a:Starlink Beta will begin in the Northern United States and lower Canada, with those living in rural and/or remote communities in the Washington state area. Access to the Starlink Beta program will be driven by the user's location as well as the number of users in nearby areas. All beta testers must have a clear view of the northern sky to participate.
There's 4 starlink earth stations in Washington state. The starlink r&d team and office is also based in Redmond.
1. Redmond office site
2. North bend, colocated with CenturyLink long haul fiber hut
3. Brewster, commercial teleport facility, as a tenant, larger site is run by USEI. This is also a TT&C (tracking, telemetry and control) site for starlink space segment network operations.
4. Prosser, also colocated with CenturyLink fiber huts.
It is also worth noting that one of the first major internet traffic exchange points which the starlink AS has joined is the SIX (Seattle internet exchange). It's my theory that their IP network and other common ISP-like infrastructure is the most fully developed in Seattle.
If you take a look at their peeringdb page it will give you an idea of where they're publicly announcing availability for peeing and PNIs. Presently only Seattle.
It's worth pointing out that this will probably be something only people in rural areas will be interested in. "High speed" is in reference to the utter garbage available to these people. The throughput won't be close to what you can get from copper/fiber in an urban/suburban setting.
If you want to stick it to Comcast+co, this is unlikely to help you cut your cable [internet]. We'll still need to vote and apply pressure to end this oligopoly.
Musk himself has said that Starlink is primarily meant for rural customers, and most urbanites should not expect to use it. He even specifically addressed that Starlink will not "stick it" to Comcast+co, and may actually "help" them.
> "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers."
> Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos."
Musk originally said this would compete with fiber and other terrestrial carriers. That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiber started out.
I think the only claim is that it's gigabit speeds [as fast as fiber], however I can't find a specific tweet other than one talking about 1tbps capacity (they've launched more satellites since then):
I'm not sure if you're refuting what I said, but there is absolutely no way you will get 20ms end-to-end latency from this. Satellite propagation delay, yes, but for your ping to get to Google and back will be over 50ms.
They have no cross-links, so up and down to space is going to happen multiple times in many cases. Second, they will not have data centers or ixps right where Google's ingress is, so it has to traverse fiber for quite a while. Someone gave some real numbers on the last SpaceX thread, but I believe that part alone will be 20-30ms added.
They do not have cross-links. They were in the original public announcements, but none of the current satellites have them, nor have they announced when they would be launching some that do. It's likely years away.
That's a claim musk made, but they already have over 500 launched without them. They should have 1000 by year-end, so it's unlikely they'll be able to use them for a couple of years.
Would satellite on-board caching be possible? Could you cache, for instance, the most frequently requested cat photos currently on reddit? You would be able to bypass half of the round trip
Possible, yes, practical, no. In general, you want the least complexity as possible in the payload, since you can't fix it as easily as you can with ground bugs. Also, memory that's space-hardened is going to be significantly more expensive and failure-prone, so you need a lot of redundancy.
AFAIK Verizon is doing something similar with edge compute in their 5G towers/data centers. If Starlink gets big enough, I'd expect them to do the same. However, I think it's much more likely for Starlink to put the edge compute/cache at the Starlink ground stations, rather than in the satellites themselves. I think the tech/cost still isn't good enough to have significant compute on a satellite.
It should be lower latency for transaltantic and other long haul traffic, as the speed of light in glass is roughly half that of the vacuum of space. So the extra distance to space is offset by the faster speed of light.
That is very roughly... it is about 2/3 c and can be calculated by the refractive index of quartz glass vs air (e.g. SiO2 has refractive index between 1.55 bad and 1.4 good for the speed) e.g. 1/1.55 ~ 0.645 and 1/1.4 ~ 0.714. According to "Main Parameters" section of [0] it seems to be 1/1.44 for the silica used in actual fibers.
A good approximation would be 200 km/ 1 ms instead of 300 km/ 1 ms for speed of light in a vacuum/ microwave links.
All kinds of mobile users are definitely in play too. Trucks, cars, yachts, tankers - all need a connection, and in the middle of the ocean or in the Siberian plains you don't have many options.
My friend is right now swimming under sail somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and she'd definitely benefit greatly from an affordable high speed internet connection.
$80 is what I think subscribers might pay (on average) for Starlink - it's a guess.
When you look at what subscribers pay worldwide for internet, it varies, but in the U.S., I currently pay $50/month for 3mbps/0.768mbps DSL (Yuck!) in the countryside. When I'm traveling, ATT is charging around $100/month for unlimited LTE at 8mbps/8mbps. If Starlink can give me 10mbps/10mbps or better at $80/month, I'll take interest. Even more so if Starlink can replace an Iridium go when out at sea.
I'm not sure how Starlink will price services around the world. It'll be interesting to see how they work out the terms/pricing globally. If they are competitive though, I think there are enough customers in the U.S. to make it a profitable project.
My dad pays something like $80 a month for his 1.5mbps DSL line from CenturyLink. It's such a scam, but he can't get anything else. $80 a month for something decent would be a no-brainer. I even signed him up for the beta, since he's in a rural area. I'm just hoping he is rural enough though, because he is only about 6 miles from the city. 6 miles though should be close enough to get decent wired internet...
I'm pretty sure that says more about your lack of imagination than the economics of Starlink. There are already multiple geosynchronous satellite internet providers that provide incredibly shitty (and expensive) internet service that you would only pay for if it's literally your only option. If Starlink can provide service at less than $100/month, it's going to put all of those companies out of business in a matter of just a few years.
“As confirmed by the company, Starlink will be able to provide speeds of up to a gigabit per second with latencies ranging from 25 milliseconds to 35 milliseconds. Elon Musk has previously stated that it has been designed to run real-time, competitive video games.”
It will be plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet.
As has been pointed out on every Starlink thread, problem isn't latency or speed, it's contention. Each satellite only has 20gbit/sec per beam of capacity. It's likely even in small cities that will not be enough (it's only 1-3k users streaming Netflix for example). There is no way you can connect a city of even 100k people with 20gig/sec of capacity these days, never mind major metro areas many times that size.
Elon Musk has admitted this himself, and the problem gets worse over time (bandwidth requirements grow every year, but satellites capacity is fixed), so the 20gbps they have now will seem even more limited in 3-5 years when the satellites are becoming EoL.
This is not to say that Starlink is fundamentally flawed, it has great potential for rural access.
I have friends on the Indiana Ohio border that are only offered ISP from a monopoly, ISP offers one plan $45 mo 60/40mbps. They have the first fiber optic Network ever laid in the country from adelphia cable but Time Warner Cable bought it and turned it off 20 years ago.
