The photo of the Starlink CPE in Malden, WA is not what it appears at first glance. Somebody from the WA EMD put it on top of the generator at the Ziply (local ILEC) CO, which was not burned, and remained online with a fiber link to the rest of Whitman county.
Ziply is the entity known as Northwest Fiber which recently acquired all of the WA, OR, ID ILEC assets of Frontier. The territory which are formerly GTE.
Quite honestly it looks to me like a PR stunt. Ziply was already offering a free hotspot of wifi services from the location before somebody showed up and took a photo of the starlink CPE.
If that location had internet already it was presumably acting as a base station.
Starlink needs somewhere to send packets to eventually, ideally without wasting bandwidth and latency by bouncing off ground relays, so it makes sense that they would setup a ground station at the closest place with intact high-speed internet during disaster recovery efforts.
The starlink earth stations in WA are in Redmond, North Bend and Brewster. With another one under construction near Prosser. In the photo that's not a starlink 'trunk' link/earth station antenna, which is much larger. That's an end point CPE.
The one in Boca Chica, TX is the same radomes, unknown exact dish/electronics configuration inside, mounted on steel pedestals on concrete foundations. But otherwise the same.
While it does appear to be closer to the consumer antenna than the normal base stations, it's just a radio, there is no reason it couldn't be used as a base station, and unlike the regular base stations it is designed for quick and easy setup so it potentially makes sense to use it as one during a disaster. This explanation definitely makes a hell of a lot more sense than it being a stunt.
More base stations and particularly base stations close to the disaster increase the portion of time that any given satellite has a link to both the end user and a base station. Particularly during this early stage when they have a limited number of pre existing base stations and limited satellite coverage that is very important for connectivity.
The advantage of the ground station being closely located to users is very very small (assuming options are in view and not at the extreme limits). There's not really any latency to avoid, the traffic is going up and down and through a ground station either which way. The current ground stations probably have better (as in lower latency) connectivity than a telco's local exchange anyway.
Considering the high complexity of field-deploying a ground station during an emergency when several nearby ground stations are available, it's difficult to imagine why they would ever do this. Licensing for ground stations is more complex which generally prevents installing one on short notice, and because the "teleport" link requires higher total bandwidth than the consumer links it typically uses larger antennas, higher power levels, and often even a completely different band and encoding both for higher throughput and to simplify managing interference with the consumer-facing antennas.
That said, my assumption would be that Starlink offered to provide redundancy for the WiFi at this site, so while the Starlink service in the photo is not necessarily in use it does serve a function by providing some reassurance in case the telco experiences infrastructure problems subsequent to the fire (not unlikely because fire recovery involves heavy equipment, tends to destabilize hillsides, etc).
The advantage isn't latency but connectivity. Connectivity requires both user and base station to connect to the same satellite, and that happens more often the closer they are to each other.
This becomes less of a problem as you gain more satellites, but right now with the limited rollout I'm pretty sure it is significant.
Base stations that have identical radios to user antennas (which have a general fcc license) probably don't require further licensing. They would be limited bandwidth but that's a lot better than nothing, especially during a disaster.
Documents from Starlink suggest the usable footprint of the satellites is a bit over 500km wide, so roughly the size of Washington. Further, Starlink only reported positive results from inter-satellite relay testing very recently ("first successful test" about four weeks ago).
Combining these, and considering that they are operating multiple ground stations within Washington, I don't think inter-satellite relay is a factor at all right now.
That's... an assumption that went into the logic in the comment replying to and the logic in it's grandparent.
I think you meant to contradict me, so I think my comment is being misunderstood, which might explain the downvotes too... I just can't figure out how your are misreading it.
So because someone else was also offering a solution, Starlink is the stunt? Is literally everything in life a stunt if someone has done it before you?
They literally set it up at the one place in town that already had working Internet access and power. On top of the generator of the entity already providing such. Yes, that's a stunt.
I don't doubt they're using it, just that one particular photo was possibly the worst possible choice for PR. Take a photo of one out in a field being powered from portable equipment with a Honda 2000 inverter-generator or something.
The location of Malden works for them because with the current bent pipe satellite architecture, and starlink earth stations in Redmond, North Bend and Brewster, the beta-test CPEs are simultaneously in view of satellites that can also see the earth stations. Activating a temporary CPE in Malden is no different than the same equipment that's been in field beta test with spacex's redmond based employees around WA state for several months now.
And it's at a sufficiently high latitude that the partially-complete satellite network density, at any given point in time, is denser above Malden than above a place several degrees latitude further south.
Maybe the outbound fiber link for Ziply CO is damaged by the wildfire? It's probably on poles instead of buried due to cost reason. If that's the case, then the CO would route all traffic thru Starlink.
You can't just take a legacy telco CO full of things like Cisco 15454s with OC-12/OC-48 SDH/SONET interface cards, linked to the nearest major city by SDH/TDM circuits, and pipe it through a gigabit ethernet link into a power over ethernet powered (microwave, millimeter wave or satellte) thing on the roof.
If you look around in a place like that you'll see fun things like 1RU rackmount DS3-to-DS1 mux devices connected to legacy TDM transport gear, for SS7/PSTN links, 911 and such.
If anybody on hacker news is in any way connected to this project or can get Elon Musk or somebody else at starlink's ear: PLEASE please see if there is any way that they can get some starlink equipment out to the thousands of kids who are currently living on tribal land without internet.
These kids are very literally being left behind due to the covid lockdowns. They can't do online school because they can't get internet access. It's unbelievably tragic and heartbreaking.
There are a number of tribes using federal subsidies and their own local economic base to build terrestrial, microwave, point-to-point and point-to-multipoint WISP networks.
