Hey folks. I’ve had Starlink (standard service) mounted on my van for the last three months travelling around Australia with roaming off. Has been a game changer for working remotely and helping build Gitpod. It works just fine even when driving [1] or at techno bush doofs [2].
Nice! I took Starlink with me on few road trips so far with my Model 3 and rigged it up to work off my car's battery. I did have to change my service address prior to arriving at new locations but it worked fine nonetheless. With the new roaming option, that's even easier now. I wrote about it on my blog for those interested: https://blog.oxplot.com/powering-starlink-on-the-go-with-tes...
Haven't yet had to change my service location. It's still using my residential address circa 2,344km away from me. From time-to-time the app displays "not in service address" for a couple moments then it disappears. Roaming is disabled / wasn't even an option when first started doing this.
Interesting. What I noticed was that without changing service address, it would be in search mode for hours without going online. After the change, it would come to life in minutes. I did my trips late last year. I'm sure things are changing fast week to week as more satellites (and thus more bandwidth) is put into orbit.
Does it have any algorithmic weight? if you start watching anti-CCP videos will more get served to you? This is a big part of the problem with opaque algorithms, IMO. They can downrank content secretly without outright banning it. I don’t think it’s as bad as op made it out to be, but it does seem like “the only way to win is not to play” situation.
Generally tiktok’s more blatant censorship seems to be regional (so anti-ccp content is blocked on tiktok in china). Russia and Ukraine seem to get served dramatically different war content, etc
I don't see any difference wrt western sites here. Try talking about topics that irritate western establishment on youtube/twitter/facebook and see what happens.
In the end, it boils down to "us" (or "our guys") vs "them" (or "their guys").
You're really going to claim that you have the same freedom to criticize the government of China on TikTok inside China as you do to criticize the government of the US or other western county on Twitter? Do you work for the CCP? Because it's hard to imagine being so wrong by mistake.
> Do you work for the CCP? Because it's hard to imagine being so wrong by mistake.
Yeah, attack the character instead of the argument.
In case you didn't notice, I say that censorship/deplatforming/banning from services is wrong, without regard who is doing it, period. I do not say that "their" is wrong and "our" is OK. That's why I noted that there is no difference between tiktok or twitter.
It's hard to believe you can view the two as equal. There is definitely censorship in the West and I agree it's bad too. But to say that it's somehow equal to what the CCP does requires a degree of self delusion that is simply staggering. So yes, I do sincerely find your character to be questionable. I'm not just throwing an ad hominem around to distract from a weakness in my argument.
There is censorship in both the West and China. There is also water in both a desert and a rainforest—but it would be ridiculous to say that rainforests and deserts are therefore equivalent in terms of water.
Post about US funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine. I've seen half a dozen Twitter accounts banned and subreddits quarantined/banned over posting on that issue alone.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the claim myself, though Victoria Nuland's "denial"[1] certainly raised a few eyebrows. She said that Ukraine has biological "research facilities" and implied that it would be a very bad thing if any of these "research materials" fell into the hands of the Russian forces. Whether that counts as a "biological weapons lab" or not seems to just be arguing about semantics.
Or they were banned for spreading disinformation, or being traced back to Russian state sponsored agents. You didn’t see anyone get banned for anything specific unless you monitor everything they do including their source IP, because Twitter doesn’t send you a message and say “hey we banned this person because of their anti-American propaganda”.
> I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the claim myself, though Victoria Nuland's "denial"
Yea this tactic is called “simply asking the question” and it’s always done in poor faith.
I’m not saying Donald Trump is a child molester and eats babies, but that photo of him with Jeffery Epstein sure does seem fishy... [1]
[1] Random links that nobody clicks on but appears to give you credibility and creates doubt in the minds of others who scroll by and see it.
> Or they were banned for spreading disinformation
"Disinformation" is a propaganda term. Unless you are Ministry of Truth, of course ;)
In practice, what is labeled "disinformation" is just what those in power do not want published. Or: "News Is What Somebody Does Not Want You To Print".
From personal experience, I have strong sense of deja-vu. I've seen all of this in 80's in my country. Exactly the same, except at the time it was reactionary propaganda.
> or being traced back to Russian state sponsored agents.
You see, for Chinese posting about Tiananmen Square is being traced back to US programs intended to undermine the statehood of independent countries. For them, it is the same thing pushed by state sponsored agents as you claim about Russians.
So either both are fine when censoring it, or neither is. (I personally take option two).
Except I can write all of the following statements and I could speak them publicly, but you cannot write or speak of all of these things publicly in China or Russia.
The US sponsored terrorist biolabs in Ukraine to target Russian citizens.
The US *didn't* sponsor terrorist biolabs in Ukraine to target Russian citizens and it's all fake misinformation.
and I can write:
China has never genocided Uighur Muslims.
Tiananmen Square didn't happen.
The CCP is currently participating in a genocide of Uighur Muslims.
Tiananmen Square did happen and the CCP murdered lots of people.
> For them, it is the same thing pushed by state sponsored agents as you claim about Russians.
This is called a false equivalence. I also demonstrated why it's false here in this very post. Ta-da!
Yes, you can say all of those things in isolation, where nothing is at stake. In practice, a response is triggered when the “wrong” narratives start to gain momentum.
I can say them regardless of whether something is at stake in or outside of isolation, as can others which is evidenced by the fact that people do spread disinformation and misinformation routinely in the United States.
Biolabs in Ukraine? That's just made up bullshit by Russia. Period. And despite the Sovereignty of the United States being very much against Russia, people go on television and broadcast things that are not only wrong but completely against the interests of the Sovereign and not a single bad thing happens.
Covid vaccine misinformation? That resulted in some tens of thousands (maybe hundreds) of dead Americans. I can go on Twitter or down to the state capitol building and hold up signs that say crazy things and not a single thing will happen to me from the government.
I can say anything I want about Donald Trump, or Joe Biden.
Now contrast that with the CCP or Russia. You can't do those things. Period.
So these attempts to try and draw equivalences are, in fact, false. Hence, false equivalence.
yeah, that's the exact wording the Chinese, Russian and other authoritarian regimes use as well. "disinformation"
one would think 2016 should've taught you people that the power you give to the government will eventually end up in the hands of the people you don't like
>>Or they were banned for spreading disinformation,
New to this thread, and I may agree with your stance, but if this is how you defend it, please stop :D
More seriously though: "Spreading disinformation" is such a vaguely-defined, over-used phrase to justify any and all censorship, that any attempt to use it automatically invites suspicion of bad faith; and usually correctly so. Add to that my own personal perspective that censorship on account of spreading disinformation invariably backfires spectacularly .
If under discussion is "everybody censors" and our best defense is "but we do it to combat spreading disinformation", we have lost and catastrophically so. EVERYbody does it to combat "disinformation", however they choose to define it.
(I'm not taking some extreme "all truths are relative" approach here either; I'm merely focusing on this specific justification for censorship as utterly untenable)
My point wasn't "say something conspiratorial ergo get banned from Twitter" because if that were the case there would be far fewer people using Twitter. My point (and certainly I could make this more clear) was that it could be someone who is paid to say things that aren't true, for example, which would fall under this "spreading disinformation" category, but the OP has no idea because they don't have any information.
As an aside, it is also Russian propaganda and disinformation. But that's unrelated to the main point.
I'm sorry, but I don't think it's fair for you to imply that I'm posting in bad faith.
The link I posted is not a "random" link, and whether you click on it or not is up to you, but it's a real video of Victoria Nuland (a high ranking US government official) speaking to the US Congress. It's not Russian propaganda.
I honestly don't really care if the US has biological weapons labs in Ukraine. I don't live in the US, or Ukraine, or Russia. I don't have any skin in that game. When I first saw rumours of it I thought it was a nonsense conspiracy theory. It wasn't until I saw Victoria Nuland's "denial" that I thought "huh, maybe there's something to that".
You've got to trolling, these things are nowhere on the same level and it's not even correct. You can talk all about copyrighted material you want and there are many many more female nipples to be found on the Western internet than on the Chinese internet.
Just because the western propaganda machine is more sophisticated and more powerful it doesn't mean it doesn't spread lies that twist or change the facts, actually the propaganda and brainwashing done by the west enemies is far weaker and more basic. Since the west rules the world (even from behind the curtain) it doesn't care to lie to our face or even tell us their intentions directly (think about Iraq war, ISIS, Syrian war, even Ukraine now), many 3rd world citizens can't or don't differentiate between UN and US for good reasons, because they know that in most situations UN and most international organizations acts as the facade that hides who actually taking the decision.
Now things are changing, and the western bloc is getting weaker, at some point it will start to act like the standard "dictator" you imagine.
No, I actually think "our guys" (for as far there is one voice about this) have been far too naive about China.
I have lived long enough in China and know enough Chinese people in and outside of China to have a fairly good idea about Chinese censorship and propaganda. It's nothing compared to what we have here.
See? There is wide part of power that can use the delta between "Congress made a law" and "pressure was applied to get what we want".
Actually, Chinese is very similar; there are no Xi Jinping or CCP decreees top down; the mechanism to chinese censorship is very similar to US one. But there it's no problem to mix it into Chinese government (or whatever, or whatever, they are all the same anyway).
It’s an absolutely huge difference of degree. Attempting to censor blatant lies, with the occasional and accidental half-truth mixed in, is a completely different beast from denying historic events and censoring factual reports of things that actually happened.
You said «I don’t see any difference», and that statement at best implies that you haven’t looked at the situation closely enough.
See e.g. the mountain of Western criticism of the United States’ torture program during the war on terror. The difference is night and day.
It's absolutely huge difference of degree because you believe all what the western media tells you about "them" the enemies. Now just think what if all those sources are not as independent as you think and that the west actively makes advanced disinformation warfare against it's enemies (think about Venezuela for example and the coup attempt orchestrated there in the past few years, most people like to think of this as "revolution" against the tyranny instead of US backed coup). When you have this in mind you won't be able to differentiate between different types of censor and lies that much. This is harder than believing that "We're the good guys" ™ though.
You’re ascribing me a lot of views that I don’t have.
An example. Personal opinion. The so-called criminal justice system of the USA has a lot in common with slavery, and relatively to the population size probably has more of a negative effect on the quality of life of Americans than minority repression in China has on the Chinese. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
I drew this example and conclusion based on media sources in the free press of the West. One can draw some conclusions from that.
Ok good, but why you're assuming that there are no parallels to your case in "other dictatorships"? In Russia we saw people refusing the war, in China there i s work to fight corruption and expose the corrupts... in Iran there are pro west people and some public figures that publicly criticize the supreme leader and so. Whatever answer you have for this can be the answer for your case.
My whole point is, the free press of the west only free for the cases that doesn't hurt that much, and because of conflicts between the democrats and Republicans (a similar thing exists in other countries, like Iran). But for cases that matters there will be practically no alternative story (see: Ukraine war, Iraq war).
I don't know what part of the West you lived in during the Iraq war, but in my country, which is an enthusiastic NATO member, the newspapers hardly printed any opinion pieces that blatantly reflected the propaganda points of the US government.
They were quoted, of course, "weapons of mass destruction blah blah blah", but the continuous critical review was very skeptical towards the official US narrative, and was quick to point out the likelihood of forged intelligence reports and other sources that questioned the motive of the invasion. I myself went to a public protest against it at the time, and the prevailing public opinion was that the invasion was not justified. Tough luck; our opinion didn't matter but at least no one were beaten up or went to prison over it. Our tax money did not kill Iraqis.
I do understand where you're coming from, and I can agree with your sentiment to a certain extent. There is a double standard regarding certain "rubber hits the road" aspects of the top-level leadership in Western countries, that falls far short of democratic ideals. Edward Snowden and Julian Assange have been hunted like rabid animals for merely revealing factual information that was relevant to public discourse. France, USA, others, have developed a governance structure that does not resemble well-functioning democracies, and the latter is dangerously close to an authoritarian shift. The USA literally tortured suspected terrorist collaborators with no judicial oversight. This is not an exhaustive list.
So certainly, there's plenty to criticize and some of it runs very deep. Human rights violations happen with some regularity. But freedom of speech and freedom of the press is not abolished. The rule of law applies. I will certainly point it out if this risks ceasing to be the case, first and foremost because that leads to a bad society to live in, but also because the culture that stems from these values is more economically powerful than one without them.
On Ukraine I'll just disagree with you. Russia's invasion is an imperialist military expansion. That kind of thing should only happen in history books. The rest of the world must use all safe means to prevent it from succeeding and setting precedent, and for the sake of existential risk also to avoid nuclear proliferation in small and exposed countries.
No one wants to share a long land border with a geopolitical adversary; I'd be happy to criticize the lack of statesmanship and realpolitik in managing Ukraine's NATO ambitions versus Russia's wish for security guarantees. But the war, or something like it, would have happened regardless. It's just a fig leaf. The core of the issue is Russian leadership's fear of Ukraine, like Poland and the Baltic states, setting an example of a peer culture succeeding with dramatically higher wealth growth under democratic values, that the inhabitants themselves decided to implement.
If I'm wrong, I'll admit it when history becomes clearer in 10 years.
[Edit: Following one of your points. Countries without democracy, rule of law and freedom of speech certainly and obviously have independent thinkers. Some of them are incredibly brave to voice their opinions in spite of sometimes brutal punishments. More so than all Western journalists. My commentary is on the societal environment and governance. But being susceptible to propaganda is universally human, and most people are not independent thinkers, regardless of where they grew up
Should also mention that I have huge respect for Russian culture and Russian cultural and scientific achievements. These comments are not a criticism of peoples and their cultures].
I'm not denying that under some circumstances you can find lot of impressive freedom of speech in the west.
