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Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

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Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source on the 4-5 hrs?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/420791/daily-video-conte... 300+ minutes a day for TV + vMOD (streaming services). Since no one actually watches TV anymore, at least not through traditional TV, I summed them.

[deleted]

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#283
Has anyone tried Starlink? I super curious as to whether it's a decent drop in replacement for the ISP have been using at home, and have had trouble with since day one. I won't mention any names (but I will say that it sounds a bit like Smodabone). What is the latency like? The variability of the up/down? Does it do what it says on the tin? Is (non-professional) online gaming a go?

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#284

I sit in my hot tub at night and see 1-2+ satellites go over every single time I'm out there. Which also makes me wonder how many of the shooting stars I've seen recently are just old starlinks burning up.

The first time I saw the long line of starlink satellites in a dark rural area it was unreal. Straight up looked like aliens invading.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real time video and telemetry for military drones that’s nearly immune to electronic warfare counter measures is the real end game. The fpv drone carnage in Ukraine is currently limited to the contact lines plus or minus a few kilometers. Satellite comms change that drastically. Yes it’s available now but highly restricted.

But not immune to missiles. Russia's already threatened to target Starlink satellites. Maybe they're bluffing, or not, but it does offer a reminder that these are just floating computers in the sky.

How feasible is it though once the network reaches a huge size? Starlink satellites are tiny, and they've been deploying thousands of them over the last few years. I imagine it would take enormous resources to shoot them down, especially if the US does treat them like a strategic resource and adds more for redundancy.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#286

Has anyone tried Starlink? I super curious as to whether it's a decent drop in replacement for the ISP have been using at home, and have had trouble with since day one. I won't mention any names (but I will say that it sounds a bit like Smodabone). What is the latency like? The variability of the up/down? Does it do what it says on the tin? Is (non-professional) online gaming a go?

Been using it since it was first available. Latency is fine, speeds are good and steady. Occasional outages of several hours every few months or so, but improving as time goes on.

Only complaint is that their DHCP server is buggy so if you don't use their blessed router, you can expect outages when you get transitioned to a new base station and starlink expects your IP to have changed, but it doesn't, or sometimes when your IP lease expires. Took me months to figure out that was the issue. I run almalinux on my router so I just have a script that checks a heartbeat and if it gets interrupted it will nmcli down the wan interface and back up, which usually gets a new IP. Though sometimes it will give the special IP to my router that is supposed to go to the blessed router.

Overall I do recommend, but have a backup ISP if always up is important.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix uses 3-7GB an hour. The average person is spending 4-5hrs a day watching TV. I’d say most are above 100GB/month. But that’s me.

Yep, but that data originates from the providers network and never leave the providers network, so they probably don't count it towards your usage the same way. I don't think that breaks net neutrality either, which the FCC seems to be reimplementing Edit: see https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

All my data usage is over LTE and NR. On one line it mostly gets used for streaming video (YouTube,plex,twitch) and averages around 500GB/mo. I rent a line to a friend and he's doing over 10TB/mo on mostly machine learning stuff and astronomy data.

T-Mobile absolutely counts all data used over the network, my voice lines go QCI 9 (they are normally QCI 6) when over 50GB of any kind of data usage each month, the home internet lines are always QCI 9. I don't have congestion in my area so it does not affect my speeds. This is QoS prioritization that happens at physical sector level on the tower(s).

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#288
post #225

So that is "432 Mbit/s per laser, and 9000 lasers total". I don't know you guys but I find that statement much more relatable than "42 PB/day". Interestingly, they also say each laser "can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link" (although another part of the article even claims 200 Gbit/s). That means each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity. Which makes sense since 100 Gbit/s is p…

> That means each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity.

Don't forget that every communication protocol has fixed and variable overhead.

The first is a function of the packet structure. It can be calculated by simply dividing the payload capacity of a packet by the total number of bits transmitted for that same packet.

Variable overhead is more complex. It has to do with transactions, negotiations, retries, etc.

For example, while the theoretical overhead of TCP/IP is in the order of 5%, actual overhead could be as high as 20% under certain circumstances. In other words, 20% of the bits transmitted are not data payload but rather the cost of doing business.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#289
post #225

So that is "432 Mbit/s per laser, and 9000 lasers total". I don't know you guys but I find that statement much more relatable than "42 PB/day". Interestingly, they also say each laser "can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link" (although another part of the article even claims 200 Gbit/s). That means each laser is grossly underused on average, at 0.432% of its maximum capacity. Which makes sense since 100 Gbit/s is p…

Netflix uses 3-7GB an hour. The average person is spending 4-5hrs a day watching TV. I’d say most are above 100GB/month. But that’s me.

Who has 4-5 hrs a day to watch television? ..or am I completely out of touch?

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#290
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposedly they use steering, since the horizontal azimuth to adjacent-plane satellites varies from 0 to 65 degrees across an orbit: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA348174.pdf

It doesn’t get into it too much on pages 14 and 15, but it indeed suggests that they probably exclusively use the “intra-orbital” links closer to the poles to get data to a satellite where the inter-orbital links are more practical. I believe Iridium had way more downlinks than they used to pre-bankruptcy. I guess volume constraints were less of an issue, so ok to hop around more in space.

This has more details: https://fcc.report/IBFS/SAT-MOD-20131227-00148/1031348.pdf

Apparently it only happens above/below 68 degrees latitude, so the next satellite with a working inter-orbital-plane connection is at most one hop ahead or behind.

https://spaceflight101.com/spacecraft/iridium-next/ has some more photos and diagrams; seems like they're really mechanically steered even on the NEXT constellation.

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