The maritime coverage map shows coastal coverage around countries with inland coverage right now, i.e. they are bouncing the connection via one of their satellites to a nearby groundstation.
Starting in Q4/2022 they want to cover mid-latitudes around the globe. That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? (This is a bit surprising - on one hand, this step extends coverage towards higher and lower latitudes but on the other hand not as much as they already have inland-coverage (cf. Brazil). It also extends longitudinally around all of the globe?).
Coverage above mid-latitudes requires satellites in polar orbits to join the network. (Their non-polar orbits have an inclination of 53° which means that satellites go no further north or south than that (plus a bit whatever their range is)).
If you zoom in on the coverage map, you notice that it's splines manually drawn by whoever made the map.
This isn't the output of some fancy RF model figuring out exactly where you'll get coverage. Nor is it circles of a specific diameter around ground stations. Or even hexagonal cells where coverage will be allowed/denied in their backend config.
In places it seems to follow countries territorial waters (which would be expected due to regulatory issues), but in others it spills out into international waters.
Overall, the map has sufficient 'oddities' that I think there is a good chance it's a rough hand made 'guestimate' coverage map, and won't perfectly reflect where coverage will really be delivered.
highly unlikely, the per day cost of operating a medium sized ship in an offshore environment with actual human staffing, fuel, maintenance, purchase or lease cost of the ship itself is extreme.
the one thing any satellite operator absolutely does not want is absurd ongoing monthly recurring costs to run their earth stations.
They are charging $5k USD per month per customer for this per TFA. Depending on demand (and 350Mbps downlink can generate a lot of demand) that may still be feasible.
Cargoships have operation costs in the 10s to 100s of thousands per h. Sure you could bring that down for what's required here, but you'd still sink a lot of money into these ships. How many maritime subscribers would there be?
$5k USD a month is significantly less than the monthly cost for any usable bandwidth allocation to a current tech ku band geostationary maritime vsat terminal, such as for the smallest "expedition" cruise ships, nevermind a big one.
Starlink should rent space on oil rigs at least those areas could have a "ground station" in a way. Oil rigs don't have physical undersea comm lines to land. But it can be a repeater since more power available on a rig.
If they stationed them near the edge of current coverage, the ship could be the inter-satellite link until the actual inter-satellite links are working.
That would only buy you one increment of offshore range gain; it wouldn't cover the whole ocean unless you had a huge network of ships and used multiple up/down hops. And at that point the overall latency would suck so bad your customers might be better off with GEO.
It would depend on how fast the internal relay latency is on the ground terminals.
Geostationary satellites are up at around 35,000 km. Starlink is about 500-600km - you can get a whole lot of hops between Starlink satellites and terminals before you're looking at the same distance.
There's talk that they might be able to use either existing terminals, or a special set of terminals to do this, without the need to deploy them in fixed locations.
They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too.
There's enough of those around to provide a massive network of potential relays.
But they are deploying inter-satellite laser links on newer launches, so those will come on and provide more coverage too.
>They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too.
Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?
> Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?
The thing that makes Starlink so appealing to airliners is that they can now do real-time telemetry of virtually every sensor on the plane without going bankrupt from the satellite data cost - not just for disaster recovery, but also for regular maintenance. Think of some random but unimportant component failing and the airline can dispatch a spare part and a repair crew to wait for the plane and do the maintenance right when it lands.
Call me confused, but if these satellites are not geostationary, why are the both the inland coverage and coastal coverage mostly limited to political boundaries? Shouldn't coverage be available anywhere there are satellites overhead?
But its also related to groundstations, the satellites bounce the signal down to land. They're transitioning to satellites with the capability to network between themselves which will reduce the need for groundstations.
I don't know how much they really limit coverage due to borders. Like if you get one in colombia and just move it to venezuela, does it still work? They dont have permission in venezuela but they might just not region lock it until venezuela actually complains or something.
I know for a fact that other sat internet providers do work cross border in this exact situation.
My family is using a directv antena bought in colombia and paying service in colombia, in Venezuela, so I'm pretty sure the market will try to do that as soon as they lunch in colombia
Normal satellite TV services work by restricting the area the signal is broadcast to. It has limitations on how precise it can be, and the receiver is pretty much passive.
Starlink is an active two-way system. Not only are they using high precision beam guidance on both ends, the receiver also has a GPS antenna and will report it's location back to the network.
Starlink is capable of turning off groundstations that are not where they're supposed to be. Not only capable, but for 'fixed location' groundstations (i.e normal service), they actually do block service if you move too far from where your assigned service area is.
The user terminals have a GPS receiver in them and would be able to determine where they are in the world with attendant precision. This would allow SpaceX to enforce fine-grained availability restrictions.
Just because something is technically possible doesn't make it legally possible, yet. They still need regulatory approvals where they operate because EM spectrum is a public resource.
it's a political problem because right now you need a starlink earth station in a cooperative location (politically and economically) with access to decent fiber based terrestrial ISPs
for instance right now without fully operational satellite-to-satellite laser links, if you wanted to have live starlink services in afghanistan, you theoretically could, but you'd need to have a starlink earth station in somewhere like Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Or Peshawar, Pakistan. Or southeastern Uzbekistan. All politically problematic and very protective of their own domestic telecom companies.
Not the sort of place you can just drop a starlink earth station and buy a protected 100Gbps protected DWDM circuit to the nearest major city for an IX point, as starlink has done with their earth stations colocated with DWDM ILAs in the US pacific northwest.
If only - it doesn’t appear so. Connectivity in the Antarctic is laughable - McMurdo has 17Mbps iirc, and it flakes out not infrequently, Amundsen-Scott is “when a satellite is visible”, and being on a ship in the polar regions is typically even worse, as more often than not you’re dealing with crappy weather and a rolling vessel, and a poor and intermittent iridium signal.
It also all costs an absolute fortune - iridium is about $1000/mo for 100Mb, and $10 for each additional Mb - and there are surcharges for use in polar regions.
Musk could probably bankroll all of starlink just by serving the scientific communities in Antarctica.
Looking at the orbits for Starlink, they are currently not flying over the north / south pole directly. I don't know if there's plans to do so later, probably if the investments start to pay off and they can afford more launches and sattelites. But for now it's a big money sink and I'm sure the service isn't yet paying for itself - if it ever will.
> But for now it's a big money sink and I'm sure the service isn't yet paying for itself - if it ever will.
Given that the estimated cost of building and launching the satellites is estimated at only 600 million dollars [1], it is estimated to take something around two or three years until it's been paid off, followed by two years of generating profit and the next five-year cycle starts (assuming that their estimate of five years life time per satellite holds [2]).
Personally, I think Starlink was the best bet SpaceX ever made. That thing will be a permanent cash cow.
Iridium Go is 2.4 Kbits/s compared with 350 Mbps here, and data is charged in minutes (i.e. the slower/worse the connection the more it costs). Apples and oranges.
Iridium GO is cheap, but that's all you can really say positively about it. It is arguably not even offering "internet" in the normal sense, since loading a website would be incredibly expensive/bad and is therefore restricted to low data rate messaging and plain text weather updates.
Is $5K/month a niche product? Undeniably yes, and I hope to see more flex offerings later, but this isn't a good comparison.
Iridium Go is designed to hit a price point. Whats the cheapest way to get data out in the middle of the Atlantic and is basically plug and play. It has leapfrogged SSB packet radio as the preferred, low cost data service.
Also data is not charged in minutes, it's theoretically unlimited. The voice plans are charged in minutes and I don't think worth it.
Just like the RO water-makers in the past, I believe this is the opening salvo in bringing data prices down on the high seas. A few providers have been the only players in this field (Inmarsat and Iridium) and it shows. Prices haven't budged in ages.
> Also data is not charged in minutes, it's theoretically unlimited.
If you buy the 'medium plan' for $119/month [1] you get 150 Minutes of 'Data, Standard Voice or combination of both' and can buy additional data for US$0.42/min. And the 'light plan' [2] at $57/month includes just 5 minutes.
