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Starlink Maritime

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Re: Starlink Maritime

#341

Post by ncmncm »

oceanplexian wrote: post #296
joewadcan wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Starlink satellites orbit closer to the earth than other comms satellites (iridium, oneweb). Closer distance = faster times, in addition to laser links between sats and other spectrum differences. Downside to lower orbit means they won't last as long (a few years) before they are pulled down into earth's atmo. Which is fine since their rocket company will just send up some more cheaply.

In theory, the laser links may bring Starlink below terrestrial latency for point to point communications beyond a certain distance. Light travels through fiber at 7/10ths of the speed of light, but pretty much the actual speed of light through a vacuum. Once you get past the 340km * 2 round trip on both ends, you're actually moving bits around much faster than is physically possible with fiber. Probably even faster…

Chances are, you, dear reader, will not get any of this sweet, sweet, low latency.

Most likely these laser links only go from each satellite to the one ahead and the one behind, in the same orbit. That is good enough. For example, there is an orbit that goes right over New York, London, and Hamburg.

Who wants low latency most is hedge funds. It would be surprising if Starlink did not make anyone who wants it pay through the nose to get traffic one millisecond faster than fiber, 100x that for 2ms, 100x that for 3ms, and on up for longer links. What they would really be buying is not so much getting their own packets N milliseconds ahead of the fiber crowd, which is OK, but rather for their slightly poorer competitors to get packets only N-1 milliseconds ahead, which is super-great.

In fintech, they like to say a microsecond is an eon, a millisecond an eternity. When they can get a millisecond jump on the competition, that can mean millions of dollars every day. So, they will pay it. Gladly.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#342

Post by spiderice »

roflyear wrote: post #232
Someone1234 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't matter. No person outside the mega wealthy are paying for this.

How often do people who aren't mega wealthy find themselves in the middle of the ocean anyway? What non-wealthy person is even looking for this?

Re: Starlink Maritime

#343

Post by walrus01 »

InvaderFizz wrote: post #340
walrus01 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several years ago I ensured that nothing in my 401k and other retirement savings plans has any exposure to geostationary owner stock.

I did the same as soon as Starlink launched. I saw it as an existential threat it is to all the Geo operators. I was headhunted for a SRE position with Viasat last year due to my extensive Satcom background. I noped out as soon as I found out it was Viasat. Not because I dislike them personally, but because I don't want to be laid off next year.

Without going into too much detail I know someone who was headhunted for Telesat's proposed LEO network (too late, too low budget, too little technical clue) and ran away quickly once he had an idea of what he would be getting into.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#344

Post by walrus01 »

lxgr wrote: post #339
walrus01 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

globalstar is a bad joke and not a viable option for maritime services (or over-ocean aviation services) because unlike iridium or inmarsat, its satellite terminal-to-earth-station architecture is a bent pipe. there is zero globalstar mid ocean coverage. there is a reason you will see lots of competing options for people integrating the iridium embedded modems into things designed to go on top of $40 million business…

Is Iridium really competitive for business jets? The bandwidth of even their next-generation satellites does not seem competitive with the GEOs, and I'd guess bizjets should be mostly fine with their latitude limitations. I'd expect most of them to go with one of the Ka band these days; they have pretty small antennas available these days as far as I know.

a small to medium sized business jet can easily mount an iridium terminal on top of it, where even the smallest/least capable geostationary vsat cannot.

you can fairly easily integrate iridium into something as small as a cessna 172...

at the minimum iridium will provide the ability to make phone calls to/from the PSTN while in the middle of an ocean on its smallest terminal. go up in terminal size a bit and you get something good for 500kbps of data.

for very large business jets that would be crossing the atlantic or pacific, that's a different market (overlaps somewhat with the same aviation VSAT terminals you would see on a 737-900 MAX)

Re: Starlink Maritime

#345

Post by xvilka »

_Microft wrote: post #7

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…

Will constellation completion and intersatellite links expand the reach to polar areas as well? It would be a game changer for Arctic and Antarctic.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#346

Post by oxplot »

zanethomas wrote: post #60

I recently acquired Starlink RV for my camper van. Camped out at Lake Powell with zero cellphone and 85mbs of internet!

With WiFi Calling feature of recent phones, you should also be able to send and receive phone calls/SMS as usual too. Tried this on my camping trip to great effect.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#348

Post by jhugo »

walrus01 wrote: post #226
usrn wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Having lived for years with geosyncronous internet: it's not what people think of normally as internet, it's more of a consumerized interesting radio thing. It's not reliable, it's not fast, the latency is insane, the data caps are low. Unless you're working for yourself and doing most of your work on local machines you're not using it for anything interesting.

at the consumer level under $200/mo, assuming what we're talking about a consumer viasat/hughesnet/wildblue type low cost terminal and service, what you're getting is 32:1 or 64:1 or worse oversubscribed

The main issue is the latency, which is still very limiting even if the connection is not oversubscribed.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#349

Post by oxplot »

andrew_ wrote: post #290

We still need a 12v solution for the peasants that boat offshore. The current monthly fee represents a full year of boat payments. Definitely not targeted at consumers.

You can easily use an inverter to go from 12v to 110V/240V and just use the stock adapter. Alternatively, you can get your hands dirty and do what I did [1]. However, I'm fairly certain that the non-maritime accounts won't be able to use the service on water (most likely geofenced) so that Starlink can sell their maritime version.

[1]: https://blog.oxplot.com/powering-starlink-on-the-go-with-tes...

EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#350

Post by oxplot »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #139
SergeAx wrote: post #118

Starlink RV is $135/m and looks exactly the same. I wonder what happens if I put one on the boat? Will Starlink turn it off for usage violation?

Don't know, but it will definitely stop working once you get a few miles off shore in an ocean. That requires intersat communications which the RV plan doesn't provide. (Inland lakes should work fine except perhaps for the very biggest ones like Lake Superior or the Caspian Sea. If lakes don't work with the RV plan, it's not for any technical reason.)

> That requires intersat communications which the RV plan doesn't provide.

Intersat (laser links) comms is not available at the moment. Fairly sure they simply geofence non-maritime accounts. As you can see from the maritime map, it only covers water next to the shore which is a good indicator that they still use ground stations directly to provide service.

EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.

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