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Starlink Direct to Cell

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Re: Starlink Direct to Cell

#791

Post by grapesodaaaaa »

yieldcrv wrote: post #572
grapesodaaaaa wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am skeptical AST will be able to really compete. SpaceX has a massive cost advantage. I hope that they will, but the engineers at SpaceX have made me a believer. If the gen 1 direct to cell sats don’t perform (it seems like they do), they’ll just launch another batch a couple weeks later. I don’t think AST will have this ability, so I hope they get it right.

What do you mean compete? In the US SpaceX just announced a contract with Tmobile, AST has contracts with Verizon and AT&T For service it works, and for business viability AST just has to launch more satellites, which they will for a business case thats their only overhead cost and they dont need cellular partnerships in a bunch of countries to be viable They have to raise capital for more satellites but it all looks…

They have contracts for now and cash flow. My concern is how much better/worse it will be than Starlink. Consumer pressures will dictate whether Verizon/ATT renew those contracts based on performance.

It takes longer with the dollar amount being so large, but SpaceX has a real advantage of 1) being vertically integrated 2) having customers buy the rockets and 3) having expertise and ability to iterate very quickly on satellite designs. I don’t know of a single company that can compete with them on #2 and 3 right now.

My prediction is that SpaceX satellites will perform better in the real world due to the density they’ve built up, and they will be able to partner with 3rd parties for much cheaper. I’m not saying that’s what will happen, but I’m pretty blown away by what they’ve been able to do so far.

Re: Starlink Direct to Cell

#792

Post by varjag »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #769
varjag wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A6 maiden launch wasn't completely successful but that hardly matters in a debate involving SpaceX.

What matters more is that it won't launch again until 2025 and will never be cheap to launch due to the expensive SRBs. And ESA knows this - hence the spluttering of paltry funds towards cheaper vehicles.

Naturally, as every other carrier elsewhere in the world save for Falcon.

Re: Starlink Direct to Cell

#793

Post by inemesitaffia »

scotty79 wrote: post #766
inemesitaffia wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barely nothing? Are you out of your mind? pLEO, Starshield, SDA, NSSL, Commercial Crew, Commercial Cargo????? Only HLS is in view. And it's less than 5 billion. Everything listed above is delivered and has more expensive alternatives.

I don't know about everything else but 3bln out of that 15 were supposed to fund entire Moon mission and he burnt through that cash delivering a handful of suborbital empty metal pipes ... sorry, the last one was containing a banana to add insult to injury.

That's ridiculous. There's no extra money coming. This is a firm fixed price contract. And the original plan was 2028 before Trump changed things.

Most of the 15billion is for already delivered deliverables. (You have absolutely nothing to stand on) Blue Origin is also going to the moon and received more money for a smaller lander.

Where's their rocket?

The Moon lander contract is less than what SpaceX will make from starlink alone in 2024.

Re: Starlink Direct to Cell

#794

Post by inemesitaffia »

matwood wrote: post #656
scotty79 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The pace of innovation at SpaceX is not THE reason - it’s an additional reason that no one has a snowballs chance in hell of ever catching Starlink. Don't forget over $15bln of tax money they got for doing barely anything so far.

I think it's important to recognize the irony in how much SpaceX and Tesla benefit from government programs and funds that he now wants to turn off as part of DOGE, but you can't say SpaceX has barely done anything.

All he has to do is go to the Florida Space Coast. He'll feel what they do multiple times a week.

Re: Starlink Direct to Cell

#795

Post by refurb »

openrisk wrote: post #724
refurb wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I understand your viewpoint. The OP said “the most successful businessman in the world”. Sure one can argue about how OP came to that conclusion, by what measure, etc, but the man produced a highly successful car company, in a field nobody has really been able to do it, under terms where everyone was counting down the days until it went bankrupt. That alone is an amazing feat. Then he went on to create a…

sorry, the burden is on you to distinguish genuine business accomplishment from what others might suspect, less charitably, is excellence in crony capitalism [1],[2]. The Economist made a feeble effort to rank countries in this respect [3] but it does not even include the tech sector in the "crony-prone" sectors (eyes rolling). [1] "situation in which businesses profit from a close relationship with state power, eith…

sorry, the burden is on you to distinguish genuine business accomplishment from what others might suspect, less charitably, is excellence in crony capitalism

No, actually the burden is on the person making that claim (you).