I just gave Starlink my address as per the email request they sent out today.
I'm currently on an 5Mb down 1Mb up LTE connection with a total data limit of 250Gb/Month for the low price of 100 bucks a month. I do have very low latency < 20ms, but last month my friends kid was over and managed to burn through 95 gigs playing and updating some game called PubG that ended up putting me over my limit and I got to pay an extra 50 bucks for the next tier of usage.
If I get the opportunity to try out Starlink I will be more than happy to do so as it's very frustrating being forced to use an ISP monopoly provider, especially when there is fiber available to properties less than 5 miles away from mine.
I’ve been playing a bit of pubg recently, it’s included with the Google Stadia streaming gaming service. Fun game!
Stadia can easily burn through tens of GB per hour in bandwidth, and needs low latency, so it’s a good test of my 5G mobile connection. Good thing I have unlimited data!
60/40mbps isn't bad unless you want to share it with a lot of people (e.g. larger families). Sure, downloads won't be as fast as you'd like them to be but it's enough for 4k streaming so I don't think many people would notice the difference between this and a 200mbit line.
I recently did a substantial speed drop and barely noticed.
When I dropped cable TV and phone 4 months ago, I also dropped my internet speed from the 600 I had, figuring I’d start low and then raise it to what I need.
Options were 25, 100, 200, 300, 600, 1000, or 2000, for 50, 55, 70, 80, 90, 100, or 300 $/month.
I went with 100...and am still there 4 months later. The only times I notice it’s slower than my old 600 is OS and sometimes large app updates. (And for mobile devices, the difference is even less because my WiFi was a lot closer to 100 than 600).
It hasn’t affected working from home at all (I’ve been WFH for a couple years now so have plenty of prior experience with that at 600). I do occasionally need large downloads from work, but I’ve never gotten more than 20 Mbps out of our servers hosted at AWS.
I was worried a bit about upload. Nominally it was 15 for the 600 plan and is 5 for the 100 plan. Comcast over-performs in my area, so actual is about 19 for 600 and 7 for 100. (Download for those two is actually about 620-640 and 124). But the only large uploads I do aren’t very large. They are just large enough that on the old plan I would overlap them with other work rather than wait...so now I just get more other work done during the upload and still don’t really notice the wait. I get the same total work accomplished in the same time as before, just sequenced slightly different.
I thought I might be going to 300 if it turned out that streaming TV ran me into Comcast’s data cap and I needed to go unlimited. That would have been an extra $50/month, so 100 unlimited would be $105/month. But they also had an option where you could get unlimited for much less but only if you rented their modem. Total was $25/month, but it was only available on 300 or faster plans. A 300 plan with the modem/unlimited bundle would be $105/month, same as the 100 plan with my own modem and added unlimited. Still wouldn’t need 300, but if it is the same price as 100 why not?
But it turns out that even in my bingiest COVID lockdown month I only hit about 300 GB. Also, Comcast has since raised the cap from 1000 GB to 1229 GB, and dropped unlimited to $30/month, so I now anticipate staying at 100 indefinitely.
I agree, I have the option of 1000/1000 for £50/month or 150/150 for £25/month. Both unlimited. Despite pushing the connection very hard I ended up downgrading to 150. It's hard to get more than 200mbit on WiFi consistently, and unless you download onto an SSD with ethernet, downloads are constrained by hard drive speeds (especially over USB).
make sure you have some decent AQM (qos) like cake or fq_codel. isp-gear probably has not. IQRouter was one of the first but there are others https://www.stoplagging.com/
> ”Each satellite only has 20gbit/sec per beam of capacity. It's likely even in small cities that will not be enough”
But you're not going to have just one satellite per city. Consider that Starlink already has approval for 12,000 satellites. And has applied for 30,000 more! At 20 Gbps each, that’s a lot of bandwidth.
When fully built out, any given point on the ground should have coverage from dozens (hundreds?) of satellites at any given time, spreading the load in regions of heavy demand.
But they have to move. Having 100 satellites serving NYC means you'd need a similarly fine mesh over the ocean.
I think they'll just make it more expensive than internet in cities. That way it's still the best option for rural areas without attracting too many customers in cities.
Exactly. And in a dense city like NYC, many customers wouldn't have a clear line of sight to the sky anyway. You could install communal antennas/receivers on building roofs, but at that point you might as well just pay for fibre or terrestrial mobile broadband.
There may be niche customers in cities (data redundancy/resiliency etc), but in general, the biggest advantage will be for rural/remote customers who currently pay above the odds for substandard service.
> Each satellite only has 20gbit/sec per beam of capacity
Can this be upgraded in future versions of the sats? Is it a major undertaking requiring new ground station hardware, or something relatively easy that will increase with each "new" version of the sats?
I imagine they will scale up the sats to have more beams, better tech, etc. They have a super heavy lift rocket coming online in the years between now and the current batch of sats being retired. What they will be replaced with will likely look nothing like today's model.
To a certain extent they can increase total bandwidth by launching more satellites, although it's unlikely to ever make sense for urban areas where you could roll out fixed infrastructure much more cheaply. With satellite constellations, you can't just add satellites only where they're needed.
On average, end users use about the same amount of bandwidth regardless of what speed plan they are on. Then planning is based on average and peak bandwidth
Sort of, but not really. A major metro probably has a terabit+ of peak demand these days. It's not going to be viable to have 50+ sats over all metro areas at once (that would probably suggest a spacing of a few km, requiring literally millions of satellites deployed globally).
The math just doesn't add up. It's a similar problem to why 4G/5G isn't a viable replacement for home internet service (yet) in many areas, apart from its much worse as it's easier to add new 5G base stations to densely cover cities than add new satellites.
> "It's not going to be viable to have 50+ sats over all metro areas at once" ... "requiring literally millions of satellites"
That doesn't sound right. A satellite doesn't have to be directly overhead to be reachable. The coverage map below suggests that each satellite can cover a region 800-1000km in diameter, so with a fully deployed constellation of 12,000 to 42,000 satellites, there should easily be 50+ sats visible from any metro area. Perhaps even more than that.
I'm surprised each sat has such a large radius (especially when the constellation is fully deployed). This is actually a bigger problem than I thought if that map is correct.
This means satellites are going to cover a very large area. There might be 50 sats to cover the area from Boston down to Washington DC. That's 1tbit/sec of bandwidth to cover 100m potential customers.
Considering beta service afiak is using 600-1200 sats I imagine sat penetration will be significantly less. Considering cell towers between 4G and 5G can offer 20gbps _per tower_ these days I can't see 20gbps working across an entire state. Especially when it has been hyped as better than terrestrial internet. Even with a small number of users it will degrade rapidly at peak times when you get 1-3k users watching netflix.