One of my personal pet peeves with the FCC and the federal government's methods of subsidizing rural Internet, is that it's a horribly moribund process. The USF (universal service fund) was created a long time ago to put a tiny tax on every wireline dialtone phone service in the USA and apply it as a subsidy to last-mile copper phone operators mandated to serve very rural areas. Something like that could be applied to greatly increased rural broadband subsidies in general, which would benefit not just tribal areas but everywhere with a low density of people per square km.
Excellent point, I second this nomination. The US has -hundreds- of rural tribes that (unless they've had the time and funds) -have- to be under-served. The solution your proposing could be -very- beneficial to both interests, now and after Covid (which is hurting rez's hard).
I wouldn't be surprised if their 'incomplete' coverage were limited to areas within range of large metros. Even if the PR is around underserved areas, the money is in suburbs.
Even in the current configuration without inter-satellite links coverage extends for almost 1000km from a gateway. I'm pretty sure they have enough gateways for the entire US landmass.
I have a map (from all public FCC earth station filing data) of the almost two dozen starlink earth stations so far licensed in the 48 states.
Many of them are in medium sized cities surrounded by rural areas, or already in fairly sparsely populated areas colocated with long haul fiber ILAs and well positioned to serve very rural areas.
For instance there's one in Idaho that's adjacent to some intercity fiber (from where they're almost certainly buying a transport circuit to get to Seattle) which will have simultaneous visibility of satellites serving a vast area that has no WISPs and is presently dependent on consumer grade geostationary VSAT stuff.
The problem right now is sufficient density of satellites for seamless handover coverage to a CPE (make-before-break). Which would be the same problem if you were trying to serve a suburb of Seattle or a very rural area in Montana.
I rate it as highly unlikely that at the point in time when an ordinary consumer with a visa card can sign up for starlink service, they only offer it in major metro areas. The siting choices for the earth stations say otherwise.
Technological and economic limitations in Starlink, at least with the first/second generation of stuff mean that it's not competition for the sort of wireline services you can get in the suburb of a major metro area. If I were in Kirkland, WA and could get 500 to 1000 Mbps Comcast service, or gigabit GPON from Centurylink(Lumen), I'd certainly sign up for that before Starlink. You'd be looking at something that may top out at max speeds of 150-200Mbps down and 40-80 Mbps upstream (Starlink) vs a copper coaxial or fiber last mile setup that can do 800 down, and 300-600 Mbps up.
I think that is fundamentally at odds with how the satellites have been deployed, isn't it? These aren't at high geosync orbits. The satellites aren't in a stationary location relative to a point on the earth, so I don't think you'd be able to limit the coverage to specific geographic locations.
IMO internet connectivity for education of underserved rural children is a great use case for Starlink. This population (particularly in the Four Corners region of the US) is VERY remote and expensive for existing internet service. I hope it gets there sometime soon.
I've often thought it would be fun to spec out a low-power mesh network protocol for backcountry communication[0] (safety, sharing GPS coordinates, texting). Basically anyone could place waterproof radios with solar panels wherever. You can share the coordinates like a geocache, and if someone gets close enough they can connect with bluetooth to join the network. If a node goes down anyone could repair it. Obviously the network would be very susceptible to abuse/jamming/vandalism, but maybe like wikipedia there would be more people motivated to keep it working than destroy it.
Anyway, maybe Starlink will leapfrog this dream.
[0]: Kind of like https://gotenna.com/ but with an open protocol and static nodes.
Will the receiver be something you can plug in as a USB device for a laptop and carry with you? Or is it bulkier than that?
Edit: sounds like it's half a meter, so no :-) "If you're accepted for the beta, you can expect to get a user terminal with a flat disc antenna, which measures 0.48 meters in diameter. Musk describes these as looking like a "little UFO on a stick." Your terminal's antennas will self-direct itself for the best satellite signals." [https://www.zdnet.com/article/spacex-starlink-internet-prepa...]
It needs 56V via PoE as power supply. So you need at least a 56V PoE injector and a powerbank that can supply this voltage. This is my free startup/product idea today. :) https://fcc.report/FCC-ID/2AWHPR201/4805892
DC-to-DC 1000BaseT 802.3at / 802.3bt PoE injectors already exist for loads in the 25W to 70W range, typically used for WISP access point radios on towers.
Sounds like it would be man-portable. So yes, if it's important enough to your mission. Push a stick into the ground, mount the disk on top and connect to your rugged hardware.
such things already exist for satellite news gathering and military/tactical purposes, with geostationary satellite capacity. But they're both very costly to purchase and very costly to operate, due to the rudimentary modulations necessary for any useful Mbps on such a small terminal.
The idea of a portable starlink terminal that might cost under $5000 is revolutionary.
much smaller foldable things already exist that can talk to the Inmarsat I-4/I-5 networks, but again, very costly in dolllars per megabyte of data transferred.
A 600kbit BGAN is a little larger than a laptop, and is self contained (including a battery), with built in wifi and/or an ethernet cable. Set up in a minute or two if you know where to point it (the program on the laptop will help with that, then the beeps)
But yes, you're talking $3 a megabyte on that.
Starlink's actual usuable bandwidth and cost is still a question, but if it does turn out to be an order of magnitude cheaper and faster than a bgan it will be revolutionary. I'm glad I don't own shares in companies like Inmarsat.
(And that's without the massive improvement in latency - a bgan in background mode is typically a 1000-1200ms RTT. In the per-minute guarenteed mode it's 600ms)
Until they figure out satellite-to-satellite, starlink will be still limited by having an earth station visible underneath the satellite simultaneously in the same general region as the CPEs. It's all "moving bent pipe" right now. Same architectural limitation as why the original Globalstar LEO network for handheld satellite phones was never able to offer truly "global" coverage, unlike Iridium.
It will be quite some time before Starlink is usable in the middle of the Pacific ocean. I don't think it will kill Inmarsat immediately for maritime and aviation applications. But I am also glad I don't own an of their stock (I also own no stock in any geostationary satellite owner/operator).