The idea is that the outcome is not different in the causes that actually matters! Even your point about the Iraq war proves my point, despite all the fight back, the US was able to manufacture the consent and execute the plans, similar thing happened in the Syrian war and in many other places. Even in the Ukrainian war this is happening again, you don't need to be on the Russian side (and I'm not) to understand that there is manufactured consent in the whole western bloc to move forward with the war (you can view this war as pure Russian offence, or as Geo-political provocation by the US to fight Russia and even China to stop it's decline or something in between those extremes). Of Course you will find many anti US leftists and Pro Russian voices in the west, but those are demonized(even pointing some nuance can make you a Russian bot/agent) so they have no to little effect in the grand scheme of things.
I'm from a "third wold" country that have lot of freedom of speech, you can even curse many political leaders on the TV without consequences, but I know that this is not real freedom of speech because the power structures make this irrelevant mostly (not that I want to give up on this freedom).
At some point in the future, when the western bloc already declined in power enough this will be clear, we will be talking about how the freedom of speech and democracy was mostly a facade that hides the real power structures and didn't make big effect on the important causes of the world. Decades of scandals, coups, and wars orchestrated by USA (what Snowden and Assange revealed is only one episode of long list) didn't stop many (most?) US people from thinking that they're the "good people in the room" despite some mistakes.
Well, you've got a view that's in some ways refreshing since it's really far removed from what the mainstream narrative says. But we're either discussing subtly different topics, or I don't agree with your central point. Not entirely sure which.
Democracy, freedom of speech, rule of law mostly a facade that hides the real power structures regarding the most important questions of the world? If we decide that "the most important questions of the world" is something other than what the citizens of democracies really care about, then sure, you can run a supertanker through that rhetorical opening. There's plenty of space for dubious foreign policy that supports a small group of people, outside of the space of topics that most people care about. As long as the country in question is so rich that it can afford a powerful military with only a small fraction of its tax revenue. In that case, the foreign policy becomes just a budgetary rounding error that most people don't care about. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars could arguably fit that definition. But the USA couldn't have afforded those (and maintained enough public support) if it wasn't stupidly rich compared to everyone else.
The reason rule of law, democracy and civil liberties won out over totalitarianism after World War two is that those values turn out to produce societies that have more economic power. Not that they're inherently morally superior, although I know what sort of society I'd prefer to live in. I'm ignoring for the moment that the Soviet Union was one of the victors; they wouldn't have been if the USA hadn't been shipping them an incredible amount of home-produced weapons and equipment. It's hard to understate the power of the incentive of retaining most of the value of the valuable thing you created.
Regarding Ukraine, if we accept the extreme view that the USA in fact deliberately managed to goad Putin the idiot into making the biggest strategic mistake of the 21st century (invading Ukraine), the mistake is still on Putin. I'll agree it wouldn't have been a nice thing to do, but the moral calculus isn't easy to untangle. Wars are hell, but I have no illusions about what moral transgressions Russia is capable of, and an expanding empire with great power is certainly not a force of great net good in the world. Maybe it could be a net force for good in general, just by default, if the progress of civilization does not stagnate. But it certainly could stagnate and make a net negative. And it's hard to believe it would do a better job than a civilization with great individual freedoms.
If the most important questions of the world are greater quality of life for everyone, sustainably, then Western values certainly play a role in achieving that. But the calculus would be a challenge to figure out. The majority of the world's population doesn't live in liberal democracies, after all. Most scientific and engineering achievement has come from liberal democracies, but it's not completely obvious if that's just because what became the liberal democracies had a big head start with industrialization.
For World war 2, the major winner who caused the most destruction for the nazi empire and made most of the sacrifices is the USSR, like the USSR or not (and I don't mostly) but that is the fact.
Now trying to make a direct relationship between Western prosperity and the "democracy" is very famous opinion (after all this the official ideology of US, and it's the brand/image that they want to sell to the world). But there are many different variables here, for example the west has a long history of colonialism that allowed them to make fortunes off the resources and the power of other people, even what looks like peacefull countries now, benefited from this.
I'm not saying that having freedom of speech is not necessary, but it's merely a catalyst. Actually USSR (and even Nazi Germany) made huge jumps in the scientific and technological fields but the western bloc won eventually. You can probably make a direct link between the US control over the oil industry (by means of very dirty wars and alliances, see for example KSA relation with the British Empire then the US).
There is a nice critic for the marxist prediction that the working class will make a revolution in the capitalist world and the working class is one unified entity in all the world, the critics said that this didn't happen because the colonialism allowed the capitalist regimes to give the working class in their countries more money / value that's extracted from the colonised countries. Now apply this logic to the western bloc and it you will have altrnative view, the western bloc is not ruling because it's democratic, and it's not stable becuase it has freedom of speech and not rich because of the magic of the free market, it's because of those countries being rich and able to control the other countries they were able to pump fortunes and make even the poor worker much better than his colleagues in the 3rd world countries.
If my prosperity and my cheap energy was dependent on making a war in a far place called the middle east and making alliances with any dirty tyranny there then I'll be more prepared to buy into the official propganda that we're going there to fight for our values.
So while technically there is good amount of freedom of speech, but in practice there is rarely deviation from the main narrative and even the alternative naratives are too weak or they're not radically different from the mainstream ones, this is one of the reasons that the west countries had been relatively stable, in our Third world countries we're always in active fight about the big choices to take so we're mostly on the edge of civil wars and revolutions and wars with external enemies.
P.S I'm really in no position to defend Russia, but just imagine that US faced similar danger on it's border similar to Russia with NATO backed Ukraine, actually no need to imagine, this happened multiple times From Cuba to Venezuela to many south american countries, the thing is the US in most cases didn't need to go into direct war instead it needed to orchestrate coups and civil wars and then convince the world it's all about democracy.
I'm familiar with the ideas you're summarizing here. There is no question that colonialism, explicit previously, implicit and less obvious recently, has made big contributions towards the wealth of Western countries. The question is how much.
Is it a critical ingredient? Do cheaper raw materials and cheaper labor for things we've previously done locally, make enough of a difference that in a fair competition, an economic system with much worse incentives and individual freedoms for keeping the fruits of one's labor, will actually do equally well as Western ideals?
I have concluded that this is not the case; we would still see countries with Western values as economically more powerful in such a scenario. They would be less wealthy than they are today, but not in a different league entirely. The colonialist strategies amplified the success, but were not a requirement.
I'm not convinced of the comparison to the situation in South America. St. Petersburg and Moscow are already a short IRBM flight from Estonia. NATO does not have five hundred years of history as an expansionist empire, Russia has. NATO does not have ambitions of expansion; countries threatened by Russia wish to join NATO for their security against invasions that have hundreds of years of precedent. The USA does not conquer other countries and ship their industrial surplus back home, Russia does.
But yes, USA has orchestrated coups and toppled well-functioning, locally-chosen governments. There are geopolitical analogies here, and I'm not as certain of the last point as I am of the first.
> I have concluded that this is not the case; we would still see countries with Western values as economically more powerful
We have many examples of countries doing very well in science research and technology development without necessarily adopting liberal democratic values, such as USSR, Nazi Germany, China (which is catching up very quickly even on advanced research topics despite it was on the edge of famine not so long ago), even small countries are doing very well given their situation (Sanctions and wars) such as Cuba & Iran. Actually most of the advancement in the history of humans happened under non-liberal/democratic civilizations. And for fighting poverty China pulled a relative miracle by pulling hundreds of millions of people from poverty (recently they declared the success of getting rid of extreme poverty in China).
> an economic system with much worse incentives and individual freedoms for keeping the fruits of one's labor, will actually do equally well as Western ideals
Ok this is about the "free market" myth (in my opinion), if we looked carefully we can see that most of the advancements happened because of wars (especially WW2) and governments funded programs (example: Internet, Space programs), attributing the majority of the advancements to the free market need serious evidence. Also you're underestimating the importance of the cheap resources, cheap labor and open markets this makes most of the difference. It's not only about that, the success of the US to attach it's currency to the oil industry allowed it to make free money just by controlling and "protecting" the oil sources (especially in Middle east)
It's important to say that of course the colonial countries are for sure they should have some advancement to be able to colonize other countries but the bar is relatively low in comparison the profits that can be made, and the positive feedback loop that kicks in.
> NATO does not have ambitions of expansion
USSR begs to differ, US gave the falling USSR guarantees that it won't expand to the east but it did, and it was planning to do this again in Ukraine probably.
> countries threatened by Russia wish to join NATO for their security
That's the point about coups and wars, it allows the US to change the regime by means of force and/or disinformation campaigns (or alliance with terrorists, such as AL-Qaeda) and then install puppet regime with ruling class that's has deep interests with the west and viola, that regime will voluntarily want to join the NATO and do most of what the US wishes. That's the point of being the strongest empire in the history, you have thousands of playing cards that you can use, and you still get to look like the good guy.
Also note that for example Ukraine was almost invented by Lenin (Ukraine didn't exist at the time), also many of the territories of eastern Ukraine has majorities or big minorities of Russian people so things are more nuanced than the mainstream narrative.
> NATO does not have five hundred years of history as an expansionist empire
Yes they just colonize whole continents and practically exterminate the whole native citizens, if we're talking about history.
Also UK, France, Belgium... are in the NATO should I say exactly what this means in the last 500 years?
> The USA does not conquer other countries and ship their industrial surplus back home
They're doing this right now, even in small occupied territories in eastern Syria (and you guessed it, it's the oil and wheat rich territories). Sure US doesn't always steal like that, but they protect the regimes in the Persian Gulf and they sell them weapons, they burn whole countries to the ground (Iraq, Korea, Vietnam), they force the economical structures on the countries (If you're in the orbit of the US, you can't sign meaningful deals with China, they use the UN organisations to force certain structure on the economies even for big countries), they sanction whole countries for decades (Iraq, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nkorea...). They support apartheid regimes (S. Africa, Israel) and the list goes on. Actually any comparison of the US and any random Tyranny will almost always be in favor of the tyranny.
Censorship in the US operates on a distributed basis, through outright deplatforming, algorithmic suppression, astroturfing counter narratives and smears, coordinated mass reporting/flagging, etc. You can never point to an explicit decree banning a topic as that would deeply offend our American sensibilities, but if we see the exact same ultimate results while feeling like we have some participatory agency, then we can easily accept them as the natural outcome of the free market, democratic will, or our collective individuality.
Think about any contemporary geopolitical opinion that would trigger knee jerk emotional responses, a hail of downvotes, and accusations of being a foreign agent. Notice how the narrative quickly gets reduced to good versus evil, democracy versus dictatorship. But have you ever actually heard a serious fact-based debate on any of these issues? Many people would consider the question itself offensive.
Americans believe that we’re savvy media consumers when we recognize the bias of individual pundits or specific media outlets, but we tend to miss that the entire sphere of media and discourse is a sculpted garden premised upon certain conceits and assumptions which are in no way politically neutral. The band of acceptable conclusions which flow from this underlying framing always seem to uphold and carry forward the essential interests of the select few who already hold power.
I love that “some private US platforms do content moderation so therefore the US is morally equivalent to the Chinese government” has filtered down from our broken US politics into a weaponized defense of the CCP. (Not accusing the parent poster, just noting the content of the whole thread.) Very efficient!
What’s more efficient is to always view politics as a manifestation of grand moral or ideological conflicts rather than beginning from an understanding of the concrete economic interests at work.
From the photos I think you still have to set the antenna somewhere stable to use it, so it won't work at sea or maybe even at anchor. Don't get me wrong, it'd be cool just to be able to sail around and have low-latency high-bandwidth access in every port!
I have picked up the dish in hand and walked around my rural block of land whilst on a social Google Meet call with a co-worker at Gitpod. He was wondering the same. Will it work? Turns out the answer is yes. Was pretty wild walking around a paddock with iPhone in one hand and Starlink auto homing in the other. Didn’t really miss a beat until I tried spinning on the spot lol.
While they are officially recommending mounting the antenna rigidly, lots of people (including the grandparent post) report it working just fine when driving or otherwise moving dynamically. This isn't too surprising, since the phased array technology they're using allows instantaneous beam steering, and they need to support some amount of it anyway for high winds and wobbly mounts.
Their license only allows it to be used in fixed installations.
I suspect that the "while stationary" text is just lawyerspeak so they don't get accused of violating the license. If too many people post videos of using it while driving down the highway, they might have to add technical restrictions so they don't get fined for violating the license.
Yeah, I had no idea how involved it was until I went on a week long YT solo sailing across the <insert body of water> binge. Mad props to those people.
The biggest question they don't answer is: How much does it cost? How much up front, and how much recurring?
Also, does it need to have a completely unobstructed view (i.e. can it be set up right beside the RV if the area is a little sketchy?) How much do overhead trees interfere?
Overhead trees, buildings and bridges etc do indeed inhabit the signal greatly. How it manifests is dropouts for 10-30 seconds every 5 minutes or so. The app clearly shows where instructions are and service expectations with the obstacles. When the dish is mounted on your van it’s simple to reverse park and determine where is good. Typically I get out of the van and look where the dish is pointing (usually due south) and adjust van as needed. As vans need solar, I don’t find myself parking under trees because solar needed to charge batteries and tree branches destroy vans in bad weather.
Costs are not even worth discussing. It’s how I earn income. As such portions are tax deductible and loss of a days productivity due to bad internet (let’s say you are only using 4g) at a campsite you haven’t been to before is disastrous in comparison to cost of multi homed internet.
I usually search for things like "price", "costs", "check for service" etc. Things that indicate "this is where you find the price". Hiding it behind the "order" button is just silly because I'm not going to order before I know how much it costs!
I agree. They should turn the Order now button into Get price and order now. Plenty of space for that.
Btw, the quote I got is
Hardware €644.00
Shipping & Handling €75.00
Service €124.00 /mo
Due Today €719.00
That's for an address in Italy. Four times as much as I'm paying for a truly unlimited 4G connection (some 30 Mb/s maximum, I'm far away from the base station.) I'm paying 7.95 for the 4G SIM in my phone, capped at 90 GB per month, similar speed at home, different base station.
Four times the price of fully unlimited 4G for a much better connection with more availability than 4G seems fair to me.
If you don't need starlink, then don't get it.