Re: Starlink Direct to Cell

#796

Post by b112 »

sneak wrote: post #751
b112 wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent should have said "SpaceX", Starlink is just a subsidiary. SpaceX has more military applications than Starshield alone. For example, SpaceX's assembly line will be pumping out (eventually) a rocket a day. That's the plan. From a military perspective, Starship is supposed to be able to send 100+ people on long space trips. If that is instead to deliver troops to other parts of the planet, I'm sure hundreds could…

Starship as passenger transport point to point on Earth is a nonstarter most likely, even for civilian applications. It looks just like an ICBM, because it is an ICBM. I doubt Russian and Chinese air defence forces will wait for them to land and see if it’s full of people or plutonium before launching a retaliatory strike.

Your missed the part about parachutes. Also about flyovers. No landing would happen.

(We've been dropping people and gear for 100 years by plane. And yes, it can be done with Starship.)

On the side of civilian transportation, there is nothing to stop normal passenger planes from having nukes on board. The shape of the object is irrelevant.

Communication is key.

Re: Starlink Direct to Cell

#797

Post by refurb »

scotty79 wrote: post #765
refurb wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I understand your viewpoint. The OP said “the most successful businessman in the world”. Sure one can argue about how OP came to that conclusion, by what measure, etc, but the man produced a highly successful car company, in a field nobody has really been able to do it, under terms where everyone was counting down the days until it went bankrupt. That alone is an amazing feat. Then he went on to create a…

> Then he went on to create a rocket company that broke barriers of space travel no one has been able to do. Look closer into how the sausage is made. For example the Moon grant for SpaceX to the tune of about $3bln was awarded by a person who wrote it in first person singular and after she did it, she promptly quit and went to work for SpaceX. Musk is definitely successful, but a grifter not a businessman. > [...] m…

As the British would say the proof is in the pudding.

I do know we didn’t have self-landing rockets nor a massive reduced cost of space cargo until SpaceX.

Whether Musk hired the author of a Moon grant is irrelevant to that fact.

Same with Tesla. We had multiple, massively funded car companies try and fail to mass produce an electric car consumers wanted

Whether Musk overpromises FSD isn’t relevant to that accomplishment.

Re: Starlink Direct to Cell

#798

Post by throwaway290 »

aguaviva wrote: post #781
throwaway290 wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my question was rhetorical. it is nonsense to say it was sovereign and at the same time belongs to ukraine since 1991 what it is, is an occupied territory of ukraine fully controlled by russia with russian military on it that's whom starlink service in Crimea would benefit

I didn't say "it was sovereign" (all by itself). I referred to "its sovereignty", in terms of who it belonged to (both in 1991 and now). The two contexts are entirely different. what it is, is an occupied territory of ukraine fully controlled by russia with russian military on it And yet -- still entirely under Ukrainian sovereignty. It seems you're a bit unclear as to what the term means. It doesn't mean "military c…

Whether to provide Crimea with Starlink or not depends on who sits there. Similar reason why all Crimeans got under sanctions immediately after annexation. Not just Starlink but every other Western company respecting sanctions stopped doing business with Crimea. Same with Donetsk and Luhansk.

No one cares if it's "legally" Ukraine. People care about the "effectively".

Legally always depends on who you ask. Some will tell you that Taiwan is part of PRC for example. Maybe at least half of the world will. However Taiwan is not under sanctions because effectively it isn't under PRC.

> Indeed, it looks like you're shooting into the wind here

I am just trying to reduce you some confusion by explaining some basics. Starlink was not yet in Ukraine when Crimea was annexed and the world mostly sat and just watched it happen. Therefore the musk-man could not "cut out crimea". There's nothing to argue about. Just don't spread misinfo please, there's enough of it.