I think Musk will deliver. May take another 5 years. Sure we'll still be buying older kit like vsats for a year or two after that too, but it isn't going to be growing.
You're right about GEO market -- it's more than just IP. We have an old UKI doing probably it's last event this weekend (delayed due to covid). The replacement doesn't have a dish. Started decommissioning a truck with a vsat today -- replacement is 4g/5g only. The traditional non-IP market is shrinking even without starlink.
The biggest risk to starlink I suspect would be Musk dying. He seems to have the ability to defy naysayers and change industries.
OTOH, there's a good chance that the many engineers and scientists at SpaceX, working under Gwynne Shotwell, will deliver something viable.
Stop giving Musk credit for the things he didn't do. His death won't affect the viability of Starlink, and if anything, it would likely improve the final product. SpaceX's successes and failures are generally inversely proportional to the attention Musks puts into running the company; i.e., SpaceX's success is inversely proportional to his micromanaging and meddling.
I agree it will be some time, but even if they never get sat to sat links they can solve the Pacific ocean problem via relays on ships - it wouldn't take that many.
Those are already signed up for Iridium and Inmarsat. They've already got equipment and SpaceX might not be so economical in short term.
SpaceX would be great for recreational sailors, cruisers and liveaboards. That's market of less than a million clients (if that), compared to billions in rural population. It's not even clear current gen antenna would work on small craft.
So, easy to set up and a measured latency of down to 30ms - both great things. The throughput is pretty respectable as well, at least in comparison to urban cable internet (which is, admittedly, a low bar).
5-10 minute connection times, that's a bit concerning. Due to a lack of coverage, or signal to noise issues?
It would still be nice to see some readings over time; how stable are these numbers?
that's 5-10 minutes to set up the connection. a different article on the subject cites the same source saying that the usual time to setup is multiple hours. the times you quote are actually best in class by an order of magnitude:
By comparison, Hall emphasized that it took him between five and 10 minutes to set up and connect a Starlink terminal. And a single person can set up one of the devices: “It doesn’t require a truck and a trailer and a whole lot of other additional equipment,” Hall said.
“I have spent the better part of four or five hours with some satellite equipment trying to get a good [connection]. So, to me, it’s amazing,” Hall added.
Its amazing to me that seemingly any project Elon Musk is associated with has at least 2-3 Top level comments shitting all over it from who are either incredibly nip-picky or inertly uniformed.
But are utterly convinced their options are amazing.
> “I have never set up any tactical satellite equipment that has been as quick to set up, and anywhere near as reliable” as Starlink, Richard Hall, the emergency telecommunications leader of the Washington State Military Department’s IT division, told CNBC in an interview Monday.
> The company has confirmed that it’s been conducting a private beta test of Starlink with employees, but Hall said Washington’s emergency division use case “grew organically out of previously unrelated talks.” When Washington’s wildfires became increasingly severe in August, with catastrophic damage, Hall saw Starlink as a new solution for areas where the damage meant “there is no other available data connection.”
> “I even did setup to allow kids to do some of their initial schooling too, because they were pressing forward with some limited presence slowly. We covered a whole lot of bases,” Hall said. “Starlink changes the game as far as what’s available.”
Clearly all a PR stunt by Evil genius Elon Musk who never does anything other then spend his time planning the next big PR move to confuse the masses.
Edit: I wrote a response but Hacker News does not allow it, basic point is, provide evidence that it is a PR stunt if that is your claim. The person interviewed seem to have credibility. Seems like interpretation in bad faith to me. Not question your technical knowledge.
If you're referring to my comments, I'm probably the only person in this thread who works professionally in two-way satellite. My day to day work encompasses the venn diagram overlap between terrestrial ISP backbone network engineering, point-to-point high capacity microwave and millimeter wave band transport links, and various two-way satellite access technologies when a link via geostationary is the only viable option.
And I don't dislike Starlink. I actually think it's amazing tech. I'm criticizing the specific PR stunt of putting a starlink CPE at an exising ILEC CO, not what Starlink is.
Starlink, when ready for ordinary end user production use, will be an amazing improvement over cheap ($110-200/mo) consumer grade VSAT terminals. The physics and economics of launching 4000-6200 kg geostationary telecom satellites and their extremely limited aggregate capacity means that a consumer grade VSAT must be oversubscribed at a 32:1 ratio or worse. Resulting in terrible things like 60GB/month data quotas for end users. It's overall a miserable experience. Starlink has the potential to entirely disrupt and kill what I call the 'shitty VSAT' market.
Above the 'shitty VSAT' market there's a whole category of serious two way satellite technology that the ordinary consumer will never see. And things like o3b and starlink also have the potential to improve that. You would visibly cringe if you saw the monthly $ per MHz transponder costs for Ku spot beam capacity over eastern Africa. The dollars per Mbps ratio is ridiculously bad. In order to achieve any reasonable bps/Hz modulation density you can easily spend $100k to erect a pair of 4.5m size earth stations for a dedicated 1:1, SCPC link. And that's before you're looking at anywhere from $5000 to $30,000/month paid for transponder capacity, depending on how much data you're trying to move, and how asymmetric it is.
There's a reason why every telecom/ISP in every developing nation is trying their hardest to connect to the nearest submarine cable landing station and not remain reliant upon monthly C or Ku band transponder leases.
> There's a reason why every telecom/ISP in every developing nation is trying their hardest to connect to the nearest submarine cable landing station and not remain reliant upon monthly C or Ku band transponder leases.
It's not just cost, it's also the latency. While it's apparent you know this, most commenters might not realize the game changing difference with Starlink.
Starlink latency can be as low as 15ms to the nearest POP. The minimum latency for any geostationary satellite to the nearest pop is 528ms RTT. That's speed of light, going 28k miles 4x, assuming you and the POP are on the equator directly below the satellite.
yes, that as well. FYI minimum latency for a round trip ICMP ping on geostationary is more like 492-495ms. 520-525ms is also typical. Will vary somewhat with modem FEC complexity, FEC code rate, and exactly what modems are in use on a 1:1 dedicated link.
