311–320 of 530 posts
Is anything know about the power consumption of the Starlink antenna? Does the maritime version use less power than the conventional unit? The fixed-location version of Starlink consumes around 60 to 100 W constantly which is problem if you want to e.g. use solar panels on a sail boat to supply the device.
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> 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.
highly unlikely, the per day cost of operating a medium sized ship in an offshore environment with actual human staffing, fuel, maintenance, purchase or lease cost of the ship itself is extreme. the one thing any satellite operator absolutely does not want is absurd ongoing monthly recurring costs to run their earth stations.
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…
Call me confused, but if these satellites are not geostationary, why are the both the inland coverage and coastal coverage mostly limited to political boundaries? Shouldn't coverage be available anywhere there are satellites overhead?
for instance right now without fully operational satellite-to-satellite laser links, if you wanted to have live starlink services in afghanistan, you theoretically could, but you'd need to have a starlink earth station in somewhere like Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Or Peshawar, Pakistan. Or southeastern Uzbekistan. All politically problematic and very protective of their own domestic telecom companies.
Not the sort of place you can just drop a starlink earth station and buy a protected 100Gbps protected DWDM circuit to the nearest major city for an IX point, as starlink has done with their earth stations colocated with DWDM ILAs in the US pacific northwest.
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This is different. The problem of providing offshore satcom with LEOsats is a quantified engineering problem. IOW, the industry knows quite well what technologies will solve the problem and Starlink has those technologies in place. The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be. None of that is true for the self-driving car problem. That problem still contains a multitude…
> The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be. Those communications are still an unsolved and hugely difficult engineering problem. It will be awesome if SpaceX has actually achieved this: getting the kind of precision required to communicate over direct laser links between specks of dust hundreds of km apart traveling at thousands of km per hour is no easy feat.
Can anyone explain how the ping is so low on starlink? I always assumed satellite internet was always going to be inferior for online gaming, but everything I find online says that starlink is great for it. I guess I don’t have a specific question. It’s just one of those engineering marvels that I never thought I’d see. No wires, but still frag people at <90ms ping.
Note that latency isn't as good as Starlink advertises. My residential service is supposed to get 20-40ms latency. In reality I get 40-80ms (as measured with ping to 8.8.8.8) and it's highly variable. Starlink latency is still quite good and a completely different category of service than any geosync satellite ISP. But they've got a ways to go to improve it. A lot of gamers seem unhappy with it right now, FWIW.
i think the record low was 14.8 ms
Is anything know about the power consumption of the Starlink antenna? Does the maritime version use less power than the conventional unit? The fixed-location version of Starlink consumes around 60 to 100 W constantly which is problem if you want to e.g. use solar panels on a sail boat to supply the device.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Mar 31, 2022 datapoint is -0.21%. They do make a good profit in the years they do, but my point is they also have quite a bit of volatility. I would not touch that business without the 10%+ profit margin opportunities.
Definitely agree, I probably wouldn't touch them at this point any more at all. Was just replying to the notion that this couldn't be artificial highway robbery just because their net margin isn't great. I believe it definitely still can be, because apparently the only way these companies are even in business right now is exactly by highway robbery.
it is not like they have an extreme profit margin between their actual operating cost and the cost that a chunk of dedicated 1:1 transponder kHz/MHz (or a whole 36 MHz transponder) can be sold to the end user.
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Inverse square law issues? Naively, cost+speed+coverage=value?
Mostly it's "Elon likes to promise things that he may not be able to do" issue
"Tesla production up 87% year-on-year!"
"But what about Cybertruck, Roadster, and Semi? Fail."
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Iridium Go is 2.4 Kbits/s compared with 350 Mbps here, and data is charged in minutes (i.e. the slower/worse the connection the more it costs). Apples and oranges. Iridium GO is cheap, but that's all you can really say positively about it. It is arguably not even offering "internet" in the normal sense, since loading a website would be incredibly expensive/bad and is therefore restricted to low data rate messaging an…
Iridium Go is designed to hit a price point. Whats the cheapest way to get data out in the middle of the Atlantic and is basically plug and play. It has leapfrogged SSB packet radio as the preferred, low cost data service. Also data is not charged in minutes, it's theoretically unlimited. The voice plans are charged in minutes and I don't think worth it. Just like the RO water-makers in the past, I believe this is th…
There's no competition up there, GEO sats are too far north to see the Pole.