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

Starlink Aviation

starlink.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 526 posts

Re: Starlink Aviation

#471

Post by coryfklein »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #355
kilroy123 wrote: post #350

Slightly off-topic. I hate that internet is becoming more common on flights. One of my favorite things about flying is that it's a good chunk of time where you disconnect and don't worry about emails or messages. Just sit back and watch a movie or listen to music. Or catch up on sleep.

To be fair you can always choose to disconnect for a period of time. I understand if your job expects you to be online when possible but if you have difficulty disconnecting without an external pressure to be online you could consider talking to a therapist to help you manage your reliance, especially if it's bothering you significantly.

Yes, but now if you're not online during your flight it's because "you chose to" and you're a slacker.

Another dimension here is that it's a refuge from "the always on" society; if you were to step back and look at your life from a distance almost everyone would say "I need to disconnect more", but you often don't realize how dependent you are on that dopamine hit the connected internet provides until you're forced to disconnect. Then you see the peace and realize, "oh, I'm OK when I'm not attached to my phone".

But there are fewer and fewer opportunities to have that kind of realization these days.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#473

Post by coryfklein »

le-mark wrote: post #387
FL410 wrote: post #385

This is a game changer. It works really, really well - better than I ever expected to see internet on a plane work. The price tag seems ridiculous, but will probably make sense for a lot of the operators of the planes on their initial STC.

I think the big customers are militaries of nation states. Satellite communications for military drones is a huge enabling technology.

Surely they'll eventually be competing with Viasat for those juicy contracts with the major airlines as well. I won't be surprised if my Delta in-flight internet service is provided by Starlink in a few years. I suspect it wouldn't make any economic sense to retrofit existing planes, but potentially on their newly built ones!

Re: Starlink Aviation

#474

Post by MaxikCZ »

rkangel wrote: post #450
JTon wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's how shit wifi Seems like you know a bit about this. Could you indulge my curiosity and elaborate why wifi is shit? I assume some combo of DSP bottleneck (i.e. want to keep hw cheap) and maintaining backwards compatibility with older standards?

Wifi is improving now. Newer standards like Wifi 6 are doing that basically by taking the good ideas from LTE (4G) and applying them to Wifi. The cellular radio community has been much better about evolving standards, coming up with new technology and rolling it out . Maybe they have it easier because everyone gets a new phone every two years, but they've still had fairly good backwards compatibility support. Multipl…

Sometimes I work in a factory (full of metal everything) that's a metal plated building with no signal repeaters inside, basically a faraday cage. U can get enormous signal boost by just opening doors trough the wall. Most places inside the building report low signal with no usable internet connectivity, but some special spots provide enough signal to get few KB/s trough both ways. I was always impressed by the amount of work needed to push few KBs of data to cell tower trough such conditions, given a phone is able to establish and hold a connection. With WiFi there would be no hopes of even holding a connection between two points inside the building 30+ meters apart.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#475

Post by ajaimk »

coryfklein wrote: post #471
AlecSchueler wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair you can always choose to disconnect for a period of time. I understand if your job expects you to be online when possible but if you have difficulty disconnecting without an external pressure to be online you could consider talking to a therapist to help you manage your reliance, especially if it's bothering you significantly.

Yes, but now if you're not online during your flight it's because "you chose to" and you're a slacker. Another dimension here is that it's a refuge from "the always on" society; if you were to step back and look at your life from a distance almost everyone would say "I need to disconnect more", but you often don't realize how dependent you are on that dopamine hit the connected internet provides until you're forced t…

Just claim the wifi was down on the plane. It's an easy lie that can't be refuted.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#476

Post by mytailorisrich »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #459
mytailorisrich wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gogo is also working on an air-to-ground 4G/5G network covering the continental US. The thing is that once Starlink has the service working, and they have, it does not require a lot of extra investment to support ships and aircrafts. On the other hand, an air-to-ground system requires a full cellular network on the ground (at the very least with dedicated RF and antennas), although with fewer sites because cells can…

> it does not require a lot of extra investment to support ships and aircrafts. Are you sure about that? I have a friend who worked in airspace comms his whole career (including at Gogo) and he described some of the challenges of the engineering problem (these systems have to be airgapped from the critical systems on the plane, the certification processes, the antennas have to be super highly directional to talk with…

Yes, of course it is relative.

Developing new terminals is orders or magnitude cheaper than developing and deploying a cellular network.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#477

Post by mytailorisrich »

JTon wrote: post #438
rkangel wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically LTE in the 2.4 GHz band, with a load of extra bits for beam forming, coping with speed and distance etc. Using the 2.4 GHz band allows them to build a network covering the US without spending billions on spectrum. Yes, it's the same 2.4GHz ISM band that wifi uses, with the same power limits. And yes, it works well enough that you can do video calls hundreds of kilometres from the base station. That's h…

> That's how shit wifi Seems like you know a bit about this. Could you indulge my curiosity and elaborate why wifi is shit? I assume some combo of DSP bottleneck (i.e. want to keep hw cheap) and maintaining backwards compatibility with older standards?

Wifi's use case was, and still largely is, to be a wireless LAN. This means few users, no mobility, static devices, short distances, devices plugged in (not so true now). It started pretty much as exactly that: Just transmit ethernet frames over the radio and everything else is exactly as wired ethernet.

Cellular standards cater for a very different use case and, as a result, as vastly more complex and robust. To manage a lot of moving users and to support mobility is hard, also taking into account that cellular has had to deal with quality of service from the beginning because even if data rate was low voice requires a constant throughput with constrained delays.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#478

Post by giarc »

93po wrote: post #469
AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 months before deciding to reneg due to too many fake people in Montreal. He accuses the City of Montreal of hiding the true number of thugs and criminals.

As dumb as that whole saga is, I find it amusing that people think Twitter is actually honest in their filings about the amount of fake/bot accounts. Tech companies inflating account numbers is a tale as old as the internet itself.

A tale that Elon knew well (as publicly demonstrated numerous times), yet still tried to back out of the deal using it as an excuse.

Re: Starlink Aviation

#479

Post by blitzar »

deelowe wrote: post #451
blitzar wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that $4,500 a month is insanely cheap and an absolutely incredible value for Ukraine "I have bought over 50 StarLinks, with official prices right from the website in EU countries - Poland, CZ, Germany - like 400-500 bucks each, then enable portability for extra IIRC 50$, then payed monthly fee of 60$ (was 120$ before). It’s the same for everyone else in EU" Dimko Zhluktenko, the head of Dzuga’s Paw charity fund, tw…

Regular joe seems to be donating the typical residential units on residential plans. My understanding is that the military set up is different, especially in terms of support/priority.

The 'donated' units are business plans - there is no 'military' tier.

Starlink - Latency 20-40 ms Download - 50-200 mbps Upload - 10-20 mbps

Starlink Business - Latency 20-40 ms Download - 100-350 mbps Upload - 10-40 mbps

Re: Starlink Aviation

#480

Post by greedo »

Mashimo wrote: post #462
grishka wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flights are/were a universally understood, no-questions-asked excuse for someone to be offline. That's the nice thing about them.

If flying is one of the few times where you are allowed to be offline, it sounds like a rather 'meh work environment.

I would consider it an extremely toxic environment if I'm expected to be online 24/7. There's a reason our industry has rotating on call...
Post reply on HN