Data seems to a "call via the Iridium GO! Access number" like old school dial-up.
It's only if you buy the 'heavy plan' for $149 [3] that you get the 'Unlimited Data'
Maybe, though there are 43830 minutes in a month and that package offers 150-mins. Guessing there better bulk min plans, but at the 0.42 a min over the 150-mins, that’s $18345.60 + the monthly fee.
Any given ship in the shipping industry probably burns that in fuel per day. Or half day. I think the value proposition is in line. I'll admit it seems expensive from the perspective of our dream sail around the world whilst coding and collecting benjamins from various hustles.
Thanks for the clarification; I didn’t want to overspeak. Next question though, how do they onboard 42x that much fuel for a 6 week transpacific journey?
globalstar is a bad joke and not a viable option for maritime services (or over-ocean aviation services) because unlike iridium or inmarsat, its satellite terminal-to-earth-station architecture is a bent pipe.
there is zero globalstar mid ocean coverage.
there is a reason you will see lots of competing options for people integrating the iridium embedded modems into things designed to go on top of $40 million business jets and just about zero globalstar.
An Iridium embedded modem is one of the things we came across in the wreckage of a small plane we were recovering the pilot's remains from[0].
It was for his Spidertracks[1] flight tracking system. (Which, with the ADSB track, helped us hone in on the possible location. The wreck ended up being right in line with the last few pings.
there's iridium SBD modems for low data rate/non-realtime comms (like position trackers) and full featured iridium voice/data modems integrated into a vast array of products now, in the land mobile, aviation and maritime segments.
one thing iridium has actually done really well is provide the developer documentation to make this fairly straightforward, there's a set of 600 page PDF files with every detail you could possibly need to make a very tiny embedded linux system talk to an iridum modem over a UART.
The Garmin inReach[0] line of satellite communicators are another example of a 3rd party Iridium partnership. Given the size/form factor, I wonder if they're using more custom hardware than just an off-the-shelf module for their integration.
They're another example of exorbitant fees for tiny bits of data. (Though, being able to text pretty much anywhere on the globe on a tiny device is really nice - even with a 20minute RTT.)
Is Iridium really competitive for business jets? The bandwidth of even their next-generation satellites does not seem competitive with the GEOs, and I'd guess bizjets should be mostly fine with their latitude limitations.
I'd expect most of them to go with one of the Ka band these days; they have pretty small antennas available these days as far as I know.
a small to medium sized business jet can easily mount an iridium terminal on top of it, where even the smallest/least capable geostationary vsat cannot.
you can fairly easily integrate iridium into something as small as a cessna 172...
at the minimum iridium will provide the ability to make phone calls to/from the PSTN while in the middle of an ocean on its smallest terminal. go up in terminal size a bit and you get something good for 500kbps of data.
for very large business jets that would be crossing the atlantic or pacific, that's a different market (overlaps somewhat with the same aviation VSAT terminals you would see on a 737-900 MAX)
I'm planning on moving onto a sailing boat this year, I'd be very interested if it was something an mere mortal could afford but at that price I'm sticking to 5G mobile broadband. Marine Starlink would have given me a broader range of places I can stay (especially remote areas) but the cost is far too high.
Commercial and military vessels have contracts with Iridium/Inmarsat etc for mission critical stuff.
An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
I used to be a naval officer in the Dutch navy, this is the type of capability that we would love to have. It was always a mess to divide satcom bandwidth between operational and recreational purposes, so if we could put all non-essential traffic on Starlink (for only 5k/month/ship too!) that would be a huge win and free up massive operational bandwidth on the more serious satcoms.
Would there be any concern that you are essentially advertising your location at all times to some third party corp? Or is that only a concern during certain times and you can just turn off the commercial system at that point?
By the time NATO partners can no longer trust each other with the position of their naval vessels you have serious problem already. The official satcoms are all NATO-shared satellites anyway, so you could probably derive their positions from that.
With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" operations that block any non-essential comms. I no longer work for the navy but I can imagine that would involve physically cutting power to the starlink dish.
>With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" operations that block any non-essential comms.
As a practical matter as well, both in theory and based on usage in Ukraine, Starlink appears to be a somewhat challenging target too. A phased array doing 10-12 GHz is a fairly tight beam and it's tracking very fast across the sky, jumping around between LEO@550km (and in the future VLEO@~350km) sats. In a naval setting it's not clear that'd be much of a limiting factor: something capable of seeing that would probably need to be at such an altitude and angle to ships on the ocean that it could also just plain see any surface naval vessel directly optically or via radar. The stealth ship proposals Skunkworks suggested back around the F-117 never went anywhere since the US Navy is dumb^Wtraditional.
But as you say either way they can always just turn it off as needed. It'd be very helpful the much higher percentage of time that things are boring.
Another commenter here mentioned that Starlink user terminals include a GPS receiver, and report their coordinates back to Starlink. That'd create an alternate vector for locating maritime users – exfiltrate that position information from their servers.
I had a hard time finding confirmation of this online (lots of hits about Starlink potentially being used _as_ a GNSS), but one of the photos of this teardown of a terminal highlights the GPS receiver: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teard...
All the existing commercial maritime comms providers will happily sell separate bandwidth for crew use, or let them meter/throttle it, so I assume the challenges the Dutch navy has with their existing setup are related to specific security and/or procurement restrictions preventing them from just installing the same solutions commercial vessels use. Probably less about broadcasting location and more about what is and isn't allowed on their vessels
All surface maritime vessels, military or not, need to advertise their location to anyone who can listen for the purpose of collision avoidance. If they didn't that would probably violate a treaty.
Military vessels are exempt from that particular treaty. That would not be a significant worry. But yes, when you go into serious operations, the ship typically enters "black hole" operations where all non-essential communications are blocked. In the ships we were at they just pulled the network cable for the non-operational comms, very effective at preventing anyone from emailing back home.
Neither iridium nor Inmarsat provides capabilities of starlink: low latency, high bandwidth, asat-resistant, jamming-resistant infrastructure, all this proven in a real world conflict. They are ‘only’ missing coverage. Military will pay top dollar for this, Musk is in the name-his-price territory here. It’s become mission critical overnight. If they manage to cover the full globe, you’ll see the DoD quietly spending billions to have access and more billions to deny any other military the option.
These vessels still have people on board who want to watch YouTube.
This will be amazing for retaining crew while sitting at anchor outside of Panama for day 27 of who knows how long.
You can prepare for a 7 day cruise between ports when you're going to be pretty busy anyway. The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe.
> The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe.
I sat through a Vodafone presentation at a maritime comms conference a couple of years ago and he quoted just how high a percentage of the world's commercial shipping traffic was within range of his LTE networks. The ability to provide high speed internet within sight of [most] land has been around for a while, at lower costs than Starlink. If providers haven't added it to their crew internet provision, it's not because they've been waiting for Elon.
I feel like cruise ships will use this a lot. They're one of the last things on the planet that don't have cell service or internet that isn't 25$ a minute.
Or vessels working offshore industry… having that kind of uplink speed could really change how the industries work. More ‘over the horizon’ control for equipment, immediate upload of huge point cloud files from as built surveys, constant video comunication with onshore engineers and project managers…
I thought they went bankrupt and had to deorbit all the satellites so I googled them. They have 1.7M subscribers. Seems they are doing something right.
They did go bankrupt, and Motorola (their original main funder) lost billions on the initial investment [0]. But shed of debt and reborn with new investors, they are now profitable [1]. They have now deorbited the first generation satellites, but since 2017 they have launched the Iridium NEXT constellation and that is what is functioning now [2].
Well, there hasn't been a lot of competition in their space traditionally. Many of those subscribers (I've been one) use it because they need it and there is no better option, but don't exactly enjoy it...
I work in the space industry and follow SATCOM closely. This is a very competitive space. Companies like Viasat, Iridium and Inmarsat already work in this vertical.
SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective, but the big question is will a LEO operator provide better coverage than a GEO operator?
a) if you've ever personally lived for months or years at a time 100% dependent upon geostationary based services costing anywhere from $165/mo to $15,000 a month or more, for internet access and links to the outside world
b) if you've personally used a starlink terminal
the actual coverage isn't there yet for things like mid ocean, because starlink satellites in the present architecture need to be simultaneously in view of a CPE and a starlink run earth station.
what they've got right now is a viable competitor for the smaller geostationary based ku and ka band maritime vsat packages sold for coastal region use, which are limited to specific ku and ka band spot beams anyways. such as you might see used in the caribbean and Mediterranean oceans.
when they have more polar orbit satellites and the satellite-to-satellite laser links are working they will have full mid ocean coverage, and I have no doubt it will beat the pants off a $200,000+, 2.4 meter C-band stabilized-in-radome maritime VSAT system with a monthly service cost of $8,500+.
anyone that's ever done the link budget calculations and seen the RF channel sizes and very simple modulations (very poor bps/Hz ratio) needed to make IP data over 2.4m size c-band terminals will know what I'm talking about. this is directly proportional to dollars in the monthly recurring costs for ongoing transponder space use.
the performance and dollar per MB cost right now for coastal region use will absolutely beat anything inmarsat or iridium based by a ridiculous margin.
I fundamentally disagree with you that it's a very competitive market, it's a market that's highly dependent upon the business model of launching 3500-6000 kg things into geostationary orbit at immense cost and trying to recoup the construction+launch cost of them before they die in 13 to 16 years. And military/government contracts. Traditional two way geostationary based satellite comms stuff is a very conservative and moribund segment of the telecom industry.
you've got other things out there that are sort of viable like o3b (now owned/controlled by SES), but anyone that's ever priced an o3b terminal and ongoing service on something like a 36 month term will know that it's not a significant improvement in cost.
You are absolutely spot on. The market isn’t competitive, it’s artificial highway robbery to even be in business. The entry requirements and expenses are insanely high, preventing a lot of competition to begin with, and the few players are free to drive up their prices to disgusting altitudes while providing services of disgusting quality. I wouldn’t even be surprised if they have agreements going on between themselves. SpaceX’s going to have a field day and brutally rip some inflated executives out of their cozy decade-old comfort zone.
The problem is actually that most of those systems are on considerably less advanced tech than Starlink and as a result only have a fraction of the capacity.
Thus each piece of capacity costs more.. thus the very high costs of Iridium and Viasat.
Their profit margins aren't actually that good because their costs are so high compared to their capacity and the costs are so high that demand simply doesn't materialise - people just do without.
Starlink will change this game because of their drastically increased capacity (assuming they get sat-sat links working). Until another mega-constellation comes online I fully expect them to do to satellite Internet what they did to the launch market.
Iridium was the first network to successfully operate inter-satellite links more than 20 years ago. I wouldn't call it "considerably less advanced".
Iridium and Starlink operate in completely different bands (L vs Ka), with orders of magnitude more bandwidth available on Ka than on L. That (and the fleet size, which differs by 2-3 orders of magnitudes) is where the significantly lower bandwidth stems from.
Iridium was a marvel of engineering no-doubt but Starlink as a constellation is in a different league entirely.
They also followed different engineering principles, Iridium was engineered to perfection while Starlink is hacked until it works and paper over the kinks with sheer scale and many iterations.
Worth mentioning I have nothing but admiration for the original Iridium constellation, it was decades ahead of it's time, it's just so unfortunate they didn't see that broadband needs were going to dominate communications in time or maybe Motorola in it's original glory would still be around today.
big difference also is that iridium was designed from the outset to address handheld size customer terminals like an original iridum 9505 phone, starlink is something that needs a considerably larger fixed phased array. rf laws of physics being what they are I don't see a ku/ka-band starlink handheld phone or anything similar to the iridium L/S-band hockey puck sized antennas any time soon.
the business model was clearly not the best, as witnessed by its spectacular bankruptcy, and the acquisition by the 2nd corporate incarnation of iridium.
Starlink has plenty of room for increasing their antenna size on the satellite size to something that a handheld could use. I was surprised how small the phased array on the sat side is. Increase that to make it similar to the size of the satellite (not counting solar array) and with the larger v2 satellites, and they'd have much more gain (allowing the handheld antenna to be smaller). They essentially already use 5G bandwidth.
Isn‘t part of what allows much hire bandwidths for Starlink due to spatial frequency reuse, which requires mandatory beamforming on both sides of the connection?
There are many satellites overhead at any given time (the current LEOs and MEOs usually have just one), so terminals need to be able to limit their gain to a small angle not only for gain reasons. Steering in handheld applications seems very difficult.
Of course, they could dedicate parts of their spectrum to "one sided beamforming" and compete with Iridium that way (no idea if the L-band has any other advantages over Ka when used like that).
Actually in exactly the same way. The nice thing about phased arrays is they steer electronically, so you can aim them extremely fast and compensate for any movement. That's how 5G works and that's also how Starlink on moving vehicles works.
a flat panel phased array still has considerably more gain in the direction it's aimed, vs a randomly oriented omnidirectional (physical) antenna in a phone. i can guarantee you starlink doesn't work well when the array elements aren't aimed correctly in the general direction of where the satellites are.
the path loss and need for more gain at LEO satellite distance is considerably greater than talking about terrestrial cellphone networks in bands <2500 MHz.
5G phones already use a flat panel phased array, just with fewer elements (and less gain, but that can be compensated by using a lot more elements on the satellite side and by operating at much lower bandwidth). And yes, I understand the difference between lower frequencies and higher. 5G can also use lower frequencies but the main bandwidth advantage (over LTE/etc) is in the higher frequency, the mm-wave, roughly 25-50GHz, a frequency band that overlaps that used by the Starlink phased arrays.
5G and Wi-Fi don't use MIMO for terminal side spatial multiplexing though, as far as I know.
In MU-MIMO (available in newer versions of 802.11, for example), the base station transmits to and receives from multiple mobile devices that are located at different spatial angles. But in the mobile devices themselves, the gain from that steering is not high/fast enough to allow for multiple (relatively) fixed base stations in the same space.
In other words, a stationary/slowly moving antenna array on one side of the channel can target individual moving users due to angles changing slowly over time and the antenna array being quite sophisticated, but moving users with smaller antennas and angles varying over a much shorter period of time can't do the same.
Think about it: From a satellite's point of view, your angle varies much more slowly and predictably than the other way around, e.g. when taking a turn in a car or on a rocking boat (that's why high-gain antennas usually have to be gimbal-stabilized).
Starlink's orders of magnitude higher bandwidth, as far as I can tell, stems from requiring slowly and predictably changing angles on both sides, giving it m:n (relatively) independent spatial channels rather than just 1:n as is common for a one-sided omnidirectional approach. (That's also why Iridium and Globalstar wouldn't be able to scale significantly better in low-gain mobile-client applications by just launching more satellites.)
Sorry to interject between two people who clearly know what their talking about.
I've been reading books on satellite communications and have some idea of all the technical terms you guys mentioned as well as relationship between 5g and phase array etc.
Where do you get your knowledge from regarding these issues in such detail? Do you guys work in this area? Are there any reading materials you recommend in this field that are relevant and updated to keep track of these tech?
this is completely incorrect. viasat's technology is far more advanced than starlink. just because it's not LEO doesn't mean it's simple.
and starlink doesn't have dramatically increased capacity. they have a moderate increase over the busy areas geo incumbents have. most of their capacity is over water.
The end results of the link budgets required for geostationary to low cost consumer grade terminals means that now matter how good viasat's tech is, the end result is going to be mediocre. Have you actually lived on the far end of a consumer grade highly contended oversubscribed ku/ka band vsat terminal?
Viasat's modems and rf chain stuff are about as good as can be expected within the very constrained BOM budget, antenna gains and link budgets involved.
