I don’t understand why star link is country bound. Here in the eu you can’t take your starlink equipment with you when you travel to another eu country. It just won’t work. Even if it’s a neighboring country. And even when starlink is offered in said country. You need a country specific kit.
This is the only reason I didn’t get a starlink subscription. Seems like a bullshit limitation. Reminds me kinda of Tesla stink.
There's a couple reasons this is currently happening:
1) The Starlink Constellation only looks for your base station in it's allocated cell and isn't setup to scan and discover mobile stations
2) Right now there is no communication inside the constellation (they might have launched a few with the laser links but it's not turned on broadly) so the satellites are linking down to another base station that has access out to the wider internet. They need to provision access on those so they don't get overwhelmed.
3) The base station itself needs to know where it is well enough to hit the active satellite for it's cell. You might be able to do that without GPS but it is an issue you have to address.
Both of these are supposed to be solved eventually and they've said they are planning to allow roaming base stations eventually.
They need to have enough intra-constellation communication to route traffic out to some satellite that can see a base station. They said the "v0.9" satellites that were launching starting this year were all laser equipped and all sats launched this year (and presumably in the future?) would be similarly equipped.
SpaceX has to allocate bandwidth on the satellites to consumers. If consumers move, they will have overallocated bandwidth in some places, degrading network performance. They'll probably come out with a mobile product at a higher price point in the future.
Kind of doubtful that consumers moving their terminals around would be statistically significant compared to all the other factors that cause regional variations in aggregated bandwidth usage.
If it were offered as a mobile service it would be very attractive to people on the go so it would skew the number of mobile nodes higher than expected. I think base station discovery is another issue blocking mobile nodes from happening so an in between step could be to provide a way to easily move your base station and register it to a new cell.
>I don’t understand why star link is country bound.
First and primarily, the legal front: All regulated electromagnetic spectrum transmission is country-bound, since the regulators are by country. Private entities cannot legally transmit in any given country without authorization, and there is a fairly in-depth set of national and international legal frameworks for this that are pretty well respected. In principle SpaceX could negotiate the proper licenses and agreements internationally to allow roaming, and they certainly will eventually for certain applications like maritime and aircraft usage. But it's perfectly understandable in their bootstrapping phase of pure fixed point service (which is the easiest for a host of reasons) that they just put a blanket ban on it. Those who want mobile just have to wait.
Second, there are technical reasons. Starlink will always face some fundamental density limitations in how small a cell any sat can talk to and how much bandwidth there will be per cell and for the overall sat. And in its initial version, satellites also act purely as "bent pipes", mediating directly between a ground station which then talks to the internet at large and the end customer CPE. And SpaceX is being careful and deliberate about building up all the infra needed to scale its network, and wants to ensure that everyone joining gets a good experience. So they're also being fairly careful about allowing anyone out of their assigned cell.
Eventually a number of developments will alleviate this to some extent. Intersat optical links are now launching on new birds, and IIRC this year (maybe early next?) they'll have the in-space routing network up. That will dramatically increase their flexibility in routing traffic and dealing with chokepoints (as well as allowing Starlink usage out of range of ground stations, again critical for ships/aircraft). Simple increasing raw numbers of sats (and particularly VLEO v-band with Starship) will improve their density margins a bit as well. And then there is just plain old software infra stuff. Portal for customers to update addresses, backend to deal with handling allocations and looking for cell overload including across varying regulatory regimes, figuring out pricing at the margins and what to allocate for fixed vs mobile usage in a given area, letting people see where there is room and where there isn't, and putting a nice GUI over all of that is work that isn't needed for a 1.0 MVP but will be important to getting stuff to work right.
>Seems like a bullshit limitation. Reminds me kinda of Tesla stink.
No, this one at least is pretty reasonable. Easy to forget that Starlink is doing something very different, new, with more to come, and is very, very early. And still a chance it could all fail, they haven't actually hit their core minimum economic targets yet (that was what Elon's "bankruptcy" warning last month was about). It's much more capex intensive and opex intensive then traditional offerings. They've got an excellent product though and are bootstrapping it impressively but they've got to be very careful nonetheless. Plenty of fundamentally incredibly promising businesses have foundered on the shoals of scaling.
This is the only reason I didn’t get a starlink subscription. Seems like a bullshit limitation. Reminds me kinda of Tesla stink.