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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

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Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#401

Post by Geee »

unionpivo wrote: post #327
martin8412 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who do you imagine will buy it on a global scale? Rural NA areas, rural Australian areas and a few places in Europe. At the price point offered it is insanely expensive unless your only other option is satelite or a very crappy DSL. Maybe a few people in Asia, Africa, South America can afford it, but it is very few, and in the places where people can they are likely to already have better service.

I mean, you can get several houses together. If you split between 5 houses, you still get decent bandwidth (you wont be watching 4k, but then again if you can afford 4k screens ...), and the price is 100 USD + 20 per month. If you don't have any other option this might be decent alternative

Yeah, lots of small villages in Africa or other poor countries will have shared Starlink connections.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#402

Post by intrasight »

martinald wrote: post #375
geerlingguy wrote: post #14

I was able to place an actual order just last week in St. Louis, MO. I will be using it and doing some tests in an area that actually has cable Internet (though spotty, and until very recently was limited to less than 20 Mbps up, no matter how much you paid). But you have to realize, when you look at the $600 initial cost and $100 monthly fee—this will bring 100+ Mbps down and 15+ Mbps up to so many places (even in s…

Let's see how well it copes with more users. My guess is it won't cope well. There is only 20gig/sec of capacity per satelite, and I believe that is raw speed, which will get hammered in poor weather conditions and more FEC or less efficient QAM is required. 20gig/sec is not a lot of capacity for many thousands of square kms. It's 1-2k users at peak times watching Netflix for example on 1080p or 4K streams, nevermind…

Starlink will be a huge improvement in rural areas.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#403

Post by bryanlarsen »

cody3222 wrote: post #387

Could this theoretically put an end to China's firewall?

No. Starlink relies on base stations which would need to be located within a couple of hundred of kilometres of the customer. It also relies on RF licenses which it needs to receive from every country in which it operates.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#404

Post by minusSeven »

So it costs 99$ a month. I guess by Western standards that low but in India I pay roughly 50$ for 3 months 150mbps internet at 600gb per month. The 1 tb per month package costs 60$ for 3months.

I guess they won't be launching anytime soon in India, but I guess it can used in remote parts of India where there is no internet connectivity for miles. Still rather expensive though.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#405

Post by Chris2048 »

awaaz wrote: post #258

Curious to see how this plays out in a country like mine (India) where the government loves [1] to shut off Internet access on the flimsiest of excuses. Everything from entire states (like Kashmir), to few localities (farmer protests around Delhi) have had their mobile Internet access switched off because the government likes to curtail communication when it suits them. [1] https://www.indiatoday.in/diu/story/more-th…

Could citizens set up local WANs that host local chat servers, and caches?

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#407

Post by tuatoru »

martin8412 wrote: post #324
unionpivo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, if you look globally. Just usa ? Not sure. But i think that they would have to become ISP and comply with local law with most jurisdictions if they want to have local ground stations. Not sure how that will go.

Who do you imagine will buy it on a global scale? Rural NA areas, rural Australian areas and a few places in Europe. At the price point offered it is insanely expensive unless your only other option is satelite or a very crappy DSL. Maybe a few people in Asia, Africa, South America can afford it, but it is very few, and in the places where people can they are likely to already have better service.

> Who do you imagine will buy it on a global scale?

About 3.5 billion people don't have reliable access to the internet[1]. That's a large market.

The satellites are orbiting anyway.

For household customers in OECD countries, Starlink will charge OECD retail prices.

Customers in developing countries represent extra revenue for negligible extra cost, so Starlink can practise geographic price discrimination to maximise net revenue.

Or Starlink could permit "village WISP" bandwidth reselling arrangements in specific geographic areas. A video call needs no more than 2 Mbps down and up, so you can probably serve up to 50 undemanding households plus a one-room school and a medical clinic on one connection (with appropriate rate limiting and local caching).

Starlink can also price-discriminate by latency tier for high-frequency traders and arbitrageurs. They can price-discriminate by QoS for organisations that demand a guaranteed minimum bandwith (e.g. militaries). And then there are shipping lines and air lines.

1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/coronavirus-covid-19-...

("weforum" is the World Economic Forum.)

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#408

Post by kalleboo »

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…

Satellite internet has already existed for a long time, and while it's not fantastic, it's not bad enough to be a show-stopper for a small self-sustaining community. My parents are on satellite internet, and for their uses (YouTube, Facebook, some FaceTime calls to family), it's fine.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#409

Post by shaklee3 »

nickik wrote: post #237
shaklee3 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We don't actually know that. There was one unknown source who once said it was some number X but the reliability of that claim is highly questionable.

We do know that. We know how much phased array costs, and many experts in that area have said so. Shotwell and musk both have said getting the terminal cost down is their biggest challenge. They wouldn't say that if it was $500.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#410

Post by shaklee3 »

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…

The response below mine goes into great deal, but yes, it's going to be fpgas, or an FPGA with a management cpu core in there. They had many reqs open for fpga developers early on.
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