351–360 of 530 posts
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There's very little value with Iridium -- do you work for them or something?
I thought they went bankrupt and had to deorbit all the satellites so I googled them. They have 1.7M subscribers. Seems they are doing something right.
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Iridium was a marvel of engineering no-doubt but Starlink as a constellation is in a different league entirely. 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…
big difference also is that iridium was designed from the outset to address handheld size customer terminals like an original iridum 9505 phone, starlink is something that needs a considerably larger fixed phased array. rf laws of physics being what they are I don't see a ku/ka-band starlink handheld phone or anything similar to the iridium L/S-band hockey puck sized antennas any time soon. the business model was cle…
It'd only work well outside, though.
"$5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals." wow! Why cant you just take your normal starlink with you on your boat? Don't people do that with RVs?
People do install normal starlink on boats [1]. The $10K/$5K price tag really has me scratching my head about what they are thinking. Does look like they plan to cover the entire ocean, so at least there is a specific benefit they can point to. They're definitely giving up a lot of everyday coastal business in hopes of making it up with a few whales. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHHCK6aARn0
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Definitely subsidizing the losses in the consumer business. Without Starship Starlink is on a path to bankruptcy like the companies that came before.
Please share your math. At $15M to launch 50 v1 satellites costing $250k each to build, they are looking at $320k per satellite At $110/mo with 500k customers, they can afford to launch roughly 170 satellites per month. That is about break-even for their average launch cadence over the last 3 months.
That is not to say that, even when they can launch new birds, they will be able to make a profit on regular peon service. They probably will depend utterly on top-dollar accounts. Don't be surprised if your peon bandwidth gets disappointingly slow as they add more customers, and more who are more important than you.
The second sentence in the paragraph at the top of the home page is pricing. Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction. Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you wh…
Could you share a screenshot? I don't see pricing anywhere on the page, though near the bottom it says "PAY AS YOU GO". Likely geolocation, though I'm curious what I'm missing. EDIT: used VPN. Canada version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea. US Version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea. $5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,…
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> 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…
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Elon on everyday astronaut: "Falcon neither has the volume nor the mass [to] orbit capability required for Starlink 2.0," Musk said.
It's not clear to me whether this means physically or economically; i.e., could the 2.0 satellites be put into orbit by Falcon but not at a cost that would make it worth it?
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https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-laser-test/
Lasers require a lot of power. I doubt this is going to work.
This statement is meaningless as written. You can emit as much or as little with a laser as you like. You could say "a lot of power is required for a reliable inter-satellite optical link", to which I would say "citation needed".
Iridium has been doing inter-satellite links since the late 90s and moving from RF to optical doesn't change the game that much.
Always a treat to see the urban HN crowd comment with great confidence on anything outside of their immediate area. While hopefully eventually SpaceX will bring this down and be more disruptive, right now they simply cannot possibly meet demand, they are very rightfully anxious to get revenue going for Starlink, they're in a completely unique level of performance for maritime, and HELLO FOLKS, here is a taste of what…
Having worked in two way satellite for many years it is always very amusing to see the HN crowd who've never implemented remote terminals in physical reality... They should definitely go price some Inmarsat I-4 or I-5 based BGAN services or gyro stabilized maritime C/Ku/Ka band VSAT terminals before thinking this is expensive. You can easily spend $130,000 on a fairly basic geostationary VSAT terminal for something l…
Absolutely everyone can (and does) have an opinion on how to run the entire economy. At least you guys can say a bunch of stuff specific stuff and 99% of everyone will have to take you at your word and pretty much shuts up, lol.
I totally get it though, has to be frustrating. I was really shocked at the price but when its put into perspective _if_ it works it's clearly going to be a significant improvement.