But if you have a cabin in the Italian alps where its either Starlink or else, then 124 / month seems like a much better deal than having no internet at all. Particularly if with those 124 / month then one or more people can live there and work earning multiple thousand euros per month of income (vs zero income living there without Starlink).
This may be intentional. For example, if demand for their service is still exceeding supply, they may be targeting customers who are less price conscious.
Actually, in my case I put my address and got the next screen asking for PII with the text:
> Deposit Due Today $99.00
But no final price. The service is not yet available in my area, the site says that it is expected in 2023, so presumably they do not know how to price it yet. That makes one wary to put down a deposit.
50W is not nothing when running off of batteries. It's not a lot on its own but it all adds up quick. 50W for Starlink, 20W for a laptop, add in lights, a fridge, phone, etc and suddenly it's more than you thought it'd be.
This will be a game changer in terms of ensuring I have high-speed 'net access when my partner is doing locum work in the middle of central QLD and other places. Any surprises using this in rural aus?
I've used it all over Kangaroo Island (SA), on the salt lakes of tyrrell (VIC), a Westfield carpark (NSW) and in the middle of nowhere in remote central QLD. According to the service coverage maps anything north of Rockhampton won't work (haven't been that far north yet) and there's a straight line to Katherine (NT) and anything above that doesn't work so it isn't a complete solution for doing 4wd red-dirt exploration but it's the best thing available for remote work in Australia and knocks the socks off LTE :)
Ah that's awesome to know! Can't wait to get into it when we eventually start doing locum work. Would be awesome to be able to go out to those areas with my partner and still do my job: LTE is rough for a lot of what I need, but I'm also easily able to be 100% remote!
Nothing, other than we're never going to be in one place for long, and being reliant on whatever Wifi happens to be wherever we are staying is a bit of a pain. And LTE chokes and dies with the sort of bandwidth I need from it for work, sadly
Yeah, I understand that feeling very well. I think Starlink is going to be the best option for you that way. The 5G connections are "lacking" in that area.
Hey for what its worth I went to check out Gitpod and followed the 'Try Now' button, logged in and was presented with an empty Workspace with no suggestion/direction of how to make use of the service. If you could provide a sample project (maybe just a Hello World) to demo the power of Gitpod I think that would go far in converting random people like myself who stumble across the service.
In my experience in New Zealand, a doof is a private party in a rural location that you need an invite to or contacts, usually with music DJs and drugs involved. I wouldn’t call large festivals Doofs, as the Wikipedia article does, although perhaps the word has been co-opted by larger events, or has a different meaning from the little I have used the word. I would guess the word derives from doof doof music, named after a heavy bassline sound.
Rhymes with boofhead, or poofter, or woof in NZ (sorry, I couldn’t think of better words with the correct sound, Aussie & NZ English have some unique vowels, and English dialects have wayyyy too many different vowel sounds to easily cross reference). Someone says doof in this Aussie vid, which has the right atmosphere to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iavVc_23-NM
Starlink at 110km/h works fine if you are going in a straight line. It's when one does a whole bunch of turns navigating around suburban streets when service isn't great so have it configured as a primary link with my 4g array (https://ghuntley.com/internet) as the fallback for those type of scenarios. After the van stops moving it takes about 1 minute at max to relock and be functional as max speeds. Essentially what happens when lock is lost is the dish goes flat and looks right up (even when driving), finds a satellite and provides marginal connectivity, about a minute after that point it slants and provides exceptional connectivity.
From what I understand, in the US the FCC licensing for fixed location transmitters, relocatable transmitters, and transmitting while in motion are different (sorry can't remember the official terms). These stations may not be approved to transmit while in motion, and so Starlink may put technical restrictions in place to prevent use while moving. The license applications they put in for ruggedised terminals, intended for marine use and the like, requested ability to transmit in motion, but I think these are standard terminals (certainly not gimbled or gyro stabilzed) and aren't covered by that license. We'll have to wait and see until people start receiving stations and testing them out.
From their ToS:
Best Effort Service for RV Users. Network resources are always deprioritized for Starlink RVs users compared to other Starlink Services, resulting in degraded service and slower speeds in congested areas and during peak hours. Stated speeds and uninterrupted use of the Service are not guaranteed. Service degradation will occur most often in "Waitlist" areas designated on the Starlink Availability Map during peak usage hours. See the Starlink Specifications for expected performance of the Starlink for RV Services.
I'm not sure it could even work any other way. Either mobile users are subject to deprioritization or there is no such thing as guaranteed service for anyone, including mobile users still.
It’d kinda be a fun feature to implement paid priority - someone on mobile can pay $5 to be prioritized and someone fixed who offered to be deprioritized gets $4 or something.
Okay, but the top comment as I’m writing this is someone saying they have already been using the standard service, in a mobile fashion, mounted to the top of their van.
So my question to Starlink would be, what’s the difference? If I want to get an RV and work remotely using Starlink, why wouldn’t I just get the standard service, and avoid these restrictions on the RV service? I suppose the more flexible monthly billing & the ability to pause service on demand are the killer features?
The language of that TOS is quite concerning to someone thinking of using this in a professional setting.
Presumably the standard Starlink service will be restricted to your registered address, or will switch to the de-prioritized RV mode when outside your registered service area.
People talking about using it while roaming currently also say they are switching their service address in their account for each new location.
I’m not sure how it ties in with roaming capability but they do have a Business offering for those needing higher reliability and allocated bandwidth.
This comment seems to make a lot of assumptions about the scarcity of bandwidth for Starlink. If there's enough bandwidth for everyone, why would deprioritization be needed?
If there were enough resources for everyone then by definition there couldn't be deprioritization as there is nobody to deprioritize you for and vice versa.
I have been waiting patiently for almost two years to get it the old-fashioned way. Just canceled my longstanding deposit, and ordered Starlink for RVs. It helps that I really wanted it for my RV anyway, and just assumed all along that at some point in the not-to-distant future they were going to allow that.
Fairly expensive, but it will allow me to work remotely from a very beautiful, remote location, and I intend to take full advantage of that.
Hell, on r/starlink there are multiple users reporting that their fixed installations have had no service for a month+, customer support is completely unresponsive, but are still being billed.
So, even getting it doesn't necessarily fix things.
I have 400aH worth of lithium batteries and 600 watts of solar (not laid out in an ideal configuration down the sides of the roof on my airstream).
I have found I use 60-90watts AC to power my starlink.
I can easily go all day even with 2-3 laptops and external monitors (150 watts or so). The solar keeps up and even does a little charging during the day.
Every other day when it’s cloudy or rainy I will need to top up with the small generator but that is easy to do with lithium batteries since they charge at the full 120amps unlike lead acid that taper the current significantly.
The one thing that bothers me about having all that pricey gear on an RV is what keeps people from stealing your panels, starlink, etc from a remote primitive site?
I mean some people will be using the RV for work, so will be present a lot but for the folks that park and go hiking or fishing a lot, what then? Some folks will handwave this away but we've had a lot of break ins at local boat landings. I can only assume the primitive camp sites are similarly vulnerable
You would need to mount it in a way that someone couldn't just come along and pick it up and go. Any mounting solution that requires internal access to undo would be a further deterrent.
Cameras would help too, and if you have either a very strong router (like a Ruckus), or cellular service, you could even potentially get notifications from the camera, prompting you to walk back because someone is attempting to unmount your stuff. Even just talking through one of those doorbell cameras will probably make them scurry off.
Even if you just slapped a simple chain bike lock on everything before you walked away that's probably going to stop most if not all attempts at stealing your stuff.
Most new RVs these days come with panels, they're screwed into the roof. Could you steal them? Sure, but it's probably more of a pain than the panels are worth. The Starlink is a different story, perhaps. Mine will be mounted on a pole attached to the RV, and taken off for travel anyway, so if I leave the RV unattended for any length of time I'll just stow it.
Battery theft is definitely a real thing these days, too, especially with expensive lithium batteries, so mine are in a lockbox to deter casual theft.
Did you study electrical engineering? Can you recommend a laymans resource for getting smart on how you did those calcs? For example I’d struggle to figure out the battery size for a given wattage / amp of draw.
Not the commenter, but it’s fairly straightforward.
I’ve actually made a simple calculator[1] for this, but you don’t really need it.
What you want to do is get a good picture of your actual usage per day in kWh. You can use a Kill-a-Watt plug or similar (a device that kWh that pass through it).
Once you have your daily kWh use, you can multiply by however many days you want to run without charging the battery. A lot of off grid solar people go for 2-4 days.
That gives you the useable battery size in kWh you need.
LiFePo4 batteries (arguably the best for this setup) typically have 80-90% useable capacity. Lead acid (the more traditional kind) have around 50%.
Adjust for that and you know what size of battery to buy.
A lot of batteries are defined as Amp hours and voltage. Multiply them together to get watt hours.
I got my ham radio license in March and I learned a lot about practical electricity while studying. Might be worth checking out some of the YouTube videos to see if it's up your alley.
I've worked remote for 2 years in an travel trailer with a 250w solar panel and 200kwh battery and have never needed shore power. I use my phone for hotspotting and use a mac book, they both charge in about 2 hours so I run for 2-3 hours, charge it, run 2-3 hours, and then charge it before logging off.
That said, yea - no second monitor, I close a lot of apps when i'm not using them (looking at you docker and chrome), and have a setup where I ssh onto a machine or use ci-cd agents to do a lot of my work.
edit: that said, this is a lot easier in sunnier places (you don't need to use electricity for heat) which I tend to prefer. I got close to needing a campground after a week or two in WY/MT near winter.
You CAN have that much capacity, but you would basically have to build the RV out of battery cells. I'm assuming they meant 20kwh, which is still HUGE for an RV, but they did say they never needed shore power in the last 2 years of living, so I guess, its possible.
With the kind of draws described, I believe OP got the terms confused and meant "200ah". We've got a 200ah house battery in our RV, and you can run low-load stuff like a laptop and a monitor for a long time on that battery. Hell, fire up the 1100W microwave and heat some lunch. Just do it early so that the solar panels can refill before dark.
And of course 200 Ah (@12VDC) is 2.4 kWh. BTW, I have a couple of these LiFePo 100Ah batteries, and they are great. But I do get a kick out of how the capital cost is about $800 USD to store 1 kWh, or $0.15 worth of electricity (omitting solar cell cost solar charge controller cost, which are comparatively minor)! Still, the grid independence (for sustainable Tiny Electrical Living) is a wonderful thing.
I have 6kWh of LFP batteries in my RV and 990W of solar on the roof. I do bring a generator just in case but only rarely ever use it. Even at 90W I don’t think I’d have power problems, at least not during the summer months.
An M1 Macbook will draw an average of about 30W under load.
Starlink dish is about 50W.
80W * 8 hours = 640Wh
With a 100W solar panel generating 200Wh total throughout the day, you would use up 440Wh of your 1000Wh battery.
These are conservative estimates. My M1 pulls less than 20W at most times and you can get well over 200Wh from a 100W panel in a day. Tweak the numbers just a bit and you get indefinite power for a 40 hour work week.
Issue is, if you're really in the sticks (and therefore no 2g/3g/4g/5g service), you're completely disconnected unless the thing is on, idling away at 50w.
Sure you're not using data while you're sleeping, but you might want to be able to get a call from someone if they really need to get in touch with you. Or other passive tasks where you want to at least take a call/message/email if required.
Even in a residential environment, I've toyed with a timer that cuts my ISP modem and router overnight (and kills smart devices from trying to phone home...) because falling back to 3g/4g saves me ~15 watts, but it's honestly dollars/year of savings.
I do a ton of backpacking/camping/overlanding/etc and most places you can reach by car have at least some kind of reception. It's not like you will always be 100% off the grid.
If you just need a way to stay in touch, one option is to use a satellite SMS service, like the Garmin inReach.
Though, if you really want to run that setup 24/7, 600W of panels and a 2kW battery should do it. Bump that up to 800W and 3kW and you won't have any worries.
You can also add a small gas generator to the mix for emergencies.
Of course someone had to make this comment, but don't you worry, I've driven plenty of remote trails.
Obviously there are many places where there isn't cell coverage, but the vast majority (of even very remote places) has some type of coverage. I've been hours from the nearest asphalt road, in the middle of the desert and still have coverage. This is more often than not the case. Use a cell booster with an antenna on a pole, and you can extend this range even further.
My point is that you will not need 24/7 satellite connection just for taking calls, the vast majority of the time you will be near a service area. If taking calls is important to you, you can almost always find a place to camp with service (or carry a satellite phone). I also don't find many people in the truly remote areas camping out for extended periods of time. Most of the time, people want to be relatively close to services, for many other reasons.
> Obviously there are many places where there isn't cell coverage, but the vast majority (of even very remote places) has some type of coverage.
And from personal experience I can tell you that this is not true. It is not hard to find remote places with no cell coverage.
So you either aren't that adventurous, or you haven't explored very widely yet.
> I also don't find many people in the truly remote areas camping out for extended periods of time.
You don't find them, because they're in places you don't seem to go yourself or are not aware of.
> If taking calls is important to you, you can almost always find a place to camp with service (or carry a satellite phone).
Yes, there are other options and people have been making it work since before star link was available.
While I agree that most people won't need starlink on 24/7, it simply isn't true to say that you can count on some sort of cell service in the vast majority of places you can reach with a car.
> So you either aren't that adventurous, or you haven't explored very widely yet.
I've explored CA, NV, UT, and CO very thoroughly, and WA, OR, WY, and AZ but not to the same extent. I've had many rigs throughout the years (Tacos, 4Runners, ADV bikes, vans, campers, roof tents, I've tried it all), currently building out an E350 (retired ambulance). I've done week long moto-camping trips through-out CA and OR (week is my limit for moto). I've been at it for about 15 years now and have camped many hundreds of nights, mostly outside of developed campgrounds. My Google maps is filled with hundreds of markers for great boondocking spots that I've found over the years. You're not talking to someone that goes out to Moab once a year and stays in a yurt.
> While I agree that most people won't need starlink on 24/7, it simply isn't true to say that you can count on some sort of cell service in the vast majority of places you can reach with a car.
