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SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

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Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

#71
post #67
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can adjust itself in principle and orient itself. But maybe the motion of the boat might be to much.

Isn't it a phased-array antenna? It can adjust itself at the speed of electronics, without moving parts, so that should not be an issue in any reasonable scenario if the software supports it. A larger problem for use on sea might be that first generation Starlink sats do not have satellite-to-satellite links, so the boat and a ground station would have to be within range of the same satellite.

You still have to orient the whole antenna into the direction of the right part of the sky. From then the phase antenna will be able to track the individual satellites.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

#72
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s about a 7th the world population... According to google “ Almost 4.57 billion people were active internet users as of July 2020, encompassing 59 percent of the global population.” So about 15% of everyone connected to the current internet...

700k / 4.57 billion = 0.01% You're a little off. Check your math. It looks like you mistook 700k for 700 million.

Argh Yeah - I read that as 700m

Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

#73
post #34

I have a house on a farm. I only have relatively high speed internet (25mb/s) b/c someone set up a line of sight system pointing at a mountain as a co-op. My neighbors' house about half a kilometer away is blocked by a hill so they can't use it. When it's cloudy, I have to use my phone as a mobile hotspot. Coming from San Francisco, I didn't realize how many people face this reality of poor connectivity. I don't care…

My parents still live in the house I grew up in. It's about 30 miles from the nearest big city, a top-10 U.S. city. - They had dial-up until the early 2000s. - Then they had that terrible asymmetric satellite service where the upstream service was also dial-up. That lasted a couple of years. - Then they got some kind of two-way sat service. Still terrible latency, but tolerable for the time. - Finally, sometime in th…

So why can't they get Internet via a phone like you do when you go there?

Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

#74
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents still live in the house I grew up in. It's about 30 miles from the nearest big city, a top-10 U.S. city. - They had dial-up until the early 2000s. - Then they had that terrible asymmetric satellite service where the upstream service was also dial-up. That lasted a couple of years. - Then they got some kind of two-way sat service. Still terrible latency, but tolerable for the time. - Finally, sometime in th…

So why can't they get Internet via a phone like you do when you go there?

Data caps and throttling make it prohibitively expensive.

I’ve done it for weeks in the past, and (what I personally consider normal usage) burned through my monthly cap in a week, leaving me with large overage charges that wouldn’t be sustainable long-term. I haven’t heard of a US carrier-provided plan that’s less than several hundreds of dollars, and if there is one it’s likely unavailable in rural areas

Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

#75
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents still live in the house I grew up in. It's about 30 miles from the nearest big city, a top-10 U.S. city. - They had dial-up until the early 2000s. - Then they had that terrible asymmetric satellite service where the upstream service was also dial-up. That lasted a couple of years. - Then they got some kind of two-way sat service. Still terrible latency, but tolerable for the time. - Finally, sometime in th…

So why can't they get Internet via a phone like you do when you go there?

For a year my family used 4G as our home internet (this was around 8 years ago). At the time it was incredibly expensive because you pay by the gig used, and the pay scale is built around using a couple of gigs. Watching a couple of episodes on netflix bumps you into a higher tier for the month. Downloading and then uploading a single 1GB artifact for work could bump you up 2 tiers. I've looked around a bit, and the situation doesn't look much better today; you can pay for a certain data cap, and then pay something like $10 / month / GB over that.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly likely. Keep in mind, Comcast owns NBC as well. So probably we’ll get a lot of negative coverage of Elon Musk on NBC and MSNBC in the process. It’s much easier to lobby against a public villain than a public hero. So every tweet by Musk will be amplified out of context. Wouldn’t surprise me even some allegations of foreign impropriety will surface and soon having starlink becomes a national security unless it’…

I know it's very hip and cool to be cynical about journalistic independence these days but newsrooms still take the concept very seriously. There's simply no mechanism by which the CEO of Comcast could simultaneously a) meaningfully affect NBC's coverage of Elon Musk and b) not have it be an open secret and scandal within the industry. I've worked on the product side of legacy media companies before and trust me, giv…

On “journalistic independence”, NBC told Ed Schultz not to cover Bernie Sanders and why Schultz and Cenk both left the network [1]

Im sure we can agree that ratings are one of the key drivers and pushed by management. Here’s how cable media profited by covering Trump. This Trump coverage resulted in 160% increase in ratings and in return gave Trump $3 billion [2]in free advertising ( I’ve seen $5billion number in total free coverage as well).

