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Starlink Maritime

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Re: Starlink Maritime

#421

Post by walrus01 »

shaklee3 wrote: post #410
walrus01 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm usually here to promote starlink? Before yesterday go through my comment history for weeks or months into the past and find how many times I mention it... Sheesh

For the record if oneweb or kuiper or telesat's proposed LEO networks existed as a viable, usable product right now and worked similarly I'd be equally enthused about them. (Yes, I know about Oneweb beta tests in Alaska)

Re: Starlink Maritime

#422

Post by londons_explore »

Eventually they will enable inter-satellite links.

But they could also quite easily support global coverage by bouncing data off other users dishes. The latency would be a bit higher and the service reliability a bit lower, but I would guess the result would still be far better than alternatives for maritime comms.

I'm actually really surprised they haven't done this already - it seems like something they could easily support, and it means they could deploy to anywhere in the world with mere hours notice, at least for a basic level of service.

Imagine the possibility of a demo sitting in the office of say the telecoms minister of venezuela... "So today, we have no infrastructure in your country. But we have something we'd like permission to deploy. Do you give us permission to transmit to your office to give it a demo? Yes. [Nods to engineer who types a few commands...]. Okay, it's enabled. Here it is working - this is the internet your citizens can get anywhere in the country tomorrow if you give us approval."

Re: Starlink Maritime

#423

Post by walrus01 »

shaklee3 wrote: post #390
jpgvm wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

this is completely incorrect. viasat's technology is far more advanced than starlink. just because it's not LEO doesn't mean it's simple. and starlink doesn't have dramatically increased capacity. they have a moderate increase over the busy areas geo incumbents have. most of their capacity is over water.

The end results of the link budgets required for geostationary to low cost consumer grade terminals means that now matter how good viasat's tech is, the end result is going to be mediocre. Have you actually lived on the far end of a consumer grade highly contended oversubscribed ku/ka band vsat terminal?

Viasat's modems and rf chain stuff are about as good as can be expected within the very constrained BOM budget, antenna gains and link budgets involved.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#424

Post by walrus01 »

shaklee3 wrote: post #398
walrus01 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you think that the network engineers running starlink in Redmond are going to walk blindly into the mistakes made in excessively oversubscribed networks by every pre existing geostationary vsat consumer grade service, you must have a very low opinion of their intellect, experience and ability to research the market.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#425

Post by jonah »

lxgr wrote: post #334
jonah wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they can do it - my parents have Hughes satellite internet. I've been able to do multi-person video calls from their house. It's pretty low bandwidth though 40Mbps or so claimed I think and something like 50Gb/Month data cap. It was faster and cheaper to tether to my cell phone while working from their house.

Out of curiosity – why don't your parents use fixed 4G or 5G internet in that case?

Good question. They may not be aware of it. Though I did talk with one of their neighbors who mentioned they had it.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#426

Post by londons_explore »

_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…

If you zoom in on the coverage map, you notice that it's splines manually drawn by whoever made the map.

This isn't the output of some fancy RF model figuring out exactly where you'll get coverage. Nor is it circles of a specific diameter around ground stations. Or even hexagonal cells where coverage will be allowed/denied in their backend config.

In places it seems to follow countries territorial waters (which would be expected due to regulatory issues), but in others it spills out into international waters.

Overall, the map has sufficient 'oddities' that I think there is a good chance it's a rough hand made 'guestimate' coverage map, and won't perfectly reflect where coverage will really be delivered.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#427

Post by FeepingCreature »

shaklee3 wrote: post #395
toomuchtodo wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm just going to throw some numbers out here.

edit: MASSIVE miscalculation fixed!

Let's say they have 12k satellites. With oversubscription at 10? and a third of time over land? but 20gbps capacity for 200mbps connections, you get 333 users per satellite. 12k gives you 4 million users, at $100/mo or $1.2k/y. I'm going to drop that to $80/mo because Starlink need to pay for backhaul, so let's say $1k/y because it's round. So $4 billion annually. Over 12 years of satellite lifetime that's 48 billion. Satellites cost $300k to make, so subtract another 4 billion for production (44 remaining). Sats are launched in batches of 50, requiring 240 launches. Internal costs are somewhere between 30 to 60 million, it's unclear because of reuse, let's say 50 million for 12 billion launch costs, leaving 3 billion a year.

And then there's some operational costs which they pay from that.

So Iunno, it doesn't seem as extremely profitable as my first calc, but it's still probably pretty profitable. And any improvement they make to the satellites over time just adds on top. (Also I don't think they actually have $50 million internal cost per launch.)

edit: Terminals "reportedly cost around $1000 to make" and are sold for $500, so nbd, subtract another 2 billion per customer-lifecycle.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#428

Post by jhugo »

shaklee3 wrote: post #403
jhugo wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

The data rate has very little to do with the complexity of the satellite-to-satellite links, and steering RF and optics isn't as different as you might think.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#429

Post by jhugo »

HWR_14 wrote: post #409
jhugo wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You'd need an excessively powerful transmitter to use an omnidirectional antenna. In the context of a satellite, where power efficiency is crucial, it makes much more sense to use a lower-power transmitter and a directional antenna / beamforming.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#430

Post by kalleboo »

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

Isn't your garden-variety GPON fiber also 32:1 oversubscribed, and cable internet even worse? It doesn't seem like a very useful metric.
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