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Starlink Aviation

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Re: Starlink Aviation

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time a plane is over farm fields or water. Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. Not gonna be flying over NYC w this. Kind of a good fit I would think in terms of utilization.

> Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. ?? cities have fiber, who wants starlink in a city?

Most cities in the world do not provide fiber to the home to every person. By far.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#292
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. ?? cities have fiber, who wants starlink in a city?

A friend lives in a city with a lot of startups, a lot of technology companies and a research university that's been on the internet since before the DNS. He's on the waiting list for Starlink because the fastest residential connection he can get is 3Mbps. There's much fiber there, but also many streets where no fiber is available. AFAICT that kind of spottiness is the most common case and few cities have uniformly g…

You'd think there would be investors popping up left and right to improve it, because offering 500 Mbps in an area where you can only get 3 Mbps is sure to sell.

Is this where the weird dichotomy between the US being on the one side very liberal for businesses yet on the other very restrictive? (the restrictive being protectionist practices from the established companies in this case)

Re: Starlink Aviation

#293

Slightly unrelated but makes me wonder how different would be the airline industry nowadays if Musk had launched a airline company at the same time he launched SpaceX. How different would it be to take a plane and travel across the world.

Not very I'm sure; for space tech, they tried Concorde, too expensive. for electric tech, companies are working on electric airplanes but that too is still far away - despite the huge drop in the cost of battery tech for example that in part Tesla was responsible for.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#294

Slightly unrelated but makes me wonder how different would be the airline industry nowadays if Musk had launched a airline company at the same time he launched SpaceX. How different would it be to take a plane and travel across the world.

The worst part about flying is the part before and after the plane ride, when you get stressed about what time to show up, going through security, sitting around, waiting to board, landing and waiting for the doors to open, taking a bus to the terminal, waiting for a carousel for 5 ~ 60 minutes, etc. If someone could solve that for me affordably, I can handle the sitting on an airplane in economy class for 15 hours b…

Isn't PreCheck supposed to lessen that a bit?

I don't think "security" is going to be lessened in our lifetime, if anything it can only get worse. Disrupting the space would take an insane amount of money you don't have. People who have money, can fly private.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part about flying is the part before and after the plane ride, when you get stressed about what time to show up, going through security, sitting around, waiting to board, landing and waiting for the doors to open, taking a bus to the terminal, waiting for a carousel for 5 ~ 60 minutes, etc. If someone could solve that for me affordably, I can handle the sitting on an airplane in economy class for 15 hours b…

The solution exists but unfortunately for your affordability criterion it means flying first class.

First class has its own levels I think, just because you spend 10k for a flight you're not going with a limo directly under the plane without any wait in the airport. Some airports do have shortcuts though, that's true.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#296

Once upon a time, all plane transmissions were pretty much air to ground. As inconsequential as it may seem, the positioning of antennas above the plane are a bit metaphoric for flipping things up side down. Looking out into space instead of back to earth. Also notable that SpaceX keeps finding these cool (revenue generating) use cases to further cheapen the cost of sending things up to space. Pretty much dogfooding…

> In-flight wifi (and otherwise all other transmissions) have pretty much always been air to ground This has not been the case for several years. Most in flight Wifi is now being provided by Viasat which, as the name suggests, is air to space. Even Gogo started rolling out satellite service in 2015. Very few services are now air-to-ground. Random pictures: https://i.stack.imgur.com/I7Yfd.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.n…

If this has been working correctly for many years, how is it that we still lose planes? :(

Isn't such connection bulletproof for the trajectory of the plane, even if simply passively tracking?

Re: Starlink Aviation

#297

Won't this require spectrum licensed from every country the plane fly's over? Easy in North America... But all other regions of the world a typical flight might go over 20 countries. If you can't secure a license for just one, you're gonna have a 5 hour flight with 20 minutes of no internet... Not great. And I don't think they're getting a license for Russia, Iran, China, half of Africa, etc any time soon.

No planes are flying over Russia anyway

Many planes are flying over Russia, because Russia is big and sometimes you need to get things from one end of it to the other end of it quickly.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. ?? cities have fiber, who wants starlink in a city?

I live in a dense city near Amsterdam. My home does not yet have a fiber for high bandwidth connection. However, I found myself content with the 300 Mbps line supplied by cable. A typical 4K video stream is about 25Mbps of bandwidth. So, for households 300Mbps is plenty for now. What is nicer is reliability of the connections and the latencies. If fiber could bring any benefits there, I'd be happy to pay up. How is S…

20ms according to the article

Re: Starlink Aviation

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities. ?? cities have fiber, who wants starlink in a city?

I live in a dense city near Amsterdam. My home does not yet have a fiber for high bandwidth connection. However, I found myself content with the 300 Mbps line supplied by cable. A typical 4K video stream is about 25Mbps of bandwidth. So, for households 300Mbps is plenty for now. What is nicer is reliability of the connections and the latencies. If fiber could bring any benefits there, I'd be happy to pay up. How is S…

How is DOCSIS in terms of latency (compared to a fibre line)?
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