Amazing how just a nugget of bad info can change things.
Back in Satellite Controller school in 2003 we were taught geostationary is 28,500 miles. So even since then I've been using that as my reference point.
In reality, it's about 35,786km, or 22,236 miles[0].
That means the minimum RTT time is 479ms, given the perfect scenario I previously laid out and zero equipment delay. Which isn't a thing.
Then again, the mythical perfectly spherical radiation pattern dipole antenna that we base all dBi off of isn't a thing either.
One of the tradeoffs in modern state of the art VSAT modems is that you can intentionally choose more computationally 'expensive' FEC, to slightly improve your bps/Hz in a given fixed kHz/MHz amount of FDD transponder capacity, at the expense of higher latency. With the Comtech CDM-760 for instance.
This is getting better as the years go on and modem manufacturers are able to throw additional CPU and FPGA resources at FEC processing, without increasing their cost to build a modem a great deal.
Equator is 6,378km from the centre of the earth, so GEO is 42,164km, or 26,200 miles, so not sure where 28,500 came from.
> Then again, the mythical perfectly spherical radiation pattern dipole antenna that we base all dBi off of isn't a thing either.
It got knocked over by a spherical cow.
(I did have a colleague lose a satellite connection in Libya once which he blamed on a herd of cows. I think he aiming fairly low on the horizon to the east, with the disk near ground level, so I give him the benefit of the doubt)
One of mine is on 531ms at the moment, but that's guaranteed traffic on a dedicated slot. General wifi stuff on BGANs in background mode tends to be twice that.
By comparison, my office in Sydney is currently 276ms rtt from London.
"Starlink, when ready for ordinary end user production use, will be an amazing improvement over cheap ($110-200/mo) consumer grade VSAT terminals. The physics and economics of launching 4000-6200 kg geostationary telecom satellites and their extremely limited aggregate capacity means that a consumer grade VSAT must be oversubscribed at a 32:1 ratio or worse. Resulting in terrible things like 60GB/month data quotas for end users. It's overall a miserable experience. Starlink has the potential to entirely disrupt and kill what I call the 'shitty VSAT' market."
Actually, GEO satellites have quite a bit of aggregate capacity (1 Tbps and going up) and more capacity where it matters (over land, and specifically, population centers) than LEO constellations, and therefore have better bandwidth economics. They also last ~3x as long, which brings the $/Mbps down more.
60 GB/month caps are not really a thing anymore, unless you're still using HughesNet.
Latency will be dealt with using hybrid modems that can use LEO/DSL/4G for latency-sensitive applications and GEO for large amounts of cheap bits. Hughes, to their credit, has had such a solution available since 2007, last I checked.
> Actually, GEO satellites have quite a bit of aggregate capacity (1 Tbps and going up) and more capacity where it matters (over land, and specifically, population centers) than LEO constellations, and therefore have better bandwidth economics. They also last ~3x as long, which brings the $/Mbps down more.
the aggregate capacity of a 180 million dollar (construction plus launch cost) 6000 kg geostationary telecom satellite is less than two strands of fiber and a set of modern 100/200/400GbE coherent DWDM system line terminals.
saying that the throughput of all of the ka-band spot beams on a satellite is 1Tbps is both double-counting math for the capacity in both directions, and does not reflect the actual capability of the satellite. maybe if every single ground station was something large enough and with enough link budget to operate at 16APSK and better modulations. not a realistic figure if you're talking about low-cost, sub $1500 hardware, consumer grade ku and ka band vsats.
for a randomly chosen rural zip code in WA state, hughesnet is offering a 50GB quota/month for $150/month. so yes, 60GB transfer limits and things are still a real thing. and during peak evening hours TDMA contention means that latency will be 1150ms+, or worse.
the unavoidable economics of consumer grade small VSAT require serious oversubscription. Dedicated 1:1 satellite capacity starts from $1500/Mbps and up, and requires a serious VSAT terminal, not a hughesnet/viasat/wildblue type toy.
as to your last paragraph, if you have a proper 4G/LTE network in your area, just use that. There's verizon and at&t resellers with plans available that have quotas close to 200GB/month for a reasonable price now. why you would want a hybrid cheap vsat and 4G LTE setup, as a consumer, I don't know.
> the aggregate capacity of a 180 million dollar (construction plus launch cost) 6000 kg geostationary telecom satellite is less than two strands of fiber and a set of modern 100/200/400GbE coherent DWDM system line terminals.
Not sure how that's relevant. In any case, the total cost of a GEO is closer to double that.
> saying that the throughput of all of the ka-band spot beams on a satellite is 1Tbps is both double-counting math for the capacity in both directions, and does not reflect the actual capability of the satellite.
This is not correct.
> maybe if every single ground station was something large enough and with enough link budget to operate at 16APSK and better modulations. not a realistic figure if you're talking about low-cost, sub $1500 hardware, consumer grade ku and ka band vsats.
I'm not sure if you're talking about the ground stations that connect to fiber backhaul, here, or to the CPE terminals. In any case, ground station capacity is not an issue, and neither is CPE terminal capacity.
> for a randomly chosen rural zip code in WA state, hughesnet is offering a 50GB quota/month for $150/month. so yes, 60GB transfer limits and things are still a real thing. and during peak evening hours TDMA contention means that latency will be 1150ms+, or worse.
Yup, that's what I said: "... unless you're still using HughesNet."
> the unavoidable economics of consumer grade small VSAT require serious oversubscription. Dedicated 1:1 satellite capacity starts from $1500/Mbps and up, and requires a serious VSAT terminal, not a hughesnet/viasat/wildblue type toy.
Again, not sure how this is relevant. Every residential (and even many business) connectivity option is oversubscribed.
