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How much does it cost?
(I am not OP, but this is pretty easily found on the site.) $499 USD for the dish, $99 USD per month for service (no data cap.) Price seems to change to local currency if your country is not USA.
Is it though? Perhaps it's because it's not available in Croatia, but there is nothing on the front page that mentions price, and it's not in the FAQ either.
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This seems very much like a beta-only limitation though.
> beta-only limitation though There's no way you are crossing borders with it and transmitting from a country where it's not approved.
I noticed this:
https://www.canadasatellite.ca/Satellite-Phone-Limitations.h...
"While satellite phones work essentially anywhere on earth, there are some physical and political limitations."
one limitation was not what I expected:
"Cuba restricts the use of satellite phones because they’re seen as tools for subversive purposes"
Back to starlink - I think distributed living is a wonderful if not the most wonderful application of this.
I can imagine in a number of years having a tesla pull a trailer with fold-out solar panels. Have a little self-sufficient base camp with power for climate, cooking, transportation. And now internet.
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…
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That kind of sucks, maybe in the future they will allow you to move about. I don't see why you couldn't travel with the array. I can understand if the dish were moving but if you just have your RV parked it seems like you should just be able to just jump online.
I'm sure very soon you'll be able to pay a premium to use any cell.
For example, a lot of recreational boaters are likely to get a terminal, which will work well over the open ocean. However, when all of those boaters tie their boat at the LA marina, there is absolutely no hope that the system can provide anything even approximating good service to them. So mobile starlink connections will almost certainly come with some language about how they work so long as you stay away from other people.
0:https://www.spacex.com/updates/starlink-update-04-28-2020/in...
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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
If it was just knowing where to focus, the terminal could send a low bitrate signal with that information. And/or they could let you punch in new coordinates before you go somewhere.
Instead the satellite steers towards an arbitrary area on the ground, and the users must be within that area to work.
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> 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…
Other than the cool factor I’m not sure why you’d want it in a city. I get gigabit for 60$ a month and star link will never match the latency I get due to physics. If it was cheap enough I’d love to get it for traveling but it should be used for things like that not to replace your inner city connection.
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Why couldn’t intersatellite laser links have similar capacity to fiber? In principle, if not practice? Is it because ISLs will require more powerful lasers because the light is focused through a lens instead of guided through a fiber?
probably less (literal) bandwidth, lasers are expensive
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If it was just knowing where to focus, the terminal could send a low bitrate signal with that information. And/or they could let you punch in new coordinates before you go somewhere.
The satellite doesn't steer towards the user. Steering is too slow and there are too few beams to steer to all users. Instead the satellite steers towards an arbitrary area on the ground, and the users must be within that area to work.
And they don't have that many satellites. Each one needs to have a pretty large active area.
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(I am not OP, but this is pretty easily found on the site.) $499 USD for the dish, $99 USD per month for service (no data cap.) Price seems to change to local currency if your country is not USA.
> this is pretty easily found on the site Is it though? Perhaps it's because it's not available in Croatia, but there is nothing on the front page that mentions price, and it's not in the FAQ either.