I've had their service for 4 years straight in the past. it's not as good as cable, but it's nowhere near as bad as you say if you're not playing real time games.
the constrained BOM is the very reason why the terminal cost is reasonable for this business. it's well known that SpaceX is selling the terminal at a huge loss to gather customers in the short term.
Even if viasat's consumer service was handing out high quality steel 1.8 meter elliptical offset ku band dishes with norsat PLL LNBs and 8W BUCs to consumers, the path loss and modulations required would mean that a given section of contended (let's say, 10MHz of a transponder) service to many terminals would still have significantly lower speeds and greater oversubscription to be economically viable compared to what end users see right now on starlink.
that's simply not true. they have transponders that should deliver 10Gbps to a single user IF they were willing to pay for both the service and terminal. SpaceX is limited in the exact same way, and their terminals + satellite costs are much higher for the number of them.
10Gbps to a single terminal using exactly what modulation and code rate, and channel size?
Or course you can achieve high speeds over geostationary if you throw entire transponders full of MHz at the problem. Which has a proportionally huge monthly recurring cost to control that transponder space. Or as a total percentage of the satellite's transponders dedicated to your network.
Yes satellite tx power from the twta is more powerful than it used to be. You still need a huge ass earth station to start doing 16apsk/32apsk reliably.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. starlink is also multiple smaller beams within a single beam for frequency reuse. a single beam does not get more bandwidth (in Gbps) than a viasat terminal.
> You still need a huge ass earth station to start doing 16apsk/32apsk reliably.
16apsk has been used for about a decade now on GEO satellites. I'm not sure why the gateway size matters when we're talking about user speeds.
If you don't understand why in a geostationary based link, the antenna size at either end matters a great deal for overall link budget, gain, Eb/No and what modulation you can use at a certain MCS and code rate before it gets too blurry in a QAM eyeball chart, there's no sense in talking about satellite communications with you.
I note you didn't answer my question because you have no idea of what modulations, channel size and such are required to actually push 10Gbps through a satellite link to a single terminal. I think you're going off Viasat's marketing material where they're claiming aggregate throughput of an entire satellite or something.
Show me the exact hardware configuration of modems you think are capable of 10Gbps by geostationary and how much transponder MHz it needs.
I literally just said that 16APSK has been used for a decade on Geo satellites. I don't know if you aren't aware what modulation means, but that is the modulation. it does not matter at all what size the gateway or the user antenna is. 16APSK (actually 32APSK is used as well) and the carrier size tells you all you need to know about the speeds, unless you've never done a link budget or worked in this industry.
I said if they wanted to they could sell a 10Gbps plan, because that's what the link budget allows. they don't, of course, because it's not profitable. SpaceX also could in theory, do that, but they also don't. your original claim is that SpaceX somehow has far greater bandwidth to an area than Geo is patently false.
> the path loss and modulations required would mean that a given section of contended (let's say, 10MHz of a transponder) service to many terminals would still have significantly lower speeds and greater oversubscription to be economically viable compared to what end users see right now on starlink.
if your definition of economically viable is getting VC money and government subsidies pumped in so that someone else other than the subscriber is paying for the service, then I agree with you. but that's not the metric most people use when they discuss being profitable
you can't really compare iridium to purely geostationary operators as a business model, however, something LEO based that support very small L/S-band modems and handheld size terminals, embedded modems is very different than a company that only owns C/Ku/Ka band geostationary satellites and makes most of its revenue from selling transponder kHz.
iridium is truly unique in that in the pre-starlink era it has been literally the only, true global pole-to-pole coverage LEO network. the trade off has been that the original network architecture of it was designed for very low data rates, so just highly compressed voice and low rate data only.
even the second generation iridium network which is now operational is still very limited in IP data rates.
you're still not going to get a starlink terminal to be as compact as a very small iridium modem and L/S-band portable antenna.
Viasat while it has a lot of consumer facing exposure (and contracts to do things like build teleports for the DoD) is not a major player in the market of actually owning geostationary satellites. Look at entities like Intelsat and SES.
I did the same as soon as Starlink launched. I saw it as an existential threat it is to all the Geo operators.
I was headhunted for a SRE position with Viasat last year due to my extensive Satcom background. I noped out as soon as I found out it was Viasat. Not because I dislike them personally, but because I don't want to be laid off next year.
Without going into too much detail I know someone who was headhunted for Telesat's proposed LEO network (too late, too low budget, too little technical clue) and ran away quickly once he had an idea of what he would be getting into.
I would argue that 25% or so net margin for a decade is a pretty significant sign considering how small their customer base must be and how much expenses they must have.
I see a lot of volatility for Iridium with quite a few years with big losses and zero profit.
Viasat simply has near zero profit margins, and quite a few years with losses.
Inmarsat looks like it has 20% or so profit margin for the last few years, but I could not quickly find more years of data.
Also, I would expect decent (10%+) profit margins for a business with few customers and extremely costly barriers to entry. Both of those factors add to volatility, and investors would require a commensurate return to make it worth investing in.
Iridium apparently had much more expenses for a few years around 2018, possibly mass upgrading their infrastructure, but before that a decade of near constant 20-30% net, recovering again now, unless I'm misreading this data.
They do make a good profit in the years they do, but my point is they also have quite a bit of volatility. I would not touch that business without the 10%+ profit margin opportunities.
Definitely agree, I probably wouldn't touch them at this point any more at all.
Was just replying to the notion that this couldn't be artificial highway robbery just because their net margin isn't great. I believe it definitely still can be, because apparently the only way these companies are even in business right now is exactly by highway robbery.
Iridium (and to some extent Inmarsat) are currently in an almost completely different market than Starlink is: They provide safety-of-life certified solutions for maritime, aviation and military customers.
I wouldn't be surprised if equipment and certification costs would dwarf the actual fee charged per month and user in these applications, and the market entry barrier in such highly regulated industries is usually enormous. (It took Iridium a long time to get SOLAS-certified, for example; before that, Inmarsat was the only solution besides HF radio.)
In the market of providing fast, non-safety-critical internet access to remote places however, my guess is that Starlink is going to shake up things significantly.
Large and serious budget offshore applications these days will of course have an Iridium terminal live and on the network, and also a geostationary based VSAT of some sort. Something such as Starlink is meant to take market share from the VSAT.
In some cases it might pay for itself in less than 1 month of service compared to the $/Mbps from the VSAT, using antenna hardware such as this and various vendors' choices of modems (and 3rd party VSAT ISPs that resell transponder kHz and operate teleports).
Go price what it would cost for 1:1 dedicated monthly recurring billing to have 5 Mbps down x 1 Mbps up DIA service assigned to a medium sized maritime VSAT terminal that roams around the Gulf of Texas... Or even in a 5:1 or worse contended network.
What you'll see is the Iridium of course remains live and on the network and is used for critical voice calls and message and such, while the data network on the ship/offshore oil rig/whatever has a new better DIA path via starlink.
the price looks like highway robbery from the POV of an end user purchaser of "internet by satellite" from a geostationary company, but they do also have extreme operating costs. a company like eutelsat or ses has extreme amounts of funds going out for purchasing satellites and launch services.
it is not like they have an extreme profit margin between their actual operating cost and the cost that a chunk of dedicated 1:1 transponder kHz/MHz (or a whole 36 MHz transponder) can be sold to the end user.
I cannot agree with that characterization. How can a business be a suboptimal or undesirable investment because it does not earn enough profit relative to risk, and simultaneously be committing highway robbery (i.e. charging too high a price for its products/services)?
If anything, it seems like the customers should feel lucky the investors are risking their money on this product/service, and it is being offered at all.
I think there's a misunderstanding. I noted that I wouldn't see these businesses as a good investment any more because of SpaceX and further developments.
I believe they can still commit highway robbery even without their net margins being dramatically high, since highway robbery is exactly what you stated - charging too high a price for its products/services.
Charging "too high a price" is only possible in a monopoly position. Would you argue that any satellite provider has one, at the moment?
