Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Setting up Starlink

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 340 posts

Re: Setting up Starlink

#51

Post by tyingq »

nevi-me wrote: post #10

The cell grouping is interesting. A colleague likes the outdoors, so he's preordered one for his Suzuki Jimny, to mount on it. I wonder if Starlink are considering this use case. I haven't been able to preorder mine, because we're planning on moving out from the city to a small village next year, but the Starlink website requires a street address. Our villages are quite primitive, no street names (I think it's cos no…

"he's preordered one for his Suzuki Jimny, to mount on it. I wonder if Starlink are considering this use case."

It sounds like they don't support a roaming base station for now. From the FAQ: https://www.starlink.com/faq

Can I travel with Starlink, or move it to a different address?

Starlink satellites are scheduled to send internet down to all users within a designated area on the ground. This designated area is referred to as a cell.

Your Starlink is assigned to a single cell. If you move your Starlink outside of its assigned cell, a satellite will not be scheduled to serve your Starlink and you will not receive internet. This is constrained by geometry and is not arbitrary geofencing.

Sounds like some sort of authorization comes down from the satellite, and they don't want to have to push all authorizations from all satellites. Which is odd for a full duplex service. Searching around google suggests a "cell" is roughly a 4.5 mile radius circle, and you probably aren't in the center. So movement would be pretty restricted.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#52

Post by Reventlov »

Gwypaas wrote: post #4
bserge wrote: post #2

Wow, I'm impressed! I thought it would take more than a decade to implement when it was announced, but it's here and it works. Just amazing. 100/16 Mbps is pretty decent I guess, hopefully it doesn't go down as the number of users goes up. The latency is great imo, 40ms using satellites? I don't think anyone has achieved that before. Would a bigger dish work better or not?

Aiming for 20 ms later this year. (Elon time) A bigger dish would not lower latency but may increase signal strength leading to better throughput. But it's not a simple parabolic antenna. It is the first consumer oriented phased array antenna tracking the satellites as they move across the sky, so that would increase the antenna cost even more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

« A bigger dish would not lower latency but may increase signal strength leading to better throughput. »

A better signal strength would probably lead to better modulations being used, therefore, less transmission and reception time, and a better latency, or am I wrong ? (at least that's the case for Wi-Fi: the better the signal strength, the lower the transmission time so the better the latency).

Re: Setting up Starlink

#53

Post by voisin »

nevi-me wrote: post #10

The cell grouping is interesting. A colleague likes the outdoors, so he's preordered one for his Suzuki Jimny, to mount on it. I wonder if Starlink are considering this use case. I haven't been able to preorder mine, because we're planning on moving out from the city to a small village next year, but the Starlink website requires a street address. Our villages are quite primitive, no street names (I think it's cos no…

Interesting edge case of no street names (which in retrospect is not an edge case at all given the use case for remote users!). Wonder why they haven’t allowed GPS coordinate input?

Re: Setting up Starlink

#54

Post by Denvercoder9 »

gameswithgo wrote: post #19
bserge wrote: post #2

Wow, I'm impressed! I thought it would take more than a decade to implement when it was announced, but it's here and it works. Just amazing. 100/16 Mbps is pretty decent I guess, hopefully it doesn't go down as the number of users goes up. The latency is great imo, 40ms using satellites? I don't think anyone has achieved that before. Would a bigger dish work better or not?

The latency may well be better than landlines in some cases. For instance, data from an edge cache in your city will be faster than starlink. But data from china? Starlink may win. I wonder if it could improve gaming/video conferencing with people far away.

Right now, that's not really the case though, as the satellite interlinks aren't operational yet. All your traffic goes through a base station relatively close to you, and continues over "regular" fiber around the world.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#55

Post by Sebb767 »

izacus wrote: post #21
_ph_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That this works on most of the planet. If you can get fibre or good DSL for a reasonable price, take that. But even in the US large parts don't have fibre available, especially in rural locations. Many countries don't have any networking infrastructure. It will be a total game changer once mobile versions (airplanes, ships, yachts) become available.

