Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some lawyer is kicking themselves for writing a shitty contract.
Why? Starlink is Spacex's own product.
Ahh, didn't know that. Thanks.
SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
91–100 of 162 posts
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind, the entire Starlink array will only be able to handle like ~1% of global consumer internet traffic. They're only a handful of gbps downlink each. ~10gbps downlink.
20 Gbps per satellite, according to the FCC filings. Which isn't that great.
Netflix claims an UHD stream is 25 Mbps. This is probably the most demanding use case for your average consumer, but it may not be a rare use case in the near future. Each satellite can support 800 UHD streams. That doesn't seem sufficient if each satellite covers a large geographic area.
This suggests to me a low data cap and/or rate, perhaps comparable to DSL.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#93Will there be a Starlink train again and where?
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#94Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink. Traditional ISPs are in trouble if the Starlink latency is really in the sub 100ms due to the LEO distance advantage. Global coverage with decent latency! I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure. Physical infrastructure is about to become obsolete as more advancements in wireless tech and satellite internet…
Sorry to rain on your parade. But Starlink will never be competing with internet in urban areas. The economics for simply laying a few miles of fiber are too good (if the fiber isn't even already there). More so the satellite density needed to serve an entire city is many more than even SpaceX is proposing. Starlink is for long distance backhaul and for rural/underserved areas.
If starlink allows roaming high speed internet, then I would be willing to pay for that instead of a fiber line.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not easy to block with technical means over a large area. But easy to block with legal means. The way Starlink works the system needs to know exactly where each terminal is, so SpaceX doesn't have plausible deniability about serving customers in areas that prohibit it. It would make much more sense for them as a business to try to provide censored service to China so that they could openly sell to the Chinese. Elon h…
> Not easy to block with technical means over a large area. But easy to block with legal means. The way Starlink works the system needs to know exactly where each terminal is, so SpaceX doesn't have plausible deniability about serving customers in areas that prohibit it. That is incorrect. SpaceX doesn't need to know where a terminal is for it to work. The Terminal itself though will know where it is, as it needs tha…
But you can proximate where the clients are based on where the satellite is. Since they're flying low, there can't be that much deviation in ground location between the client and the satellite. You could get plausible deniability if the satellite is flying over border regions, but there's very little excuse to not enforce chinese censorship regulations when flying over the middle of china.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that the more remote your location the further you likely are from the nearest ground station, which means more hops through the satellite network before you get back down to the ground, higher latency, and reduced total throughput of the system. The system Starlink is trying to beat is BGAN and regional Ku/Ka providers. If you're expecting them to beat the pants off of your terrestrial wired service you're pr…
You want to downlink near the server, not near the client. Packets will move 40% faster through vacuum than through fiber.
Each RF hop is going to have more latency than fiber for RF physical layer processing. Forward error correction intentionally uses large frames to spread out burst errors.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#97One off the satellites where apparently already dead and would not respond to commands when they got it mounted on the rocket. But they launched it anyway.
I've been having this hard to articulate notion that humanity hasn't really begun to fathom the changes that will come with "cheap" launch vehicles. We have better than half a century where space launch was so expensive, and so rare, that this had an impact on the payloads themselves. Perversely it caused the payloads to become so highly engineered (for a variety of reasons) that they also became ultra-expensive in-l…
Soon (a decade or two) every major corporation and organization will have a manned station of their own.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#98Can't wait to see every Tesla become a wifi hotspot hooked up to Starlink. Traditional ISPs are in trouble if the Starlink latency is really in the sub 100ms due to the LEO distance advantage. Global coverage with decent latency! I wonder if that's why google dipped out on rolling out fiber infrastructure. Physical infrastructure is about to become obsolete as more advancements in wireless tech and satellite internet…
Keep in mind, the entire Starlink array will only be able to handle like ~1% of global consumer internet traffic. They're only a handful of gbps downlink each. ~10gbps downlink.
Starlink apparently won't be a fixed concept. 5 year sat lifecycle means its likely we'll see rapid year-over-year turnover and hence macro-level iteration on the specs and design.
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are going for scale, where missing launch window is more expensive than just launching the rest of the payload. https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1193687615528042496 And in this case, if dead, the satellite will be used as a science experiment
That's interesting that they say 100% of the components will burn up on reentry— is this an updated design? That wasn't true for the previous batch
If this becomes really common, do any of the materials on the satellites present a health or environmental concern?
Re: SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two reuse records
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd feel about the same as I do when Comcast wants to use my own cable modem as a public wifi hotspot. At this point I'd just like to have a built-in wifi hotspot for my own usage in my car. My Chevy can do this. My fancy high-tech Tesla cannot.
What if you were paid some/all of the profit via micropayments when people used your tesla/modem hotspot?
If I recall correctly, Ubiquity had a network around this concept for broadband connections in the late 2000's. I don't think it ever caught steam, but I could be wrong.