It's also why Wifi, as amazing as new generations are, can't be the universal solution. Even well built installations in offices will quickly clog up during busy times. Wifi is important for devices where cables don't work, the same as satellite via internet or 5G only makes sense where fibre doesn't work.
...and if you look at the second half of wherever you are quoting that from, you'll see that the person you're replying to is correct. Starlink is meant for rural customers, and according to Elon Musk himself it will not be "plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet" for urbanites.
> Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband.
> The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said.
> So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.
So what does this mean for people like me who are rural, but right next to a major city? Right now, I am 5 minutes from the city but have to rely on a slow 10mbps-ish (down, don't ask about up) 900mhz point to point wireless connection. If I end up with Starlink as an option am I going to be fighting with urban users for bandwidth?
In many ways those of us in this scenario get the worst of both world because infrastructure spending / subsidies for rural Internet improvement gets used in real remote places, while most people don't realize that if you drive one street over from the suburbs, out into the farmland, you're unlikely to even be able to get low quality DSL. It's simply not available to me. When the sprawl finally brings the bulldozers in to build McMansions around me, I guess that's when the fiber lines will come in...
Starlink will likely be more expensive than city fibre. That should solve the issue naturally. The only people using it in cities could be companies for backup connections or people taking their router when travelling.
Plenty good, yes. But if you already have decent service, you’re not likely to be an early adopter of this. I live in a decently sized Midwestern city with fiber available. I’m not going to switch over to Starlink. However, my father, who lives in a rural area, has had to work with a) satellite or b) LTE internet. He is going to switch over to this in a heartbeat.
At least initially, this is going to primarily be a rural and/or mobile warrior type of service.
And I don’t believe those latency figures at all until I see them working in the wild. It will be significantly better than geosynchronous satellite service, but the question is by how much.
I do think that's highly optimistic. It'll be worlds better than Geostationary consumer VSAT or a crappy wisp, but not as low latency or with as much throughput as a wireline docsis3.1 network or GPON FTTH.
The most optimal market is not somewhere like a northern suburb of Seattle with a well-developed Comcast network that also has CenturyLink GPON 1Gbps available, but more rural and fringe areas.
To be fair, my 300mbps connection is rarely ever actually 300mbps, even at times like 3am. I don't have access to a gigabit connection where I live, in a well-developed suburb.
Honestly from a cable operator (Comcast/shaw/charter/whatever type company) I'd rather have only 100Mbps and more than three nines uptime over a one year period, than gigabit and something more flaky. Quality of network engineeeing and how much battery backup and generator protection is put into last mile and middle mile docsis3/3.1 networks varies widely.
A benefit I have found since switching to wireless (5G) broadband is that uptime is significantly better than it was with my old cable connection. The fibre/cable internet would randomly go down for an hour or so, probably once a month on average - and that's just the times I was home and noticed.
But the mobile network almost never goes down. If something happens to a given cell tower/base station, the connection will seamlessly switch over to another. Performance might degrade a bit but you probably won't notice. There is built in resiliency/redundancy with less single points of failure. I imagine a network like Starlink will be the same.
So true for cable internet. My parents just upgraded from 300 to 600 and it did nothing from what I can tell as they are still getting like 25 mbps. It is freaking ridiculous how bad it is for what they are advertising.
One thing people need to consider also is their router.
If they plug a 1gig network into an old 802.11g wireless router or an old 100/10 network card with cat4 cables, you are not getting what you pay for at all.
Rock on over to my parents house. They were paying for 40 and had it plugged into a wireless usb dongle that could maybe manage 2.5 on a good day. That came from the ISP. Bought them a better one and they were getting near the rate they were paying for.
(Lots of plans: 5 up, $40/mo, or 18mbps up, $103/month, no caps)
I’m paying comcast $80 for 6 up, 1TB cap. It’s nominally 75mbps down, but performance is sometimes too slow for netflix 1080p (3-6 mbps down) during prime time. They won’t sell me a cheaper plan.
Can I ask you something a bit off-topic? In Spanish (well, specifically in what you've heard in Mexico) do people use the word Jesus like you just did (i.e. Jesus esto es horrible)? Or is there a similar word/phrase that you would say takes that place?
I'm from Spain and there it's only used when someone sneezes.
The word "Jesús" is rarely used nowadays to express a strong emotion like astonishment or disgust. It's something my grandparents would have said. My father is in his 60s and sometimes says it but only jokingly.
It's more common in Mexico but it's also disappearing. When someone sneezes the usual response is "salud".
Note that these are wireless ISP’s. They put a directional antenna on your roof, and aim it at an omnidirectional antenna on a hill. This is similar to starlink, but with lower latency (to the tower/satellite).
I agree that the speeds are awful on an absolute scale, but they’re competing with entrenched monopolies that own legal right of ways that will never be developed. This lets them prevent competitors from running fiber.
Starlink is attacking the same ridiculous regulatory problem. Why build an entire reusable launch infrastructure and custom satellites when laying fiber is dirt cheap? Heck, Facebook says they have a robot that will piggy-back 2km of fiber over existing power lines in a day!
In California, deploying the robots would mean getting PG&E to cooperate, but I could see it helping out in other states.
In some areas, you'd need 10km of fiber to reach 50 households. Considering frequent repairs and maintenance, even with robots that's not cost efficient at what consumers are willing to pay.
Rural WA outside Seattle 50mi you can get gig fiber for $60/mo http://www.ifiber.tv/internet/mason-county there are allot of other similar municipalities (eastern WA/parts of TN) with similar deals. Just don’t let the telcos become a monopoly and this is what you get.
Tbh, none of those numbers look good from where I'm sitting. I pay €45/month for 80Mb down/20Mb up fibre. Granted I'm in a city (in Portugal). My parents in rural France pay €39/month for 20Mb down / 8Mb up. None of us have data caps
I get a symmetric gigabit fiber connection for $80 a month (€70). If I didn't need the bandwidth I can get 200/20 for $45/month. I'm on the US east coast.
I think it highly depends on what's available in your area.
That's more like it. Actually, I've just checked and my ISP here in Portugal (MEO) is now offering 1Gbit down / 200Mbit up, no caps, 1 month minimum contract length for €45.99 (... seems I need to move package!).
I actually think they should cap Starlink at 10Mbps just so that it IS only competing for Rural. I will likely get Starlink because Frontier is ending support for future development in the rural area I'm building a house. The house will be ready by the end of this year, so I'm hoping I can go with them instead of an ATT connection.
Given that it is going to pretty be my only option, it would suck if a bunch of city people suck up all the invites.