It is factually correct since just Verizon's cell coverage is something like 70% of the US land area. But of course, I can get in my 4Runner right now and find a place within a 30-mile radius that doesn't have cell coverage.
> It is factually correct since just Verizon's cell coverage is something like 70% of the US land area.
2/3rds isn't what I would call a vast majority and the coverage for the western states is much lower than that. If you only include places where boondocking is legal, I think the coverage drops significantly below 50%.
It is certainly feasible and can be satifying to only boondock in areas where you can get cell coverage, which I think was the point you were trying to make.
I'm not talking about hiking paths. National Forests publish MVUM maps that tell you where you are allowed to take a vehicle and drive/camp. These forest roads can be in rough shape, but many of them are easily possible with competent driving and a bit of clearance. Large swathes of these areas have no cell coverage at all.
Then add in all the amazing places you can camp in northern BC, the Yukon Territory and Alaska and the list of coverage-less camping destimations grows even longer, though many of those areas are outside the latitudes where Starlink works right now.
There are also quite a few established , non-dispersed campgrounds in the weat that I've been to that had no cell service. The other Crater Lake (the one in northern California) is one example I can remember off the top of my head.
I think you're missing the context of this discussion. Of course there are many places without coverage, but the idea that you will be in these places for extended periods of time, working and taking calls, is nowhere close to reality for even the most adventurous (and that's not because you can't get cell coverage).
But yes, if you're talking about Alaska/Canada, that's a whole other story. I am mainly referring to the US, especially the Western part of the US.
> I think you're missing the context of this discussion.
I live in my vehicle full time and work remotely while driving around the West Coast and prefer unpopulated areas. I understand the context completely. You are simply wrong and unwilling to admit it.
> the idea that you will be in these places for extended periods of time, working and taking calls, is nowhere close to reality for even the most adventurous
I can say from personal experience that you are wrong here. I would not even class myself as the "most adventurous" and my rig doesn't have 4wd.
There are absolutely places that I have chosen not to stay because I couldn't get reliable service to make work calls. I have also stayed places with really dodgy cell service and had to do work calls over the phone rather than via slack.
So yes, there are absolutely many places where I and many other Boondockers want to go and stay that have no cell coverage. Boondockers that need to be reachable around the clock in those areas will need to have enough solar and batteries to leave their Starlink array running overnight. Personally, I am fine with dropping off the grid overnight, though I suspect that I would occasionally fall asleep without remembering to turn off the internet and then spend days getting my batteries back to full.
My limited solar capacity currently is why I am still hesitating on buying Starlink. While I have a 4kwh battery, I only have 200w of solar and running a Starlink for me would require some more careful power management unless I also significantly upgrade my solar capacity.
> Alaska/Canada, that's a whole other story. I am mainly referring to the US, especially the Western part of the US.
Alaska is part of the western US, but not relevant to the point I am making since it is (mostly) outside the current starlink supported latitudes.
> There are absolutely places that I have chosen not to stay because I couldn't get reliable service to make work calls. I have also stayed places with really dodgy cell service and had to do work calls over the phone rather than via slack.
That's not what we are talking about.
We are talking about running Starlink 24/7 vs just during working hours. I'm saying that you can get away with just running it during work hours. You don't need 24/7 cell access when you're boondocking. That's the discussion here. Not whether you can always get cell service at all times when you need it. You can just plan around when you will be working. Sometimes you camp in a place with cell service, great. Other times you don't, no big deal, use other solutions (Starlink, satellite phones, etc).
Yes, if you're living out of your car in remote places and need to be reachable 24/7 you are a unique case and should plan accordingly. But for the vast majority of people working on the road, that's just not the case.
> the idea that you will be in these places for extended periods of time, working and taking calls, is nowhere close to reality for even the most adventurous
Go back and re-read the thread. You gave the availability of cell coverage everywhere you can drive as an explicit reason why those who need to be reachable don't need to run Starlink 24/7. Then, when I pointed out that was factually inaccurate, you shifted to saying that those places exist, but nobody would want to stay there for extended periods. That I was also able to contradict through personal experience. I've only addressed topics you directly brought up yourself.
> Yes, if you're living out of your car in remote places and need to be reachable 24/7 you are a unique case and should plan accordingly. But for the vast majority of people working on the road, that's just not the case.
This I agree mostly agree with (except the hyperbolic "unique case"). Pager duty isn't that uncommon for software developers so it is not an unrealistic use-case and is worth discussing on a platform like HN and doesn't deserve to be dismissed out of hand.
I think you have a tendency to make hyperbolic claims, (e.g. "nowhere close to reality for even the most adventurous") when you would have been better served by just relating your extensive experience with how easy it is to find good places to boondock that do have enough cell service to not require starlink for 24/7 contactability.
Edit: I would also have been more effective if I had left out the first sentence of my original reply and instead provided examples of the areas I was talking about in the initial comment rather than in a follow up.
I don't think this is what he's referring to — there are vast areas in NM, AZ, NV that do not have cell coverage. Even when you apply all service levels (even 3G) across all cell providers, using carrier provided data (which tend to be overly optimistic), even then you can see giant no-cell-service zones on the map.
There are many places in the world that are beautiful, more or less in the countryside, yet have access to electricity and running water.
And hey, if your tech job is just typing along on your Macbook, you're actually not pretty high in energy usage! They're machines that can run on tiny batteries, after all. Same as a fridge, basically.
Dunno how much you can get out of RV solar panels on a good day though.
I have 515W on top of the roof of my sprinter. I also have a custom-built 12VDC-direct mini-ITX system that I use in the van (160W TDP). Because I do native development, not web related stuff, that means compiling a lot. The computer uses more power than the refridgerator. The 515W is enough for about 7-8 months of the year at the range of latitudes spanned by the USA. It's not enough during winter even in sunny NM or AZ.
I guess I was being a bit "greedy" on the analysis, cuz I was thinking about an M1 Macbook Pro, or just laptops in general.
An M1 Mac Mini max power draw according to Google is ~40W. Google tells me a 24 inch monitor is 20-60W. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong numbers, but that looks like a 100W thing? Perhaps that's totally off base though, or not comparable numbers. But I have to imagine that a laptop (or laptop-based infra) is gonna be better for you (even if you need the power in theory).
I have a laptop also (Lenovo Y700). Because I need the compilation power, it basically uses about the same amount of power as my custom built system. The difference is that it has its own battery, which changes (a little) the way it interacts with the van's power system.
Especially if your vehicle has battery capacity itself if some sort - you can charge the batteries on grid in the morning and head out to the lake all day.
The flush ones don't last nearly as long, either. AFAIK most manufacturers, and most aftermarket installs as well are using rigid panels mounted with z-brackets. More effort to install, but gluing flexible panels to a membrane roof wasn't what I wanted to do either.
Almost entirely yes, my preferred remote sites are all within the same state. I'd have to pay my home state taxes anyway. And the nearest state I'd be likely to work from occasionally has no income tax.
But even if it weren't that way for me, I don't think I'd worry that much about someone accusing me of skipping out on taxes I should pay because I parked my RV in another state. It's not a permanent address.
I really wonder why they don't introduce new hardware.
I know the system is fairly complex (tons of TI frontends building a big steerable phased array antenna), but the current hardware is awful for RV and really any use. There's a motor-oriented rectangular "dish" with a mandatory 1+ foot mounting arm, which stows in only one vertical orientation. Then, there are proprietary micro-HDMI esque connectors on both ends of a vendor provided fixed-length CAT5e from the dish to the router. For RVs, all of these are awful - the dish can't lie flat and must be brought inside for transit, and wiring is an unnecessary hassle.
As a Starlink user, my take is pretty much that the core technology is revolutionary in specific areas, but the product itself is mediocre in both cost and implementation. I wish they'd "unchain" the system with less bizarre hardware.
> but the product itself is mediocre in both cost and implementation.
Go compare it to what you will get for $150 per month from consumer grade geostationary based highly oversubscribed services. Viasat/Hughesnet/wild blue/etc.
I could pull out my checkbook right now and start a contract for $6,000 per month on a 36mo term of dedicated SCPC geostationary capacity (requiring about $8500 of equipment at my site with a 1.8 meter dish, moderately powerful BUC and new modem) and not be able to come anywhere near matching the speeds and capability of my starlink terminal.
I worked for a while with PoP-in-a-Box container systems you could drop in anywhere and run. The ammount of effort tuning each partner satellite provider to work with voice & video with ultra low codecs etc was huge overhead in addition to the cost for SCPC service/equipment. People complaining about ease of use are totally missing how hard the equivalent was not so long ago. Yes, there were simple point plug and play suitcase mobile solutions like BGAN but only at a fraction of the bandwidth of a StarLink system.
> Go compare it to what you will get for $150 per month from consumer grade geostationary based highly oversubscribed services. Viasat/Hughesnet/wild blue/etc.
Aside from "it's not a good deal just because it's cheaper than a bad deal" - your point is completely irrelevant to terrible design choices that have little to do with cost.
A permanently-attached cable on a very expensive outdoor device is mind-boggling levels of asinine, to the point that it seems done purposefully to help subsidize the service by making money off returned units with damaged cables.
Or guarantee that units will eventually die; it sounds like Musk wants to shift to being a satellite backbone, not providing interwebs for plebs - and one great way to shift to that is to simply stop selling dishes to consumers and wait for the existing units to die of cable failure.
(And before you jump all over me: yeeeeees, I'm aware that implementing a connector for the cable has costs. Starlink chose to cut those costs.)
It's completely up Musk's alley to pull this sort of blatantly anti-consumer nonsense. His entire life he's been profiting off exploiting his customers. For example, in the case of paypal, blatantly stealing money from people's accounts for "suspicious" activity, and getting away with it because "paypal isn't a bank, neener neener."
> it sounds like Musk wants to shift to being a satellite backbone,
Musk and his network team are not that dumb. They know about the Shannon limit in rf microwave and millimeter wave and the multi terahertz channel width capacity of basic 9/125 SM fiber.
Anything RF based has incredibly tiny capacity compared to modern 100/200/400GbE 40/80 channel dwdm systems. The capacity of two strands of fiber on a long haul path is incredible.
Internet backbone links carry far too much traffic to handle through even the most optimistic starlink sat to sat laser links.
I 100% concur with you on the foolishness of the cable. It should be some kind of ip68 rated twist lock Ethernet connector.
Why do you think 100gbps+ is not feasible for sat to sat lasers? The vacuum of space is a better environment than 500km of glass with a bunch of inline repeaters.
Because a few discrete OOK lasers in a single frequency aiming at another moving target, while they will have a lot of capacity compared to an rf link, will have a minuscule amount of capacity in Gbps compared to a whole DWDM based, coherent 100GbE+ optical transport system operating on singlemode fiber.
Like, literally, twenty or thirty individual full duplex 400GbE circuits in two strands of fiber, if you have enough money to throw at the problem.
The only way you could approach matching the same capacity on a sat to sat link would be if you had a massive array of 30-40 separate laser tx and corresponding massive array of 30-40 rx receptors on the other side. It's easier to understand if you've seen a DWDM mux and demux in person in a telecom facility.
I'd like to be proven wrong if somebody can do multi Tbps of capacity on a sat to sat laser link, that would be awesome, but the challenges are very high.
> The only way you could approach matching the same capacity on a sat to sat link would be if you had a massive array of 30-40 separate laser tx and corresponding massive array of 30-40 rx receptors on the other side.
This does sound like the sort of thing Musk would try, especially post-Starship, if the rest of the setup was physically possible.
One of the other problems is that the ultimate last hop for data would still have to be an rf link satellite to earth station through atmosphere, where lasers don't work well at all (there's a rain and junk in the air reason the telecom industry has given up on free space optics lasers for 1-2km, 1 to 20Gbps data links roof to roof and uses millimeter wave fdd radios instead)
Two satellites from the same launch, in the same orbital inclination, following each other in a conga line of starlink satellites are still slightly moving relative to each other, considering the narrow beam width of a laser shot at distances of 50 to 80 km or more between satellites.
The cable isn't permanent on the rectangular dish. It's got weird proprietary micro-HDMI esque connectors on both ends (and each end is different!) This at least isn't completely out there, since the cable can be replaced, but certainly isn't as good as an off the shelf cable that can be replaced in almost any town.
I think this must have been done due to either weatherproofing (RJ45 is awful for this, you can make it waterproof with weird enclosures but it's painful) or some kind of issue with the excessive power requirements from the dish. The cable is just CAT5e. I cut it and put RJ45 in the middle (through a gas discharge surge arrestor) to avoid needing to drill another hole in my house, and my system works fine even in snow melt mode, so... shrug.
The weirdest part about the rectangular Dishy system is that the router doesn't have an Ethernet port, and, to add one you have to buy a proprietary dongle because there's no Ethernet PHY for an additional port in the router itself. Plus, there's no official way to eliminate the router hardware - you can put it in passthrough mode and eliminate the actual routing part, but the proprietary PoE injector is fully integrated into the router hardware.
Things are improving slowly, though - at least there's now a "remote management" function in the Starlink app, so passthrough mode users have (proprietary) access to their connection's vitals. Previously, enabling passthrough mode eliminated all telemetry from the connection, so you couldn't see if the link was obstructed, for example.
I didn't want to put up a 100+ foot tower, so I started a rural FTTH ISP instead and ran my own fibre rather than pay the existing local WISP to give me crappy 5-10Mbps service.
Still, there are lots of cottages and other rural homes we can't get to and are trying to get Starlink at. The entire region I'm in has been stop-sell for a long time, yet there are zero uplinks anywhere nearby. I'd be more than happy to host an uplink for where we have dark fibre back to a data center to help increase capacity in the region, but nobody ever answers emails at Starlink. It's kinda awful how bad they are at customer service.
Starlink is only interested in colocation of their earth stations along major longhaul fiber routes, typically next to regen huts with existing Telco infrastructure. Just having dark fiber back to a medium or larger sized city isn't enough.
