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.