[1]https://youtu.be/-0w_8spt-6c [2]https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/487472/

Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

#77
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother's house gets an extraordinary 0.25 Mbit/s download rate. I didn't measure the upload. 50 metres uphill, there's a 4G signal which gets >20 Mbit/s download. But ADSL is only 0.25 Mbit/s, and that's what you're getting in the shadows. It's sold as "up to 8 Mbit/s".

Isn't it possible to install a mast with a pair of directional antennas on the house to get this 4G signal? Plug the antennas in an all-in-one modem/router/access point and enjoy great Internet in the house. 4G is amazing these days, I recently moved from a big city (coax 500 Mbps) to a house that only gets 4G and I barely feel the difference.

No, the house is too low behind a low hill for a short mast, and a very high mast wouldn't be ok. The way to do it would be 4G at the top of the hill and a cable or relay to the house, but as it's a populated village that would need cooperation among residents.

If there was plenty of cooperation and interest among the residents, they could install a better shared solution for the whole village than 4G even. There was a company willing to install something like that. But not enough people signed up to make it worthwhile.

I agree with you about 4G. I switched from ADSL+ to 4G last year in the middle of a city, and it's been a good improvement in download speeds, and an x10 improvement in upload. Netflix works excellently. Though there tend to be latency spikes, and new connections to websites for some reason are quite slow. I actually switched to save costs - unlimited data on 4G was less than half the price of bottom-of-the-range ADSL too.

When I want the best connection out of every option, such as a big download. I switch to my mobile phone, which seems perverse but there we are. I get ~90Mbit/s download via my phone. It's faster than wifi at the office, faster than ADSL, and faster than 4G at home too - the phone has a better modem than the standalone 4G router.

However I've tried 4G in London, which is the largest city in the UK, and it was awfully slow there. Too much density I suspect. So it's not a solution for everywhere. I think I'm lucky with it where I live. Around the same city, there are plenty of "notspot" shadows where there's no signal, not even 3G.

Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

#78
post #71
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it a phased-array antenna? It can adjust itself at the speed of electronics, without moving parts, so that should not be an issue in any reasonable scenario if the software supports it. A larger problem for use on sea might be that first generation Starlink sats do not have satellite-to-satellite links, so the boat and a ground station would have to be within range of the same satellite.

You still have to orient the whole antenna into the direction of the right part of the sky. From then the phase antenna will be able to track the individual satellites.

Would gyroscopic mount help, or is it too hard/expensive to make such a system to cope with waves at sea?

Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

#79
I will confess that I don't get it and I would appreciate thoughts on why this is a good idea instead of a FOMO kind of thing (and especially AWS Kuiper),

The total switching capacity of the entire __planned__ constellation is around that in a _single_ large switch chassis or internet core router and the individual satellites have the capacity of a beefy enterprise Wifi6 access point; however the geographic area each will service is enormous.

What I can't figure out is: what is the market? The market for an Iridium-style remote access is demonstrated to be tiny, there just is not the bandwidth or capacity to target "unserved" areas for ordinary internet.

So what's left that's big? Industrial IoT? Military? Even industrial placements (Rio Tinto, etc. mining concerns) will prefer to set up dedicated links and regional wireless to this solution, so IIOT use case is really a pre-development stage market, which is again small.

I even went looking for what the business press said (example: [1]). Reading this almost makes me think the author is in on a sort of dark joke; especially the “Fortunately, companies have new options for generating revenue from connectivity” section appears to be written by someone with a very dark sense of humor who is straight up trolling the reader.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/aerospace-and-defense/ou...

edit: added "planned" to distinguish the long term from the immediate term [the first batch Starlink satellites didn't even do any in-space switching at all]..

Re: SpaceX says Starlink internet has ‘extraordinary demand,’

#80
post #66
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the marketing department of SpaceX works for free?

You have any numbers on the marketing department and how much time they spend trying to sell Starlink?

Unless they are working for free any publication would cost money. starlink.com exists and is filled with marketing graphics. So they spend money, Q.E.D. .

It could still be impressive if they published actual numbers. Instead we have that $0 claim that gets repeated.

Disclaimer: They could pay people with "exposure" I heard that is the way to go with graphics artists at least.

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