The level3 Prosser, WA hut site and starlink equipment there is a good example.
WISPs come with their own challenges; namely time and line of sight to another node on the network.
Heck I about bought a schoolhouse in rural Michigan until the WISP got back to me and told me they couldn’t provide me service because of the trees in the yard.
I've seen people erect light duty 60' towers suitable for the wind load of one 60cm ptp microwave dish for a link to a local wisp, can be $2500-4500 all in including shipping, foundation, concrete work, etc.
That’s all fine and dandy; I’m happily on the west coast again instead. Happy it didn’t work out! That amount of uncertainty when buying a home and working from is not for me.
Only if the fiber provider is in the same area doing a build to serve at minimum a few hundred other homes at roughly the same time. Some people who live in rural areas where they would need a 60-80 ft tower for wisp cpe or starlink may be in a place so far from existing ISP fiber that a new build purely aerial fiber construction project could run $300,000.
It's perfectly possible to do FTTH builds for 30-40 homes at a cost of $30-40k. Just make sure you know what you're doing and avoid getting fleeced by engineering consulting firms and high margin construction companies.
>the product itself is mediocre in both cost and implementation
Getting a phased array antenna with a gain enough to get range of more than 500km for $500 is mediocre in cost? I've got curious and googled Starlink antenna teardown - man, that looks like a fighter radar hardware, may be not of a 5G fighter, yet definitely not every 4G fighter has such a radar. There is no way it costs $500 even in BOM. The BOM itself must be several thousands at least. Starlink is basically giving away its hardware in order to get customers.
1) I was mostly referring to the monthly cost, although the upfront is steep as well.
2) As a customer I don't care if the product has a $5000 COGS to the provider or has unicorn blood in it, I care what it does. Compared to most WISPs, LTE/5G, or using the Internet access provided by a commercial campground or RV park, it's extremely expensive and really inconvenient. For example, my parents chose not to redeem their Starlink invitation as at home, they'd get similar performance to their existing WISP for over 2x the price and a really inconvenient installation process, and for the road, the cost just didn't justify the rare occasion they were at a campsite without LTE or commercially available Internet nearby.
Compared to geostationary and existing constellation satellite solutions, Starlink is a massive winner, and competes well. But, those markets were already shrinking and IMO Starlink will eventually have to compete with terrestrial wireless solutions as well. To do that, they'll need a better cost and CPE model.
There is already an aviation and Maritime mobile antenna unit in beta test. I've seen photos of it. You can also see the prototypes of the flush/conformal mount aviation terminal stuck to the side of some of the starship prototypes.
The units that exist right now are meant to be relatively low cost and compete with consumer geostationary vsat terminals.
Terrestrial fiber based ISPs doing GPON can regularly spend several thousand dollars in new build outside plant fiber construction costs to bring a single home on net, but they know they have a very good chance of getting at least ten years if not more of revenue at $85 a month from it.
Let's say they make 30 million profit from each Falcon 9 launch. Last year they did 31 launches, but half of those were Starlink launches. That's 15x30 = $450 million profit off Falcon 9, plus whatever they made from Dragon.
You're probably right that they would be fine as a company if they couldn't get any more money. SpaceX could operate at a decent profit and still do either Starlink or Starship at reduced pace. The "free money" just allows them to get to their goals a lot faster.
Absolute worst case scenario it goes bankrupt and ends up like the second corporate incarnation of Iridium under entirely new owners. Which is very much a successful and essential, mission critical business today.
Department of Defense has had a perhaps unexpected taste of Starlink’s capabilities in real warfare and they will not let them go. I expect a large infusion of cash from that direction if anything bad was on the horizon.
I mean, read what little official commentary is available from them. You can practically hear those guys salivating at what they’re seeing: unjammable, indestructible, untappable communications infrastructure with high bandwidth and 5 min setup time in the field, man portable if necessary.
A big difference is Starlink satellites are low enough that they will reenter the atmosphere in 5-10 years. So, a short shelf life limits its value as an investment.
Musk has said that for Starlink to be successful they need the launch capabilities of Starship.
So what? At 100$/month, the initial 1000$ "subsidy" is paid off and the dish generates naked profit - internet contracts can run for extremely long, especially if there is no competition.
Cable and DSL networks renting you a shitty 50$ modem for 5-10$ a month or charging you 5$ for the privilege of using the shitty wifi AP are worse in that regard.
I am surprised you have not raised a major issue others have highlighted, that the dish is a MASSIVE energy hog in RV terms, where electricity is a premium when you are not hooked up to services where internet is usually also available, even if it is spotty.
2nd gen dish not so bad, it's about a 65W load if not in ice melt mode. The first gen is 85W to 150W depending on if heaters are on or not. But even so , yes, the cumulative kWh from a 65W load powered up for 1 month is a lot. Probably best handled on an RV that can mount multiple 360W class big pv panels on the roof.
> Starlink for RVs is not designed for use while in motion.
This is really their current service, but not strictly limited to only one location cell. So, you can use it whenever you reach your destination, but it isn’t designed to be used while you’re in motion.
I can see plenty of room for improvement to optimize it even further. They could use accelerometers/gyroscopes to detect & predict "regular" movement (boats, etc) as well as current position to predict turns for land-based vehicles (from map data) so that the antenna can essentially "lead" the predicted movement (and maybe even do some magic with TCP flows to prepare them for predicted dropouts so they pick back up faster once the link is reestablished).
In practice I'm not so sure it's such a bad thing for it to not be permanently mounted on the roof because of the importance of avoiding obstructions. Imagine your campsite is under a tree, but there's a clearing 50 feet away.
Though I did see one clever installation under a cover on a spare tire on the roof (for the round Dishy). You could leave it up there and pull it down as needed to avoid obstructions when parked. The cable would even coil up nicely in the tire.
I'm aware that they expect one of their customers to be stock market companies where lower latency is highly important. Are you referring to that or something else?
The "stock market companies" is a fantasy promoted by random people, not SpaceX.
What SpaceX shared is that they plan to be "fiber cable" except via space. They'll carry a backbone traffic e.g. between Australia and U.S. via laser links.
Companies that currently pay for undersea fiber cable to carry traffic will pay Starlink for the same service.
High frequency traders would look into this, but I don't think it would be a big revenue stream for SpaceX.
I used to work for a company doing microwave backhaul and they liked us as the speed of light through air is faster than fiber, and they could get more direct links. It was important enough that we had special low latency builds of our firmware with some features removed.
Eventually, with satellite to satellite laser links, and full global coverage with this efficient number of highly inclined orbit satellites, they intend to capture the entire market that is right now addressed by various very expensive motorized tracking geostationary dishes mounted on offshore vessels, plus L/S band inmarsat, iridium, and others.
Offshore oil and gas, cargo ships, Cruise ships, coastal vessels, medium-distance ferries such as in Greece, business jets, airliners, portable military applications, data links to offshore scientific applications for buoys and weather, all sorts of stuff.
I understand that’s a lot of use cases, but is it a lot of REVENUE?
Verizon and AT&T built multi billion of dollars a year of sales from cookie cutter DSL (simplistically). All these crazy edge cases…are they material? Does it make sense to shoot thousands of satellites in space for ferry boats in Greece? Financially that is.
That being said it’s really cool what a “catch all” solution we’re getting as a humanity for basically free. This feels like Google Maps / Gmail / WhatsApp where all humans get like value for free (especially in the developing world) due to one company creating a massive positive externality due to their business strategy. So cool.
Go look at the combined revenue in billions per year from all the geostationary satellite owning companies like Inmarsat, thuraya, Intelsat, ses, eutelsat, arabsat, amos, etc. Most are publicly traded
ompanies. LEO properly implemented will beat the pants off it in performance and speed.
HFT already uses HF radio bands between the UK and USA which is lower latency than either submarine fiber or starlink will be. Although much more limited in kbps.
Big ass yagi uda antennas in certain locations with totally custom rf chains and modems.
Experimental licenses so far or straight up illegal, they're making much more money than any FCC fines would be. The FCC enforcement bureau is actually pretty small and doesn't come after you until you really screw up someone else's pre existing licensed service.
All FCC fines are public info (called a notice of apparent liability and published in their daily data dumps), I've yet to hear of one getting fined.
I'd venture a guess they could mean using Starlink as the backbone for off-planet comms? I've heard that referenced a few times. The true end game is probably all of the above and more. If the need fits the bill and the pockets are deep enough, it'll probably be using Starlink.
I’m very ignorant about HFT, but https://www.starlink.com/ says “latency as low as 20ms in most locations”. Isn’t that many many orders of magnitude too much for HFT?
As I understand it, HFT justified digging new tunnels between NYC and Chicago to take advantage of the shorter distance the signal would have to go. And that was transmitting at or near the speed of light. Somehow, I doubt bouncing on a roundtrip to a satellite is worth it.
> And that was transmitting at or near the speed of light. Somehow, I doubt bouncing on a roundtrip to a satellite is worth it.
That's the thing, the speed of light in fiber is actually significantly slower than the speed of light through air, which itself is slightly slower than the speed of light through a vacuum.
Over long enough distances this adds up to the point that high frequency traders already have built radio relay networks between New York and Chicago. You can't easily build radio towers across oceans, but a satellite relay network that could follow a nearly line-of-sight path is almost the same thing.
Also fiber isn't run as the crow flies, sometimes it has to take a winding path which adds even more distance to the run than you might think, on top of the reduced speed of light.
If Starlink manages to get their satellite to satellite laser link tech working, which is a MASSIVE if, they're in a very good place.
Mark Handley[1] has done a number of videos running the numbers based on published Starlink numbers, both with and without the inter-satellite laser links.
It's been a while since I watched them, but I recall that even without laser links, they can beat any of the terrestrial links over a certain distance - because the terrestrial links can't get direct-LOS.
Based on what math? Tokyo and New-York are 10,848.68 km apart, terrestrially (though cables don't go as the crow flies), but LEO is only 2,000km off the surface. If Starlink can get connect Tokyo to New York in fewer than 3 hops, and thus over shorter distance, then you can bet that HFT firms will be falling over themselves to sign up.
The speed of light in fibre (I.e. glass) is substantially slower speed of light than near vacuum .
So yes bouncing up a few hundred km is faster for medium and long range connections .
It will not be faster than fibre for Manhattan to Princeton , but it would be faster for London - New York or London-Frankfurt
I think it’s more like cross-world latency. Where going from one side of the world to the other will be slower going via fibre optic vs through space as with starlink? I think this is reliant on the satellite-satellite latency being low and the ground to satellite being not insanely high.
Musk has said there's a risk of bankruptcy if both Starlink 2 and Starship don't work.
> The consequences for SpaceX if we can’t get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1 by itself is financially weak, whereas V2 is strong.
I very much hope they both do work but let's be clear there's still a lot of risk to get through before that's clear.
Starlink orbits are far too low for kessler syndrome. Atmospheric drag would clear them out in <10 years, probably much less. In fact, Starlink satellites are far too numerous for anti-satellite weapons to be effective (at least, until countries decide it's worthwhile to start mass producing orbital-class rockets to attack enemy satellite constellations, which would almost certainly lead to a loss of their own satellites as well). Russia would love to be able to take out Starlink right now, but they can't.
Nobody has enough asw weapons, and probably can't afford to build enough, quickly enough individual asw missiles, to take out even 15% of starlink. They launched four batches of 53 satellites each just in May and the month hasn't ended yet.
Additionally the US and NATO would see an act like that as barely one step below declaring nuclear war.
People with ASW don't want to use them against Starlink, they want to use them against spy satellites. Starlink would just be collateral damage.
If anyone in NATO considers blowing up satellites to be one step below killing hundreds of millions of people, I want that person fired. Because they have completely lost touch with reality, and should not be allowed anywhere near a weapon, or a job where they manage people with weapons.
Ukraine is using Starlink to control drones and Russia has tried jamming the service. Given that its not outlandish to contemplate Russia escalating. They might destroy one and say they'll do worse unless Ukraine is kicked off.
The reason taking out spy satellites is taken so seriously is it is considered a likely prelude to an attack.
Are spy satellites actually intended to detect ongoing icmb attacks? Isn't the overwhelming majority of that job done by ground and sea-based radar stations?
There is no meaningful difference between detecting a launch from Siberia, and detecting it once it's over the Bering sea. Either way, everyone on both sides will die.
I wonder how many Starlink sats one would have to take out to start a cascade to destroy the usefulness of the constellation? Of course there would be a lot of other collateral damage.
This strikes me as a rather odd comparison to make.
4G serves an entire nation of cell phones, using generally similar wireless technology and limitations LEO satellite comms have. 4G towers are closer to the users than LEO satellites, meaning the power requirements are lower, this is a desirable thing for the people in terms of both battery life and radiation power levels.
5G takes it even further in this direction using more towers; shorter distances and lower power levels, AIUI.
Unless I'm utterly mistaken, LEO satellites are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to competing with the cell network for handheld mobile customers.
Satellite connectivity has its place, and it's basically where you won't have cell service, since that's obviously the preferable option if it's available.
Why not both. Have a 4G tower with a starlink on top. Give internet to a whole rural village. That might not be fast enough for the first world, but in other places that will be a much more viable solution compared to building physical infrastructure on the ground.
But those satellites cover everywhere, including places where no carrier would consider erecting a cell tower because it's not dense enough to be profitable or further out into the boonies than would be cost effective (or politically viable) to run cable.
It's an expensive upfront cost, but once the full constellation is up, they'll have basically full world coverage, and anywhere that's not a big city charges big money for internet. See how much internet in rural Canada costs.
Except their network is extremely limited in capacity. 4G/5G is a much better solution for 99.9% of use-cases. Starlink is better for the extremely rural locations where installing a tower just isn't feasible.
I have a pretty rural property and there are areas nearby that get 5G UW with speeds in excess of 1Gbps. Most of the area is covered by 4G with download speeds of over 40Mbps.
5G is already replacing wired home internet for many people. Give it a few more years to expand coverage and I bet 5G will make Starlink obsolete for most of its US users.