Or make it more expensive? I'm sure their 1gbps plan won't be cheap. Probably expensive enough that no one in a city would consider taking it. In rural areas however it's the only alternative.
Starlink's business is probably more successful anyway if they focus on fewer customers but charge those more. Less congestion and lower bandwidth requirements for their ground stations.
That seems fair, but still, it seems like you should still be required to be in a rural area to get those bandwidths. I can also imagine a scenario where dads in the city decide to buy this so that they can take the internet with them during weekend RV trips. So even if they are paying double what they pay Comcast, it's worth it for the internet everywhere factor. So perhaps, the satellites can give them that high bandwidth in remote regions, but only when the device is truly remote. When it returns to the city, perhaps the bandwidth should not compete with cable.
Last I saw, it requires an antenna that’s about the size of a television satellite dish. Maybe portable enough to stick on an RV or campervan, but almost certainly not something you can take with you while hiking or backwoods camping.
From what I can find each Starlink can support about 650 users. I'm not sure how far apart each satellite is and if that means the 651 person is out of luck.
Rural areas with sparse populations would make sense rather than dense urban areas with greater populations. Even if like GPS there are several satellite overhead even a dozen may be too few for large cities.
The perfect customer is one person who lives in a rural area that doesn't have trees and it doesn't snow.
As a rural customer only 5 miles out of town, I have a DSL bonded pair. No cable service. 20mbit/sec down, 1.5 mbit/sec up. Starlink doesn't have a high threshold to meet for it to be a major improvement to our service. My situation is not unusual in rural settings.
Cellular is also spotty, so its not a good option either. Very hilly terrain with low population density. All of my cellular service at home is over wifi via the DSL connection.
Comcast has no interest in running cable/fiber the 2.5 miles needed to get to us. No ROI.
Rural Washington is a great test market, there are entire counties with only a single viable provider (Kittitas). Or counties in which there are NO viable broadband providers (Okanagan)
There's 3 small independent WISPs in kittitas county in addition to Charter cable in Ellensburg, and whatever Consolidated (the ILEC phone company) is doing. Definitely some more rural parts of kittitas the only thing you can get is a consumer-grade vsat terminal, but those are really quite small amounts of population.
For okanogan, Google NCI datacom, they're a wisp that covers much of the county. But not out to the fringes. Okanogan county itself and the PUD have fiber along the highway all the way from Brewster to the Canadian border, with POPs in the towns along the way. Several WISPs make use of it.
If you were using either of those counties as an example because you actually know people who are finding it difficult to get last-mile broadband, let me know and perhaps I can help put them in touch with the right people.
If we were going to use a very rural Washington State location as an example of where starlink might do well, somewhere such as people who live on acreages outside of Republic might be a better example. Or somewhere like Stehekin.
If I had to guess, the reason why Washington state is a good test market for them, is a combination of relatively low cost and easy to provision lit transport services they can buy from each earth station back to Seattle, reasonable driving times and hassle for people to come and go from the Redmond facility to the test sites for physical install and modification of equipment, and a fairly good sized base of consumers in very rural locations presently dependent on hughesnet/wildblue type cheap consumer VSAT.
Are WISPs really a viable broadband option? The pricing vs data caps that you get are pretty ridiculous, especially for rural customers
And yes I do know people who have had problems in these counties. I also had an absolutely miserable experience using Charter due to their poor infrastructure in the valley. Internet on nights, weekends, holidays, etc. was unusable due to their high utilization of low bandwidth lines
FCC official broadband number is 25Mbs per household. I, personally, think a good number is whatever is enough to sustain productivity, entertainment, and education - so about 5 down/2 up a person (obviously, more is better).
In a household with 5 people, that is 25/10, which does fit into the FCC's definition.
WISPs are popping up left and right that can do 1000/1000 per access point, which can be shared with all customers within about a 500ft radius. That's definitely doable with the above definiton of broadband. Basically, it's one wifi-based access point that has a uplink, and each household has an externally mounted wifi antenna that then redistributes to a conventional home router.
On the other hand, I personally have a WISP in a dense urban area. I pay $45~/mo for guaranteed 100/100 - usually, my sustained speeds are closer to 200/200, or 300/300. It's an antenna on our building that is the backhaul for about 50 households.
WISPs are viable in rural areas - they bring broadband to those who can't get it.
WISPs are viable in urban areas - regions where installing new copper or fiber would be prohibitively expensive, they allow upstarts to challenge the duopoly.
Just about the only awkward middle ground where the economics get a little tough is in spread suburban areas.
maybe! I video conferenced on 1.5up for a week and I did have to turn down send quality, but other than that, it was fine.
I think the bigger issue is that if you can only get 1.5 in 2020, then that means that the physical layer between you and the internet is tenuous. Like, DSL far away from the DSLAM and thus packet loss and line noise.
I worked from home for years on a 2mps symmetric link from a wireless ISP in Tanzania, video conferencing worked well enough (Google Hangouts or whatever it was called 5 years ago).
For the heavy uploads I usually resorted to doing the upload from a VPS instead though, when possible (build the artifacts from that VPS, so that both the build and upload are much faster).
They absolutely are if implemented with the right technology and some degree of network engineeeing acumen. One wisp I know in kittitas is selling 50Mbps down x 15Mbps up with no data caps or quotas.
There are also a lot of crappy WISPs out there, so this is by no means definitive. Same as there's lots of crappy frontier copper wireline 5Mbps ADSL2+ still out there on degraded copper lines from 40 years ago.
Lol, ah Frontier. I have friends in the valley who used to work for them, great horror stories. What is the name of this kittitas WISP? I have long since moved out of the valley, but can pass this on to my family who still deal with horrendous providers.
(Try to ignore the closely bunched satellites; those haven't spread out yet.)
They're all in an inclined orbit, with the orbital planes regularly staggered about Earth's axis. So, the simple way to consider this is that the distance between these orbits is greater at the equator than it is near the poles.
An extreme to illustrate the point; if they were all polar orbits, all the orbits would intersect at the poles, providing coverage from all of the planes, whereas each location at the equator might be served by one or two orbital planes.
