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Starlink Ground Station Map

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Re: Starlink Ground Station Map

#51

Post by sliken »

KiwiJohnno wrote: post #42
ackbar03 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their eventual goal is to allow communication directly between the satellites I guess they'll have to though if they want to make it more scale-able? They satellites will always have to be up in space, but with communication between them they won't have to build ground stations everywhere. Plus ground stations themselves have to have good internet connectivity

Another huge potential market for Starlink will be internet links to ships at sea, or aircraft. When far from land there would be no ground station in range of the satellites overhead, and laser crosslink is the only way to make this work.

Or skip real time, and allow a store and forward setup for, imagine if you could send/receive a few MB of a few times an hour.

Re: Starlink Ground Station Map

#52

Post by paxys »

supernova87a wrote: post #21

On a tangent, I wonder what effects Starlink will have in countries where the government wants to control or filter/restrict people's internet access?

Realistically Starlink will register as an ISP in the country and follow government rules for censorship like all the rest.

Re: Starlink Ground Station Map

#53

Post by sumedh »

yosito wrote: post #48
supernova87a wrote: post #21

On a tangent, I wonder what effects Starlink will have in countries where the government wants to control or filter/restrict people's internet access?

I know Cuba strictly controls which antennas can be imported into the country. I think it would be pretty hard to sneak a Starlink device in undetected, even if Starlink supported it.

> I think it would be pretty hard to sneak a Starlink device in undetected,

I am sure people who smuggle drugs will find a way.

Re: Starlink Ground Station Map

#54

Post by sumedh »

cameldrv wrote: post #26
supernova87a wrote: post #21

On a tangent, I wonder what effects Starlink will have in countries where the government wants to control or filter/restrict people's internet access?

For other sat phones and sat internet, if a country makes it illegal, the sat carriers don't provide service when you're in that country.

What happens if you are in a border area and one country its legal and one country its illegal?

Re: Starlink Ground Station Map

#55

Post by stirlo »

aeyes wrote: post #37
stirlo wrote: post #2

Those stations in Chile are going to revolutionise comms down there. I trekked to El Chalten in 2019 and the entire town was connected with a ~150mb microwave link. With thousands of tourists in town it had slowed to a crawl. Starlink won’t do much in cities but for regional areas it will open massive opportunities particularly in tourism with today’s instagramming travellers.

El Chalten is in Argentina and its a completely different story over there. Chile has fiber all the way to the very south and is in the process of further expanding this network to all relevant cities in the south until the end of next year. https://foa.subtel.gob.cl/mapa-de-proyecto-foa/

I am well aware El Chalten is in Argentina, hopefully there's not a requirement to have a national base station to serve a particular country. The Patagonian location should be able to cover both Argentina and Chile effectively.

Interesting to see Chile's new Fibre network taking shape. I guess it was a factor in the placement decision for these base stations though I imagine they were also located in Chile for the higher wealth and economic stability compared to Argentina.

Re: Starlink Ground Station Map

#56

Post by walrus01 »

supernova87a wrote: post #21

On a tangent, I wonder what effects Starlink will have in countries where the government wants to control or filter/restrict people's internet access?

A starlink terminal needs to transmit in known bands and have clear unobstructed view of the sky, and looks quite distinctive. Authoritarian states like Iran are totally capable of training cops to use portable spectrum analyzers, which are not nearly as big or costly as they used to be.

I'm not saying it's an impossible problem to solve, but will require some real time and effort.

Re: Starlink Ground Station Map

#57

Post by walrus01 »

supernova87a wrote: post #17

Does anyone have an image of what one of these ground stations looks like? Do they piggyback on some existing antenna shack? Or did they build their own from scratch? I also wonder whether they considered partnering with AWS Ground Station? https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/ Or maybe the Starlink constellation's requirements are not amenable to that?

> also wonder whether they considered partnering with AWS Ground Station? https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/

Absolutely not since kuiper will be a direct competitor, and starlink's earth station design is their own proprietary equipment.

The majority of them are colocated with long haul DWDM regen huts, where they buy transport to the nearest major city. In the western US states they're adjacent to either Zayo or lumen (CenturyLink) sites.

Re: Starlink Ground Station Map

#58

Post by walrus01 »

chrissnell wrote: post #5

These are some very strange locations. Many of them are way out on country roads, some in places where I’m imagining they had to spent some money to get power service. Check out Panaca, NV, near the Utah border. I’ve been right through here and it’s super desolate. I’ve also been near the one in Evanston, WY and the one outside of Hutchinson, KS. There ain’t nothin’ out there! What’s the reasoning for these locations…

DWDM regen huts on major inter city fiber paths are usually out in some real randomly weird locations. Like the one in Prosser, WA. They're sited wherever they can get cheap land with electricity and a road passable by a normal pickup truck or telecom work van, approximately every 80 km of fiber, plus or minus a bit.

Re: Starlink Ground Station Map

#59

Post by walrus01 »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #15
chrissnell wrote: post #5

These are some very strange locations. Many of them are way out on country roads, some in places where I’m imagining they had to spent some money to get power service. Check out Panaca, NV, near the Utah border. I’ve been right through here and it’s super desolate. I’ve also been near the one in Evanston, WY and the one outside of Hutchinson, KS. There ain’t nothin’ out there! What’s the reasoning for these locations…

The majority of sites in the United States, actually all of them I've checked, are pre-existing fiber shelters, mostly CenturyLink's in the west. They exist at various points on the fiber line for add-drop and power injection. It's not especially unusual to negotiate with carriers to install equipment at these sites as part of your transit agreement. I don't immediately see any aerial photos where SpaceX's equipment…

One thing to clarify there's no power injecting going on, unless you mean optically through things like Raman amps and EDFAs...

Long haul terrestrial fiber cables aren't like submarine fiber which has copper lines to carry high voltage power for submarine repeaters/amps. The power at each site is self contained, usually a fairly normal feed from local grid utility, backup generators (diesel or propane), and -48vdc rectifier + battery setups of normal Telco grade equipment.

Re: Starlink Ground Station Map

#60

Post by lmm »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #47
ec109685 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are working on satellite to satellite links: https://spacenews.com/spacex-adds-laser-crosslinks-to-polar-...

True but for best latency and speeds a direct link back to ground would be best. I think the laser links would be more for remote areas and oceans where downlinks are impossible.

> True but for best latency and speeds a direct link back to ground would be best.

Speed maybe, latency no. Light is faster in a vacuum than through a fiber optic cable, so a satellite-to-satellite path would generally be faster even though it has to go a few hundred km further.

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