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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

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Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#331

Post by ianai »

kortilla wrote: post #247
CrazyStat wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dead industry projects incompetence onto disruptive newcomer, news at 10. More seriously, the phased array antennas seem to be a big part of Starlink’s innovation. Launching tons of satellites cheaply by itself isn’t a super protected moat because if they block competitors from using the launch platform at a reasonable price, they risk antitrust action.

I don't see antitrust legislation being a real factor to anyone. Several companies have gone trillion dollar market valuation and several decades without such action. Even if Microsoft had a crystal ball of the future legislation when they were starting up they probably wouldn't have changed a thing. Antitrust in modern history is a thing without teeth when used and almost never used.

(I say this as someone who 100% wants market regulation that actually reinforces the natural market efficiencies - including sane, forceful antitrust legislation.)

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#332

Post by ninkendo »

chj wrote: post #315
walrus01 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 firs…

> satellites need to be simultaneously in view of your terminal and a spacex earth station. Does that mean that there is no connection between satellites?

Correct. The intersattelite laser link is still vaporware at this point, and I’d wager always will be. It turned out to be a much more difficult problem than they originally anticipated, and so they’re basically not doing it. I will be very surprised if it ever happens.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#333

Post by rcxdude »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #255
shaklee3 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you sure about that? I see there's an article from a couple years ago talking about quad-core A53 CPUs with FPGAs. That's most likely used for the satellite avionics, rather than for the starlink radios. While it's possible the avionics and the radios are tightly coupled, I would be surprised if they were. They're probably mostly separate for fault tolerance reasons. I suspect FPGAs wouldn't be fast enough to do…

FPGAs are extremely commonly used in the RF telecomm space. You don't implement a multiplier in the free-form FPGA fabric, instead such FPGAs have banks of 'DSP blocks' which essentially give you hard silicon ALUs which you can then hook up however you want. This gives you extremely flexible and potentially massive parallelism with very tight latency guarantees, and you don't lose a huge amount of performance because most of the heavy lifting is in hard silicon anyway. Also FPGAs excel at high bandwidth I/O, which is usually extremely important in these use-cases. A DSP or even a GPU might give you more FLOPs per W or $, but they'll usually struggle with latency.

The quad-code A53 CPUs with FPGAs sounds like Xilinx's RFSoCs, which are explicitly designed to basically give you a custom high-performance base station on a chip (though they can't directly convert to the frequency range Starlink is using).

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#334

Post by toxik »

sschueller wrote: post #328
whylo wrote: post #316

Interesting snippet from the terms of service: > For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.

So whom ever gets there first makes the rules? However if this is not suppped to be a joke then this is absolutely insane. There is no way humans, other then maybe a few austranouts will make it to mars in the next 20 years by which this service will be obsolete or no longer exist. Edit: If HN is still around in 20 years I will be asking you to reconsider your down votes.

If a bit of sci-fi in your ToS makes people actually read them, what’s the harm?

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#336

Post by RapidFire »

whylo wrote: post #316

Interesting snippet from the terms of service: > For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.

History tells us it is far better to let Martians govern themselves. The colonies would eventually rebel regardless; might as well embrace it and let them dictate their own laws.

That being said. Guns on mars! GUNS ON MARS!!! They have a rIGHt to hunt space deer!

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#337

Post by hntrader »

junon wrote: post #28
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…

Not sure how any of that magically creates better politicians, and it's worth mentioning that some people really enjoy large cities and the idea of a megalopolis. However, I do agree that Starlink could be the answer to impoverished areas not having readily available internet. This is something I hope to see change as a result, as it would really reinforce some of the early sentiments Elon put out a long while ago.

Speculation - it could create better politicians through two means:

(1) More competition for local immigration, which creates selection effects whereby the better run locales attract the largest populations and survive

(2) Small local elections aren't subject to partisan MSM outrage coverage or social media virality. Local politicians more likely to emerge organically through legitimate community relationships and reputation, instead of how effectively they're able to stoke the national outrage. Local journalism is also more healthy and fact based, so perhaps more likely to get an informed outcome instead of an outcome driven by partisan tribalism.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#338

Post by tester756 »

kortilla wrote: post #10
thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #4

100$ a month. Plus a 600$ fee to buy the hardware. i think they said 50mbps - 150mpbs It's a little on the pricey side but at least, as far I know, it's not comcast or at&t.

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.

>trillion dollar company easily

trillion dollar??

it seems WAYYYYYYYY too much for

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#339

Post by secfirstmd »

zachberger wrote: post #62
secfirstmd wrote: post #54

I'm currently in the middle of trying to help loads of human rights defenders in Myanmar plan to deal with the internet shut downs that are happening. Satellite stuff like Iridium is too crazily expensive to be useful. I really wish some thing like this was available.

How can someone help you out with this? I think this is really important work.

Drop me a mail at the email in my bio!

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#340

Post by andrewaylett »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #308

I live on the Western Isles of Scotland I tried random places near me to see if they show up on Starlink The nearest one to me is Stornoway (the main town on Harris) I am about 50 miles away from it Would this solution work? Currently I am happy with my 4G internet but always interested to try something else. https://www.google.com/maps/place/57%C2%B038'54.0%22N+7%C2%B... Also the Satellite doesn't look like it would…

Try using a Plus Code? The link you sent is 9C9MRJ9C+XP (visible in the left panel of Google Maps when you click on a location) which isn't on land and is rejected by the Starlink website, but "V84R+RR Isle of Scalpay" (the nearest land) gives me the same pricing as I see for my location in Edinburgh. So I suspect you'd be fine.
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