I drove by the ground station here in Michigan recently and it’s coming along but it’s definitely not looking close. In a month they basically installed conduit, electrical, and a fence. I don’t currently see any radio gear.
q:What is Starlink Beta?
a:Starlink Beta is an opportunity to be an early user of the SpaceX's satellite internet system.The purpose of Starlink Beta is to gather feedback that will help us make decisions on how best to implement the system for Starlink's official launch. By design, the beta experience will be imperfect. Our goal is to incorporate feedback from a variety of users to ensure we build the best satellite broadband internet system possible.
q:Who can participate in Starlink Beta?
a:Starlink Beta will begin in the Northern United States and lower Canada, with those living in rural and/or remote communities in the Washington state area. Access to the Starlink Beta program will be driven by the user's location as well as the number of users in nearby areas. All beta testers must have a clear view of the northern sky to participate.
q:Why do I need a clear view of the northern sky to be a beta tester?
a:The Starlink system is currently made up of nearly 600 satellites orbiting the Earth that can provide internet service in a very specific range between 44 and 52 degrees north latitude. Your Starlink dish requires a clear view of the Northern sky in order to communicate with the Starlink satellites. Without the clear view, the Starlink dish cannot make a good connection and your service will be extremely poor.
q:Can I document and share my Starlink Beta experience?
a:No, unfortunately you cannot document or share your Starlink Beta experience publicly. Beta testers will be required to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement as a condition of their participation.
q:How will my service quality be during Starlink Beta?
a:During Starlink Beta, service will be intermittent as teams work to optimize the network. When connected, your service quality will be high, but your connection will not be consistent. This means it may support streaming video with some buffering, but likely is not suitable for gaming or work purposes.
q:What is expected of me as a participant in Starlink Beta?
a:Beta testers will provide feedback in the form of periodic short surveys over an 8 week period to help our teams improve every aspect of the service.
q:Is there a cost to participating Starlink Beta?
a:There is no cost to be a beta tester, aside from a $1 charge to help test the billing system.
q:What will I receive as a Beta Tester?
a:Your Starlink Kit will arrive via FedEx pre-assembled with a Starlink dish, router, power supply and mount depending on your dwelling type. Your Starlink Kit will require a signature for delivery, but you will be able to manage your delivery date and time through FedEx.
q:How does Starlink internet work?
a:Starlink will deliver high-speed broadband internet across the globe with a large, low-Earth constellation of relatively small but advanced satellites. Satellite internet works by sending information through the vacuum of space, where it travels nearly 50% faster than in fiber-optic cable.
q:Most satellite internet services today come from single geostationary satellites that orbit the planet at about 35,000km, covering a fixed region of the Earth. Starlink, on the other hand, is a constellation of multiple satellites that orbit the planet much lower at about 550km, and cover the entire globe.
a:Because the satellites are in a low orbit, the round-trip data time between the user and the satellite – also known as latency is much lower than with satellites in geostationary orbit. This enables Starlink to deliver services like online gaming that are usually not possible on other satellite broadband systems
q:If I sign up to be a Beta Tester and I change my mind, can I cancel?
a:Yes, you can cancel at any time
I really hope Starlink works out. I have relatives whose only option is satellite internet and with the ultra-low data caps streaming video is just not an option at home. Imagine living without Netflix or Youtube.
I found living without Netflix and Youtube enlightening, as inter-library loans granted many titles that aren't available to stream. Also, Netflix dvd-by-mail service works fine in rural areas.
After a while, I realized that my habituation to constant connection wasn't actually making my life more enjoyable... but for telework I'm rooting for a connectivity solution via Starlink.
For me, it's more about what kind of opportunities people miss out on when they're in an underserved area. For example, a lot of learning is being done remotely right now. How does a student on a satellite Internet connection participate in a streamed classroom? They can't so they just... miss out on schooling.
I was in a tiny surfing town in Costa Rica and they had gig fiber. You reach it via 3 hour car ride through the jungle and rivers on a single lane dirt road. Better internet than I have in the US.
if you're implying that people in the developing world live without internet access, you'd be dead wrong. Cell service is ubiquitous and data is cheap. Those people are probably better-connected than rural Americans (not suburban, but truly rural, the people living out in the sticks).
American data connectivity is just that bad. It's worse than eastern europe. Worse than Asia. Worse than Africa.
I've used YouTube to learn a tremendous amount from programming to home improvement and beyond. I wouldn't consider it essential to my life, but I would certainly be worse off if I didn't have it.
Firstly, I didn't call them life essentials; I invited the typically nerdy and internet-focused HN audience to imagine life without two services which comprise over 25% of global bandwidth usage in order to remind them of the massive accessibility gaps which still exist even in wealthy countries. Secondly, why does something have to be completely universal to be considered a life essential?
Also, you tweet about streaming shows on FoodNetwork Go, so why do you act like that's any different from Netflix and Youtube?
Did you forget the part where you said "several billion other people"?
If you're not talking about the developing world, and just look at the rural and those who don't want a connection, that's not nearly enough people. So it's not wrong at all for people to assume you meant the developing world.
To be fair to the other person, China alone (in which neither Netflix nor YouTube are widely available) is almost 1.4 billion people. That could easily be part of their calculus, though I guess you could argue over the meaning of “several” in this context.
This. When I travelled to Vietnam I was shocked to find out access to Facebook was free (unlike the data plans, which seemed expensive to me and therefore likely out of reach for most of the folks there.
It was really nice to be able to communicate with my travel buddies reliably, but this is definitely the tiered internet people are afraid of.
This is partially true. Connectivity is better than most people imagine, even in places like Madagascar (was something like the fifth poorest country recently?). We had 4G in the middle of nowhere and yes, it's cheap for Westerners.
However just because 3/4G exists doesn't mean people can afford it. In Madagascar for example, the minimum topup is 100 ARY or about 3 cents. Most people can't afford significant amounts of data, especially not when an autoplay video can bankrupt you.
That's the big problem with the argument that starlink is helping developing countries. These countries would be much better off with better rural cellular coverage first, not expensive satellite networking. Unless spacex will subsidise developing nations, who's paying for it?
You'd also be surprised by what's considered rural. Vermont is the most rural state and it's right next to Massachusetts which is one of the least rural.
Rural isn't a simple calculation of area divided by population. It's based on the density of the population. People are not evenly distributed over Alaska or Wyoming, the majority live in urban settings around cities with the majority of the land in those states being uninhabited.
60% or more of the population in Alaska and Wyoming live in an urban setting. In Texas it's over 80% and in California it's over 90%.
New Jersey's population is 99% urban, does that mean they all chose to live in an urban setting or that the State is so crammed full of people that there's no place to live in isolation?
Looking at a map of New Jersey, it looks like if you managed to setup camp in the middle of a state park you might manage to be 5 miles from the nearest town.
I think the point wasn't people not having it available or not using it by choice, but people who are used to having it and now having to imagine not having it.
Imagine living without JS. 90% of the web would break. Right now a decent amount of web would break without images and even some without video.
If you live on a yacht with cheapest sat connection (which is really obscene at $150 per month) you get a mere 2kbps. That's not even enough to load html. You only get to get email and weather via specialised software.