If you're saying that satellite cannot compete with fiber or cable, then you'd get no argument from me. If you're saying that satellite is a shitty option, well, I think you'd find that some people disagree with you on that.
That's not to say there isn't room for improvement, but providers know this and are working on it.
> In any case, ground station capacity is not an issue, and neither is CPE terminal capacity.
because consumer grade CPE terminals need to be so small (because of hardware cost and economics), link budgets suck and less complex modulations must be used. As compared to serious 1.8 meter and larger VSATs. Show me a consumer grade VSAT that's using 16APSK/32APSK and the correspondingly higher bps/Hz efficiency that can be achieved with big, expensive satellite earth station gear used for dedicated 1:1 links.
the aggregate throughput of a geostationary satellite is greatly reduced if you start using tons of tiny VSATs on it. Go look at how much actual capacity is available in a 15 MHz chunk of Ku transponder capacity (even with a 51dBm EIRP hot spot beam), used with an iDirect evolution series linecard at the hub end, that is populated by a bunch of cheap 1.2 meter compression molded fiberglass dishes with 3W/4W class BUCs on them. How many Mbps is that? Not a lot.
> Every residential (and even many business) connectivity option is oversubscribed.
the aggregate throughput capacity of a single CMTS port on a DOCSIS3 or DOCSIS3.1 network segment is equivalent to a significant portion of the entire capacity of a geostationary satellite serving consumers. one CMTS port can serve hundreds of (yes, oversubscribed) 200 to 1000 Mbps class residential end users. One 10GbE circuit feeding a 2U rackmount sized GPON OLT can serve a ridiculous number of end user customers. It's oversubscribed but not in such a way that individual users see latency increases during peak hours (unless somebody has really fucked up their network). With the CMTS example we're talking about things that regularly achieve 1024QAM to 4096QAM modulation on copper wireline plant using the RF channels that previously would have been analog TV.
wireline is oversubscribed? yes. I could show you traffic charts from a 175-suite condominium building where every unit is wired with symmetric gigabit 1000BaseT to the home, that has an 80% take rate of subscribers. The whole building has a single 10GbE uplink and everyone is perfectly happy. Because of course not everyone tries to use the whole capacity of anything all the time. But when you start getting into the wildly high oversubscription ratios needed to make geostationary consumer grade VSAT stuff work economically, it becomes a very poor end user experience.
> If you're saying that satellite is a shitty option, well, I think you'd find that some people disagree with you on that.
I'm saying geostationary consumer grade satellite stuff is a shitty option and should always be the choice of last resort when anything else exists, due to its unavoidable poor economics and aggregate capacity.
I have a lot more optimism that starlink will have the real world throughput needed to be a viable option for rural broadband. Because the link budgets are much better with small antennas and small tx poweer electronics, due to the LEO orbit. And the much lower latency. I think people who believe starlink will replace their 800 Mbps comcast DOCSIS3 32x8 connection or GPON last mile gigabit connection are not fully informed. Properly implemented wireline networks will always have a great deal more throughput at a much lower deployment cost. What Starlink will kill is crappy consumer grade VSATs and sub-75Mbps class terrestrial PtMP WISPs.
> Show me a consumer grade VSAT that's using 16APSK/32APSK...
Not that it matters, but, I could.
> How many Mbps is that? Not a lot.
So, e.g., Viasat offers 100 Mbps service.
> the aggregate throughput capacity of a single CMTS port on a DOCSIS3 or DOCSIS3.1...
Yes, you can get tons of traffic through a coax cable. There's more bandwidth and you can use higher efficiency modulations because the SINR is way better. Not sure how this is relevant, though.
I'll point out, though, that plenty of people see slowdowns on their cable modem networks during peak busy times. Even these networks have their limits.
> ... it becomes a very poor end user experience.
Again, I think some people would disagree with you on that.
> ... real world throughput needed to be a viable option for rural broadband. Because the link budgets are much better with small antennas and small tx poweer electronics, due to the LEO orbit. And the much lower latency.
No doubt about the lower power electronics (vis-a-vis GEO) and the lower latency, but even so, SL's CPE is around $1,000, and the reliability through rain, wind, and snow is unknown. Setting aside the reliability question for now, I think what it really comes down to is the price vs latency trade-off. In order to be profitable, SL will have to be more expensive than traditional GEO solutions because the CPE, the ground network, and the actual constellation all cost more on a $/bit basis than GEO solutions. It will be interesting to see if the lower latency will be enough to draw consumers.
The big X-Factor in all of this is how much more capital Elon can raise. He has an amazing talent for raising money and if retail investors don't care that SL is less cost-effective than other options, then it can go on for a long time.
You clearly aren't aware of the existence of traditional geostationary-based VSAT terminals/modems/equipment, all of which already fit those grossly misunderstood and uninformed use cases.
Trust me, if there's one thing the DoD is really good at, it's spending money on launching its own satellites and buying commercial C/Ku/Ka band transponder capacity from third parties.
Really rich people don't need starlink. Traditional earth station equipment for dedicated 1:1 capacity, two way satellite already exists.
Also o3b already exists. By the scale of money of the sort of person who buys a large private island with a staff, the hardware cost of an o3b terminal is a tiny rounding error.
So I guess we're just going to lay back and accept that Comcast and other awful ISPs are going to rule over our access forever? Just completely shit on anything that attempts to improve the situation?
Additionally, there's nothing stopping several people from connecting to the same satellite dish that connects to Starlink. Yes there are bandwidth limitations, but for grandmas checking Facebook and emails you could have hundreds of people on a single satellite dish. This is still a huge improvement for millions of people.
> should I be ok with trading the stars from earth
This level of hysteria doesn’t strengthen your argument. Are these satellites even visible to the human eye? Why are the thousands of satellites in orbit today not an issue for you but more are?