Re: Starlink Direct to Cell

#799

Post by benjam47 »

nikkwong wrote: post #308
mmaunder wrote: post #283

Vertical integration by Starlink of the cheapest launch capability in the world (by far) is the reason there are no competitors, and there will be no competitors. The pace of innovation at SpaceX is not THE reason - it’s an additional reason that no one has a snowballs chance in hell of ever catching Starlink. I’ve seen talk of competitor satellite networks or a possible competitor emerging. Folks it’s game set and m…

My family had starlink installed at a remote house we own for internet access. While we could get it up and running, the connection wasn't reliable and we encountered many issues. When we tried to contact Starlink for help, support was non-existent; sent us to multiple dead ends, and often wasted our times with repairs promised weeks into the future, over and over, which never surfaced. After 8 months of pain, we end…

I was an early user of Starlink, starting with the original terminal (today I have the 3rd generation high performance terminal). Being in a very rural area in MT where there was never congestion in my cell and I have a very open view of the sky, it has worked well for me since day 1 and has only gotten better with time.

Personally, I monitored latency more than speed, as I always had enough speed to do whatever I wanted. When I first started using SL, latency averaged around 100ms (which compared to my previous provider HughesNet was amazing, but was high compared to ground based connections), but today averages around 35ms which is still technically higher than ground based connections, but for all practical purposes for me, is indisguishable from any other internet option, even for online gaming and live video streaming.

Although I did not monitor speed as regurarily, it averages around 300Mbps for me. Sometimes it exceeds 400Mbps (I just ran a speed test and got 420Mbps), and it is rarely less than 100Mbps.

I have contacted support twice, and always received quick replies. However, based on my monitoring the Starlink Reddit forum, customer support during their beta period did appear to have often been poor. And there was also a period of time where performance was poor in many populated regions as they started opening up the floodgates a bit sooner than they probably should have, resulting in slow speeds for people in many regions, until their satellite launches caught up to demand.

However, my impression is that both of these issues have improved significantly since Starlink left beta. I do still see some complaints about customer service, but anecdotally it appears less frequent. My impression is that they have the ability to remotely troubleshoot many hardware issues, and will quickly send a replacement if they can confirm a fault. I do worry about this though, as even a quick reply and a quick hardware replacement means several days of downtime.

Speed complaints are almost certainly less frequent than they used to be.

I have no doubt that your customer service hell story is true, and if that happened to me I would be just as turned off, but I think that, especially today, that is not the norm.

I have considered purchasing a spare terminal as a backup, but I do have some concerns. I have heard that terminals that stay unpowered and unconnected for very long periods of time get too behind on FW updates and essentially become bricked, I don't believe that is the case today but I am not 100% sure. Also, back when there used to be a queue for signing up, it would not have been practical to just set up a new account for the new terminal, but now that the sign up queue is gone, maybe it is an option today. I have not fully researched my options for this redundancy idea.

Re: Starlink Direct to Cell

#800

Post by scotty79 »

refurb wrote: post #797
scotty79 wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then he went on to create a rocket company that broke barriers of space travel no one has been able to do. Look closer into how the sausage is made. For example the Moon grant for SpaceX to the tune of about $3bln was awarded by a person who wrote it in first person singular and after she did it, she promptly quit and went to work for SpaceX. Musk is definitely successful, but a grifter not a businessman. > [...] m…

As the British would say the proof is in the pudding . I do know we didn’t have self-landing rockets nor a massive reduced cost of space cargo until SpaceX. Whether Musk hired the author of a Moon grant is irrelevant to that fact. Same with Tesla. We had multiple, massively funded car companies try and fail to mass produce an electric car consumers wanted Whether Musk overpromises FSD isn’t relevant to that accomplis…

We also used to not have have LLMs, bipedal and quadrupedal robots, ubiquitous GPS maps, cell phones, miniature cameras of insane quality, ridiculously fast mobile internet connections, residential fiber and many other useful things.

Many smart people make things happen all the time. Regardless of whether there's some singular rich grifter in that specific that can latch onto them soon enough to claim credit or not.

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