For high-bandwidth large-terminal, you have Inmarsat GX, Viasat and various other Ka and Ku band based providers; for safety of life you have Inmarsat and Iridium (except at the poles, where it's Iridium and HF); for land-based tracking, you have Globalstar and Iridium; for handheld telephony, you have Iridium, Inmarsat and Globalstar.
Notably, Starlink also does not look like it will be competing in any of these fields.
> Iridium (except at the poles, where it's Iridium and HF)
a note that part of the DoD iridium market where Iridium was previously the only ultra-high-latitude/polar coverage part is served by the DoD's own molniya orbit satellites which provide full polar coverage. the orbits of these are designed to be at apogee and long dwell time directly above high latitudes.
the DoD is still a big part of iridium's revenue stream in general of course.
To be fair, a non vertically integrated geostationary-satellite-owning company like intelsat, ses, eutelsat or arabsat or similar has little to no control over how much Boeing charges for a fully equipped 702 series satellite bus, or the disposable rocket launch costs.
It’s incredible to behold. Can you imagine either being a satellite comms service provider or space vehicle provider trying to acquire or raise capital to acquire your compliment to vertically integrate and reap higher margins? You’ll get laughed out of the board room or the investment bank office. And instead, SpaceX knocks it out if the park with reusability such that they say to themselves (or rather, Musk tells the board) “well, we’re about to cannibalize the launch market and we’re running out of TAM, can we launch our own satellite constellation and consume another TAM with these F9s we’ve got laying around not being productive?”
geo companies don't care much about launch cost since it's infrequent, and SpaceX has not shown starlink has a path to be profitable. I know it's the cool thing to do to love SpaceX, but separate the launch from the satellites. the latter hasn't shown it's sustainable unless there's a large influx of government subsidies.
Let's say they have 12k satellites. With oversubscription at 10? and a third of time over land? but 20gbps capacity for 200mbps connections, you get 333 users per satellite. 12k gives you 4 million users, at $100/mo or $1.2k/y. I'm going to drop that to $80/mo because Starlink need to pay for backhaul, so let's say $1k/y because it's round. So $4 billion annually. Over 12 years of satellite lifetime that's 48 billion. Satellites cost $300k to make, so subtract another 4 billion for production (44 remaining). Sats are launched in batches of 50, requiring 240 launches. Internal costs are somewhere between 30 to 60 million, it's unclear because of reuse, let's say 50 million for 12 billion launch costs, leaving 3 billion a year.
And then there's some operational costs which they pay from that.
So Iunno, it doesn't seem as extremely profitable as my first calc, but it's still probably pretty profitable. And any improvement they make to the satellites over time just adds on top. (Also I don't think they actually have $50 million internal cost per launch.)
edit: Terminals "reportedly cost around $1000 to make" and are sold for $500, so nbd, subtract another 2 billion per customer-lifecycle.
This calculation illustrates the problems of subtracting a big number from another big number.
Here's some of my math:
* Each customer brings in $1.2k/year.
* Satellites have 20 gbps of bandwidth, and consumers today are reporting about 50 mbps links.
* Maximum capacity is then ~1000 customers/sat because a 50 mbps connection takes 100 mbps of capacity to run duplex, and you need to double that again because customer data needs to get to backhaul.
* Satellites will spend significant time over water, and even more time over people who aren't paying - remember, metro areas all have cheaper cable internet. I would give these ~10% capacity at most.
* Satellites have 5 year life, but some fraction of them fail early - let's say that averages to 4 year replacement, and that estimate is at the high end of Musk's original estimate.
* One satellite is capable of $1.2M annual revenue, assuming 100% utilization, or $5M revenue over its life.
* Satellites cost $250k to manufacture, and $1M to launch ($50M per launch of 50 sats, making the math simple). Let's raise the unit cost to $1.5 million assuming a very good yield on satellites making it to orbit.
* The profitability of a single satellite is heavily dependent on utilization: At 10% utilization, each satellite makes $500k of revenue over its life. Satellites have to run at 30% utilization to break even.
* Customers receive a ~$1k subsidy to access the network in terms of the discount on the dish. This means we have 1 year per customer to break even on the customer. Assuming 3 year customer/dish lifetime (and assuming we will subsidize dish replacements when they break), we have only ~$2k margin per customer over 3 years, or $700 per year amortized.
* Now, the per-satellite gross margin drops to around $3-3.5M. This means that you now need up to 50% utilization to break even on a satellite.
What this all means is that starlink, if it is ever profitable, will be profitable based on niche use cases where they can charge extremely high subscription prices. Use cases like airplanes, yachts, offshore oil platforms, and military deployments. Customers who aren't paying a lot per subscription are dead weight.
By making slightly different assumptions, we have dramatically different conclusions.
It's a round number, and assumes about 10% loss. But also, they can't make or launch the sats for $1.25 million each yet, so it might not be a bad number.
Also, by my math, 5:1 oversubscribed is about breakeven, and it appears to be what Starlink does (reports of 10-50 mbps by users).
Just to note, 5:1 oversubscription wouldn't give you 10-50mbps unless everyone was using the connection at full rate at once. That's why (quick google) DSL services often oversubscribe by up to a 100:1.
I can't edit anymore, so correction: Current sats only have 6y lifespan, which drops us to 1.3 billion yearly, but I think that's partially cause they're still iterating on them. It seems clear that satellite lifespan is the main factor for profit.
Very bad source. I go into why in more detail in this comment, but to keep it short: his numbers are lies and he knows it too - some of his screenshots are photoshopped to preserve his narrative. He has an agenda - an anti-Elon Musk agenda - and has no intellectual integrity.
Read around and that thread a bit and you'll see that people confirmed my claims and that those who doubted it and checked his numbers themselves observed a three order of magnitude difference* in his cost estimation versus their estimate.
This isn't a source to get informed by, but one that makes you delusional.
He claims the terminal costs at least 3× the retail price and will never make a profit because of it
He also claims that its product offering brings nothing new to the table compared to hughesnet and viasat which is wrong imo as offering 1/10th latency of these products is a gamechanger.
Sorry, I'd do better but I'm on mobile, I think it's worth a watch at 1.5×
- After lying about SpaceX launch costs, he later posts screenshots of articles. One of those articles had the true launch costs. The image was photoshopped to remove this launch cost.
- When posting pricing information for competitor services, he uses their lowest cost tiers for their highest cost service provision. He also falsely implies that SpaceX and other satellite providers are providing comparable services despite the latency difference. This is all part of his effort to mislead with regard to demand.
- When quoting speed test results, he uses outdated alpha information. He argues that speedtests would not improve, but at the time he posted the video the speed tests results did improve. He knew this. You can tell because he claims there is a government conspiracy to favor SpaceX for funding for rural internet. This reveals he knows that they qualified for this. Which reveals that he knows his speed test numbers are out of date.
- He lies about the number of launches SpaceX will have to do, double counting replacement launches. I might think these sort of things were an honest mistake, but the pattern of behavior is clear. Given any information, he distorts it and attempts to paint a bad narrative, going as far as photoshopping or proposing government conspiracies. It is obvious he did a great deal of research - so it is absurd to give him the benefit of the doubt with regard to ignorance.
TL;DR - Watching that video will make you uninformed and delusional, not informed. It is not worth watching. The person who made it is not trustworthy. You are linking, not to a skeptic, but to an Elon Musk conspiracy theorist.
When I brought this video up, I just wanted to provide a voice from the other side of the debate. I did not really verify its contents and wanted to hear what other people had to say about it.
I'm familiar with the mobile satellite sector and I can say for a fact that he is right about the cost of the terminal being couple times higher than $500, though getting at the exact number would require a considerable amount of digging.
I got things to say about the attitude in this micro-thread though: I'm sure y'all heard the saying "If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed". I like that quote, but I always felt like some elaboration should follow.
