31–40 of 607 posts
What is the pricing? No one ever seems to answer this all-important question...
Shotwell has said that it will be competitive with existing Internet pricing at $80. She didn't say it would be $80, but competitive with that pricing. Read that as you will. I'm sure that's only the starting price, that you'll be able to pay a lot more for more bandwidth.
This is already quite an achievement! In just 10 launches, SpaceX is operating the world's largest satellite constellation and can already provide broadband of reasonable quality to some customers. In rural areas, I have struggled to catch weak LTE signals with fixed antennas that often didn't hit these speed and latency numbers. This absolutely seems on track to be an excellent alternative to rural LTE or existing s…
I just got back from an AirBnB where I worked remotely for a week and the internet was DSL. It was about 1.5Mbps up and down. Work was still possible. Even group video calls worked. Uploading and downloading large files was out of the question however. I had to do a lot of work SSH'd into a remote server. So, 11 to 60 is not great, but still useful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect it will be really serving areas where that is unlikely to happen (rural areas and over ocean transportation).
I'd switch to Starlink JUST to spite Comcast.
Honestly, this is just awesome. It's a working demonstration of high-speed satellite internet, showing this approach is a viable solution for "anywhere on Earth" internet. For all those people who don't have broadband available, this will be life-changing. It'll only get better from here, welcome to the future :) (and remember that perfect is the enemy of good)
I wonder what happens on a cloudy day.. currently the satellite based DTH television displays a cloud and refuses to work. Technically is there a work around to that?
It's kinda funny because cloudy cover are a smaller portion of signal loss at GEO, (most loss is due to distance), but it affects that signal quite a bit once satellites are tweaked to get signal to Earth. Most GEO satellites try to have something like 95+% uptime due to average cloudy days in an area, which means they account for those really bad days where the clouds are just too thick. They use weather stats to project how much cloud cover each region will get so they can build bigger beams for that area.
In the past those beams would cover large areas (Like the entire USA). Now they're getting smaller (State Sized) so they can tweak how much signal could go to say Washington vs. Idaho. They're always trying to make this stuff better. But those newer sats at GEO cost 300+ million dollars per sat and are expected to last 20+ years. So it'll be a while before this new generation of GEO sat is out there.
The workaround would be. More signal power at the satellite (costly), or you as a consumer get a bigger/more powerful receiving antenna.
Honestly, this is just awesome. It's a working demonstration of high-speed satellite internet, showing this approach is a viable solution for "anywhere on Earth" internet. For all those people who don't have broadband available, this will be life-changing. It'll only get better from here, welcome to the future :) (and remember that perfect is the enemy of good)
Having this kind of network is a good thing but the idea that any kind of satellite or wireless can replace wires is just fantasy. Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. And that's just a tiny fraction of the market. Physical cables/fiber represent several orders of magnitude more capacity and always w…
Most homes already have a phone line and can support a DSL network... and in some countries a phone line is mandated by law, so the infrastructure already exists.
But, DSL is not nearly as "sexy" as thousands of satellites...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#:~:text=VDSL%20offers%20s....
Won't these speeds dramatically reduce once there are a lot of users saturating the connections?
If the network keep up in this state probably. But the plans are to launch some thousand more satellites
1000 more in that shell, but overall 11,578 more satellites (most of them lower than the current shell). Their target number is 12,000 satellites, with possible expansion to 42,000 (!!)
The sheer scale boggles the mind
What i'm more interested in is longer term (well, longer than a speedtest) consistency. 11mbps is fine if it's never less than 11mbps. Aiming for "20ms latency for gaming" etc is useless if the thing drops out even once in a game.
The price may be concerning if we compare to the current offers of competition. There are caps and bandwidth limitations. Satellite time is expensive.
Honestly, this is just awesome. It's a working demonstration of high-speed satellite internet, showing this approach is a viable solution for "anywhere on Earth" internet. For all those people who don't have broadband available, this will be life-changing. It'll only get better from here, welcome to the future :) (and remember that perfect is the enemy of good)
Having this kind of network is a good thing but the idea that any kind of satellite or wireless can replace wires is just fantasy. Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. And that's just a tiny fraction of the market. Physical cables/fiber represent several orders of magnitude more capacity and always w…
Honestly, this is just awesome. It's a working demonstration of high-speed satellite internet, showing this approach is a viable solution for "anywhere on Earth" internet. For all those people who don't have broadband available, this will be life-changing. It'll only get better from here, welcome to the future :) (and remember that perfect is the enemy of good)
Having this kind of network is a good thing but the idea that any kind of satellite or wireless can replace wires is just fantasy. Delivering just 10Mbps to 100 million customers is over 900 Tbps. There is absolutely no way a satellite network can clear that kind of downlink bandwidth. And that's just a tiny fraction of the market. Physical cables/fiber represent several orders of magnitude more capacity and always w…