But then you live on a yacht. Why not pull into a port with known good wifi and download what you want in bulk? Use your sat connection for email to keep in touch. Sneakernet the big things (movies, TV, games).
This is what life was like for me when I first got the internet back in the 90s. 14.4 dialup translated to around 1.5KB/sec. And I lived at home. I didn’t get to enjoy travelling the world in a yacht.
having internet closer to normal standards would allow more people to enjoy such a thing. I could afford to buy a sailboat now, but if I were to take it out to sea I would be unable to work the job that funds my existence. starlink (or others) bringing cheap and reasonably fast internet to the ocean would open up a world of exploration to people who can work remotely. supposing you are okay with the inherent compromises of being aboard a sailboat, something like starlink is really the only missing piece for being able to do it without being a successful lifestyle vlogger or very very wealthy.
Hacker News is totally usable on dialup. The home page is only ~7KB. I'm sure there are plenty of other sites out there which are usable as well. RSS feeds should be fine as well. Podcasts can be downloaded in bulk when you pull into port.
I didn't even mention the web in my original comment though, and that was on purpose. When you live on a yacht, you get to be out exploring the world and enjoying life. Why would you want to be cooped up in the cabin, scrolling Facebook or Twitter, or watching Netflix all day? If that's what you want, you should probably sell your yacht and get an apartment with broadband.
There are plenty of people out there who still live without broadband. People on small islands, or in 3rd world countries. They may not be wealthy, but they have happy lives. With a yacht you can go visit some of them. Spend some time eating food and enjoying different cultures. The world is a big place.
A big portion of yacht life if you use it to see other countries is travel time. Having the Internet would be super nice. As of now you have to make do with books, movies.
I apologize for an off-topic comment, but I just had to chuckle at the term "living aboard". In similar contexts it is usually a typo of "living abroad", but here it is quite fitting. :)
The number of people without youtube access is decreasing every year. It is weird to me how many of you sneer of youtube use when I see it becoming more and more a platform for passing knowledge to people specially in the developing world that did not have access to it before. Yes because of easy access a lot of bullshit spreads too but youtube as a whole is an underrated access to knowledge for a lot of the third world.
Curious that a HN commentator never uses YouTube. If you’re a dev, don’t you come across video tutorials that you have to watch? Do you have insufficient bandwidth?
Unless it's for something physical (assembling an object) or otherwise visual (painting, 3D computer modelling, mapmaking), video tutorials are pretty bad for conveying information, due to low information density.
For programming, it is especially wasteful, as compared to an article with code samples, or, if necessary for the particular topic, a screenshot or two.
Don't disagree with you, but sometimes video tutorials are the _only_ source for such information (Some of Google's cloud services are guilty of this).
I'm a dev, and I only watch videos for entertainment. Any programming video tutorial could be a webpage, and I get professional information in text form exclusively.
Curiously, what is your point here? I'm sure you understood the authors message, so i imagine your reply is cheeky in some manner. I imagine your reply pokes fun at the idea of those being important.
However.. i just don't get that. I imagine several billion people can disagree about many "important" things. Does that dismiss the importance of those items? How many millions of people live below basic human means? Should those basic means be considered unnecessary?
I imagine if i lived in the woods in the middle of no where i might scoff at the idea of electricity. That doesn't invalidate peoples dependence on electricity. Which, is what is what i take from your comment. Sure, Youtube vs Electricity, not quite a fair comparison - i get that. Nevertheless your comment strikes off the mark for me, but perhaps i don't get your intent.
Honestly, my life got a lot better when I cancelled my Netflix and stopped watching TV. I’ve taken up actual hobbies like playing guitar instead, as well as working on personal projects. I still use YouTube, but I’m trying to ever so slowly wind that down too.
You do know that Starlink is completely different because their satellites are not on geostationary orbits (but instead much closer to the earth), right?
Starlink won't have higher data caps than other satellite providers. They have at most 20Gbps per satellite, and realistically, much lower. Even with a couple in view that's still far less than the existing HTS satellites.
This doesn't say how many will be in view at any time. Since this tweet they've had suspected propulsion problems and have filed an amendment to change their orbit to a lower one.
I've never understood why people used Redbox when you have to physically go to a kiosk, you're limited to whatever movies are in that kiosk, and worst of all - you rent by the night, so if you decide not to watch it, you've either got to return it, unwatched, or pay more.
Netflix still does DVD rentals, and though it's been a few years since I've used it, they had a great selection and except for some new releases just after relese, they were always in stock.
In the years before streaming netflix, I often did Redbox. Pick up a DVD on the way home form work on Friday. Return is Saturday when I go out shopping.
Do it twice a month, spend $2 (or $3 when they raised the price).
Netflix was 9.99 or more, and you basically had to watch 5 or 6 DVDs a month to "get your monies worth". So I often found myself watching a DVD when I didn't want to because I had already paid it, so I could send it back and get the DVD I actually wanted but didn't get because it was out of stock.
Netflix DVD is solving a different problem. The issue with Redbox or streaming services is they frequently have absolutely nothing I want to watch. I tend to go to the movies enough to have seen any new releases that I had any interest in. However, with a vastly larger selection I can load up on classics or random recommendations. It might not be what I was in the mood for, but it will be good.
How old are you? I remember being a kid 30+ years ago going to the VHS store and picking out some crap and loving every minute of it. It's an experience. I remember the joy of going to a vHS / DVD rental shop with a date etc. Nothing wrong with getting out of the house for a bit and picking something out, it was fun! (;
Yeah, I remember that too... but then when I was old enough to be on the hook for returning my own movies, it lost its allure and I switched to Netflix DVD as soon as it was available and never looked back.
I still have a few blockbuster VHS's floating around that I was so late on returning, I had to buy them.
For a time, it was a really convenient thing, generally located right at the grocery store. It was easy to grab a movie and return it the next time. It was also pretty easy to copy things.
Streaming via satellite is actually quite painful, and getting a 4glte data plan is almost always the better option over satellite (from personal experience).
It's not the same satellite. Do you know that starlink are not the same kind of satellite and don't have the same latency as the old providers? Starlink is much closer to the earth and has much lower latency.
Streaming via internet, yes, but streaming one of the 500 or so channels with scheduled programming on satellite TV is not. And totally agreed, if you've got 4G that's the way to go.
I never tried satellite TV, but have a few relatives who had nothing good to say about it, mostly due to poor reception issues. I think if you live in a dry region it might not be so bad, but unlike with internet, you can't as easily drop a connection and try again when watching a scheduled or live broadcast.
Today I received an email message from SpaceX/Starlink to obtain my "service address." Previously I had provided my email (more than once, actually) on the Starlink "beta" sign-up page. This is the first communication I've seen from them.