By all means, do watch/read/consume anything and everything, and first use introspection, ie. ask yourself "Am I qualified/informed/sane enough to reach a conclusion about this matter?", and if your answer is yes then use your critical thinking neurons to reach YOUR conclusion. Then still try to verify it with your peers, or if you can find any, experts in that particular field. Personal attacks (along with other logical fallacies) have no place in a civilised discussion.
Basing on the above, if the Starlink opposers are as desperate as you say about distorting the facts to advance their narrative, it only increases my confidence in the project. You see, I did not end up being delusional, just reached a logical conclusion to the extent of my abilities.
So all in all, thanks for taking the time to write this up.
You're wasting your time arguing with a TSLAQ idiot. They will just ignore all your facts and keep spreading lies. I bet they also use Jenny McCarthy as the source for their vaccine information.
Yeah. Having lived for years with geosyncronous internet: it's not what people think of normally as internet, it's more of a consumerized interesting radio thing. It's not reliable, it's not fast, the latency is insane, the data caps are low. Unless you're working for yourself and doing most of your work on local machines you're not using it for anything interesting.
at the consumer level under $200/mo, assuming what we're talking about a consumer viasat/hughesnet/wildblue type low cost terminal and service, what you're getting is 32:1 or 64:1 or worse oversubscribed
The bandwidth possible in the terahertz size "channels" in singlemode fiber is incredibly larger than the channel size and modulations needed for rf to/from geostationary.
If you look at the per cpe traffic charts for each of the 32 customers on your typical 32:1 oversubscribed GPON connection, each individual one doesn't move that much traffic at all, relative to a chart that's scaled to 1Gbps on the Y axis.
With very basic CWDM you can push a ridiculous amount of data through just one strand of good sm fiber.
Docsis3/3.1 cable internet is worse because it's reliant on asymmetric use of downstream rf channels and much more limited bandwidth in the coax (though, they do still achieve 2048 and 4096qam!)
If you have a very small piece of rf spectrum like some tiny fraction of one 36MHz satellite transponder and you then oversubscribe it 32:1 or worse and also have to use fairly rudimentary loose modulations (very poor bps/Hz compared to terrestrial wired line modulations) at geostationary link budget distance, yeah, it's gonna suck.
It's more like, imagine you had fifteen people with laptops all connected to a single 802.11n AP from 12 years ago and you're all trying to torrent the latest 5GB debian install iso at the same time.
which is exactly what starlink will be when it has enough customers. it's already having a slow decline in speeds as the network fills, and it's not even close to capacity in most areas.
If you think that the network engineers running starlink in Redmond are going to walk blindly into the mistakes made in excessively oversubscribed networks by every pre existing geostationary vsat consumer grade service, you must have a very low opinion of their intellect, experience and ability to research the market.
I'm not sure why this has to do with network engineers in Redmond. SpaceX doesn't control the rest of the internet, and they don't have enough POPs (and won't) to hit the latency elon promised. there's a reason why fiber internet is 30ms ping and not 15-20ms.
The latency promised is obviously for the satellite segment, any DIA end user with a clue knows that terrestrial fiber latency to and from various places will vary based on where you are and how your local ISP is linked to nearby ix points and peers.
I can tell you what the latency is on fiber from the Redmond or North bend Earth stations to downtown seattle, and it's minuscule. Same as if a person was a customer on a docsis3 or GPON network in Redmond.
Ahhhh, so when Elon musk himself says pings will be < 20ms, he's talking about just the satellite segment, right? because obviously everyone pings just the satellite segment.
It does matter. When you make claims that a small group of people say is not possible and are quickly shouted down, only later to be completely ignored, it matters. It's the same reason FSD coming "next year" for 5 years matters, or having 20k satellites in service by 2021 matters. You say these things, people believe you and prop you up like a god, but when you fall well short it's "not a big deal".
If you recall there was non-stop chatter about how HFT would be using Starlink because the latency was so low, or that it would replace fiber because the latency would be lower. It was all fake. The latency will be 30-40ms nominally for most users. That's great (it's just okay for LEO) for satellite, but let's not pretend it's anywhere near what the goal was.
> a) if you've ever personally lived for months or years at a time 100% dependent upon geostationary based services costing anywhere from $165/mo to $15,000 a month or more, for internet access and links to the outside world
i have - it was horrible. i was at least on land, and could drive with my laptop to a point where i could finally get cell service and tether my laptop whenever i needed internet service (need to download a new copy of Xcode? that's 15% of your monthly allotted bandwidth). it wasn't the speed or bandwidth so much as the latency: 900ms each way meant nothing could be close to "real time", which made things much more difficult.
I appreciate the LEO of starlink, but without essentially "free" launches, there's no way it could be financially viable.
Given how hard the 'old guard' have been fighting Starlink, I think it's relatively clear that it's going to shake things up significantly for traditional GEO operators.
IIRC Viasat has been especially active in trying everything they can to throw up regulatory hurdles and slow down Starlink deployment.
You could be 2 cups and a long string and beat most of those providers. I've been trapped in their horrible world for over a decade and can't wait for "any" other option. I don't even care how much it costs anymore.
I’ve done work video calls using my friend’s starlink wifi on a remote mountain, and it’s unlimited bandwidth so this didn’t cost anything beyond the flat $110 monthly fee. Are geosynchronous services even capable of doing the bandwidth and latency needed for a two-way video call? And if so, how much would it cost?
My parents are on Sky Muster in Australia and it works fine for them, we call them a couple times a month and the latency isn't amazing but I've had worse calls with people on DSL.
My subjective opinion was that the starlink was better than DSL and even better than some cable internet services I’ve subscribed to in recent years. The downside of the starlink was that it would sometimes drop out for 8 seconds, but I’ve had cable and DSL that would fail for half an hour. Apparently the dropouts have become much less common in the last year.
Yes, they can do it - my parents have Hughes satellite internet. I've been able to do multi-person video calls from their house. It's pretty low bandwidth though 40Mbps or so claimed I think and something like 50Gb/Month data cap.
It was faster and cheaper to tether to my cell phone while working from their house.
Any reason to believe that SpaceX isn't capable of getting global coverage using intra-satellite links? Assuming this, and they've already proven they can do it, SpaceX will be strictly better than any other solution out there.
How so? Starlink seems extremely competitive in bandwidth and terminal size with Ka and Ku band GEOs, while blowing them out of the water when it comes to latency.
bandwidth per dollar is what matters, and Leo is not as good as geo in that regard. if you threw the same amount of money SpaceX is putting into starlink into a viasat-3 you'd have more bandwidth and better coverage.
In my opinion, between SpaceX and Amazon, the majority of heavy lift launch is already booked for years to come. OneWeb has to bet on Relativity Space that has never even launched anything to launch their constellation.
Companies like Viasat, Iridium and the others will have a very, very hard time ever competing in the LEO space.
> SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective
Depends on how you define marketing. I work for a very big and well known organization. We wanted to engage with them about an interesting initiative.
I's almost impossible to reach out to anyone from SpaceX. Go and try to find an email address or a phone number.
Then, even when you obtain their sales email you will not get any response whatsoever.
Depending on how this is priced this is still an extremely viable option for a good chunk of the maritime industry, even if coverage is limited to ports and national waters.
I don't think I said there wasn't a difference. There are always differences.
But I do stand by my point that you can't put much stock in Musk's claims. Which, now that people are becoming more aware of it, makes him less and less likely to deliver anything major again.
As an example, take a look at his failed purchase of Twitter. He wasted a ton of his time and caused a lot of damage to Twitter, its employees, and his own reputation. You can bet that any future business partners, even the ones willing to ignore his behavior on Twitter, are going to take it as a cautionary tale.
In the latter case, there is precedent. Elon promised to revolutionize space travel, he's done so. He promised to revolutionize electric cars, he's done so. He promised to revolutionize intercity traffic, that didn't pan out. Clearly you can see the difference between him and someone that's never delivered on what they promised.
as you might know, it's also about bandwidth and latency. LEO satellites can be an enabler for a lot of remote operation, IF (and this is a big IF) latency remain small also with intersatellite links, and connection reliability is comparable to GEO
I've been looking forward to marine starlink with the thought of being able to work remotely while sailing. Then I saw the pricing!