The question is: will this stall development of more scalable fibre optic infrastructure and municipal fiber - to support a proprietary single corporation solution?

Can fiber rollout actually be stalled even more?

But on a more serious note, with fiber you can supply a whole street with symmetric gigabit links pretty easily and for what is pretty much a one-time cost of laying the fibers. Upgrading the line to 25 GBit and up is done by only switching the receivers, once that becomes economically viable. Even if the satellites can handle multiple hundred gigabits (they can't), it would be impossible for them to compete with fiber in either bandwidth, price or latency.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#56

Post by BurningFrog »

Gwypaas wrote: post #4
bserge wrote: post #2

Wow, I'm impressed! I thought it would take more than a decade to implement when it was announced, but it's here and it works. Just amazing. 100/16 Mbps is pretty decent I guess, hopefully it doesn't go down as the number of users goes up. The latency is great imo, 40ms using satellites? I don't think anyone has achieved that before. Would a bigger dish work better or not?

Aiming for 20 ms later this year. (Elon time) A bigger dish would not lower latency but may increase signal strength leading to better throughput. But it's not a simple parabolic antenna. It is the first consumer oriented phased array antenna tracking the satellites as they move across the sky, so that would increase the antenna cost even more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

I read that as "future versions of the antenna will be much improved", in price and performance.

I know Moore's Law is being repealed, but that's still how new types of electronics work, right?

Re: Setting up Starlink

#57

Post by _0w8t »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #20
shp0ngle wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more cost effective to cover those areas by 4G mobile phone network?

Have you tried using 4G as your only connection? Even carriers that provide “unlimited” transfer typically throttle your connection after a certain amount of usage.

I use 4G as my primary Internet connection in Oslo, Norway. The apartment block where I live has a 100 years old copper line and DSL gives like 10 MBit/s with 100ms ping.

For about 90 USD/month one can get 60 MBit/s connection l both ways with ping bellow 20s. The connection is only throttled after 2 TB of data. But then you need a router and an antenna.

Or one can pay like 15 USD/month extra to upgrade the mobile subscription with 10 MBit/s connection and the throttling limit of 1TB. The ping is about 30.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#58

Post by swiley »

Reventlov wrote: post #52
Gwypaas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aiming for 20 ms later this year. (Elon time) A bigger dish would not lower latency but may increase signal strength leading to better throughput. But it's not a simple parabolic antenna. It is the first consumer oriented phased array antenna tracking the satellites as they move across the sky, so that would increase the antenna cost even more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

« A bigger dish would not lower latency but may increase signal strength leading to better throughput. » A better signal strength would probably lead to better modulations being used, therefore, less transmission and reception time, and a better latency, or am I wrong ? (at least that's the case for Wi-Fi: the better the signal strength, the lower the transmission time so the better the latency).

It could also mean less retransmission, depending on how the MAC works. That would lower the average latency.

Re: Setting up Starlink

#60

Post by swiley »

tyingq wrote: post #51
nevi-me wrote: post #10

The cell grouping is interesting. A colleague likes the outdoors, so he's preordered one for his Suzuki Jimny, to mount on it. I wonder if Starlink are considering this use case. I haven't been able to preorder mine, because we're planning on moving out from the city to a small village next year, but the Starlink website requires a street address. Our villages are quite primitive, no street names (I think it's cos no…

"he's preordered one for his Suzuki Jimny, to mount on it. I wonder if Starlink are considering this use case." It sounds like they don't support a roaming base station for now. From the FAQ: https://www.starlink.com/faq Can I travel with Starlink, or move it to a different address? Starlink satellites are scheduled to send internet down to all users within a designated area on the ground. This designated area is ref…

I wonder if you can schedule changes to this.
Post reply on HN