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Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

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Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#451

Post by jonplackett »

ncallaway wrote: post #433
RapidFire wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History tells us it is far better to let Martians govern themselves. The colonies would eventually rebel regardless; might as well embrace it and let them dictate their own laws. That being said. Guns on mars! GUNS ON MARS!!! They have a rIGHt to hunt space deer!

I agree that any Mars colony should very quickly become independent. However, I think we should wait until there are enough people on Mars that there can be a small representative government (or other form of government that they would choose). Mars shouldn't be independent when the first 10 people land on the surface of the planet. This tos item has always been my biggest complaint about Starlink. I shouldn't be for…

> I shouldn't be forced to take a position on premature Martian independence just because I hate Comcast.

We really do live in the future!

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#452

Post by jonplackett »

gambiting wrote: post #351
whylo wrote: post #316

Interesting snippet from the terms of service: > For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that Elon added this to potentially establish his own governance over Mars(or his descendants) but yeah, I think good luck with that.

Yeah I think he'd be a shoe-in for Presidente of Mars.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#453

Post by bogomipz »

walrus01 wrote: post #40

I have been using a starlink beta terminal for 3 months now, ask me whatever you want. Day job is senior network engineer for a regional-sized (4 US states) fiber based ISP. My most important message to everyone reading this is that it's not intended to compete with properly implemented wireline based services. It's going to absolutely blow away consumer-grade highly oversubscribed, bottom of the barrel ku and ka ban…

Can you say what type of average bandwidth and latency you are seeing? And how does it compare to the data plan or tier you are beta testing.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#454

Post by spamtarget »

sschueller wrote: post #328
whylo wrote: post #316

Interesting snippet from the terms of service: > For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.

So whom ever gets there first makes the rules? However if this is not suppped to be a joke then this is absolutely insane. There is no way humans, other then maybe a few austranouts will make it to mars in the next 20 years by which this service will be obsolete or no longer exist. Edit: If HN is still around in 20 years I will be asking you to reconsider your down votes.

what downvotes? i can only upvote

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#455

Post by jonplackett »

martinald wrote: post #375
geerlingguy wrote: post #14

I was able to place an actual order just last week in St. Louis, MO. I will be using it and doing some tests in an area that actually has cable Internet (though spotty, and until very recently was limited to less than 20 Mbps up, no matter how much you paid). But you have to realize, when you look at the $600 initial cost and $100 monthly fee—this will bring 100+ Mbps down and 15+ Mbps up to so many places (even in s…

Let's see how well it copes with more users. My guess is it won't cope well. There is only 20gig/sec of capacity per satelite, and I believe that is raw speed, which will get hammered in poor weather conditions and more FEC or less efficient QAM is required. 20gig/sec is not a lot of capacity for many thousands of square kms. It's 1-2k users at peak times watching Netflix for example on 1080p or 4K streams, nevermind…

That's mostly OK though. It makes no sense financially in cities anyway.

I would love to get Starlink just because it's awesome, but I'm in a city and can get 350gbps broadband for £50 a month so it would be kinda pointless.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#456

Post by bahmboo »

walrus01 wrote: post #110
Jedd wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect a fair bit of interest from latency-sensitive markets (eg finance) here in Australia. A few years ago when I was in the WAN optimisation space, IIRC Sydney/Singapore latency was ~150ms, partly raw distance, partly because the route was physically quite convoluted. There's some expectation that once Starlink's mesh comms ramp up, it'll be significantly faster to go up to a bird, across through one or more at…

in terms of raw capacity, I do not think that the intersatellite laser links (if/when they do get that working, which is a long ways off, 10 out of the 1050+ satellites right now have them, and none in production use), will approach anywhere near the capacity of a 40 or 80 channel, coherent 100/200/400GbE DWDM submarine line terminal. it's a whole other order of magnitudes.

Check out this analysis of starlink ground relay routing vs fiber https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#457

Post by ecpottinger »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #347
ninkendo wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. The intersattelite laser link is still vaporware at this point, and I’d wager always will be. It turned out to be a much more difficult problem than they originally anticipated, and so they’re basically not doing it. I will be very surprised if it ever happens.

https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-laser-test/ ahem

Why do people keep betting against Elon's plans, they always lose in the long run.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#458

Post by ecpottinger »

apcragg wrote: post #440
herpderperator wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I am not OP, but this is pretty easily found on the site.) $499 USD for the dish, $99 USD per month for service (no data cap.) Price seems to change to local currency if your country is not USA.

I don't have any insider info but there is absolutely no chance that the dish is costing them even <2x what they are charging for it. I don't really see how their business model pencils out even assuming massive oversubscription, perfectly geographically distributed customers, and the new laser links. It's just hard to make it work when your satellites fall out of the sky and need replacing. The technology certainly…

Why? It will take less than two years, maybe one year subscription to pay for the dish, and calculation show $10 a month pays for the satellites. It looks like pure profit for any customer who uses their service for three or more years, and there are a lot of customers out there.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#459

Post by hedora »

systemvoltage wrote: post #22

I am not sure if this is wishful thinking but can Starlink lead to growth of smaller communities that are self-sustaining (produce their own renewable electricity, food, etc) that cannot simply exist due to connectivity constraints? I have a dream of the world where we live in 1-10k population small towns littered around the globe, connected through starlink and public ways, and the idea of cities would become obsole…

The smaller communities in you describe in the US often have better internet than larger cities.

The trick is to be somewhere AT&T refused to build out to back in their heyday. Those places sometimes have local telephone cooperatives.

Fiber optic cable has been dirt cheap for decades (cheaper than a dirt road, in fact). Gigabit to the home in tiny communities is basically free these days. You don’t even need to dig a trench, since there are inexpensive machines that bore tunnels as they lay fiber behind themselves.

Starlink would make no sense if we simply broke up the ISP duopolies.

Alternatively, people could organize enough candidates to take over their city and county governments, and have those people force right-of-way for local ISPs to be approved.

Even without that, WISP’s are a thing, don’t require right of way (but do require line of sight), and compare favorably to starlink.

Having said that, there are still places where only starlink can reach; it should be a much smaller percentage of the population than it is though.

Re: Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders

#460

Post by VectorLock »

n4r9 wrote: post #309
Robotbeat wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not exactly a long ways off if a dozen satellites are already using it (there were 2 previous ones). Every time SpaceX makes a goal, someone claims it's really far away until it is completed. If there was a need for Terabit/s laser capacity for Starlink, there's no particularly good reason it couldn't be developed.

Musk does tend to achieve his goals eventually although the timescales are generally 2-7 years too ambitious: www.bloomberg.com/features/elon-musk-goals

Damn that doesn't bode well for me getting a Cybertruck any time soon.
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