To be clear, there are about ~15,000 objects (active + debris) in orbit ranging from small debris chunks to active spacecraft.
Starlink alone is expected to add ~30,000 active satellites with relatively large solar panels/bodies, which by virtue of their area alone can be expected to be more visible from the Earth than most of the small objects that are currently tracked.
Ok, sure, so here's a valid argument from you - roughly, "why is Starlink allowed to double the number of objects in earth orbit?"
But, you follow it up with an unjustified comment - "with relatively large solar panels/bodies". Can you expand on this? Are these things an order of magnitude larger than the median tracked object? A factor of two?
Finally, you make a comment that doesn't follow for me:
> which by virtue of their area alone can be expected to be more visible
Is it not true that angling solar panels away from the earth to minimize the "area" relative to a ground observer is trivially accomplished?
And, also, already not really knowing the size of objects in space, I find it hard to accept that they are such significantly larger objects that they take up more of the sky. Please expand on why they are so much larger or perhaps fly so much closer to earth or perhaps have such limited maneuverability that I should be concerned.
Even the most expensive cellular data subscription will cost much less than the cheapest satellite internet connection, assuming you are comparing apples-to-apples (bitrate and total data transfer).
My rural lake home has fiber internet while my home in the city is stuck on Comcast (Minnesota for both lake home and home).
Fiber is really cheap to run if you can hang it on poles in rural areas. I think the satellite internet market will shrink as more local ISPs start stringing fiber up on existing utility poles in lower population density areas.
Satellite internet will have a place for areas like the western US where the population density is very low.
Do they have enough cash to pay for this service and to keep this a viable business proposition? I'm still hoping this will be a great alternative to locations that are more densely packed, but only have 1 option for broadband. Need to keep the Comcasts and Verizons of the world in check.
Many do, yes. In the north american market there's the "consumer grade" VSAT category for stuff like viasat/hughesnet/wildblue/xplornet highly oversubscribed small ku/ka-band VSAT terminals, with monthly costs under $200/mo.
In the developing nation market, go to a remote part of some place in Nepal that has no fiber or terrestrial microwave links back to the big cities. Find an "internet cafe", what you're likely to see on the roof is something like this, a cheap 1.2 meter VSAT on the roof with a 4W BUC:
In a highly contended, highly oversubscribed TDMA network in some ISP's small piece of one transponder, linked back to an earth station elsewhere. For 200, 300, 400 bucks a month.
What's going to change is the quality of service and speeds that somebody in $small_nepalese_city is going to get for their 250 dollars a month.
I think he will leverage his other companies to use this thing. Starlink on a tesla truck/car/whatever or bundled with solar. That is an interesting use case. Also there was at one time many trucks rolling around the US with a satellite receiver/transmitter on them. They were bound to the US and setting up stations in other countries was a huge deal. But this changes that market radically. You will start to see a mix of cell and satellite again. If the costs are within the same range. For what the cell companies want for their data plans in some IoT cases I can see why he may have said 'I will just build my own'. Use the system to bring down cost per rocket also is a good use case. I think he is burning money on a few different things here. Rural ISP is not the only one. But it is brought up a lot.
I am sure there are a ton of people on this forum that work remotely, and would love to live in a rural area, but don’t make the move because of the lack of reliable connectivity.
You'd be surprised where in the USA has at least one viable last mile terrestrial WISP. I can think of a few parts of Idaho where you would think nothing exists, but you can get 25 Mbps x 10 Mbps service from a competently run small ISP, by point to multipoint 5150-5850 MHz band equipment.
But there are also vast areas of Idaho too sparsely populated to support any WISP at all, where you'll see cheap consumer grade VSAT stuck to the sides of peoples' houses.
This is true, I used a wisp for 10 years in Montana. However in my valley there are many residents who don't have the required line of sight to the wisp providers tower/equipment for service due to trees or hills blocking. Their only current solution is 4g or satellite.
I have been having challenges with this. I want to move to Wyoming and get a decent amount of land, but I also want gigabit internet. What I just described appears to be a unicorn. I've already had ISPs laugh at me. Realtors and their websites are no help in this area.
I have a great deal of sympathy with this. There's so many beautiful low cost of living/low cost of real estate locations in the US and Canadian west, but the best locations are also places where you're looking at no Internet, off-grid solar/wind power, etc.
Depending on where you are looking, and what your budget is, and your level of motivation you might look into seeing how difficult it would be to build your own point to point link back to a place where you can get 'real' internet.
I also want symmetric gigabit but in a very rural location I might be totally satisfied with 40 Mbps down x 15 Mbps up, if it was sufficiently reliable and good quality (overall uptime in a year, latency, jitter, etc).
There is a great deal that can be done with sets of equipment like a 90cm high performance dual polarity shielded dish (ALG or Jirous or similar), ubnt AF5XHD radios, etc. Perhaps for less than $10k all-in you might be able to build your own link to reach the nearest WISP or terrestrial connectivity. Entirely depending on how remote you are and terrain.
I've thought about this as well. It would cost more, but I could get a really small house at the edge of a city, set up a Ubiquity tower, maybe licensed, and have my own radio link. I managed these links in the military and bad weather aside, they were decent. I too would be ok with 40/15 myself, but family members need more. I might catch some flak for putting up a small tower. I would like to avoid the commercial wireless solutions so that I could have more control over jitter/latency.
At the moment, Starlink is a bit of a loss-leader for SpaceX. They're putting up the satellites to justify the cost of continuing development on Falcon-9, because they've saturated the market for satellite customers. It's entirely possible that the program continues on that vein and is eventually subsidized by an expanding satellite launch market as companies realize there are things they could do with satellites that they previously couldn't afford, now can.
There is, of course, market risk---both the one you've identified and the entirely mundane "SpaceX goes under and the satellite fleet goes defunct" risk.
