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Starlink Premium

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Re: Starlink Premium

#171

Post by oxplot »

markdown wrote: post #76
gonehome wrote: post #44

$500 deposit, $2500 total cost for the dish, $500/mo for the service. Looks like it's targeting the enterprise market. The dish cost is probably closer to the actual value of the dish. The original dish we bought for $500 I think I read actually cost closer to $3k for them to manufacture (I'm not an expert on this)? Regular service is $500 for a dish and $99 a month which is a great deal for 50-200mbps at pretty low…

> The original dish we bought for $500 I think I read actually cost closer to $3k for them to manufacture $3k? Were they mining the metal by hand and then using only the most hipster blacksmiths shipped in from Portland to hand press the steel for the dish?

There are 1500 antennas, and accompanying electronics for each, plus main board to deal with all that, GPS, motors. You also get a Wi-Fi router. Even $3000 is mindbogglingly cheap once you see what's inside of that "dish" and what quantity these are produced at (in 100K vs millions like smartphones).

Re: Starlink Premium

#172

Post by smoldesu »

Phylter wrote: post #167
smoldesu wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I'm typing this out over a first-gen Starlink connection, and the value is a lot better than most people realize. My other options include: - 4g hotspot, 150ms latency, ~15gb/month, speeds of ~10-20mbps, costs $50 + $15/gb overage per month - WISP network, 400ms latency, unlimited data at 500kbps-6mbps, ~95% uptime, costs $80/month - HughesNet satellite, 600ms latency, 50gb/month, less than 10mb/s down, 90%…

With the spread of 5G mid and high band home internet service I wonder if that might not cover enough ground at some point to make it worthwhile. Verizon is actually selling it as unlimited internet for a decent price. I don't know about other carriers.

It certainly won't cover anything out where I live. Even if they did put up a 5G antennae, it would cover maybe 2 houses on my street if they placed it strategically.

Re: Starlink Premium

#173

Post by stickfigure »

scotty79 wrote: post #60

Are we not concerned about Kessler syndrome anymore so that we think that hastily doubling the amount of satellites around there is a good idea? The news came in that SpaceX rocket stage will accidentally hit the Moon and will become first billionaire made garbage/pollution there. Are we sure we trust this company with not devastating low earth orbit due to some accidents? And for what? For expensive mediocre interne…

> The news came in that SpaceX rocket stage will accidentally hit the Moon and will become first billionaire made garbage/pollution there.

The Apollo lunar ascent modules crashed back into the moon after returning astronauts back to the command module.

Re: Starlink Premium

#174

Post by shmerl »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #165
shmerl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would FCC add such limitations?

The FCCs mandate is to protect the airwaves from interference. Starlink uses shared bands. if the receivers move, tracking down interference is harder.

What about mobile networks which literally do just that? Or they don't use shared bands?

Re: Starlink Premium

#175

Post by plugger »

nickvanw wrote: post #107
gkhartman wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was nodding along until I got to the $500/mo. service charge. I'd feel pretty good about $150/mo. or $200/mo., but I guess I'm not their target market since I have decent wired broadband. I was hoping that this would give Spectrum some competition in our area, but I'll have to wait a little longer.

Starlink won't really ever be designed to compete with wired internet. There is limited bandwidth per satellite, and the density of most places that have good wired internet far exceeds what is reasonable on the current generation of satellites. It's designed for people who are currently suffering on geostationary satellite internet, or some other low-bandwidth/high-latency setup.

*In countries with reasonably good wired internet

I live in Australia, a 30 minutes drive from the centre of a state capital and I've had a near 10x increase in my download speed and a 4x increase in my upload speed by moving to Starlink. I'm paying $40 AUD extra per month ($130 for Starlink, $90 for pleb tier wired) for the privilege. My wired link will not go any faster, 5G still isn't available at my house, and even if it was it's metered so borderline useless for a primary home link with a family watching Netflix, YouTube for kids, etc.

Re: Starlink Premium

#176

Post by plugger »

mdasen wrote: post #118
gonehome wrote: post #44

$500 deposit, $2500 total cost for the dish, $500/mo for the service. Looks like it's targeting the enterprise market. The dish cost is probably closer to the actual value of the dish. The original dish we bought for $500 I think I read actually cost closer to $3k for them to manufacture (I'm not an expert on this)? Regular service is $500 for a dish and $99 a month which is a great deal for 50-200mbps at pretty low…

Why does this seem aimed at the enterprise market (besides the price tag)? From what I've seen, Starlink uses CGNAT (carrier grade network address translation) so it's hard to handle incoming connections (given the lack of a public IP address). CGNAT seems like it would be a problem for enterprise customers. Would this be enterprises in cities where they'd be looking for a backup for a wired connection? I know that a…

How many enterprises are running their own DCs these days? Very few from what I see. Cloud for your services, StarLink for individual office premises. Sounds fine to me.

Re: Starlink Premium

#177

Post by shaklee3 »

smoldesu wrote: post #157
nickvanw wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink won't really ever be designed to compete with wired internet. There is limited bandwidth per satellite, and the density of most places that have good wired internet far exceeds what is reasonable on the current generation of satellites. It's designed for people who are currently suffering on geostationary satellite internet, or some other low-bandwidth/high-latency setup.

Exactly. I'm typing this out over a first-gen Starlink connection, and the value is a lot better than most people realize. My other options include: - 4g hotspot, 150ms latency, ~15gb/month, speeds of ~10-20mbps, costs $50 + $15/gb overage per month - WISP network, 400ms latency, unlimited data at 500kbps-6mbps, ~95% uptime, costs $80/month - HughesNet satellite, 600ms latency, 50gb/month, less than 10mb/s down, 90%…

you're getting better service than the others because they are not at capacity, and won't be until the chip shortage is over. enjoy it while you can, because speeds will get worse soon, and what you thought was a great service will be just like the rest.

Re: Starlink Premium

#178

Post by shaklee3 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #165
shmerl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would FCC add such limitations?

The FCCs mandate is to protect the airwaves from interference. Starlink uses shared bands. if the receivers move, tracking down interference is harder.

this is not really true relative to what OP said. there are fcc regulations for spectral leakage and such, but that's well known and means you can't transmit outside a service area. but that just means you're in another, adjacent service area. it has more to do with the spectral efficiency going down as you move from boresight, so they don't want a capacity loss. fcc has nothing to do with this decision.

Re: Starlink Premium

#179

Post by shaklee3 »

initplus wrote: post #37
yata69420 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual competition: https://www.hughesnet.com/get-started

Starlink blows competitor offerings out of the water. Starlink has higher speeds, lower latency, and no data cap.

because they have no users yet. once the satellites are filled you're back to the status quo.

Re: Starlink Premium

#180

Post by shaklee3 »

wmf wrote: post #126
tzs wrote: post #77

My understanding is that the Starlink antenna uses a phased array allowing some electronic steering and that it has motors for physically steering it. The physical steering is just done at setup time to point the antenna in the right general direction for your location and the the phased array is used for actually tracking satellites. A back of the envelope calculation tells me that when they have all their satellite…

Starlink is limited by the FCC to only use one satellite at a time (technically called Nco=1).

no, the antenna is cheap and cannot receive from more than one at a time. nothing to do with fcc.
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