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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

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341–350 of 541 posts

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#341
post #245

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.

Almost every military in the world already has the ability to jam the frequencies used by Starlink.

True but that doesn't mean they will. When you have few options it's necessary to do whatever you can

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#342
post #313
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will test this.

I’d be really interested to know how much motion the current terminal can tolerate? Does it lock at the slightest vibration or only if moving at vehicle speed? I’m thinking about putting it on a boat at anchor or at a dock. Thanks

People have tested it. It’s about a 90 mile radius. It’s a hard limit of having limited satellites service a large (90 mile) radius.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#343
post #108

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 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…

Is there any mechanism by which we (in general) or a client specifically could use an expensive low latency for say browsing and a high latency but wide/cheap pipeline for bulk transfer?

I can imagine being able to do this when you control both sides by letting one type of data flow over one IP and the other over a different one with different peerings. But I wonder whether this is generally available.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#344

I've heard that this will be a disaster for amateur astronomy. Yet Starlink is claiming that their mitigation techniques will avoid the problem [0]. I can't tell if their claim is sound. Can someone with expertise weigh in? 0: https://www.spacex.com/updates/starlink-update-04-28-2020/in...

On this, I wonder if those satellites could be equipped with some astronomical devices and grant some kind of public access? Maybe just a download link of recent raw data from an antenna.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#345
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

£439 for hardware, £89/month service, £54 delivery in the UK. The equivalent of US$611, $124 and $75 respectively at today's rates. Our prices include sales tax (VAT) though.

Ooft, that's pricey.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#346

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…

This would just permanently entrench existing wealth structures. Gated communities will be celebrating at what you suggested. It would be the end of economic mobility. Great for the long tail, not so great for those left of the power law.

If "we only hire in our NY or SV head office" tends towards "we hire anywhere, as long as you're good enough" - wouldn't the effect be the opposite?

We've been seeing the slow death of rural communities for decades so the status quo doesn't seem to be of much help to them. Some reverse migration back into these communities and a trend away from increasing centralization into a few rich cities should only help their economic prospects.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#347
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-laser-test/ ahem

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#348
post #343
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…

Is there any mechanism by which we (in general) or a client specifically could use an expensive low latency for say browsing and a high latency but wide/cheap pipeline for bulk transfer? I can imagine being able to do this when you control both sides by letting one type of data flow over one IP and the other over a different one with different peerings. But I wonder whether this is generally available.

If either your ISP exposes that ability or if you maintain multiple outbound connections, then yes. But I don't think this is commonly implemented today, however.

You would probably have to configure your own routing table to direct traffic for each application through the appropriate link, but that's completely doable as long as you can write rules to distinguish the packets (for example based on destination).

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#349
post #343
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…

Is there any mechanism by which we (in general) or a client specifically could use an expensive low latency for say browsing and a high latency but wide/cheap pipeline for bulk transfer? I can imagine being able to do this when you control both sides by letting one type of data flow over one IP and the other over a different one with different peerings. But I wonder whether this is generally available.

If you use TOR browser, you're already doing this. Requests from TOR browser go over TOR, if you have a regular browser open in another window your internet-routable requests there go over the internet. Of course the first hop goes via your ISP in either case, but it's easy to imagine it doesn't.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#350

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…

If i understand correctly the antenna tracks a specific satellite as it transit above it.

So how does it handle the switch from that satellite to the next one without losing signal?

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