157
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'm interested in mounting it laying flat (no stand) to the top of a van. I don't expect it to work while on the move. But do you think it would still work in a fixed configuration like that? And how much do you think tree coverage would affect service?

It needs to be able to tilt and angle itself.

Trees cannot be in the way. 11GHz+ doesn't like trees.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#177

Post by AdamJacobMuller »

cromka wrote: post #159
gpm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In principle, yes. They've demoed it on fighter jets. But they don't seem to be selling that capability to consumers just yet - presumably to avoid issues with too many subscribers congregating in one place. See the faq answers on "Can I travel" and "Can I change my service address" https://www.starlink.com/faq

"Your Starlink is assigned to a single cell. If you move your Starlink outside of its assigned cell, a satellite will not be scheduled to serve your Starlink and you will not receive internet. This is constrained by geometry and is not arbitrary geofencing." I like how technical they still are. Probably a matte of time before they have to dumb-down everything there.

This seems very much like a beta-only limitation though.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#178

Post by kortilla »

tzs wrote: post #153
kortilla wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really meant to compete with cable/fiber. This is for people stuck with geo stationary trash, dsl, microwave relay, etc. It’s a massive market and can take SpaceX to a trillion dollar company easily without ever stealing a cable customer.

Their 12000 satellites will have a total bandwidth of 240000 Gbps. I don't see how they get to a trillion dollars on that. A 100 Mbps stream being uploaded to one satellite and then relayed through others and finally download to and end user is going to use at least 200 Mbps of that total system bandwidth. That puts an upper limit of 1.2 million worldwide simultaneous 100 Mbps streams, and that's probably being too g…

> Overselling can push those numbers up, but I don't think they can oversell enough to take them to a trillion dollar company.

You’re vastly underestimating how much you oversell as a consumer ISP. Fiber companies with dedicated lines to your house can’t even handle all of their customers pulling 100mbps at a time because the bottlenecks are the IXPs.

The AMS IXP is one of the largest exchanges in the world, and it only hits about 10,000 gbps max per day.

You’re also forgetting that $100/mo is a cost offered to consumers on the ground. Commercial shipping and military won’t bat an eye at paying $1000/mo for a measly 10mbps to a ship in the pacific. Oil rigs, mines, military bases, etc, etc.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#179

Post by c2h5oh »

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,…

tl;dr; Yes, this is happening - as soon as there are enough satellites in orbit and terminals are certified to be used on the move.

1. Officially confirmed that moving to a different location is currently locked due to sparse coverage. As soon as this improves to a point it makes sense and starlink has logistics of this figured out it will be allowed

2. Officially confirmed that putting terminal on a car (or even a plane) will be possible, but this only makes sense with much denser coverage and requires separate, stricter (vs fixed terminal) certification from FCC.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#180

Post by sandos »

new_realist wrote: post #152
walrus01 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

DOCSIS 3 latency is 8ms in my experience; fiber is 1.5ms.

I had to try my fiber connection. I get 0.6 - 0.8 ms within our town which is not that big, To Stockholm, which is only 80 or so km away if you measure straight line, is 3.5 ms away.

Iv'e always been curious as to what adds so much latency and what I did read was that its the network equipment itself mostly. The inherent latency in the fiber should be on the order of much less than 1 ms as far as I understand. 3.33 us per km, and 3,33 * 104 (more realistic distance) is only 346 microseconds.

Its weird though, using mtr its very clear that its the "long" hop that most of the latency, or at least 2.8 ms. So is the figures for speed of light in fiber wrong, or is there something else that adds up to a lot of latency in fiber connections? Is it the optical components?

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