I guess they're aiming for the megayacht crowd not average shmoes on small boats.
I worked remote while sailing. my personal advice.... cruising is relatively cheap once you leave the dock. turn off your computer and go sail a while and plan on taking contracts during extended periods in port.
Also having packed a few offshore miles at this point... I have never had much luck being productive doing "work" while actually on passage. The ocean has a funny way of sticking to its own agenda anyway, despite our best plans.
Most of your time cruising is hanging on the anchor anyway. Depending on where you are there is pretty decent cell coverage a lot of places, or hotel wifis you can get from your anchorage.
I'm doing it an a mono-hull right now. I have not tried to work on passage, but I think it would be totally doable on a cat where you could sit relatively stable and keep a watch while working.
I’ve been doing the same, and I was personally hoping it would follow the same standard price + $30 that the RV crowd has gotten. I’m pretty disappointed with the cost, and I would fear that they’ll use geolocation to force you to maritime billing if they detect you’re on a boat.
It looks like my sailboat remote life is still on hold for the time being.
Depending on the type of sailing you do, probably can get away with using the RV service. If you're sailing within their current maritime coverage map https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map.... you're just using the direct CPE-Starlink-Uplink Station connection. Provided you're still in that coverage cell, there is really no difference to the entire system if you're 10 miles from shore inland or at sea.
Requiring an unobstructed view of the sky is pretty incompatible with sailboats anyways, unless you stick it at the top of the mast (where I expect it won't last long).
Then there's also the power requirements, which I haven't seen yet, but they'll probably be exceedingly difficult to meet for your average sailboat.
- This is a more niche product (just due to sheer numbers). Therefore, supporting it for each user will have higher overheads.
- Competition is expensive, e.g. BGAN at $284/GB of data transfer or more, while offering lower speeds (700 Kbps for a $6.5K Cobham Explorer 710, Vs. 350 Mbps for this).
- Competition likely won't be able to directly compete on offering for a while.
The next step will likely be commercial aircraft over the ocean. "Because they can [charge this]" is obviously the primary reason, but if you go look at what is available in this space right now, this isn't nuts, far from it.
Internet over the ocean is an incredibly hard/expensive problem. You cannot directly compare it to over-the-land offerings where the consumers are 1:1M.
Astrospace is also planning mobile broadband trough the satellites, their target audience also rural areas, I wonder they will support ocean as well, if so that would help competition.
The antenna is electronically steered. The pictures do not show any gimbal but they probably had to add an IMU to measure the motion of the boat (antenna) and adjust the antenna beam steering to compensate.
phased array antenna, so its either a software switch or they simply detect if your station moves too much without paying for the privilege and disable/throttle you.
The phased array can probably only do so much and a gimbal might still be needed to compensate for movement outside of what the phased array can handle?
It can at least go horizon to horizon now. The satellites aren’t geosynchronous. I generally only have one satellite overhead at a time. They take about 5-10 minutes to fly by.
The beam steering only operates in one dimension. The dish has to physically rotate and tilt so that the beam steering line coincides with the satellites orbit.
Doesn't the normal Starlink have an Az-El motor for rough positioning? Beam steering only gets you so far, and the more off-boresight you get, the worse the performance.
I imagine this has a larger array. The more antennas, the greater the resolution. I’m sure they’ll use the motor for rough positioning but I doubt they’ll add a gimbal. That seems overkill.
People do install normal starlink on boats [1]. The $10K/$5K price tag really has me scratching my head about what they are thinking. Does look like they plan to cover the entire ocean, so at least there is a specific benefit they can point to. They're definitely giving up a lot of everyday coastal business in hopes of making it up with a few whales.
I think Starlink is looking for more money. They've raised prices on everyone 11% after about a year. They've introduced Starlink RV at a 23% premium over their regular Starlink service (and a 36% over the original Starlink price point).
I think Starlink doesn't want to use too heavy a hand with customers using their equipment not as intended (as is the case with most companies), but it does look like they're trying to increase their average billings.
I'd guess that they're trying to pick up a lot of commercial business. While it only covers coastal areas at the moment, it'll cover the North America/Europe/North Africa/Asia parts of the ocean in 6 months and substantially everywhere in 9 months. For a shipping company looking to replace their old-school satellite service, $10,000 for equipment and $5,000/mo is probably nothing. For every rich person with a yacht, that's basically nothing. It seems like a great way for Starlink to grab a lot of additional revenue in areas where there won't be a lot of congestion - and from people who are used to paying much more outrageous rates.
And they haven't said that they're going to be heavy handed with people grabbing a $600 Dishy and putting it on their boat by the coast. Maybe they will be, but we haven't seen that yet.
I'd also note that it's likely that the equipment is a lot better to withstand the motion and environment of being at sea. These are going to have to withstand a lot of salt-water air and spray while maintaining their motors in good working order. They'll probably also need to be rated for a longer lifespan given the amount of movement the motors will be doing compared to a stationary one (not just the travel of the vessel, but also the waves).
I'd guess that Starlink is assuming that small boat owners will just grab a regular Dishy and service and Starlink will ignore it as long as they're relatively near land. This will add 45x the revenue for those who can afford it - shipping companies, rich people with yachts, etc.
> I'd also note that it's likely that the equipment is a lot better to withstand the motion and environment of being at sea. These are going to have to withstand a lot of salt-water air and spray while maintaining their motors in good working order. They'll probably also need to be rated for a longer lifespan given the amount of movement the motors will be doing compared to a stationary one (not just the travel of the vessel, but also the waves).
The dish cost has some good engineering explanations.
The 40-50x service cost increase, at least in territorial waters, is all about competition.
I've seen videos of people using starlink on boats. Without compensation for the boat movement it performs poorly/unpredictably. I really wonder if they'll just tolerate the people that do it anyway since they're unlikely to convert those to the higher price point for something that works well.
A colleague of mine has Starlink on his boat using one of the clever stabilization modifications out there. It works "good enough" that I don't see him upgrading to Maritime...
Number one complaint from seafarers is lack of good internet. Ship owners are always looking for cheap ways to keep this crew happy and loyal, they will be lining up to get this installed.
If the pricing is that low for commercial customers then it will sell out before you know it.
It's a lot more than a "few whales". Commercial shipping, oil rigs, military (even if only for the recreational/non-operational traffic) will be a much bigger pie than yachts.
-- If I had to guess part of the reason would maybe be carrying capacity - a house that doesn't move is predictable - RVs & boats move so the per satellite bandwidth predictability of that class of object is lower - i think meaning the requirements for redundancy are higher - redundancy is expensive? - just a guess --
Starlink RV is only currently meant to be used while stationary and can't track while in motion, which is why the hardware is identical to the home unit. They're supposed to be coming out with new hardware that allows use while in motion. It was only a week ago that the FCC approved the application for "vehicles in motion."[1] It will be on airplanes as well, soon.
What I really want is hardware that is mounted on RV roof and can be deployed and folded with a press of a button. While I don't care if it works in motion, I do care about setup convenience, and I'm not getting current version because setting it up is just too cumbersome.
Or even better: just flat beam-forming antenna on the RV roof. Once thing there is enough on the roof is space.
Ehh, we just got an RV unit for Search and Rescue use in remote areas[0]. Setup is about three steps and just a couple minutes. Waiting 5-15 minutes for it to connect to the constellation takes longer.
When you setup RV, you already have to do a lot. Every extra thing counts. On top of that you can’t really leave this unit deployed and leave - the risk of it being stolen is relatively high.
Yeah would be possible with a larger antenna that has a wider FOV. The current dish has too narrow a FOV to simply recess it into the roof/enclosure unfortunately.
Would only work near shore, this must mean they have some capability to go beyond the one hop to a station. Edit: from the coverage map it looks like this is only coastal waters…
> Interesting. I didn't know that coverage was limited. I assumed satellite == pretty much all of earth.
