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Starlink Maritime

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Re: Starlink Maritime

#391

Post by shaklee3 »

walrus01 wrote: post #253
lotsofpulp wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Viasat while it has a lot of consumer facing exposure (and contracts to do things like build teleports for the DoD) is not a major player in the market of actually owning geostationary satellites. Look at entities like Intelsat and SES.

in terms of bandwidth they own more than all those others. it doesn't matter how many satellites you have if the capacity of each is tiny.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#392

Post by wumpus »

wpietri wrote: post #385
wumpus wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best part about the "Elon is a liar" meme is that you can use it on successful, on-time products, too. Very powerful: "Tesla production up 87% year-on-year!" "But what about Cybertruck, Roadster, and Semi? Fail."

Quoted post unavailable.

> Your theory is that we can only call somebody a liar if 100% of their statements turn out to be false?

No, but thanks for twisting my words.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#393

Post by HWR_14 »

bobsmooth wrote: post #386
wpietri wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

There's a difference between someone that promises the world and never delivers and someone that promises the world and occasionally delivers.

Why? In both cases, what they say is meaningless.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#394

Post by wolrah »

jhugo wrote: post #357
Phlarp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

You may not be aware that Iridium has been doing inter-satellite links since the late 90s. Using optical rather than RF doesn't really change the game that much.

> Using optical rather than RF doesn't really change the game that much.

The precision required for aiming is directly related to the wavelength. Iridium NEXT satellites use Ka band with a wavelength around ten millimeters where anything light related has a wavelength measured in hundreds of nanometers.

The forward/backward links are a lot easier than the inter-plane links, but it's still not trivial because you're trying to hit an object the size of a small car with a laser from over 1000 miles away. Not impossible by any means, but there's not a lot of margin for error when they're looking to be able to transfer around 100 gigabits per second over this link. Other FSO systems work at significantly lower bandwidth and/or shorter range. That's not even getting in to the inter-plane links, where the target is constantly moving even in a relative sense.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#395

Post by shaklee3 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #255
walrus01 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a non vertically integrated geostationary-satellite-owning company like intelsat, ses, eutelsat or arabsat or similar has little to no control over how much Boeing charges for a fully equipped 702 series satellite bus, or the disposable rocket launch costs.

It’s incredible to behold. Can you imagine either being a satellite comms service provider or space vehicle provider trying to acquire or raise capital to acquire your compliment to vertically integrate and reap higher margins? You’ll get laughed out of the board room or the investment bank office. And instead, SpaceX knocks it out if the park with reusability such that they say to themselves (or rather, Musk tells t…

geo companies don't care much about launch cost since it's infrequent, and SpaceX has not shown starlink has a path to be profitable. I know it's the cool thing to do to love SpaceX, but separate the launch from the satellites. the latter hasn't shown it's sustainable unless there's a large influx of government subsidies.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#396

Post by bobsmooth »

HWR_14 wrote: post #393
bobsmooth wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between someone that promises the world and never delivers and someone that promises the world and occasionally delivers.

Why? In both cases, what they say is meaningless.

In the latter case, there is precedent. Elon promised to revolutionize space travel, he's done so. He promised to revolutionize electric cars, he's done so. He promised to revolutionize intercity traffic, that didn't pan out. Clearly you can see the difference between him and someone that's never delivered on what they promised.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#397

Post by wolrah »

maccam94 wrote: post #210
wolrah wrote: post #31

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…

> as far as I'm aware it hasn't been openly demonstrated to work yet They did a test in late 2020[0], and all launches since June 2021 have been Starlink v1.5 with lasers[1]. 0: https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-laser-test/ 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_launches

What I mean by openly demonstrated to work is some sort of public demo that would require use of the inter-satellite links. The linked article just says they've started testing and been able to move data, which means nothing about how well it actually works.

I'd even be satisfied by specific claims of test results that could be validated once the capability is officially activated.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#398

Post by shaklee3 »

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

which is exactly what starlink will be when it has enough customers. it's already having a slow decline in speeds as the network fills, and it's not even close to capacity in most areas.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#399

Post by wolrah »

intrasight wrote: post #121
wolrah wrote: post #31

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…

> Supposedly every satellite launched in 2022 has the capability Additionally there's the issue that their operating licenses don't allow inter-satellite communications.

> Additionally there's the issue that their operating licenses don't allow inter-satellite communications.

This is of course a much easier problem to solve than putting a dynamic mesh network in space.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#400

Post by shaklee3 »

ww520 wrote: post #254
aml183 wrote: post #164

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?

For latency and bandwidth, LEO beats GEO hands down.

bandwidth per dollar is what matters, and Leo is not as good as geo in that regard. if you threw the same amount of money SpaceX is putting into starlink into a viasat-3 you'd have more bandwidth and better coverage.
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