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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

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Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#201

Post by 40four »

”Starlink satellites are over 60 times closer to Earth than traditional satellites”

Goodness! I really need to learn more about satellites! For some reason that statement really strikes me.

I wonder what the ‘band’ of distance from earth most satellites fall into. The range of area a satellite can orbit earth must be pretty wide if this is the case.

Now I need to look up what is the closest & furthest distance a small object can reasonably orbit earth. I mean, now that I think of it, the moon is a satellite. How far is the moon?

Dang it, I’m realizing I really take all these things for granted. I just realized my reading TODO list for the weekend :)

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#202

Post by shaklee3 »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #172
walrus01 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Satellite typically doesn't use cdma. See dvb-s

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#203

Post by shaklee3 »

6nf wrote: post #147
space_fountain wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard speculation that the issue is actually satellite signal steering. They’re using phased array antennas on both sides so the satellites need to know where to be listening

Taat makes sense, with a small number of users they are not likely to spend CPU time doing fast Fourier transforms and whatnot for areas with zero subscribers

They don't use cpus. They use fpgas, and the signal processing is done regardless of whether a user is there.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#205

Post by shaklee3 »

reustle wrote: post #116
zamadatix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$499 to get the equipment and $99/m for service. Right now service is locked to the cell you purchase in. The intent is to allow mobility eventually.

It feels weird that I pay some small SaaS products more than this. You'd think slinging a few hundred satellites into space would be a more difficult / expensive endeavor.

It is. The antennas are heavily subsidized to get that $500 price point.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#206

Post by numpad0 »

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.

Sounds like combinatorial explosion peeking from backstage

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#207

Post by [deleted] »

sverhagen wrote: post #174
walrus01 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#208

Post by nly »

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

Many wired leased lines that connect data vendors to exchanges are only ~2Mbps even in 2021.

You tend to get bandwidth spikes on most feeds at market open and close, but intraday rates are low

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#209

Post by swarnie_ »

boardwaalk wrote: post #149
reustle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels weird that I pay some small SaaS products more than this. You'd think slinging a few hundred satellites into space would be a more difficult / expensive endeavor.

SpaceX is way in the red on this right now. But I'm sure they've done the math on how much profit they can extract from the constellation in the long term.

Yep - Profit and loss are pretty much meaningless while investors are still willingly to fling cash at them faster then they can spend it.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#210

Post by nly »

colordrops wrote: post #90
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…

I regularly get 12ms latency to google over my DOCSIS3 cable coax connection.

Google probably have servers in your ISPs data center
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