> "SpaceX goes under and the satellite fleet goes defunct" risk.
extremely unlikely considering the value of the assets already deployed in space. One scenario is a debtor-in-possession arrangement via bankruptcy court.
Another thing that could happen is something like what happened to the first Iridium corporation's bankruptcy, where a group of investors formed a "new" Iridium corporation and stepped in, via the bankruptcy court, to take it over. Google "iridium bankruptcy" for more details. Also this book:
"... value of the assets already deployed in space..."
But, what is that value? Of the ~ 800 SL satellites launched so far, about 5% have already deorbited. Of the remainder, all but 2 don't have inter-satellite links. The others will deorbit in 5 years. LEOs, in general, require tremendous amounts of money just to maintain an existing constellation size. At steady state, SpaceX would have to launch something like 60 satellites per week just to maintain their constellation. I can't remember the numbers now, but I think that meant costs in the $10's of millions / week just in maintenance once you account for construction and launch costs.
> I can't remember the numbers now, but I think that meant costs in the $10's of millions / week
$500 million per year is a drop in the bucket for ~600Tbit of worldwide low altitude high speed satellite Internet. That’s ~$800/Gbit at 20Gbit/satellite and 30,000 satellites.
Starship will carry 240 satellites at a $2 million launch cost. That’s $250 million in launch costs every 5 years to fully cycle 30,000 satellites. If the satellites themselves will cost ~$250k each or $7.5b for the full constellation, so annual costs overall would be $1.5 billion, but I would guess at that scale per-satellite cost is actually much lower.
If you do the math, a fully operational Starlink will print vast sums of money ($10s of billions annually) until if/when there is a viable competitor.
The beauty is that just the marginal costs to Starlink directly fund SpaceX’s R&D budget — basically the cost side of the equation pays for Starship, while the substantial profit is just pushing Elon further up the Richest List to the point where he’ll have to find another trillion-dollar problem to throw money at.
> That’s ~$800/Gbit at 20Gbit/satellite and 30,000 satellites.
This is pretty optimistic because the shells at different altitudes have overlapping beams and can not all use the same spectrum at the same time (OK, technically, two satellites can share the same spectrum if they use different polarizations, but, anyway, SL plans to have 3 orbital shells according to WP.) LEO bandwidth scales sublinearly with the number of satellites because of this. Also, this doesn't take into account inefficiency due to timing and coordination between satellites, nor the fact that 70% of the total bandwidth is over water and even the bandwidth over land is mostly not over population centers. The actual cost per bit is estimated to be about 2.5x-10x higher (see https://twitter.com/Megaconstellati/status/13103869669917040...).
> Starship will carry 240 satellites at a $2 million launch cost.
I think the operative word here is "will". In 2019, SX charged around $2700/kg to launch (not sure to what altitude, but let's take that figure, if you will.) A SL satellite is around 260 kg. If I round the numbers down to $2500/kg and 250 kg/satellite, I get $37.5 MM to launch 60 at a time. Suppose Starship can overcome the laws of physics and aerodynamics and launch 240 satellites with the same amount of fuel, so the cost drops by 75%. That's still roundabout $9.3 MM/launch, or, around $1 B in launch costs every five years.
Nevertheless, as you pointed out, that's not much compared to the cost of the satellites themselves. My understanding is that $250k/satellite would be very good, even at scale, but let's take that number. That brings the cost of making and launching the constellation to around $8.5 B / 5 years.
But, that's just the satellites. You need an entire ground segment to make the whole thing work. As a rough estimate, say that's another $8.5 B, but it'll last twice as long, so, $4.25 B / 5 years. OK, now we're at around $2.5 B / year just for the machinery, not including the CPE, landing rights, or personnel to keep things humming.
> If you do the math, a fully operational Starlink will print vast sums of money...
I think that's the big question everyone wants the answer to: Who will pay for this? SL will cost around $2.5 B / year in just the ground segment and the space segment. At $100/month, SL needs a bit over 2 MM customers just to cover the cost of equipment. But those 2 MM customers are not spread out evenly around the Earth, where all of the bandwidth is.
If you have any insight as to who will pay for this, I'd genuinely like to know because I'd be happy to buy into the SL IPO and retire early.
I think Elon has said that the constellation is viable (consistent uptime at reduced density) with 1,000 satellites. So to start they need not 2 million but perhaps 100,000 customers to sign up. Then they can grow the constellation concurrently with the customer base.
2 million customers for high speed / low latency internet for $100 / month seems like a very small ask.
SpaceX projections are that they can win 3-4% of US households, or ~3.6 million households in the US. IMO I would expect the US would be their smallest market worldwide.
That is a very good point and I think something that would make things much more difficult in the event of spacex/starlink failure and acquisition. Their entire architecture is predicated upon producing their own satellites in bulk, cheaply, launching replacement regularly using re-used falon9 first stages at a (relatively) low $/kg launch cost. As a vertically integrated single company.
If you had to break that up in a scenario where spacex no longer existed and there were no more re-used first stages, it could cost considerably more. And also cost considerably more if a third party had to be paid to manufacture and QC the satellites.
I actually see a market for 5G towers to use Starlink as an uplink. Imagine a pre-packaged solution that gives a 5G provider a solar-powered all-in-one box that can be placed at any high point, without the need to run power or data lines to it.
I would edit your statement to maybe very remote areas around the world, usually you can just drag a cable or place a cell tower and you get much cheaper internet and telecommunication.
I mean, technically you need to drag a cable AND place a tower, unless you want really awful service.
I have heard Kuiper is going to focus on basically eliminating the cable, though, and do space-to-tower, and let the tower be the last mile. I don't have any hard information to back that, though.
What I am thinking if you need to give internet to one rich guy in a remote area you use satellite, if you want to give internet to the entire village you use cell towers or cables.
If a large number of people in a village can afford satellite then I assume there will be a few companies (in a functional market) that will show up and drag a cable and offer you cheap TV,internet and mobile phone.