A few things to note are that Starlink is by far the best option for airplanes and boats, and the percentage of very rural customers is probably closer to 5-10% than .1%. Putting up towers is expensive, and space is pretty close. If you want the tower to be much closer than a leo satellite, it needs to <<200 miles away, and in non-flat areas, having the signal go up gives much better results than trying to send it through a mountain.
> It's an expensive upfront cost, but once the full constellation is up, they'll have basically full world coverage
This is wrong. Years before they have a full constellation they will already have started needing to replace previously launched satellites. It's not like they just launch them once and they're done and those satellites last forever. Just to maintain a constellation they'll need to be replacing something like 20% every year.
Are you counting how expensive it is to keep replenishing the sattelites?
Anyway, for spacex to make bank off of this they need customers. Extreme rural living areas are not that common, and when they do become common more cost effective methods such as cell towers make more sense than starlink.
Yeah I wonder if there will be a service like "send your data into space" which sounds equally stupid (use radio waves) but yeah... just longevity woes (sculpt a rock and burry it).
Some of my code is in the arctic vault though a piece of crap Todo List.
There's so many levels of wrong in this post I don't know where to begin. Data isn't being cached. Encrypted data doesn't help anything. It's a flying network router. If you're worried about "cached" data, then don't use the internet (don't actually worry because routers don't substantially cache either).
I said in another comment of mine that I didn't care about it being cached. I wanted it to be there "cached" to be remembered. Like a fragment of data (my data) found that exists long after I'm gone.
The satellite is like a piece of debris/wreckage which someone pointed out it would have deorbited anyway at some point.
Imagine your data gets on a server in the cloud and it dies (gets replicated/replaced/decommissioned ...)
What's special about satellites (and how much caching are they gonna do) and why are you worried about data you have chosen to send in the clear over a network you don't own?
Oh I wasn't implying I was worried about it. It was an indirect reference to a Cowboy Bebop episode (sentient satellite they connect to from decades ago).
This video[0] seems to disagree with this. In particular it seems like there's a lot of recurring costs involved and this infrastructure is not super stable (the video talks about satelites having a shelf life of 5 years. We're not rebuilding fiber out every 5 years!)
The videos "has an agenda" but it seems a bit easy to accept the idea that constantly launching satelites into space is pretty expensive. Infrastructure on the ground is expensive, but most people tend to not move around so at one point just building out lots of wires everywhere can work pretty well.
Having great coverage across the globe is great! But especially after seeing that (super crappy!) satelite internet providers getting the same shit done with 3 satelites.... you're looking at the intersection of people needing access to fast internet who can't somehow take advantage of existing infra, _and_ who won't eventually get covered by ground infra (and I guess don't have trees around their house).
Here's the thing - the launch costs are only an insurmountable issue if you aren't SpaceX. The math might not be great if you assume dependence on dedicated Falcon launches, but SpaceX gets a lot of Starlink satellites to orbit by piggybacking on top of contracted commercial launches basically for free. You also need to consider that Starship will likely be orbital-ready next year with a launch cost of only the fuel and parts refurbishment, and a single Starship launch could put an absolutely stupid number of Starlink satellites in orbit.
Basically, cost calculations assuming traditional launch economics are incorrect. That's pretty much the whole point of SpaceX as a company - their business proposition is massive reduction in kg-to-space costs.
It is so much worse than that. The video doesn't use SpaceX cost. It uses their cost to others. It categorically rules out using their new rocket, even though their stated plans call for them to use it. It rules out ride sharing, even though they have been doing that. The video creator /knows/ they are doing that. They know they are lying. I can tell, because I've looked at some of the articles they posted screen captures of. They edited the fucking headlines to remove the rocket launch price. The video is absolute garbage. It even posits a government conspiracy, because it has to, because it lied about the speed test numbers that are used to decide eligibility for funding. Yet despite all that when they talk about their choice of numbers they pretend they are being generous to SpaceX by using conservative numbers when nothing could be further from the truth.
Eh, you can do your own math. 5k satellites / 5 years lifetime = expect to replace 1k per year. Each launch of ~50 satellites costs around $35M (conservative estimate). So overall capex required to maintain the system is $700M/year. SpaceX would need 530k subscribers at $110/mo just to keep the lights on - and each satellite would have to handle ~106 customers concurrently, assuming a uniform distribution (best-case scenario for SpaceX). According to some sleuths on Reddit [1], each Starlink satellite can deliver around 20Gbps bandwidth, which gives each of those customers around 188 megabit speeds, assuming absolute best case geographical distribution. In practice people will be clustered so it won't be that great.
Surprisingly not that bad. The real cost could be double and they would still have enough capacity to serve high speed internet and break even.
Just to give a sense of scale, because it is crazy. Your estimate? It is 0.000621118012422 of his one year estimate. You arrived at a figure more than three orders of magnitude lower than his figure. So I hope you'll understand why I have so little respect for his estimate.
To just restate that to try to get across how extremely different your estimate is from his. If you convert to percentage and round at two decimal places... your estimate is 0.06% of his estimate. To try and make this different a little more real for people lets try to convert it into more familiar figures. If were talking about a house rather than rocket launches and cp thought the price was $100,000 for a house then CSS would have an estimate more than three orders of magnitude different. Something more like $100,000,000. Translating this level of difference in evaluation means the disagreement in 'real object' terms is roughly equivalent to this much difference in cost estimation: $120,000,000 home https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/329-Albion-Ave-Woodside-C...? versus $125,000 home https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/31235-Manton-Rd-Manton-CA...
The difference in estimates is absurd. The reason it is that absurd is that CSS tries to argue that SpaceX couldn't work because it would cost more than the entire economy in the world. It's like a comedy thing where he tries to use rhetoric about how stupid SpaceX must be to strengthen his argument that they could succeed without an overarching conspiracy helping them lie about everything. This is absolutely a conspiracy video, not a factual video.
IIRC, he moves on from this topic shortly after that to talk about how since Shotwell is a woman she isn't worth respect. It hits harder, if you believe him, because he just made a 'strong as long as you are delusional' case that anyone who thinks SpaceX might ever be profitable is insane.
One key factor you didn't include in this calculation is "overprovisioning", the industry term for the fact that you only need to spec your total network capacity based on peak load times, and at peak times it's not actually going to be the case that every customer is using their maximum contractually available bandwidth. The typical industry assumption is that this is something like a 10x factor, although as network connections get faster, this becomes more pronounced.
If anyone is about to watch this video, I want to warn you before you do that saying this guy "has an agenda" is like saying that a flat earther "has an agenda" in that they will absolutely be giving you "facts" and whenever the "facts" disagree with reality they will give you "facts" that are designed to make you abandon reality.
If I were to state my actual opinion on him on Hacker News, I would be downvoted. If I were to try and express how I feel about someone else finding him at all reasonable, I would be downvoted. So in the kindest possible way let me direct your attention to the kind of techniques he uses.
At 7:16 in that video he posts a screen capture of an article headline. It is a screen capture? Honest right? Great data. Not so fast. The screengrab was photoshopped. He edited out part of the title. In particular, he edited out the price for SpaceX to launch a satellite to orbit. Why, you might wonder, would he do something like that? Well... he was lying about the price just before that, so it would be kind of inconvenient to let people see the truth, wouldn't it? Here is the article whose title he photoshopped: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satell...
This isn't an uncommon thing for this liar. He regularly and willfully does things like this all throughout the video. You should be taking every number he gives with an enormous amount of salt. Dump the entire fucking salt container on this meal. He lies about the cost for SpaceX to launch, a material fact, but he also double counts the number of rockets they will need to launch, another material fact. He lies about the speed test results for SpaceX (by using numbers from months before the video, rather than the actual numbers). Since he lied about that, his reported numbers didn't agree with, ya know, reality. In particular they didn't agree with the reality of SpaceX qualifying for various government funding initiatives for rural internet. So if you want to believe him you're going to need choke down a helping of "enormous conspiracy" in order to get onboard his hate train. He also lies about the cost of competitors. And... it's bad. It is so bad that I have 0% confidence that he operates in good faith and I assume anyone who trusts this person is truly lazy, because he isn't trustworthy. Not even close to it, at all, whatsoever.
If anyone wants to climb out of the rabbit hole rather than into it, someone wrote a multi-part essay debunking this video. There are /a lot/ of mischaracterizations, outright lies, and deception. It has three parts, because there was so many times that were deceptive as to demand multiple articles.
It wasn't me who wrote the long rebuttal. I watched this video months back and noticed the same thing I'm sure you did. I ended up finding this rebuttal to it way back then and because of how often a certain segment of the population who is adequately described as "misinformed and full of hate" has this guy as their 'source' for various conspiracies I tend to remember the debunking.
I watched the video, and agree with all of your points. He strongly implies that Starlink is no better than existing satellite providers. My parents live in a rural area where the best non-satellite internet is 3mb/s DSL. They subscribe to Starlink, since there are no other viable options that allow things like video calling or HD video streaming.
Viasat offers 30mb/s download for $199/mo with a 150GB data cap.
HughesNet offers 25mb/s download for $159/mo with a 75GB data cap.
Starlink offers ~100mb/s download for $110/mo with no data cap.
Viasat/HughesNet have geostationary satellites which results in almost unusable ping (300-600ms), compared to the 50ms ping from Starlink.
But, hilariously, despite the channel being called "Common Sense Skeptic" (thought it might be a science-y channel), every video is an Elon Musk takedown.
There are a bunch of reasons to believe this is wrong, in addition to the things other people have pointed out:
- Starship will further reduce SpaceX's already low launch costs.
- Economies of scale by producing 10,000+ satellite.
- Industries willing to pay a lot for truly global coverage (maritime, aviation, oil, military)
- With the laser network, high frequency traders willing to pay a massive premium for the lowest latency connections between financial hubs.
- A "fully and rapidly reusable" Starship, if achieved, will change the economics even more. Not only will it further reduce the initial launch cost, but you could imagine potentially servicing/refueling or recovering aging Starlink satellites.
- Starlink (plus increasing work-from-home opportunities) has the potential to (slightly) redistribute where humans are willing to live to more sparsely populated areas.
I believe during the video he uses pricing offered by Tesla(EDIT: SpaceX rather) as the optimistic pricing for Starship! So taking the "cheap" numbers!
Tesla doesn't have anything to do with Starship launch prices. Let's look at costs to SpaceX for launches, since those are the most relevant numbers:
Reused Falcon 9 launch: $15M[1] in the best case, but let's double it just to ballpark the average, so $30M. Falcon 9 can loft around 50 satellites per launch. 30M/50 = $600k/satellite.
Starship: Aspirational goal of $2M cost to launch. Let's just round that up to $10M for whatever might be more expensive than expected. Starship has been predicted to be able to launch around 400 Starlink satellites at a time, the last figure I saw was that Starship launches would carry "100 plus" Starlinks[2]. $10M/100 = $100k/satellite. This is assuming Starship is launching v2.0 satellites though, rather than the current v1.5, which are way heavier (1 metric ton vs ~290kg)[3].
OK, yeah so the video mentioned an optimistic price of $250k/satelite. $100k is definitely better! It sounds like $250k would be matching the v1.5 satelite cost.
I guess the overall thing would be to break things down and figure it out. I'm skeptical mainly from a "possible market share" perspective ($99/month works well for some, way less for others, and honestly the competition is not wired broadband but cell networks). But I am here to be proven wrong!
>you're looking at the intersection of people needing access to fast internet who can't somehow take advantage of existing infra, _and_ who won't eventually get covered by ground infra (and I guess don't have trees around their house).
Ground infra can suck. It will probably be stuck at 6Mbps down forever since it is not economical to upgrade it. I would literally cut down trees by hand if it meant I could have fast internet.
> Ground infra can suck. It will probably be stuck at 6Mbps down forever since it is not economical to upgrade it.
Having competition changes the economics, at least somewhat. Look how fast AT&T rolled out fibers to all the cities Google announced they were going to do fiber in. It's still expensive to do new runs everywhere, but it may be worthwhile to keep some business. In some areas, as some customers leave, staying customers may be able to have better access to bonded lines. In other areas, the carrier just needs a kick in the pants to use more flexible/generous profiles to let customers use the speed that's available.
Common sense skeptic is a "hit channel" dedicated to producing and monetizing anti-Musk-related fake news. He has a captured market in a similar vein to anti-vaccine propaganda. So you should watch anything produced by him with that idea in mind.
The videos produced as a general rule will cherry pick information and also use outdated pieces of information and then mash them together to produce the illusion of something being much worse than it is.
Not to mention that (someone can fill in the accurate numbers) some rather significant number of satellites are expected to be lost every year due to various factors at a rate that will require several rocket launches just for maintenance of the current state. My understanding when I was reading about that, is that it did not even consider the "shelf life" issue.
He doesn't just include those calculations in. He overcounts them to a pretty large degree. He also photoshops screengrabs of articles and lies about launch prices and lies about the number of launches and lies about the speed of SpaceX service and lies about a government conspiracy because the speed test numbers were too low, and he is a misogynist towards Shotwell, mocking her for being female, and he lies about the cost of the competitor services.
You don't need to worry. Every angle for making the comparison unflattering to SpaceX, including taking screen grabs of Elon Musk with funny faces and making character attacks on him on the basis of his face looking funny, are more then covered in that cesspit designed to radicalize and monetize the gullible.
But as I use my internet, I never worry about what the CEO looks like, I never worry about if there is a male or female controlling matters. All I am concern with is the speed of my connection and the uptime. Keep the costs in check and those are the only things that matter.
I completely understand your point; a reasonable video author would have stuck to the things that matter. This person isn't reasonable. As the GP put it he "has an agenda" but as the GP didn't warn you he has no issue with lying when the facts disagree with him.
To get a sense of the scale for overcounting elsewhere in this thread someone pointed out we could do the calculation ourselves. They determined a reasonable number of satellites. Their estimate of the needed number of satellites was 37,000 less than CSS's estimate.