TBH, I'd really like to work for the FCC doing this stuff. I know it's grunt work, but it would be such a great end-of-career job to scrutinize hardware to the nth degree, and just have to worry about doing a precise job, not a fast one.
It's a third party commercial test lab that does this stuff, the FCC just receives the filings. There's a high degree of trust put on the test lab to meet certain engineering standards.
Not sure if that's a good thing. I know that structure exists all over the world though, in countless regulation contexts. So in practice, maybe it's OK.
Definitely! I had an opportunity to visit their physical measurement labs and get a tour of their facilities as part of my job and the amount of detail poured into every single aspect of the measurement system for primary standards was amazing.
Seeing the kibble balance that is now the primary standard for mass measurement was particularly great!
And the work going into putting primary standards into the hands of thousands of people through the Nist-On-A-Chip project is absolutely amazing.
I know some of the folks who do the ligthweight version of that (FCC EMI compliance testing, among other things), and it really does seem like an amazing gig:
- They tell the most amazing stories of things they've seen come through the lab
- Their "projects" are basically maintaining and honing their (astonishing) test systems and building out their test capabilities
- Clients (we, at least) pay them by the day and often do a lot of the setup (for debug sessions, at least), leaving them to just facilitate
- They get to enjoy someone else's tension and release when a pesky prototype just barely passes a scan (with no stakes to them)
Interestingly, this device seems to only be a WiFi router. The test results don't mention any protocols other than 802.11, or any frequency bands other than the 2.4GHz/5GHz bands used for WiFi. So the actual satellite communications must be handled by something else.
Hopefully you can turn the wifi access point + router off, and plug a better mesh network into its ethernet jack. (Think large properties with no interference from neighboring wifi networks)
yup. no phased array antenna infos, though I'd like to speculate that they may just rent the antenna and try to sell the router as a bundle (still as a part of the renting price)
I like @syshum have access to 1 gbit fiber in my current home area.
I am excited for Starlink to be able to buy a couple arces of land much further out and still be able to have "reasonable" internet that I'm able to work remotely.
You already can buy farmland and get decent ISP coverage. In fact, there is often more competition and better service in rural areas than in places dominated by the cable and telco monopolies.
I spot checked a county I’m familiar with. Population density: < 10 per square mile. Median income: 25-30K. They have fiber to the home, and offer up to 1GBit symmetric, even outside of town (where the houses are a ~mile apart).
They don’t have to trench to run the fiber underground anymore. Instead, they have a roto-rooter style boring machine that installs the fiber as it builds a tunnel. They use a metal detector to figure out where to steer it.
Looking at the filing, the only relation seems to be branding, i.e. they're probably looking to upsell people on wifi routers when they buy internet service (like all other providers do).
Yes, it is pretty standard to package an access point in with the modem. No idea if they will just include the router in the internet price, or rent it monthly on top of standard charge like how some ISPs do it.
Well... wait until you see pricing. Even if it comes in at the speculated $80/month price point, many people will find it cheaper and faster to stick with their terrestrial internet. There aren't many people willing to pay $80/month for a backup connection they'll only use once every month or two. (I'm one of them, I usually have at least one Comcast outage a month, from a few hours to a few days). I'm in a bit of a celluar dead zone, I get one bar of signal from AT&T or Verizon, and only if I walk up to the second floor)
In Alaska, specifically, gigabit internet costs ~$200/mo through Liberty Media's subsidiary GCI in the three major cities. In rural areas, GCI offers plans through local co-ops averaging $150/mo for 6mbit down, 100gb data cap over terrestrial microwave relay. Starlink will normalize this market.
Yeah, those rural customers are in the category "people with poor internet access" that I mentioned above - but I think that few people with fiber to the home are anxiously awaiting Starlink. That $200 gigabit plan is faster than I can get from Comcast (my only provider) not far from Seattle - the fastest they can provide to me is 600mbit, but with only about 15mbit upstream.
Starlink hasn't really revealed speeds, bandwidth caps, etc. Some tests claim they can provide gigabit speeds, but will have to wait and see what they can provide in real world usage.
Starlink will not cost $80 for the gigabit plan. I'd wager there won't be a gigabit plan. They need thousands of customers per 20Gbps satellite for this to even start to make sense. You cannot fit even a couple hundred 1Gbps customers on a single satellite.
You can certainly fit a couple hundred 1Gbps customers on a 20GBps satellite provided you make sure that those people don't completely saturate the entire line at the same time.
Yes, I know how the modeling works. For a 100Gbps subscriber they will need to guarantee that they can achieve 100G peak speeds when nobody is using it. That means the beam the user is in always has to be illuminated with as much power as they need for 100G. Remember, this power is shared between all the other beams on that satellite.
> I have fiber to the home that is super reliable... I am still anticipating this and will be signing up to supplement my fiber
We have fibre-to-the-home, but we'd like a bigger house and a bigger backyard. There are some really nice big houses with nice big backyards about 10-20 minutes north of us, but fibre-to-home is not available in that area. If Starlink works well, it would increase the odds we could move. So, I'd be inclined to sign up for Starlink alongside our fibre-to-the-home, just to compare the two.
I think OP is asking why is there a need for a special router. Why not just have the satellite terminal connect to a traditional WiFi router via ethernet similar to other types of modems?
If anyone from Starlink is reading this thread: Add a Lat/Lon option for addresses in the service address entry form.
Many rural homes have mailing addresses that don't resolve correctly. For example, the input form forced me to use "Anacortes, WA" for my house in the San Juans. The islands are a perfect Starlink test market, whereas Anacortes has plenty of broadband options.
I am buying an RV this week.
Both me and my wife work fully remotely for 5 years now.
Having a satellite internet terminal on the roof would make it... way more interesting.
Starlink will be great in rural Canada where the ISP oligopoly has no incentive to provide fast internet. I am curious how it will perform in stormy weather. Does it cut out like satellite TV?
Heck just living in the wrong neighborhood in freaking Orange County California can mean the only options are att with 5mb dsl or cox charging ridiculous amounts for cable.
Im not even talking about the outskirts of the OC. If you happen to live in the wrong part of town or even the wrong building; your current internet choices could be drastically worse than the house 100 yards away.
A couple blocks down my neighbors get att fiber and google fiber. I get tons of ads for those fiber services just so they can rub in my limited choices of paying att ridiculous amounts for bad dsl or Coxs even higher prices for the lowest tiered cable.
I really like that competition is coming, but hate that it is in area that again no one else can compete.
