Starlink Is a Big Deal
sneak.berlin
Starlink Is a Big Deal
1–10 of 365 posts
Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal
#2I have heard wildly differing estimates of the potential bandwidth Starlink will offer to individual consumers, at what prices, and how efficient/effective their mesh networking and ground station strategy will be. I'm taking a wait and see attitude, but it would be very cool if they actually came up with a telecom killer.
Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal
#3Given the title, I assumed this was a link to this awesome article:
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-...
Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal
#4I am skeptical of anything like 600Mbps being offered to anyone at anything like an affordable price, but overall, sure, globally-available internet seems like a good thing.
Too bad we have to give up the night sky for it, though.
Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal
#5I'm not convinced that Starlink will provide access to the "half of the human beings (who) are not online yet." Of course that would be good, yet my guess is that Starlink will target people in developed nations who are in rural areas, or people who want low latency.
Maybe Starlink could serve people w/o internet if a whole village buys a subscription, or if a cell provider uses Starlink as backhaul for voice? Still seems expensive for the third world that the author is talking about.
Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal
#6hopefully it makes inet service on planes better
Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal
#7I am skeptical of anything like 600Mbps being offered to anyone at anything like an affordable price, but overall, sure, globally-available internet seems like a good thing. Too bad we have to give up the night sky for it, though.
I'm also skeptical. A single LTE node can have a total bandwidth of 1+ Gbps. In Poland there are probably over 20k such nodes. Yet, the average speed you get is about 25 Mbps.
With Starlink we're talking about covering the whole world, not a 40 million country. So I believe it may be usable for rich people in rural areas, but in densely populated areas it stands no chance to LTE (and 5G is coming and promises lower latency than physically possible with Starlink).
Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal
#8I'm not convinced that Starlink will provide access to the "half of the human beings (who) are not online yet." Of course that would be good, yet my guess is that Starlink will target people in developed nations who are in rural areas, or people who want low latency. Maybe Starlink could serve people w/o internet if a whole village buys a subscription, or if a cell provider uses Starlink as backhaul for voice? Still…
Why wouldn't it trickle down? I feel like all new technologies start out with rich people/early adopters subsidizing mass adoption costs (refrigerators, TVs, computers, cell phones, electric cars)
Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal
#9Even in small areas we have CSMA (listen before talk) collisions in 2.4/5G bands that create high latency variance [1]. You can only have one transmitter per channel.
With Starlink there will be many ground-based transmitters that can't do CSMA (because they are directional). How many channels are available could depend on the dedicated bandwidth, but I have a hard time believing we won't see significant transmit collision issues.
[1] https://blog.parsecgaming.com/how-your-wifi-band-impacts-low...
Re: Starlink Is a Big Deal
#10>"Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live."
this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming you offer everyone a 100MB/s connection, that's... one city? And that doesn't account for transmission between the satellites or satellites not in range and so on, and the fact that those satellites are short-lived and need to be replaced.
How is this supposed to be economical or scale compared to regular terrestrial networks?
And one point on the social impact. We have heard this idea that you just need to 'connect people' over the internet to somehow give every disadvantaged place economic opportunity for decades now. This isn't how the real world works. Everyone still runs to California/their national equivalent You can count the areas where the VC money goes on one hand. Putting a satellite in the sky over Siberia isn't going to upend the social realities of geography.