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Starlink Maritime

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Re: Starlink Maritime

#401

Post by shaklee3 »

mlyle wrote: post #182
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…

It's not that hard of a problem to do fast free-space optical in space within a single orbital shell. The only thing that makes it hard for SpaceX is the relatively small mass and volume budgets on their satellites to do precision pointing with, and that you'd really want each satellite to be able to do multiple links and that's taking up a lot of space.

it's extremely hard to do at those data rates. if it wasn't there would be existing examples. Facebook tried and failed.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#402

Post by bitcharmer »

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?

> SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective

Depends on how you define marketing. I work for a very big and well known organization. We wanted to engage with them about an interesting initiative. I's almost impossible to reach out to anyone from SpaceX. Go and try to find an email address or a phone number.

Then, even when you obtain their sales email you will not get any response whatsoever.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#403

Post by shaklee3 »

jhugo wrote: post #359
roflyear wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lasers require a lot of power. I doubt this is going to work.

"Lasers require a lot of power." 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.

iridium rates compared to SpaceX are not comparable and not the same technology

Re: Starlink Maritime

#404

Post by shaklee3 »

xoa wrote: post #68

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…

this was the industry I worked in for over a decade and your comment comes off as someone that doesn't know the economics. there have been many, many articles of people in this industry showing that SpaceX cannot sustain this burn rate without major changes. their capacity is nowhere near the cadence they said, they're not keeping up with demand (in a bad way), and the ISL is not working yet. so far they've been fortunate to win rdof money, but for the amount of highly paid engineers they have it won't last long enough.

your post only has "what ifs", but none of that is working yet, and coastal coverage isn't going to win contracts with cruise ships and real customers.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#405

Post by silverlyra »

xoa wrote: post #271
WJW wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time NATO partners can no longer trust each other with the position of their naval vessels you have serious problem already. The official satcoms are all NATO-shared satellites anyway, so you could probably derive their positions from that. With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" o…

> With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" operations that block any non-essential comms. As a practical matter as well, both in theory and based on usage in Ukraine, Starlink appears to be a somewhat challenging target too. A phased array doing 10-12 GHz is a fairly tight beam and it's tr…

Another commenter here mentioned that Starlink user terminals include a GPS receiver, and report their coordinates back to Starlink. That'd create an alternate vector for locating maritime users – exfiltrate that position information from their servers.

I had a hard time finding confirmation of this online (lots of hits about Starlink potentially being used _as_ a GNSS), but one of the photos of this teardown of a terminal highlights the GPS receiver: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teard...

Re: Starlink Maritime

#406

Post by shaklee3 »

walrus01 wrote: post #160
xoa wrote: post #68

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…

as mentioned previously, I worked on exactly this for 15 years, and I also don't understand how people with knowledge of the industry believe SpaceX is going to be profitable on starlink without some course correction.

nobody is debating that a under-provisioned service can be great during the honeymoon phase. but this won't last. they're strapped for cash and these enterprise plays are purely to keep afloat while the consumer business is burning cash

Re: Starlink Maritime

#407

Post by wumpus »

bobsmooth wrote: post #396
HWR_14 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I figure that any investor who complains about 87% annual growth gets what they deserve.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#408

Post by shaklee3 »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #287
sillysaurusx wrote: post #146

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.

what you're experiencing is what everyone in the industry already knew, but we got slammed by musk fans for pointing it out years ago. the ping will never be 20ms for most people. path loss is only a small part of a ping.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#409

Post by HWR_14 »

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.

Doesn't RF just get shot in all directions and get picked up by the satellites easily, whereas the lasers need to aim precisely when transmitted?

Re: Starlink Maritime

#410

Post by shaklee3 »

walrus01 wrote: post #315
NelsonMinar wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

before my area got loaded I saw 15-20ms RTT from my starlink terminal to downtown seattle, now more like 25ms. i think the record low was 14.8 ms

I know you're usually here to promote starlink, but all ookla data shows starlink is 40+ms on average. it's dishonest to pretend 20ms will ever be normal.
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