Whatever lie, whatever unflattering take, whatever deception - this video tries every angle. If you want to be delusional, this is your video author. He will help you get there.
The video lies about the connection speed. The video lies about the latency advantages. The video lies about the costs (by several orders of magnitude). The video lies about a government conspiracy (claiming one exists). The video lies about the ability of women to make effective decisions (implying they can't).
We took our dishy out on an RV trip last weekend and it was great. Put it in the back of the truck and had great reception the entire time. I'm not sure I'll be able to go back to terrible RV park WiFi ever again.
Indirectly yes, but it's more accurate to talk about how may users they can serve in a given area. With the current constellation they've actually maxed out the capability of it in most of the eastern half of the United States. https://www.starlink.com/map
I don't know too much about it, but a few of my friends who have a normal one and on reddit I saw starlink doesn't work beyond country boundaries... that is a real no-no in the EU as for instance popping from Spain to pt or pt to Spain to France or Belgium to France or NL would be things I do a lot. Does the RV version fix that? I have mobile subs that work well throughout the EU: I would buy starlink if it works smoothly throughout the EU. The boundaries are artificial and at the cost for this thing, I cannot see how it is a good deal unless I am somewhere (in the same country?) where there is no mobile signal.
The fine print for the Starlink RV system says you can use the terminal outside of your registered country for 2 months, after that you'd have to change the registered address to whatever country you're using it in.
The thing is that people with RVs in Europe usually hop around countries a lot. In Australia or the US there is enough space in the country. Almost everyone who has an RV stay 2-3 months per country and then go to another. A group of people who rock up to where I live are old friends together from Sweden who come over in 7 RVs for 2 months via Germany, Denmark, France , Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
The main advantage I can see (over resedential + portability) is you can pause the service so basically if you wanted it for 1 month a year it's only going to cost you that $200 (Plus the significantly larger amaortized $1000 if you use it that way)
Out of curiosity, what is the justification for being booted if you're too far from your home? Is it just to try to keep bandwidth demand in areas predictable?
Will that be less of an issue when a larger portion of their satellite fleet have laser interconnects? I think I read somewhere that the required ground stations are a limitation of the initial launches without laser connections...
Plus they'll launch more satellites, build more ground stations, improve the software and potentially also improve the antennas so that they can get more real bandwidth from the same available spectrum.
Partly that , partly also to make sure there is no abuse to bypass waitlists in a cell.
There is a limit per cell how many customers can be serviced. Satellites can only handle so many connections .
However humans tend to concentrate in few areas and those areas will have higher demand.
If they allow us to buy in a light demand area and use in roaming in a heavy demand area constantly with same network quality, it would become a problem, people would do that to bypass waitlists
To solve that they are allowing roaming but giving traffic/QoS preference to local users over roaming users
Any idea what sort of degradation occurs when a cell is ridiculously (like 10x) over capacity? I wonder if it will lose carrrier entirely, or just FIFO / round robing the oversaturated connections.
I just bought one to bypass the waitlist. The magic number for them to beat is worst case 5mbit down, 3 up and 66ms, <1TB cap.
Our current internet is as expensive as these starlink plans. The waitlist here is 2+ years, and this area is full of rural nerds. I'd guess they just got 1000 "RV" orders from my county.
I'm not convinced that the statistical number of people that would regularly move outside their "primary service area", or original owner resale, etc, would drive real issues for them.
Are there reports, for example, that the mass movement of these things into Ukraine is causing significant issues?
Ukraine is somewhat of an exception in that being able to provide any service at all is sufficient. But I do recall that last year, there was an incident of someone driving around with an antenna strapped to their car.
It's just a lazy answer to an earnest question. Anyone reading HN can imagine a "just because they can" argument. I'm asking and hoping someone can help me better understand the technical issues projects like Starlink have.
Alternatively, I'd proffer that it's possibly the correct answer to an earnest question, and a helpful nugget that could easily get lost here in plenty of imagined technical problems, suggested by predominantly technical people used to thinking mainly about that and assuming it's the reason.
With the very beneficial addition of being able to pause billing for the service. Which is not possible with the regular roaming enabled extra $25 per month terminal.
I'm a little surprised they didn't mention use on a boat. I thought that would be a bigger market, as in, they could charge whatever they want to mega yacht owners. Maybe there is not as much coverage over the oceans?
Guesses: the hardware isn’t well tested near salt water, and there aren’t many base stations mid-ocean. Plenty of satellite coverage though in the ocean, just not too usable without laser beams.
I wish they set up stabilized solar powered buoys that could serve as dumb-pipes between satellites. Maybe the speed would be limited, but I don't think ocean-farers are too picky. Latency should still be better than anything GEO-sat-based.
Obstructions should be limited. But this requires overlapping sats in-view.
They would not be going forward deploying 100s of them. They had a test launch of those a year+ ago with a full batch and now every launch only launches with inter-sat links.
without laser links communication between satellites becoming active the amount of coverage of satellites won’t help as there is no downlink for the satellite to talk to from you.
The best they could in theory without laser links today is intermittent connection (due to switching) WAN . Basically a very expensive LAN party with your friend’s boat say 100 miles away.
They probably need a different antenna to deal with all the pitch and roll with forward movement at the same time. That's happening for aircraft...they have several FAA and FCC filings, and some relationship with Ball Aerospace for antennas. Though I suspect their estimates on when that's ready are overly optimistic. The FAA isn't fast about approving new things.
As far as I know, inter-satellite links are currently not operational (and most deployed satellites don‘t have the required hardware), so coverage is limited by the need to have at least one satellite in view that has a line of sight to both you and a ground station.
Starlink architecture right now is up and back to satellite as a bent pipe, satellite needs to be simultaneously in view of your terminal and a starlink earth station while it is moving. This means mid ocean won't work yet.
The satellites they are launching now do have satellite to satellite laser links, but this is not been implemented in production yet, and there are nowhere near enough polar orbit highly inclined orbit satellites in operation. 95% of what's orbiting is in about a 53.2 degree inclination.
Logically it's a bent pipe from the POV of an individual terminal, right now, even if they're doing layer-2-like MAC/PHY stuff on the satellite. But I agree with you they are clearly not just dumb repeaters the same way that a transponder on a geostationary satellite is. The make-before-break and handoff between satellites for single antenna phased array terminal that can talk to 2 satellites at once requires more intelligence than that.
The satellites certainly are not full featured routers such as the capability you'd find in a modern 1U height ISP carrier router with enough CPU/RAM/FIB/RIB for full BGP tables.
That‘s definitely solvable – current GEO-based services also need steering (except for very low-bandwidth, low-gain solutions like Inmarsat-C), and there are various gimbal-based solutions available for use on smaller boats even during heavier seas:
A flat multi element phased array is still better if you aim the flat part in the general direction where you want the most gain. This is the why the flat phased array radar in the nose radome of a modern air superiority fighter jet is mounted on a motorized steerable platform.
Starlink dishes do have a steerable mount. It just usually doesn't move in operation. It might be fast enough for on-the-road use, with fine tracking done by the phased array combined with coarse tracking with the motors. That said, since they don't move in operation anyways with moving satellites, I think they should be fine on a moving platform with just beamforming.
There are a lot of Starlink satellites, and they move in a very predictable manner. I wouldn't be surprised if, for stationary use, it actually just picks a very small cone of the sky and only uses satellites from the same orbital plane moving across that cone along a circle segment over the course of multiple seconds.
Moving the dish would then only be for optimal array alignment with the "target cone", not for tracking individual satellites.
This seems very different from the movement of e.g. a boat in high seas, which can roll or pitch by up to 30 degrees over the course of very few seconds.
the motors in current model starlink terminals are not the robust type that would be used for constant-motion tracking 24x7x365 (as you see with an o3b terminal for MEO), they're motors that are intended to be used rarely in a fixed mount application where it aligns the panel at a certain heading one or two times a day, maximum, and stays that way.
I bought a Starlink for my house in Tahoe to hopefully use as backup internet for when Spectrum goes down. They go down every time the power goes out, so even with backup power, I'd have no internet. Starlink would have solved that.
Unfortunately it's quite expensive for a backup internet plan. Being able to cancel and activate it at will with this new RV plan would help a lot with that. And while Starlink speeds are nice for what it is, I'd prefer to use my 1Gbps cable modem most of the time.
Sadly for me, I tried putting the Starlink dish in several spots on my roof and deck, but I just have too many trees around my house. 100 foot tall jeffry pines all around the house. Starlink was always reporting about 12% obstructed, so it expected a drop out every 45 seconds or so. It was usable, but packet loss here and there.
I don't think that was going to work well for any kind of video calls, etc.
So I ended up returning the Starlink dish. It really needs too much view of the sky for heavily wooded areas. They aren't kidding when they say that.
My fall back plan is to use a 5G/LTE hotspot with an outdoor antenna to make up for my usable but fairly week cell service in the area, and use that for my backup internet.
I have Spectrum as well and my service stays on when the power goes out for at least as long as my UPS lasts. I don't have a generator (apartment) so I don't know for sure how long it lasts.
Damn that sucks. I wonder if it has something to do with me being in an urban area or something. Maybe they have business customers with SLAs so they need backup power.
Now COVID is over I was planning to slowly travel to a few different countries around Europe this summer, and work while I'm there. Internet in certain countries (cough Italy cough) is spotty at best, even when you are in big cities, so having a LTE backup is usually a wise choice.
Although the EU now has 'no roaming charges' there are no providers that let you freely roam to other countries and use your plan exactly as you would at home without restrictions. At home I can get a plan with unlimited calls, texts and data for 15€/mo, but I can only use 10GB of data in other EU countries. After that I need to pay 3€/GB - which will get expensive quickly with the number of Zoom calls I need to be on.
Buying a prepay local SIM is often still a smart choice, but in some countries that's difficult (to actually get the SIM) and prepay plans don't always have unlimited data options. If you need to travel a lot between countries where that's the case, or just want less hassle, the price of Starlink starts to seem a lot more affordable.
If you need it for work, it might be worth it looking into a business contract. Those are usually way more generous with roaming (and everything else, really) than consumer ones.
That's how it feels in my country at least. We had 21 cases today, compared to a few thousand this time last year. Masks and restrictions were one of the strictest in Europe, and it's all gone now.
5G doesn't magically extend range. It is still using the same frequencies and range is going to be about the same as 4G. The high-bandwidth (and low range that the other comments are talking about) is just a different frequency that 5G can run on. It's like the difference between 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wifi. I say range, but really it's penetration through walls and such.
So in rural areas, you'd be more interested in range/penetration, but there's only so much you can do with trees, hills, etc. in between you and the transmitter. Starlink has no obstacles between you and the satellite, and it runs at 10+Ghz giving more bandwidth.
Meanwhile T-mobile purchased the 600 Mhz band that used to be used for broadcast TV for their 'extended range LTE/5G'.
> 100 degree cone free from any obstacles, 25 degrees up from the horizon
Yeah, but that's not really a tall order, particularly in the kinds of places where 4G/5G coverage is bad or nonexistent. Maybe not where you're deep in a gorge or under a tree canopy, but lots of the wilderness is open space, or at least has open space accessible.
And people in rural areas are already used to putting up towers to get crappy wifi over line of sight to the next neighbor/town. Dishy on a stick won’t be a major hurdle.
5G really only works well in dense/populated areas. In central Colorado I'm lucky to get 4G LTE in town, and usually expect 3G. Most areas in the US west (Utah, Wyoming, etc) don't have any service. It's very different if you're way out.
> dense/populated areas
Not even that. Verizon is so congested in a lot of areas that you can have a very strong signal but literally data just doesn't work.
ya cell service is pretty bad. I go play soccer t the same fields I bring my kids to. When its adult games I get great speeds. When its practice for my kids and all the adults are on their phones watching youtube, I get such bad speeds at the same location
Yes, in Australia certainly, coverage of StarLink is potentially better.
Much of Australia has great 4G LTE, but when there's no signal, there's really no signal.
So there are two obvious key advantages to StarLink:
1. Full coverage in the Outback
2. No Data Caps
Despite having a great 4G LTE / 5G network in Australia we still have data caps on mobile plans. Home Mobile Broadband plans without data caps do exist, but usage policies prevent use outside of registered premises!
Also, our NBN has been a disaster in many places, and unusably bad.
NBN satellite (aka Sky Muster) is pretty solid and speed is generally ok but the latency is a killer and makes it useless for anything interactive. Fine for the target audience web browsing and streaming videos.
5G is a technology that is very short-range. If you have a concrete wall between the emitter and the receiver you will get a terrible connection. Maybe 30 mbps vs 500 mbps. Maybe 10 blocks away and you've already lost connection - unless there is another tower within a few blocks. So I don't think it would be feasible for big ISPs. maybe for some specific outdoor camps, yes. But it would require the cost of mainting infrastructure nearby all the RVs, including maintaining a clear view without physical obstructions.
5G doesn't have any bearing on the range, the frequency does -- 5G lowband will have about the same range is 4G. But to see the blazing multi gigabit/sec speeds, you'd need the high mmWave frequencies, which does limit the range,
Oh, did not know that. so 5G also includes a communication protocol ? E.g. could I make 5G work through 2.4 gHz (WiFi frequency, right ? ) and would it work well ? e.g. gigabit speeds thru 2.4 gHz ? I genuinely don't know, don't mean to make a stupid question.
kinda stupid question: (not meaning to sound as an asshole question) Isn't the mmWave part of 5G itself ? Or what would you define as 5G ?
3G/4G/5G are generations of protocols for cellular communication, they can run over many different physical frequencies.
Their standards committees agreed on certain bands of frequencies, some with more capacity than others.
I'm not an RF engineer, but given 5G can operate on frequencies higher and lower than 2.4Ghz, then I don't suppose there's any reason you couldn't if you were hacking up your own transmitters/receivers. A regular phone wouldn't, though, as they don't have 5G radios that can talk on those frequencies (or they've got hardware filters of some kind to ensure that they don't).
