661–670 of 831 posts
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Apple's feature is not comparable. It is extremely low bandwidth and requires special hardware and holding the phone pointing in a certain direction. Starlink acts as a regular (albeit low bandwidth) 4G tower in space.
Starlink DTC is also very low bandwidth in this generation, it’s is a fundamentally similar RF link budget
Vertical integration by Starlink of the cheapest launch capability in the world (by far) is the reason there are no competitors, and there will be no competitors. The pace of innovation at SpaceX is not THE reason - it’s an additional reason that no one has a snowballs chance in hell of ever catching Starlink. I’ve seen talk of competitor satellite networks or a possible competitor emerging. Folks it’s game set and m…
Sure the prices might not be quite as good as what Starlink gets but definitely comparable in big-O notation (especially compared to other launch providers).
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Rocket Lab and Peter Beck are your best hope!
I think the potential comptetitors in this business (low latency satellite internet megaconstellation) missed their opportunity. Starship is very close to being able to put next gen Starlink satellites into orbit ("very close" as in most likely within a year or so). Once that happens, it's over, there will not be competition for at least a decade. Before Bezos and others (and/or EU/China) build their own Starship cop…
Listen to the most recent RKLB earnings call. Constellation on the way, Neutron launching in 2025. There will be competition.
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Off grid cabins could use this too.
Nah, those should use a proper Starlink dish. Direct to cell bandwidth is obviously very limited.
You need very little bandwidth because there is typically not a lot happening at a remote cabin.
> ENGINEERED BY SPACEX It would be very interesting to see some kind of diagram depicting all of the corporate entities Musk is involved in and how each entity does business with one another. xAI just raised billions to help Tesla build out FSD (or at least that was part of the pitch). His empire is divided into so many corporate entities, but they all cross-pollinate and are clearly under his direct control for the…
While your overall question is valid, Starlink is simply a division of SpaceX. There's no "relationship" to consider. They are one and the same.
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"SpaceX is really good and it's hard to compete with them" is not an economic reason for it to be winner takes all. Economic reasons would be, for example, regulations that either explicitly or implicitly prohibit others from competing, as are present in many terrestrial ISP markets. Some way for SpaceX to corner the market for some essential resource like spectrum or orbits and exclude competitors that way.
Vertical integration is definitely one. It's such a big factor it can cause regulators to break up a company. See Google/Chrome as an example from last week.
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Starlink is normally a single hop from a home to a satellite and then down to a base station hooked up to fiber. To work over the ocean you pass messages between satellites potentially several hops and then eventually down to a base station, but that’s inherently constrained as with all mess topologies you get far less bandwidth than initially seems possible. So in part it’s overhead to deal with inefficiencies and i…
> Starlink is normally a single hop from a home to a satellite and then down to a base station Is this true? If yes, how do you know it?
If anyone from Starlink or SpaceX is reading these comments here’s what you want to do: Sell your own branded trail cam with solar charging and LTE from orbit. You can charge $25-$40 a month for unlimited pictures sent from the cam. This would open up hunters, nature enthusiasts, and researchers to be able to place their hardware anywhere in the field without worrying about connectivity. Here in SWVA we have deep hol…
In Finland, i get 5Mbps LTE uplink for EUR 4 per month, for a trailcam, with unlimited use (at least in principle). So $20 per month sounds expensive, but obviously there are places where one has no earthly LTE and then it could be justified. In general, having low-bandwidth Starlink IoT connections globally accessible would be just great, I can see lots of usage.
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It's not very likely. USC students just broke the non-government, non-corporate rocket launch altitude record, reaching 143.25km[1]. But that is still a long way from the ~500km that Starlink operates at. On top of that the person would have to develop a guidance system and payload capable of targeting and sufficiently damaging one of these satellites - not an easy feat. Finally, it seems unlikely that a single hit w…
Height is not the issue, you need to reach near orbital velocity, which is much harder.