Live data from Hacker News

Starlink Aviation

starlink.com

401–410 of 526 posts

Re: Starlink Aviation

#401
post #315
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say cities have 3000 people per square kilometer. Farms have 1 person per square kilometer. Only 1 in 3000 people need to desire starlink for cities to have more demand. Strange situations happen. Not having good service in your neighborhood, hating the one provider available, wanting a backup, liking the idea of internet from space, lower latency over seas and thousands of other reasons I'm not crazy enough to…

To use Starlink you need to have a line-of-sight to the satellites, and that basically requires you'll get to install the ceiling of the whole building and even that might not be enough, right? To do that you probably need to get the whole building (or the building manager) to go along with this. So if you have 1/3000 of people wanting this in the city, those same people also need to be in a matching situation to hav…

That‘s true, yet I‘m seeing a lot of TV satellite dishes even in major cities, when cable TV is arguably also readily available.

If people want it, at least some of them will find a way with their landlord, if they don‘t already own the entire building (especially in the US, single-family homes are not at all uncommon close to the center of major cities).

Re: Starlink Aviation

#402
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$25,000/mo for 350 Mbps and no download limits is extremely cheap compared to Viasat. In the short term Airlines could probably save money setting this up alongside existing services. Though Viasat isn’t going to be able to survive this kind of competition for long.

viasat can offer the same speeds for that price, and they do on business jets.

On business jets it’s less of an issue, but for commercial operations monthly upload/download limits are a much larger issue than maximum bandwidth.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#403
post #396

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…

To me, the worst part about flying is landing. As soon as you land a ton of inpatient people stand up and just rush to stand and wait in the middle isle. Every single flight this happens on. Planes need to have exits on the rear, middle, and front of the plane to make deplaning a lot easier and quicker. If this issue is ever solved it will be a miracle.

Every plane has front and rear exits, and the bigger ones have middle exits as well. The issue is airport infrastructure, not the planes.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#404
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use a 100Mbs (4G) unlimited mobile service?

Is latency competitive? 4g is quite laggy in terms of RTT. Not sure what sea-level starlink is like.

It absolutely can be, but that depends on how congested/well managed the network is.

I‘ve seen stable latencies under 20ms on some networks, but also absurd spikes of multiple seconds on others. (The same goes for cable/DOCSIS, by the way…)

Re: Starlink Aviation

#406
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

When not congested, I used to get about 4 ms to servers in my city.

But on one provider, with congestion, that would go up to 15 seconds (yes, 15.000 ms) basically every evening during the pandemic…

It all depends on how well a network is managed. This is true for ever access technology; fiber just has a lot more headroom to mask bad network management, congestion etc.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also notable that SpaceX keeps finding these cool (revenue generating) use cases to further cheapen the cost of sending things up to space. Like sending Ukraine "free" base stations and charging them $4,500 a month for service.

I mean didn't they re purpose says for the Ukraine costing 10s of millions?

Yes they gave everyone the $4,500 service even if they only took (and paid for) the $500 tier.

The $60 tier is not available on the 20,000 donated terminals - 85% of the retail price of which ($1,500 and a $2,500 model) was paid for by governments.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#408

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…

> Also notable that SpaceX keeps finding these cool (revenue generating) use cases to further cheapen the cost of sending things up to space. Like sending Ukraine "free" base stations and charging them $4,500 a month for service.

The base stations were never free - they were subsidized by various sources.

But that $4,500 a month is insanely cheap and an absolutely incredible value for Ukraine.

The media loves to whip up a frenzy over Musk, but Ukrainian commanders on the front have said Starlink is the single biggest advantage they have, their efficacy would drop by more than half without it, and even, they’d rather have more Starlink than more guns.

Simply put no one has done more for Ukraine than Elon / SpaceX.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#409
post #186
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure Starlink will be better in some way, but it's almost double... The most important difference is that Viasat uses a couple of GEO satellites where Starlink uses a massive swarm of LEO satellites. Viasat's satellites are flying just short of 35,800 kilometers over the equator, which means that your absolute best case scenario user standing right next to a gateway, both directly under the satellite, bare mini…

As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities. It can suck a bit for voice and video calls (but not as bad as you might think). Online fast paced gaming is of course out of the question.

> As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities.

As someone who recently spent a week at a vacation house that had HughesNet, you have no idea how wrong this is.

Every single individual request your browser makes has an extra half second attached to it even starting. Every TLS handshake takes a full second and a half, multiplied by every different host you're connecting to while loading content. Every packet lost (and there will be a few) has an extra half second to be resent. Downloading files over satellite internet isn't the worst thing in the world, but browsing the web over it is not an enjoyable experience. It feels like back when I was still on dialup while most of the internet had started to assume broadband.

The main reason QUIC exists as a protocol, aside from working around decades worth of horrible middleboxes that prevent new protocols from working on top of IP directly, is to reduce the number of back-and-forths required to establish secure communication which most significantly benefits high latency and mildly lossy connections like satellite and older cellular networks.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#410
It says 350 Mbps per plane. How much does it translate to per seat? Say if all passengers start a video call or a S̶t̶a̶d̶i̶a̶ Nvidia GE force game, then?
Post reply on HN