301–310 of 530 posts
Just curious. Does anyone know anyone who has received their terminal who is not a SpaceX employee or opted for Mobile/RV? I keep hearing about how they're being deployed, but the only people I know who have received their terminals are SpaceX employees or people who agreed to the more expensive Mobile/RV service.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're comparing price to a $5,000/month offering, I think it's totally reasonable to compare it to the $149/month package of Iridium.
Maybe, though there are 43830 minutes in a month and that package offers 150-mins. Guessing there better bulk min plans, but at the 0.42 a min over the 150-mins, that’s $18345.60 + the monthly fee.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Interesting. I didn't know that coverage was limited. I assumed satellite == pretty much all of earth. The low orbits that give Starlink its low latency compared to geostationary satellite internet services also mean that each satellite can only see a small part of the earth at any given time. This is why they need so many satellites to provide reliable coverage. Right now each satellite has to communicate directly…
>I'll believe it when I see it. This whole "yea inter-sat free space fiber links are totally going to happen" charade smacks of the same hype baiting as "full self driving by end of year" nonsense that Elon has been spouting since 2018. The Starlink "team" did an AMA on reddit[0] last year and it was comical how empty the answers were. People asked about the space lasers and the answers were all "yea it's a really ha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-laser-test/
Lasers require a lot of power. I doubt this is going to work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are absolutely spot on. The market isn’t competitive, it’s artificial highway robbery to even be in business. The entry requirements and expenses are insanely high, preventing a lot of competition to begin with, and the few players are free to drive up their prices to disgusting altitudes while providing services of disgusting quality. I wouldn’t even be surprised if they have agreements going on between themselv…
Iridium’s profit margins do not seem like those of a company engaging in artificial highway robbery: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IRDM/iridium-commu... Neither do Viasat’s: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VSAT/viasat/profit... For some reason, Inmarsat has very nice profit margins though: https://craft.co/inmarsat/metrics Interesting that Viasat was able to purchase Inmarsat given the figures.
iridium is truly unique in that in the pre-starlink era it has been literally the only, true global pole-to-pole coverage LEO network. the trade off has been that the original network architecture of it was designed for very low data rates, so just highly compressed voice and low rate data only.
even the second generation iridium network which is now operational is still very limited in IP data rates.
you're still not going to get a starlink terminal to be as compact as a very small iridium modem and L/S-band portable antenna.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to what? Inmarsat is the only viable alternative for smaller boats that offers unlimited data plans, has higher latency due to being geostationary, much lower bandwidth, and charges about $8000 for a gigabyte… I‘m not sure what Ku or Ka band GEO providers charge, but I doubt you can find anything competitive there either, and these require very large antennas.
Compared to what their architecture should enable. Sure, it's more satellites consumed per request but there aren't _that_ many satellites between some random point in the Pacific and the nearest base station. Certainly seems like it's not scaling that well if the price jumps from ~$120 to $5000.
The maritime coverage map shows coastal coverage around countries with inland coverage right now, i.e. they are bouncing the connection via one of their satellites to a nearby groundstation. Starting in Q4/2022 they want to cover mid-latitudes around the globe. That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? (This is a bit surprising - on one hand, this step extends coverage towards higher and lo…
> That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? Or maybe they'll have stationary ships with "ground"-stations until the inter-satellite thing is working.
the one thing any satellite operator absolutely does not want is absurd ongoing monthly recurring costs to run their earth stations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An Iridium embedded modem is one of the things we came across in the wreckage of a small plane we were recovering the pilot's remains from[0]. It was for his Spidertracks[1] flight tracking system. (Which, with the ADSB track, helped us hone in on the possible location. The wreck ended up being right in line with the last few pings. [0] https://lompocrecord.com/news/local/experienced-solvang-bush... [1] https://www.s…
there's iridium SBD modems for low data rate/non-realtime comms (like position trackers) and full featured iridium voice/data modems integrated into a vast array of products now, in the land mobile, aviation and maritime segments. one thing iridium has actually done really well is provide the developer documentation to make this fairly straightforward, there's a set of 600 page PDF files with every detail you could p…
They're another example of exorbitant fees for tiny bits of data. (Though, being able to text pretty much anywhere on the globe on a tiny device is really nice - even with a 20minute RTT.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to what? Inmarsat is the only viable alternative for smaller boats that offers unlimited data plans, has higher latency due to being geostationary, much lower bandwidth, and charges about $8000 for a gigabyte… I‘m not sure what Ku or Ka band GEO providers charge, but I doubt you can find anything competitive there either, and these require very large antennas.
Considering the coverage map is mostly coastal waters, private LTE and 5g are the 'budget' competition (for now). In some areas like the Gulf of Mexico, a not insignificant portion of the water is serviced by LTE that you can roam onto using a conventional TMobile, Sprint or AT&T SIM, often without an additional cost.
I work in the space industry and follow SATCOM closely. This is a very competitive space. Companies like Viasat, Iridium and Inmarsat already work in this vertical. SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective, but the big question is will a LEO operator provide better coverage than a GEO operator?