Live data from Hacker News

Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

twitter.com

1–10 of 209 posts

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#3
post #2

According to its Wikipedia entry, McMurdo Station had a 20Mbit/s satellite link so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station#Communications

I'd imagine the latency and per-installation cost is quite high.

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#7

How about providing free internet to China and Russia, to give the people there proper information without government oversight?

How about getting Tesla banned from China and possibly starting an orbital war that triggers the Kessler syndrome?

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#9
post #4

Does this mean they've figured out satellite-to-satellite data transfer?

Yup, I think that's the implication of the "space laser network". The plan for Starlink has been to have laser crosslinks between the satellites to provide coverage in places where the satellites can't directly see a ground station.

Re: Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network

#10
post #3
post #2

According to its Wikipedia entry, McMurdo Station had a 20Mbit/s satellite link so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station#Communications

I'd imagine the latency and per-installation cost is quite high.

It looks like it operates at 35,000 km and relays the signal between the base and Australia. The ping time seems to average a hair under 250ms.

https://www.satellite-calculations.com/Satellite/170HourList...

http://bhs.smokeping.ovh.net/smokeping?target=APAC.AS7474-1

Starlink satellites are mostly in the 550km elevation range. Average pings seem to be in the 50ms range, but this would be single satellite performance. This should drop as more units are brought online and increase capacity. Also, the laser interconnects are theoretically faster than terrestrial fiber, so there are expected to be many long-hauls where starlink will be the fastest option.

https://www.speedcheck.org/starlink-performance-2021/

Post reply on HN