I see 5g as the main connection while traveling, and starlink for back country. Is starlink latency low enough to connect to a bluejeans call w/ or w/o video?
5G in rural areas is basically non-existent. Even 4G coverage is spotty outside of urban/suburban areas. My house in Montana has 1 bar of cell service - maybe 100kbps down max. Starlink gives me 1000x that.
…have you travelled out of a city recently? Like…to farming areas of your state/province?
I live in Toronto, where I have solid 5g for maybe 30km in any given direction (except probablyLake Ontario, lol…though I do still get 5G on Toronto Island…) - but I travel out to Palmerston, Ontario, and in some places along the way I’m shocked to see the ‘E’ for EDGE or 2G status on my iPhone. My grandparents still have dial-up with no option for Cable…in southern Ontario…
I used to farm in rural Illinois. Same deal. I don’t think people in less agricultural areas really get it.
4G/5G coverage has gotten much better over the last few years but plenty of places I go with my RV its not great (usually in the mountains both east and west). Also there aren't great unlimited plans for jetpacks/hotspots/routers very expensive or caps.
Honestly if your serious about reliable access you want multiple ways online so Starlink + Cellular + WiFi wan would be a good way to go, maybe even two cellular carriers.
This is not meant as competition for somewhere that has even a moderate amount of decent terrestrial based infrastructure. It's for places where the mobile phone network is poor or non-existent, really remote areas, etc. If you look at where the market is for consumer grade small ku and ka band geostationary terminals such as rural parts of idaho, wyoming, montana, far parts of Eastern Washington state, etc.
At my brother's house in coastalMaine for example, there is marginal cell coverage (which is better than it used to be). But aside from downtime now and then--which is pretty good in my and his experience--I could actually work from there which I couldn't with cell.
I'm willing to bet on it! I live in the center of Silicon Valley and it would take me a 30 minute drive to the south or the east before I lose cell phone access.
The dark spot near the border with Belgium is possibly due to heavy use of Starlink after the flooding last year, and therefore Starlink is probably over provisioned there. The dark spot in Bavaria I can't be certain, but I suspect it's also a result of over provisioning, since that area is particularly rural and may not have thorough DSL coverage.
> Theoretically though, it should continue to work while in motion right? Perhaps with a bit more latency than if the unit was stationary?
It probably won't work great. The Starlink unit has a phased array forming narrow beams of reception and transmission to the satellite, and assumes it's on a stable platform.
It's possible to build a system that is robust to bounces and yaws, but that doesn't mean that they have.
Actual recordings in motion of normal end-user terminal in motion. It works OK-ish. But a lot of packet loss (completely lost packets) and latency spikes (from retransmits).
Of course, with ground hardware built for in-motion, you could do significantly better.
I'm guessing utilization is rather high with retransmits, etc-- which is probably a driving factor of Starlink prohibiting in-motion use in EULA.
Note it's not really the speed that matters. It's suddenly having a much different bearing to the satellite because you have begun a turn or hit a dip in the road that matters.
This. I doubt the moving target part matters much since it's a few ms of travel time, but unless you are driving perfectly straight on a smooth highway,nthe turning and bouncing would probably aim the beam wrong faster than it could compensate
Pretty sure Starlink forlvomg vehicles will be a completely different service entirely.
I know a few airlines contracted with them to provide in-flight internet. My assumption is that different hardware would be needed given both the vehicle and the satellite are moving simultaneously. I could be wrong.
Maybe, but I would interpret this to mean that they can't guarantee a seamless handoff between zones. Like, they obviously have to hand off between satellites all the time since they're all in motion, but it seems the expectation here is that the service could drop (for what, a second? a few seconds? a minute or two?) as it realises that you're in a new location and it needs to schedule in your transitions.
It depends a lot on their software/hardware design. Doppler can have a non-trivial effect if it isn’t taken into account, even at highway speeds, let alone having to constantly re-aim.
I was excited to see this, until realizing that the dish is not meant for permanent RV roof mounting -- I don't want to climb up on the roof every time I stop so I can put out the dish, nor do I want to leave a $500 dish sitting outside my RV.
Any word on whether or not they'll come out with a roof mountable dish or at least a radome to cover the dish?|
They may have gone GA with the RV dish today, I've been waitlisted for over a year for a home dish, and got the RV dish email today.
Yes, and the people I know that have done it are either putting their dish on the ground or putting it on a roof or ladder mount when they want to use it.
Do you have a link to the DIY permanent installation? All the Youtube videos and other guides I've seen mount it on the roof while parked, and take it down while driving.
On the second generation rectangular cpe, there is a certain spot where if you drill a circular hole on the rear using a hole saw, you can reach in with non-conductive tweezers and unplug the cables going to the azimuth and elevation motors. Obviously, voiding the waterproofness and the warranty of the unit.
What's stopping you from coming up with a DIY solution? It would seem that the dish + the hardware are the hard part, the mount the easy part.
Well, for one, I'm not a satellite communications engineer. I don't know how to source or fabricate the materials to create a custom radome that's transparent at the frequencies needed, nor do I know the thermal emissions of the dish and whether or not any of it needs to be heat sinked or fan cooled.
Plus, I'd feel better with a commercial radome at 70mph on the roof than some home made enclosure I glued together myself.
> Well, for one, I'm not a satellite communications engineer.
You don't really need to be. You just plop it down anywhere with a big section of the sky clear and it figures out the rest. As long as however you DIY it, it's sitting roughly flat, then it figures out the rest.
That's literally what I wrote in my post above - I want to protect it while mounted on the roof of an RV. Is the bare dish rated for 75mph+ wind and driving rain?
Any word on whether or not they'll come out with a roof mountable dish or at least a radome to cover the dish?
On a side note; I really wish there were more of an effort to provide a low bandwidth version of the internet, e.g., methods that allow common web technologies to automatically step down to deliver low bandwidth versions of their content, services, and tools on request.
As someone that grew up on the internet of yesteryear it is really frustrating when, e.g., some google site is once again buffer overflowing all over my browser or some website of low content quality is a bloated 100-200 MB disaster. Does AirBnB really need to be 200MB just to load the homepage (note saying airbnb is the disaster)? I'm just saying.
There is always this lamenting about climate change, while very many types who lament that issue, are often heavily in one way or another involved in an extremely wasteful and inefficient sector ... the internet. What is the energy cost of a 100MB website over a 10MB website? How about GB of wasteful and unnecessary data being served up every single month. I suspect a lot at scale.
To pick on AirBnB again; sure, offer the 200MB site, but how about also making a big deal about offering a low power consumption version for repeat visitors. We are trying to save the planet and such, aren't we? Or is that just for those without private jets?
While I also dislike bloated websites, I suspect the climate impact is rather neglible. The internet as a whole needs a few percent of global power, and the vast majority of that is going to be (video) streaming. Most heavy JS is going to be static and running on very efficient end devices.
The worst case estimates seem to be 7kWh/GiG (2012) (the best case much less than a 0.1 kWh/Gig, but only including network), which is ~60 km in electrical cars or 15 km in petrol cars. (The latter two only including the incremental energy usage).
The additionally induced trips by AirBnB (especially flying) are going to be so much worse than their website could ever be.
Energy usage data is from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jiec.12630 (with very old & high estimates disregarded). In 2022 the internet will probably be more efficient, the study estimates a halving every 2 years. So naively (very naively) extrapolating the 7kWh/Gig figure from 2012 to now is less than half a kWh/Gig.
You also used to be able to interact with Twitter solely through SMS. I think there are two big reasons why this sort of design philosophy is uncommon:
I do hope this turns out to be workable and scalable fast.
Thinking of RVs reminds me of the cruise ship I was just on. I actually liked the cruise much more than I had guessed but even the premium service was terrible. I would think the cruise ship would be happy to shell out for better internet - could actually see remote working from a cruise if so.
I unfortunately cancelled my Starlink preorder because they raised the monthly price (because of inflation???) and the equipment cost (because of inflation, this one is more understandable) suddenly and despite my first day preorder I had still not received my unit over a year later.
Why is it unreasonable to raise the monthly price because of inflation? Inflation affects all costs: satellites, ground stations/network, salaries, etc.
I’ll be running Starlink off an Inergy solar generator at the Placerville adventure expo on June 3rd if anyone wants to see it in action. http://go.drod.io/InergyVanlife
I'm guessing that this only works when parked. I wonder when Starlink will be able to track satellites from a platform that has fully dynamic position, orientation, and obstructions.
I had Starlink for a short time but had to send it back for a refund. I desperately wanted it to replace my 20Mbit DSL, but I could not place the dish anywhere that was not blocked by trees. Even with a small portion of the sky blocked, I was getting constant drops that made me unwilling to make the further investment of switching over all of my infrastructure to use it.
Ultimately, my issues stemmed from the required field of view being oriented in a northerly direction, whereas my southerly view from the same location is completely clear of obstructions. I occasionally pull out the app to check whether they have removed that limitation, but it still looks to the north as of this writing.
40ms latency according to realword reports seems really impressive to me
Will starlink ever have a competitor or will they be free to slowly crank up prices as being become "hooked"? Even a duopoly may not keep prices in check.
Only around one quarter of them are in their operational positions, with just over one half of them having been launched (the other one quarter is either raising their orbits or drifting into position). So it's not quite enough to run a service on yet, for that portion.
It looks like the waitlist is around populated areas. If you zoom in you can often see that urban areas are waitlisted while anywhere remote or without much housing is available.
I got off the waitlist and live in the bay area -- possibly im not doing something right or Starlink is extremely spotty; it gets "offline" most of the time and very rarely gets online so I can actually use it. After 4 months of unuse I canceled my the $99/mo subscription which is more than the internet I actually pay for
RV service can expect more throttling in waitlisted areas.
> Users can expect high speed, low latency internet in areas marked "Available", and notably slower speeds during hours of peak usage in areas marked as "Waitlist" or during events with many collocated users.
* There's no waitlist for Starlink for RVs service (jump the line)
* Costs as much as Residential + Portability add-on ($135/mo)
* After the first month, you can suspend/restore service at will (unclear if it's prorated or if you pay for a full month when you need any service; I'm betting the latter)
* You're always in deprioritized mode (in congested areas during peak time, your service is degraded compared to Residential customers)
I'm leaving next month for 3-4 months cross-country and then returning to a place with decent Comcast (a rental where I have no choice but to pay for Comcast), so this is perfect for me. I'll suspend service when I get home, and maybe pay for it if I do any short winter trips.
Watch for more highly inclined orbit launches from vandenberg, polar orbit and highly inclined orbit is not possible (safely) from florida. The Wikipedia page for a list of starlink launches has a column for orbital inclination.
They just recently finished construction of an earth station in ketchikan, which is quite public and obvious. Almost certainly there will be something for more Northern latitudes, when there is a sufficient number of satellites to actually make it usable without significant gaps.
Thanks. Hadn't seen the launch schedule. Starlink keeps saying "2022" for service in my area (I made a deposit over a year ago). I'm on the Kenai Peninsula, so not too far North. I'm currently on a wide area wireless provider with a directional antenna on a mast mounted to my roof (rates are very expensive - but it works), but at least it's better than having to go with one of the GEO providers. Though, annoyingly, performance degrades noticeably during tourist season in the summer.
Tourists: stop coming to Alaska. The mosquitoes will eat you.
Unfortunately as you're at around 60 degrees north. "2022" is almost certainly incorrect as they haven't even begun to launch the high latitude constellations yet. They launched 51 test satellites to the high latitude, but they're not launching any more of them yet and seem focused on filling out the 53.2 degrees north/south constellation first.
This wiki section has info about each section. The "inclination" section basically sets the maximum northern latitude that the service will work to (plus a little bit as the signal goes further north than the satellites are). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Constellation_design_...
If starlink continues to focus mostly on the 55 degree latitude market and below, it's been possible oneweb will be complete and usable before there's full coverage of polar orbit starlink. A oneweb terminal isn't meant for use by 1 consumer but could be used by a small to medium sized local wisp or fiber ISP to serve a remote northern town.
OneWeb has no announced plans to enter the business of selling direct to consumers. They want to only sell to other businesses. Their constellation has much lower capacity (smaller and fewer satellites) anyway so that's understandable. Also remote northern towns I believe still have network connections and I doubt a wisp will help much. Alaska has a decent number of very isolated people with complete off grid properties.
yes, as I said, a oneweb terminal could be acquired by a local WISP and used as the primary uplink to serve a remote area. With the local ISP doing distribution of network services by point to multipoint unlicensed band wireless fiber, whatever is practical and financially possible.
The capital equipment cost for a oneweb terminal is much too great for anyone except maybe a very wealthy person with a private island. It's a big set of two motorized tracking antennas in radomes with their own RF chains.
> Also remote northern towns I believe still have network connections and I doubt a wisp will help much
in many cases these are connected by existing geostationary satellite links which are at minimum 492ms, and the $ per dedicated Mbps cost is quite bad. If oneweb can beat the geostationary operators on $/Mbps ratio, they will win a lot of business. Just as o3b beat the geostationary operators for high capacity links into places like pacific nation islands with no submarine fiber.
It doesnt matter. by weaponizing the dollar repeatedly, biden has made the world turn the world against any US technology. 135 out of 165 countries in the world rejected US call for sanctioning Russia.
George Bush: Sorry I killed 500,000 people for absurd reason in Iraq. "hahahaha".
Russia: we dont want missiles on our door step and we will invade.
"russia hur durr, putin eats babies, has cancer , rabid shriekings"
For those not aware, Starlink has no problem with working in motion as it's used on airplanes travelling at 1000km/h. This is more of availability announcement for end users.
Starlink user terminal is "physically" not designed for working in motion. That is, it has not passed any safety tests that ensures it won't dismount, and fly off and damage property or injure people. The Starlink system is absolutely designed to work at high speeds (both as evident from comments in this post from people maintaining connection at 100km/h to it being deployed on airplanes).
[1] https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSdXwqGrP/?k=1
[2] https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSdXwbq2b/?k=1
Happy to answer any questions.