Cable will offer better speeds and include TV not like wireless so I am thinking wireless is a maybe initial workaround until the ISO will reach your location with their cables.
I was thinking at small villages that already are connected to the electric grid, for those you pull a cable on the existing electric polls, is not like if you live in a village you have no internet, in fact in Easter Europe you can get cheap and good internet in villages better then some cities and there is also competition.
What I am thinking if you need to give internet to one rich guy in a remote area you use satellite, if you want to give internet to the entire village you use cell towers or cables.
Pretty much everyone on this site would likely switch to starlink given the chance despite the limitations you listed. I doubt very many of them are "rich." - ltehacks.com
I assume most people on this site live in densely populated areas, something Starlink is not designed for as there can only be so many connections per square mile per satellite.
I think the poster is referring to the 'ltehacks' forum/website, which is a group of people using things like 700/800/850/1800/1900 band LTE last mile, via things like cradlepoints and hotspot devices, where no WISP exists.
Because they can achieve much better latency and GB/month through that than by buying a wildblue type terrible consumer grade VSAT.
Starlink will be revolutionary for those people who live in a place where no viable fixed-wireless WISP exists.
Its always astonishing to me how people who don't have a clue about what they are commenting on, deliver their nonsense with such confidence and pretense of knowledge.
And its the same 4-5 argument in every single thread about Starlink that then get shot down as nonsense. Its really unbelievable how that works.
Starlink is a continuation of giving away radio frequency bands, which doesn't thrill me, but it's not the worst offender.
The space it consumes in space isn't really concerning though. It's a tiny fraction of the potential total satellites. It's in low enough orbit that the satellites deorbit instead of consuming space in space forever. It's a huge economic driver for further access to space for everyone since it finances launch systems.
No one else wants that space right now, so why not let spacex borrow it.
Na, they also want the em spectrum not the physical space. The problem for them isn't that the satellites take up too much space (they don't - physically they obscure basically nothing even for astronomers) but that they're too "bright".
One important distinction is that GPS has no per-user cost.
While I agree the decisions the US government has made about GPS have been exemplary, we should at least consider whether a government owned ISP would look more like GPS or USPS. The gov. isn't always the best when it comes to pricing.
The per-user costs for roadways were supposed to be paid via gasoline taxes. This is why it's illegal to put red gasoline in cars. Ultimately I believe they pay for around 50% of the cost depending on the state.
I see no reason we should let shareholders take excess profit from the American people for doing nothing but negotiating sweetheart deals with the politicians they own.
Shall we add banks and big Pharma to the list?
But seriously I'm not into the capitalist dogma that masks and enables the reality of corporate welfare.
We can give away trillions to the burgeois but merely feeding the proletariat is unamerican?
> It's like we learned nothing from the wholesale give away of our airways to corporate interests.
What giveaway?
EM spectrum is already owned by the public. But it's scarce, so it's tightly regulated, and bands are licensed. This already gives the public the ultimate control over Starlink: governments can, at any time, take away Starlink's ability to operate over their territory.
> Compare this opportunity to the magnitude of life changing innovations the GPS public good brought us.
GPS satellites are a public good. Civilian-use GPS receivers are private products.
And sure, one day maybe it'll make sense for there to be government-operated Internet satellites. But before that happens, it'll first make sense to have the government be the ISP and the cellular telephony provider. If you're worried about private control over the Internet, you're barking at the wrong ISO/OSI layer. The Internet is already a quasi-public-good due to the intersection of laws and Internet's distributed nature. The forces that want to control it are companies like Google and Facebook, that try to make Internet less distributed where it matters. Not Starlink.
> We've given away space.
It's funny to say that when talking about a product whose primary reason for being is to open up space for everyone. It's like everyone forgot that Starlink exists to fund Starship R&D. It's literally trying to give us space, so that we truly have it for the first time ever.
The ground based stations could be private products too. Just like cars.
My general point is that the USA needs a free public Internet.
Our politicians have no vision for the future of America. They should have done this. If they want to put up cell towers every where I'm OK with that too.
There is limited bandwidth so they will have to charge for it or it will be overloaded. This would be true whether it's public or private. It's not like GPS, which is broadcast only and any number of devices can use it.
Same could be said of roads. Toll free. Rush hour sucks. We will adapt. There can still be commercial alternatives, like planes today if you want higher rates of travel.
Yes, it’s plausible, and charging money isn’t the only possible congestion control mechanism. But there don’t seem to be any serious plans to spend the tax money to do this.
"Defeatist" implies that it is somehow up to us but, realistically, we are just observers here, commenting on Hacker News about things we have no effect on. (Or so I assume. Are you doing anything about launching satellites?)
I don't claim that a public satellite network will never happen. However, as an observer, projects that are happening are more interesting to me than projects that aren't happening (yet).
It'll never happen, because no one cares and we can't do anything about it anyway.
More defeatism.
We should all just roll over and play dead because we are all going to die, no one cares, and there's nothing we can do about it anyway, right?
NO! We all have an effect on everything and every problem is ours to solve.
Even if that means just talking about it. Raising awareness. Creating ideas. Pointing out the flaws in our reasoning and direction. Opportunities for improvement.
I agree that writing matters sometimes, but it seems like if you want to get attention for this idea then it means taking writing more seriously? If someone wants to write a blog post going into detail about how a public satellite network might work then that seems like a worthy effort.
I don’t think it’s a reason to stop cheering for Starlink, though, because it’s not everything you want? This thread started out as criticism of Starlink.
Ziply is the entity known as Northwest Fiber which recently acquired all of the WA, OR, ID ILEC assets of Frontier. The territory which are formerly GTE.
https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/13109751475332710...
Quite honestly it looks to me like a PR stunt. Ziply was already offering a free hotspot of wifi services from the location before somebody showed up and took a photo of the starlink CPE.