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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

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Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#411

Post by megous »

arcticbull wrote: post #199
cromka wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Australian FinTech will definitely appreciate Starlink, then?

I suspect Australian FinTech would be more interested in colocating near exchanges instead of trying to beam their orders through space, but I don't work in the sector so I can't say for sure.

Does this have a name? Something like "a race to ridiculousness?" It's so bizarre that it matters that someone places an order a few ms before someone else. And it's probably ns now. No time to stop and think,... just be faster than someone else.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#412

Post by shaklee3 »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #241
shaklee3 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satellite typically doesn't use cdma. See dvb-s

There's no reason to assume starlink works like a typical satellite, though. Digital video broadcast in particular is in one direction from geostationary orbit. Latency is on the order of several seconds due to all the forward error correction that's necessary to tolerate bit errors in reception. There's not really any need for a "multiple access" scheme because "channels" are statically allocated frequency bands. I…

Satellites are interference limited and power limited. Dbv is not just for broadcasting, despite its name. It's used for pretty much all non-proprietary satellite waveforms.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#413

Post by shaklee3 »

lazide wrote: post #321
shaklee3 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP said "where people couldn't get more than 10/2 or so for any price." Your response directly refutes that, so I don't know why you are asking for a source. I didn't say either of those are competitive with a non-existent service offering from starlink. Wait until they have a real service that is oversubscribed, then we can discuss what plans they'll offer.

Hughesnet and other geostationary providers have 400+ Latency that are rather terrible.

Again, OP was talking about speeds, not latency. Nobody is going to refute geo has higher latency than Leo.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#414

Post by tuatoru »

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

> you wont be watching 4k

Netflix says you need 25 Mbps for "Ultra HD Quality"[1], so yes, you could watch a different 4K stream in every house simultaneously. And have 25 Mbps left over for other traffic.

Edit to add: Netflix is right.

If you can't get reliable 4K with a 25 Mbps connection, the most likely reasons are:

- First by a wide margin, is that you are using Wi-Fi to connect your display device. Don't do that. Use ethernet (at least until you have 802.11ax everywhere).

- Second, you have a flaky connection to your ISP. Misconfigured, marginal (e.g. DSL more than 2.5 kilometres from the cabinet) or in poor electrical condition.

- Third, you have neighbours regularly operating very large electric motors or electric arc welders.

- Fourth, your ISP doesn't know what it's doing, or is deliberately monkeying with your service to try to upsell you.

1. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#415

Post by kalleboo »

AlexDanger wrote: post #213
syedkarim wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are dozens of custom ICs from STMicroelectronics in each terminal. ST is a public company; NYSE:STM The terminal is also using a large amount of high-frequency substrate. That could be Rogers, but maybe one of the much cheaper Chinese materials. But I don’t think a position should be taken based on what’s inside of a terminal. The real play is in shorting the entire satellite industry. Every existing satellite…

Fantastic response! Are you aware of the players in Australia? There is Skymesh (owned by a UK company) but I'm not aware of other players in the Aus market. Of all of the providers on your list - are any of them doing LEO constellations that are able to provide low latency in the way that Starlink can offer? One might quibble about cost efficiencies and system capacity, but in the consumer market I cant see how you…

Wikipedia has a list of who else has announced LEO constellations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Competition_and_marke...

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#416

Post by igetspam »

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.

I work with an animal rescue. They're out in a somewhat rural part of TX, just beyond a major metro. Only available network is LTE or bad p2p microwave that's crazy expensive. This is 1/3 the price of the microwave and about the same as the LTE plan. I signed them up and I'll pay for it. The resident who lives on site has never had a decent network. Then I can finally setup the wireless perimeter cameras too.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#417

Post by shaklee3 »

rcxdude wrote: post #333
sgtnoodle wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure what your comment on the frequency range is implying. All signals are converted to baseband before processing. Nobody processes signals on the ground at Ku/Ka frequencies.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#418

Post by shaklee3 »

anticensor wrote: post #293
sgtnoodle wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason to assume starlink works like a typical satellite, though. Digital video broadcast in particular is in one direction from geostationary orbit. Latency is on the order of several seconds due to all the forward error correction that's necessary to tolerate bit errors in reception. There's not really any need for a "multiple access" scheme because "channels" are statically allocated frequency bands. I…

> There's no reason to assume starlink works like a typical satellite, though. And it does not. Starlink satellites do active switching unlike BSS satellites which only transmodulate and redirect.

Not true. Most modern geo satellites for internet have switching capabilities.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#419

Post by kweinber »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #365
kweinber wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the current latency between Sydney and Singapore 15ms or less by now? No one who is latency sensitive should be using Starlink unless they are in some incredibly remote location. (And they should move if they are 150ms is a cosmic age in low latency trading)

Sydney to Singapore is 6300km as the crow flies. At light speed completely directly best possible round trip time would be 42ms. Light moves more slowly in glass(fibre) and the submarine cables are definitely nowhere direct route, add also routing/switching overhead and the you end up in the hundreds.

Just looked it up. 94ms. Starlink has far more latency.

By your lightsped math, Starlink won’t ever be able to compete on latency except in the most rural of areas with poor connectivity since low earth orbit has far more travel distance than convoluted surface routing.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#420

Post by Roark66 »

I went to the site to see the prices... 100eur per month for 50-150Mbit connection? There are no data caps at the moment. I bet there will be soon.

That is quite a bit more than people pay for their Internet access around here. I'm out in the countryside and I pay 20EUR per month for unlimited download LTE (15-25Mbps - I have a diy directional antenna to get the service where I am, without it I would get 1mb).I sure miss my 150MBit (soon to be upgraded to gig) fiber Internet I used to have when I lived in a city, but I wouldn't pay 5 times more for 5 times the throughput. It is not like the faster connection will actually be that many more times useful to an average remote worker/home user.

When reliable, low latency uncapped 10MBit cheap Internet is available it is very hard to justify paying many times more for faster access.

I'm glad they are developing this network so people who have no other connectivity can use it, but I wish they offer something comparable to rural LTE in price (and consequently speed probably).

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