To bring competition all what's really needed is a legislation mandating that the last mile can be leased to any company (for a reasonable fee of course) and we would get back once again to times when we needed sites like dslreports.com to decide which ISP of so many in your area to use.
It doesn't bring confidence to me that the other competitor is company run by the richest man in the world.
I meant a real competition.
Most likely the way it will happen is that it will be really nice for customers with Amazon offering lower prices until SpaceX is driven out of business and only Amazon is left.
Frequency Range
2412.0-2462.0
5180.0-5240.0
5745.0-5825.0
Looks like your standard wireless AC router (2.4ghz and 5ghz).
Whatever this is, it doesn't "talk" to starlink, per its FCC application:
> In this application, SpaceX proposes to operate in the 10.7-12.7 GHz, 13.85-14.5 GHz, 17.8-18.6 GHz, 18.8-19.3 GHz, 27.5-29.1 GHz, and 29.5-30 GHz bands.
I'd bet this is the box you place inside your house to serve Wifi, and run ethernet up to the roof to connect to the modem/antenna on the roof, hence this being essentially a bog standard AC Wifi Router.
For those unclear on the concept: Starlink is SpaceX's satellite network. The Starlink Wifi router will connect to that satellite network to provide wireless home internet.
Would this be that UFO-looking thing you stick in the ground outside. Or this is literally a router(box in home) that connects to what before connecting to the satellite(s)?
box in home router. Though it could have special equipment to further process the satellite signal, that's likely to be primarily on the 'dish' itself.
Unclear until the pricing comes out, they may just include it for free when you buy internet service. But ISPs generally need to package at least something to serve Wifi for customers that don't already have their own Access Point, looks like SpaceX just put together their own, rather than provide something off the shelf.
Most ISPs don't require this -- you can use your own equipment if you wish. Most customers take them up on the rentals, though, either because they don't know any better or because it's easier than buying and maintaining their own equipment.
AT&T is the worst. Not only do they charge for a useless router, but there’s no way to disable or bypass it. It has a DMZ mode that supposedly lets you double NAT to keep their spyware crap off your LAN, but it doesn’t seem to work in practice.
It all depends on where the downlinks are. I would expect the US government will require all US customer traffic to be handed off to the public Internet in the USA. Then it's subject to standard legal intercept.
There was an equivalent project (satellite internet) in New Zealand which was killed off because the government required that the downlink happened in NZ for legal intercept (and censorship) reasons. The costs only worked if the downlink happened in Australia (the project could share costs with Australian telcos)
The downlink for NZ customers _had_ to happen in NZ, having it hit Australia and be routed back to NZ wasn't enough.
I mean even if you own your own private modem, Comcast (and others) can and do push new firmware directly into your modem. I don't see how this would be any different.
I'm not sure how you think those ISPs supposedly push firmware to private 'modems' of all shapes and sizes, but I would like to know because I had a hell of a time reflashing my router with OpenWRT.
You're referring to the CPE which is owned and managed by the ISP just as they own and manage other routers in their network.
The other person said that they can push firmware to private modems though, which is not possible without that modem being configured to accept such pushes.
Perhaps you're thinking of CWMP (TR-069) which is a protocol that ISPs often use to push configs to modems configured to receive them, but again, it cannot be used to arbitrarily flash the firmware of private modems.
Motorola's documentation says that firmware updates to _my_ modem are pushed by the ISP, with the rollout managed by the ISP. It may be CPE, but I purchased it retail and it is not linked to any particular ISP.
Just curious: What do you presume that NSA would do to prevent a multibillion dollar private company from pursuing a communications satellite constellation along all the correct legal and licensing channels?
They’ve already have all the big core internet links, call and sms histories, facial recognition logs, license plate camera logs, real time cell locations, and gps logs at (at least) google.
I’m not sure if they bother with the long tail of traffic within smaller ISPs, but the parade of Cisco backdoors suggests they do.
The one thing I find iffy is that the current generation of Starlink Sats aren't supposed to do Sattelite to Satfelite communication, so the actual latency benefits around the globe aren't going to materialize the first couple of years. I'm really interested when they plan to have their service to be actually competitive latency-wise.
The latency will be about 20ms higher than a terrestrial pure fiber based internet customer in the same location as the earth stations. For example whatever the latency is from the north bend WA site to downtown Seattle (a few milliseconds) plus 20ms. This is a considerable improvement over the absolute bare minimum rtt ping time on a Geostationary based VSAT which is 492ms.
There are a lot of terrestrial wireline last mile access technologies that already introduce 15-25ms latency on the last mile segment. Such as ADSL2+ on old POTS copper wiring or a heavily loaded docsis3 cable network. That is just from the home modem to the neighborhood's closest network node.
Absolutely, huge improvement, i'm just looking forward to the times when actual intercontinental latencies are LOWER than typical terrestrial connections.
Most DOCSIS 3 cable internet connections I've tested are under 10 ms round trip to the gateway. With consumer fiber, it's usually under 5 ms. These are far better than anything SpaceX will do.
PC gamers will want wired internet. Everyone else could probably do with deal with 80 ms without even noticing, so SpaceX will be very successful as long as it's affordable and reliable.
For some remote places that may not matter as much. For example in the rural Rocky Mountains you are limited on internet options. This could still be much needed competition.
Good, the best live on a paved road and I can't even get DSL. I got a garbage mobile connection with a 80ms ping time to google and im paying out the ass for it and it is unreliable as fuck.
My mom lives on Fox Island, and has no access to the Internet aside from LTE, which is very expensive and unreliable. Hoping she'll get a look from the Starlink team!
A Starry employee told me they're going to start offering Starlink Internet next year in rural areas. In my city they're offering a $50/month 200-300 mb/s service using Air Fiber from Ubiquity.
I asked him about 30 questions on how the system worked and what he was doing. He said Starry Internet was going to MARKET a service with Starlink / SpaceX. He wasn't talking about using Air Fibers in rural areas -- he said satellites. Maybe he was mistaken but I was not.
No, I do not consent to yet another source of EMF blasting me at all times. I also do not consent to my view of the cosmos being permanently altered. Hope this idea, Starlink and all future competitors (it won't be just Starlink of course) go belly up.
Do you not consent to space existing? You have far more exposure to all sorts of interesting radio frequencies from space every day than you'll ever see from a small radio.
I find it absolutely infuriating that this cartoon villain can just decide to gunk up the sky for a commercial venture. This is like Nestle bottling public water.
q:Who can participate in Starlink Beta?
a:Starlink Beta will begin in the Northern United States and lower Canada, with those living in rural and/or remote communities in the Washington state area. Access to the Starlink Beta program will be driven by the user's location as well as the number of users in nearby areas. All beta testers must have a clear view of the northern sky to participate.