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Starlink Is a Big Deal

sneak.berlin

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Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#11

Post by pkolaczk »

chrispeel wrote: post #5

I'm not convinced that Starlink will provide access to the "half of the human beings (who) are not online yet." Of course that would be good, yet my guess is that Starlink will target people in developed nations who are in rural areas, or people who want low latency. Maybe Starlink could serve people w/o internet if a whole village buys a subscription, or if a cell provider uses Starlink as backhaul for voice? Still…

Unless you mean a village with just two houses, typical villages are covered by cellular networks just fine. Starlink looks like a system for people in deserts or people in third world where LTE doesn't exist. Not sure if this is big enough market.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#12

Post by dkersten »

chasd00 wrote: post #6

hopefully it makes inet service on planes better

Companies like Viasat are already offering that. A couple of years ago, they were talking about how they wanted to offer free internet to all passangers (with enough bandwidth that everyone could stream HD movies, thanks to the new satellite they launched in 2017). I'm not sure how the rollout is going, though, or if the airlines want to do this. I guess the airlines can make a fortune overcharging passengers for internet.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#13

Post by pkolaczk »

durkie wrote: post #8
chrispeel wrote: post #5

I'm not convinced that Starlink will provide access to the "half of the human beings (who) are not online yet." Of course that would be good, yet my guess is that Starlink will target people in developed nations who are in rural areas, or people who want low latency. Maybe Starlink could serve people w/o internet if a whole village buys a subscription, or if a cell provider uses Starlink as backhaul for voice? Still…

Why wouldn't it trickle down? I feel like all new technologies start out with rich people/early adopters subsidizing mass adoption costs (refrigerators, TVs, computers, cell phones, electric cars)

The problem is that rich people live in areas that have good mobile coverage, and Starlink won't be very attractive to them. LTE can offer transfers better than 600 Mbps with lower latency today, and covers 99% of population (in the developed countries). 5G will get over 1 Gbps per sector and it's coming soon.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#14

Post by wmf »

cyounkins wrote: post #9

Even in small areas we have CSMA (listen before talk) collisions in 2.4/5G bands that create high latency variance [1]. You can only have one transmitter per channel. With Starlink there will be many ground-based transmitters that can't do CSMA (because they are directional). How many channels are available could depend on the dedicated bandwidth, but I have a hard time believing we won't see significant transmit col…

CSMA is basically the worst MAC protocol. When performance matters you use TDMA.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#15

Post by toomuchtodo »

pkolaczk wrote: post #11
chrispeel wrote: post #5

I'm not convinced that Starlink will provide access to the "half of the human beings (who) are not online yet." Of course that would be good, yet my guess is that Starlink will target people in developed nations who are in rural areas, or people who want low latency. Maybe Starlink could serve people w/o internet if a whole village buys a subscription, or if a cell provider uses Starlink as backhaul for voice? Still…

Unless you mean a village with just two houses, typical villages are covered by cellular networks just fine. Starlink looks like a system for people in deserts or people in third world where LTE doesn't exist. Not sure if this is big enough market.

The US DoD has paid SpaceX to proof of concept having hundreds of Mb/s of low latency connectivity in fighter aircraft. Lucrative market based on historical DoD satellite communications contracts.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#16

Post by modeless »

Just going to plug my Starlink tracker here: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink

It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house. It's a cool sight to see because there are up to 60 of them crossing the sky at the same time in a line.

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#17

Post by Dunedan »

Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…

It's a shared medium, as is internet via cable. The 100MB/s or whatever they'll offer will be the peak throughput you can achieve.

Aside from that they already have plans to send up 30.000 more satellites [1] and of course future satellites might also have a significantly higher throughput.

[1]: https://spacenews.com/spacex-submits-paperwork-for-30000-mor...

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#18

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…

You can do a lot of business with much less bandwidth than that. Isn’t this more about getting them ability to send emails and read text and information and not things like livestream?

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#19

Post by dang »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #3

Given the title, I assumed this was a link to this awesome article: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-...

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21431717

Another big deal discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397285

Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal

#20

Post by [deleted] »

Barrin92 wrote: post #10

> "Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live." this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming…

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