171–180 of 340 posts
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Ah yes, thanks! I did mean thirties but I changed it to `ms` to avoid confusion :-)
I have never heard of adding 'ies' onto the end of numbers to mean 'ms'. I'm (probably) not alone, fyi! What industry is that lexicon from?
I'm using Starlink right now. AMA. I'm in East Idaho. Currently my dish angles itself to the north. It rarely moves itself north/south, and slightly moves east/west throughout the day. I've read that right now it locks onto a single satellite, although they're adding multi-satellite support later. My speeds are inconsistent, and interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps) but after a couple seconds they'll get to…
How is the power consumption compared to a regular router + fiber/ADSL dongle ?
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Can you compare with T-Mobile’s 5G home Internet plan? Similar numbers advertised, $60 a month, no caps.
"no caps" - but watch what happens if you move 200 or 300GB downstream on a LTE based last mile residential connection in a month. you'll either get shut off, throttled to a few Mbps, or billed extra. Look at the fine print in the terms of service. If you have a household with multiple people that watch netflix, download movies, or even want to download a single xbox one or PS4/PS5 game (they can be 120-180GB now), w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"no caps" - but watch what happens if you move 200 or 300GB downstream on a LTE based last mile residential connection in a month. you'll either get shut off, throttled to a few Mbps, or billed extra. Look at the fine print in the terms of service. If you have a household with multiple people that watch netflix, download movies, or even want to download a single xbox one or PS4/PS5 game (they can be 120-180GB now), w…
Um how do you expect Starlink to treat you once it’s GA?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, thanks! I did mean thirties but I changed it to `ms` to avoid confusion :-)
I have never heard of adding 'ies' onto the end of numbers to mean 'ms'. I'm (probably) not alone, fyi! What industry is that lexicon from?
I'm using Starlink right now. AMA. I'm in East Idaho. Currently my dish angles itself to the north. It rarely moves itself north/south, and slightly moves east/west throughout the day. I've read that right now it locks onto a single satellite, although they're adding multi-satellite support later. My speeds are inconsistent, and interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps) but after a couple seconds they'll get to…
Can you setup Starlink without the app, i.e: no cell phone? I'm getting real tired of devices that have no management/setup UI of their own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Um how do you expect Starlink to treat you once it’s GA?
A whole lot better than the quotas and caps enforced on consumer grade geostationary satellite stuff right now (hughesnet, viasat) that is available in the same price tier of $85-130/month. And also better than 90% of WISPs.
Why do you expect better than LTE?
And would you say more about WISP behavior? I know WISPs are all over the place, but in my small experience, a technically competent WISP will not look at your usage unless there’s contention impacting other customers.
Like, Starlink has said they won’t service urban areas, to prevent degradation due to contention. So I expect them to use the usual TOS and technical controls... to prevent contention. I don’t see what makes them special here. If they had some special sauce to provide more cumulative bandwidth to subscribers than LTE and WISPs, I’d expect them to open up to urban areas stuck with Comcast, and profit massively.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it'll usually be at a slant angle of at least 45°. The beta requires a field of view of 100° after tilting. I can't find the maximum tilt angle, but SpaceX has authorization to transmit only 25° degrees above the horizon, so the maximum slant angle is 65°.
But think what that means in terms of SOLID angle, not linear angle.
In this phase Starlink uses 72 orbital planes, with 22 satellites per plane, so 1440 satellites in total (they're almost there). It orbits at 550km above Earth's surface, so the orbit has radius 6921km, which gives an orbital length of 43486km.
Separation between orbital planes varies depending on your latitude, but assume the worst case, where it is 43486km / 72 / 2 = 302km¹. Thus, the nearest orbital plane is at most 302km / 2 = 151km away from the orbital plane directly overhead. However, since the planes process, on average the nearest orbital plane is only half that, or 76km away from the plane overhead.
Satellites within each plane have a separation of 43486km / 22 = 1976km. Thus, there's always a satellite at most 1976km / 2 = 988km away¹ from any point in each orbital plane, and on average there's a satellite half that away, or 494km.
Adding all this together, the nearest satellite is on average √(550^2 + 76^2 + 494^2) = 743 km away (at the worst latitude).
[EDIT: Actually, that's improper averaging, the correct average is obtained with ∫√(550^2 + x^2 + y^2) dx dy / ∫ dx dy on x=0..151, y=0..988, which yields 777km].
The original plan used 24 planes with 66 satellites, which reduces average distance to 617km. At more favorable latitudes the difference with the current design would be even larger.
[EDIT: This should be 635km.]
¹ This is distance on the surface of the orbital sphere, straight-line distance is a bit less. It probably doesn't make much difference.
One annoying thing is their super non-standard and kind of broken network setup if you want to use your own router. They have two subnets with different IP ranges (cgNAT and local) on the same Ethernet link. You have to do some weird manual routes, interface resets, and dhcp client configuration if you want things to work reliably.
I'm using Starlink right now. AMA. I'm in East Idaho. Currently my dish angles itself to the north. It rarely moves itself north/south, and slightly moves east/west throughout the day. I've read that right now it locks onto a single satellite, although they're adding multi-satellite support later. My speeds are inconsistent, and interestingly they start slow (around 60 Mbps) but after a couple seconds they'll get to…