Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

Post by gambiting » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 11:30 AM UTC

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.

Post by whatthesmack » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 11:36 AM UTC

edgyquant wrote: post #161

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…

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.

Post by kweinber » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 11:39 AM UTC

Jedd wrote: post #108

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 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…

Post by spockz » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 11:46 AM UTC

Natanael_L wrote: post #348

spockz wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Post by girvo » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 11:51 AM UTC

m463 wrote: post #272

BelenusMordred wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> beta-only limitation though There's no way you are crossing borders with it and transmitting from a country where it's not approved.

That's an interesting point. 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…