321–330 of 530 posts
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All surface maritime vessels, military or not, need to advertise their location to anyone who can listen for the purpose of collision avoidance. If they didn't that would probably violate a treaty.
Military ships routinely run with AIS off in peace time. This was the case in at least one of the recent US Navy collisions as I recall.
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…
Know next to nothing about dynamics and constraints of maritime SatCom, but... Seen number of comments about the costs, but honestly wondered why the “one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals” could not be replaced with a hand mounted cheaper DIY rig using the existing Starlink terminals. Guessing, though might be wrong, that Starlink already has this happen using the existing coastal cove…
I suspect the market here is not individuals that want to browse YouTube and check their email.
Market 1: large multi person vessels like cruise ships. At any time someone wants to use the internet, and the ship can 'sublet' out a 2Mbit subset on an time basis.
Market 2: large transport vessels where the owners want a lot of data on what's going on for security reasons. $5k/month and you can have trusted security people keeping a watch over a few dozen cameras 24/7, so you know the crew is doing they job. A bit dystopian but I'd bet there's a market for it.
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?
I would ask two things: a) if you've ever personally lived for months or years at a time 100% dependent upon geostationary based services costing anywhere from $165/mo to $15,000 a month or more, for internet access and links to the outside world b) if you've personally used a starlink terminal the actual coverage isn't there yet for things like mid ocean, because starlink satellites in the present architecture need…
i have - it was horrible. i was at least on land, and could drive with my laptop to a point where i could finally get cell service and tether my laptop whenever i needed internet service (need to download a new copy of Xcode? that's 15% of your monthly allotted bandwidth). it wasn't the speed or bandwidth so much as the latency: 900ms each way meant nothing could be close to "real time", which made things much more difficult.
I appreciate the LEO of starlink, but without essentially "free" launches, there's no way it could be financially viable.
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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…
The problem is actually that most of those systems are on considerably less advanced tech than Starlink and as a result only have a fraction of the capacity. Thus each piece of capacity costs more.. thus the very high costs of Iridium and Viasat. Their profit margins aren't actually that good because their costs are so high compared to their capacity and the costs are so high that demand simply doesn't materialise -…
Iridium and Starlink operate in completely different bands (L vs Ka), with orders of magnitude more bandwidth available on Ka than on L. That (and the fleet size, which differs by 2-3 orders of magnitudes) is where the significantly lower bandwidth stems from.
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Like other mention, its regulatory. But its also related to groundstations, the satellites bounce the signal down to land. They're transitioning to satellites with the capability to network between themselves which will reduce the need for groundstations. I don't know how much they really limit coverage due to borders. Like if you get one in colombia and just move it to venezuela, does it still work? They dont have p…
My family is using a directv antena bought in colombia and paying service in colombia, in Venezuela, so I'm pretty sure the market will try to do that as soon as they lunch in colombia
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…
They need to have a minimum number of satellites before they can enable inter-satellite communication. Apparently its getting there.
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Intelsat’s numbers look horrible, and Wikipedia says they recently filed for bankruptcy: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTEQ/intelsat-sa/... SES SA is doing well, but only a couple years of data: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SGBAF/ses-sa/profi...
Several years ago I ensured that nothing in my 401k and other retirement savings plans has any exposure to geostationary owner stock.
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.
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The problem is actually that most of those systems are on considerably less advanced tech than Starlink and as a result only have a fraction of the capacity. Thus each piece of capacity costs more.. thus the very high costs of Iridium and Viasat. Their profit margins aren't actually that good because their costs are so high compared to their capacity and the costs are so high that demand simply doesn't materialise -…
Iridium was the first network to successfully operate inter-satellite links more than 20 years ago. I wouldn't call it "considerably less advanced". Iridium and Starlink operate in completely different bands (L vs Ka), with orders of magnitude more bandwidth available on Ka than on L. That (and the fleet size, which differs by 2-3 orders of magnitudes) is where the significantly lower bandwidth stems from.
They also followed different engineering principles, Iridium was engineered to perfection while Starlink is hacked until it works and paper over the kinks with sheer scale and many iterations.
Worth mentioning I have nothing but admiration for the original Iridium constellation, it was decades ahead of it's time, it's just so unfortunate they didn't see that broadband needs were going to dominate communications in time or maybe Motorola in it's original glory would still be around today.