181–190 of 340 posts
> It's powered through PoE++ (using around 100W of power continuously) Not familiar with Sat gear, but this number seems extremely high to me for just powering an antenna (and some motors occasionally)
Aside: The router design is as impractical as it is futuristic. The thing would fall over if you looked at it sideways, and the solitary LED on the front was hard to see unless in a dark room or looking closely, straight at it. Hopefully a 2nd iteration will be better! Wow, he's right about the shape of the router. It also looks like it forces the ethernet cable in front if you want to be able to see the LED, and the…
Note that one can use any router with the dish. Basically the dish provides you with a NATed private IP which you can assign to the WAN interface of your router of choice and go from there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Relative to the helpful details on LTE you posted, though? (Obviously Starlink is incomparably better than the status quo satellite options...) 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 sai…
I'm not nearly as optimistic about WISPs in the long run, compared to my views 8-10 years ago. Really difficult to reach locations will go to starlink or similar (as a replacement for consumer grade geostationary), other places where the customers per square km density is sufficient will eventually get overbuilt with GPON last mile that provides vastly more throughput and capacity.
The most clueful and forward thinking WISPs I know are all making every effort possible, within whatever capital resources are available to them, to develop in house capacity for doing rural aerial FTTH. Buying bucket trucks, getting training, learning how to splice fiber, design GPON architecture, working with state PUCs for pole access, etc.
Is this cell limitation a billing thing, or is it maybe more fundamental? Perhaps the unit needs to be pre-programmed on where to look for satellites in a way that changes when the unit is moved?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starlink has said that they're planning on offering a roaming use-case, but they aren't there yet ( https://www.slashgear.com/spacex-starlink-cell-location-limi... ). Part of the issue is that Starlink cells are going to be very limited in capacity for the foreseeable future: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/09/analyst-probes... . Cowen suggests that Starlink "should eventually be able to serve 485,000 simu…
> Imagine people going to Burning Man with lots of Starlinks or bringing their Starlink when they go on vacation. I deeply hope people aren’t going to those to download OS updates and watch Netflix. Might have some crazies that feel the need to livestream the whole thing, but should be okay if only a handful at a time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other users have measured power consumption around 100W constant in operation. https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/l22f1u/power_cons... Power consumption could probably be a bit lower, but there are limits. Keep in mind that this is a phased array maintaining a relatively high bandwidth and high SNR link with the satellite. This is complicated microwave electronics design, a whole different ball game than old…
For anyone interested in a teardown, Shahriar at The Signal Path is a pro and he did one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6MfM8EFkGg
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That this works on most of the planet. If you can get fibre or good DSL for a reasonable price, take that. But even in the US large parts don't have fibre available, especially in rural locations. Many countries don't have any networking infrastructure. It will be a total game changer once mobile versions (airplanes, ships, yachts) become available.
The question is: will this stall development of more scalable fibre optic infrastructure and municipal fiber - to support a proprietary single corporation solution?
I was thinking about buying 40 acres in the middle of nowhere earlier this year. It had no electrical power within a mile, but there was a buried gigabit fiber line running down the dirt road. It probably cost at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to serve fewer than a hundred people. I called the ISP to ask about pricing. It was cheaper to buy a fiber/phone combo than just fiber. Why? “We get more subsidies that way.”
Starlink is clearly a superior option in cases like this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Relative to the helpful details on LTE you posted, though? (Obviously Starlink is incomparably better than the status quo satellite options...) 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 sai…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Relative to the helpful details on LTE you posted, though? (Obviously Starlink is incomparably better than the status quo satellite options...) 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 sai…
Replying to your reply, I don’t buy it. Your experience now on Starlink is analogous to being the first WISP subscriber on a newly deployed AP. Time will tell anyway. (And I will still be a grateful Starlink customer at my off-grid cabin, even with the throttling and caps. Starlink is a game changer!)
For people who have budgeted, procured and installed 'serious' two way geostationary stuff in the past (one example of which would be a 2.4m two port linear compact cassegrain antenna, NJR PLL LNB, a 40W BUC, a Comtech CDM760 modem and a 1U sized Cisco router), for 1:1 SCPC dedicated transponder capacity based services, starlink is atonishingly fast.
I could pull out a check book and spend $45,000 on buying terminal hardware and $30,000 a month in transponder space and not be able to achieve the speeds that starlink can do right now. Even if starlink was only 20 Mbps down and 4 Mbps up, go price what 20x4 service will cost by traditional geostationary right now (hint: start looking at $1200 per Mbps per month and multiply by N number of Mbps).
It is indeed a good theory that I'm seeing unreasonably higher than normal speeds right now and better latency, jitter and packet loss because I'm in a similar situation to being the first customer on a new WISP PtMP AP sector. But I also have a great deal more confidence that spacex's continued paces of launches and satellite deployment will keep up with providing at least a 100 Mbps down x 15 Mbps up service. I do not think that they will let it degrade into a contended-service-hell where customers see a very poor end user experience.
My perspective on starlink is also informed by knowing the price right now for Inmarsat and Iridium based offshore and aviation data services (sub 2 Mbps) and the $ per megabyte costs. There's already starlink aviation terminals in beta, and terminals for maritime and offshore use. It'll be a game changer there. The market for a globe-covering LEO high throughput satellite network is much larger than just the US48 state consumer residential internet/small business last mile internet market.
Wow, I'm impressed! I thought it would take more than a decade to implement when it was announced, but it's here and it works. Just amazing. 100/16 Mbps is pretty decent I guess, hopefully it doesn't go down as the number of users goes up. The latency is great imo, 40ms using satellites? I don't think anyone has achieved that before. Would a bigger dish work better or not?
Aiming for 20 ms later this year. (Elon time) A bigger dish would not lower latency but may increase signal strength leading to better throughput. But it's not a simple parabolic antenna. It is the first consumer oriented phased array antenna tracking the satellites as they move across the sky, so that would increase the antenna cost even more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
I assume that would be less expensive than creating larger circuit boards, shipping and packaging.