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First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

starlinkhardware.com

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Re: First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

#91

Post by fragmede »

IshKebab wrote: post #84
cma wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No sure about vans, but aren't lots of cars moving to 48V?

Yeah because higher voltage reduces the cost of wiring, and 48V is still under the 50V legal limit for "low voltage". Not sure what your point is though.

if the are power electronics chip they use is rated to handle 12 VDC to 48 VDC, which 30 VDC happens to be in-between, then they could just use that chip and you could give it 12V or 48V, whichever you had handy. If all cars are moving to 48V, that makes that more likely.

Re: First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

#92

Post by theodric »

stanislavb wrote: post #73
forgot-im-old wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yup, my issue with Starlink is giving money to a company owned by Musk. I will avoid that as much as possible.

Tesla and SpaceX collectively employ 113,000 people, and I really think the story should be more about them than the guy who has the keys to the nicest office in the building. Gwynne Shotwell is a hell of an administrator. Without Starlink, I wouldn't have broadband!

Elon Musk makes his questionable opinions public, but we don't know if the Hughes or Chevrolet CEO has bad opinions for which they must be cancelled, because they have PR teams and filters and the sense not to shitpost. It's possible that no product is safe.

Re: First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

#93

Post by theodric »

mattlondon wrote: post #78
wkat4242 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Starlink here in Spain costs 40€ per month. That's a lot less than the unlimited Garmin inreach plan (74,99€!!) that only allows you to send short messages! And that's the regular plan. Deprioritised Starlink costs €29/month! Still way way more useful service than inreach. I have inreach and for €19,99 I get 10 SMS per month (i don't subscribe every month) and I also have to pay a €39,99 yearly fee. Starlink is…

WTF? Entry price for starlink is £75/month in UK! ADSL is typically ~£25-30 for unlimited 80/20 for comparison

€50 in Ireland, down from €65 in the last year, down from €99 in 2022. Because they know where you are, and how much money your average target customer in a country has, and how saturated their satellites in that country are, they can be very specific about pricing.

Re: First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

#94

Post by panick21_ »

adolph wrote: post #51
panick21_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This much more likely to be something that had been in the long term plan for many years. Amazon is announcing stuff because they are spending 10e of billions and have nothing to show for it, and wont have anything for years. They need to show progress to the quarter to quarter investor. Frankly the idea that Starlink is passivly reacting to Amazon annoucments is a bit silly. The difficult part is to actually produce…

They have at least three Kuiper launches booked in mid-2025, that’s not far off! It’s awesome that they have the flexibility to choose different launch partners and can use the most reliable and flight proven technology. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazon...

3 launches don't make a constellation.

> It’s awesome that they have the flexibility to choose different launch partners

In theory yes, in practice it isn't because they can't really use SpaceX (fully) and the other options aren't nearly as good.

> can use the most reliable and flight proven technology.

I'm not sure if you know anything about rockets. They bought some old Atlas 5s, but those are finished production. After that they have to buy unproven new designs.

And again, Falcon 9 is the most reliable and flight proven rocket in the world and they are simply not gone use Falcon 9 beyond the minimal.

Re: First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

#95

Post by mlindner »

iknowstuff wrote: post #52
teruakohatu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they made it possible to disable the heating element (ie. require a human to wipe snow off it) then it would be a lot more viable for hiking. The large version draws 45-70w so a airplane carry-on legal USB-C powerbank could power it for 1-2 hours.

Fairly sure the heat is just a byproduct of the phased array antenna no?

It's not just a byproduct. There's a definite mode it switches into, that can be disabled, that draws additional power in order to heat the dish up. There is no heating element, but the community understanding is that the radio elements are themselves used to do the heating.

Re: First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

#96

Post by mlindner »

skybrian wrote: post #40
fragmede wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah they don't force you into some weird shitty contract. you can buy the hardware outright, and then not pay for a subscription until you actually want to use it for the month of Outober.

Can you sign up using Starlink itself? It would by annoying if you needed another ISP when your ISP is down.

Yes, if you just turn on the dish with no account there's still limited "internet" access that lets you access Starlink billing services.

Re: First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

#97

Post by mlindner »

valianteffort wrote: post #44

So is this device any less capable bandwidth wise? I noticed a price cut in the current flat dish and was planning to pull the trigger to swap with my home ISP but if this will suffice I'd rather have the portability factor too.

This starlink mini dish isn't available yet. So the pricing and exact capabilities are not yet known.

Re: First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

#98

Post by contingencies »

Nursie wrote: post #74
amluto wrote: post #18

I wish “mesh” WiFi was more standardized. I don’t think there’s any good reason that a device like this should require specifically a Starlink mesh mode instead of an industry standard WDS device.

There was a standard a few years ago IIRC, EasyMesh. I even bought a kit that supported it. https://www.netgear.com/au/home/wifi/mesh/mk62/ I was most pissed off when I bought another (orbi?) kit from the same vendor a couple of years later and it didn't support easymesh, and wasn't compatible at all. Does seem to be a mess!

Mesh is a mess because the government, mobile device manufacturers and cellular carriers all want you on a centralized cellular system. Money is made selling cellular plans, cellular data, cellular carrier based device distribution (especially in the US, where most devices are carrier-acquired IIRC). Google in particular don't want to encourage non-centralized models, because their whole Android-shall-prevent-Apple-from-taking-the-mobicake play ("commoditize your complement"[0]) was to preserve their cloud kingdom. They're using lawyers and doublespeak to lock down what they've got, for example through ensuring no app can be distributed on Google Play that supports non Google Play store based payments (eg. carrier payments), and no app can be sideloaded without great effort (and there you were thinking it was your device!) At certain levels of their organization they are actively refusing to make mesh work in new Android versions as a first-line use case in Android, even though the hardware has supported it for eons (since ~2011[1]), as well as fiddling with the Android security model enough to make it a pain to use even if it theoretically works. This seems to be a dual layer strategy to frustrate any non-edgecase popularity of mesh. They do claim to support it in home networking products but probably only because they want to take over, monitor and surveil the rest of your house to understand more about your family's behavior, presence and so on. People even leave the bloody microphones on all the time, knowing it's spying on them. It's insane. This is why we need open devices.

To be fair, the security model for mesh is hard. Even FirefoxOS couldn't get mesh working properly. I think someone needs to just bring out an open device with mesh as the default use case. If anyone wants to pile on and do it, I'm down to contribute.

[0] https://gwern.net/complement [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11s

Re: First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

#99

Post by sofixa »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #38

I plan to work and travel in Europe for 1.5 months this summer and I hope they will release it soon. Hotel/AirBnB wifi is often unstable and unreliable - you never know if Zoom will work or not. With Starlink I will have backup and at minimum will be able to take calls in the car. We will have rental car so planned to get regular Starlink but this one will be much better option.

Depending on what you mean by "Europe" (Madrid? Waldhufen? A bunch of cabins in the north of Sweden? A random beach on Rhodes?), 4G/5G coverage is pretty good. Local SIMs are usually affordable, and thanks to the EU, roaming comes with a lot of things included.

As a reference, I have a 20eur/month pay as you go plan from Free (France) that gets me unlimited 5G, calls, messages in France, and unlimited calls and messages + 30GB internet in the whole of the EU + a bunch of other countries. Cheaper, more reliable, more useful, faster.

Re: First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini

#100

Post by Ringz »

From the headline, I had hoped that they were smaller Starlink satellites that no longer spoil the night sky so much.

I haven't heard from this topic for a long time. Except that there is a darker coating for the newer satellites. Does anyone know how long the individual satellites are in operation before they are sent back to the Earth's atmosphere to have hot fun there?

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