The low orbits that give Starlink its low latency compared to geostationary satellite internet services also mean that each satellite can only see a small part of the earth at any given time. This is why they need so many satellites to provide reliable coverage.
Right now each satellite has to communicate directly to a uplink station, so it's only possible to provide coverage to areas where a satellite can simultaneously see the user and the uplink.
This is where SpaceX's planned inter-satellite link capability comes in to play, they claim they will be able to use lasers in a free-space optical network (think fiber without the fiber) to relay data directly from satellite to satellite, allowing service more than a single hop from a uplink station. This will also hypothetically allow for direct user to user connections over the satellite network that do not traverse the terrestrial internet, which would be huge for both military and business applications. Lots of words have been written about intercontinental high frequency trading for example.
Supposedly every satellite launched in 2022 has the capability but as far as I'm aware it hasn't been openly demonstrated to work yet. Making it work reliably within a single orbital ring is a hard problem and the claimed ability to cross-connect between adjacent rings is an absurdly hard problem. Neither are impossible, but I'll believe it when I see it.
This whole "yea inter-sat free space fiber links are totally going to happen" charade smacks of the same hype baiting as "full self driving by end of year" nonsense that Elon has been spouting since 2018.
The Starlink "team" did an AMA on reddit[0] last year and it was comical how empty the answers were. People asked about the space lasers and the answers were all "yea it's a really hard problem, BTW we're hiring!" which honestly felt like an admission from HR that they're looking for engineers willing/able to cash the checks marketing already wrote.
It's not that hard of a problem to do fast free-space optical in space within a single orbital shell. The only thing that makes it hard for SpaceX is the relatively small mass and volume budgets on their satellites to do precision pointing with, and that you'd really want each satellite to be able to do multiple links and that's taking up a lot of space.
The laser part seems easy, the targeting part seems hard. I'm imaging some type of gimbal, is there a better way?
Also seems likely that if they can find a way to make small sats with the ability to accurately point a laser at another sat, that would have pretty obvious implications to the defense dept. SpaceX is a military contractor after all.
> The laser part seems easy, the targeting part seems hard. I'm imaging some type of gimbal, is there a better way?
Here's the design 101 from base principles:
In practice, you need a big-ish telescope on both ends to control beamspread and to collect light from a big aperture. Aperture is a given based on link budget (and you can trade off power to make the aperture smaller, but halving the aperture diameter on both sides means you'll need 16x the power); if you target F/2 then it'll be twice as long as the aperture. Maybe think about a 6cm aperture and 12cm long telescope for a starting point. This will get you a 6 arcsecond wide beam @ 1000nm.
Then, you need to slew this at pretty fast rates-- perhaps 15 degrees per second for acquisition, and control the pointing within 3 arcseconds while tracking at peak rates of a few degrees per second. Yeek! This pretty quickly takes you towards some kind of direct drive fork mount that is very gimbally-looking.
One bit of fun is that you need to have a lot of bandwidth on your reaction control system on the spacecraft, too-- because when you snap one of these telescopes around, the whole craft is going to want to counterrotate, so the reaction control wheels (and/or other telescopes for links in other directions) will need to react. Feedforward is advised.
I was thinking of a gimbal to point the laser, but now that you've introduced mini telescopes and the jerk plus reaction control systems on the rx side of this equation I'm out. For inter-sat comms directional / beam formed RF feels like a better solution. The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.
> For inter-sat comms directional / beam formed RF feels like a better solution.
You can't get the same degree of directivity. As wavelength decreases, you get more directivity for a given aperture. Light has 1/5000th the wavelength of plausible radio links, so both the sender and the receiver can have much higher gains. You also can have much more bandwidth, and thus you obtain many orders of magnitude higher data rates per unit of power used.
E.g. a 6cm telescope has 82dB of gain on each side for 1000nm light.
A 1 meter aperture (about what a 3.2x1.6x0.2m Starlink satellite can likely present to another satellite) has 53dB of gain on each side.
So for equivalent power, you have 6 orders of magnitude more signal strength, and you can occupy 10x the bandwidth, too, even if you have a very large phased array.
> The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.
This kind of system has very little in common with how I would build an anti-satellite laser system.
Let's see. NASA downlinked from the moon to the ground, through the atmosphere at OC-12 rates back in 2013-- so about 100x the distance, with the added penalty of traversing the atmosphere. NFIRE did 5.6 gigabit/sec LEO to ground (again through the atmosphere) in 2011-- shorter distances but higher angular rates which is the "hard part". And EDRS does 1.8gbit/sec over longer distances in geostationary orbit. Both flown and proven.
> are you really comparing the moon to the earth with two satellites at much closer distances moving rapidly?
I'm comparing to LEO to ground, which has a higher rate of angular movement (e.g. harder to point at) than LEO-to-LEO in the same shell, among other things.
I've built systems that point to sub-arcsecond precision at satellites in LEO. It's not quite an off-the-shelf controls problem (e.g. good luck getting a COTS motion controller to hit-a-fast-moving-target-at-a-chosen-time, rather than follow a track and not care about time) but it's not super hard, either.
Citation needed, for Facebook: A) spent billions of dollars on this specific problem (free space optical links in space), and B) couldn't solve it.
Given that there's systems that have successfully flown doing links from GEO to LEO (e.g. high angular rates again), using several year old conservative technology, it's not so bad.
There's a million little details, of course. Just conduction cooling for fast optical transceivers is going to be annoying in space, for instance.
SpaceX started a LEO system as ambitious as SpaceX for its time back in 2013. again, GEO to LEO is not LEO to LEO, and is also not moon to earth. there are no successful examples of 20+Gbps between LEO satellites. The million details is why SpaceX has yet to turn them on for production.
You may not be aware that Iridium has been doing inter-satellite links since the late 90s. Using optical rather than RF doesn't really change the game that much.
> Using optical rather than RF doesn't really change the game that much.
The precision required for aiming is directly related to the wavelength. Iridium NEXT satellites use Ka band with a wavelength around ten millimeters where anything light related has a wavelength measured in hundreds of nanometers.
The forward/backward links are a lot easier than the inter-plane links, but it's still not trivial because you're trying to hit an object the size of a small car with a laser from over 1000 miles away. Not impossible by any means, but there's not a lot of margin for error when they're looking to be able to transfer around 100 gigabits per second over this link. Other FSO systems work at significantly lower bandwidth and/or shorter range. That's not even getting in to the inter-plane links, where the target is constantly moving even in a relative sense.
You'd need an excessively powerful transmitter to use an omnidirectional antenna. In the context of a satellite, where power efficiency is crucial, it makes much more sense to use a lower-power transmitter and a directional antenna / beamforming.
A bit? It doesn't really change the nature of the problem, just the tolerances. It's nowhere near the intractable problem that some people make it out to be.
I mean, we are all aware each extra 9 of precision/uptime/etc. is far more expensive than the last. If the lasers require an order of magnitude more precision (and I could imagine it being higher), it would be a far far harder problem.
What I mean by openly demonstrated to work is some sort of public demo that would require use of the inter-satellite links. The linked article just says they've started testing and been able to move data, which means nothing about how well it actually works.
I'd even be satisfied by specific claims of test results that could be validated once the capability is officially activated.
At 550km altitude, each Starlink satellite in low-earth orbit has a visible horizon of only about 700mi, and I suspect usable range that is much smaller, probably low 100’s of miles. To extend range to a ground-station beyond that will probably take multiple peer satellite hops - I suspect that inter-satellite bandwidth is a a precious commodity - and priced as such.
I think you're confusing the horizon of places on the surface of Earth that you can see with the distance to another satellite you can see.
6900km from the center of Earth. Figure you don't want the link to point within 150km (6500km) of Earth, to not pass through much atmosphere and to not see too much atmospheric glow (even with narrow filters, this matters).
Effectively you have an isosceles triangle with 6900km on the common side and an altitude of 6500km (tangent to "top of atmosphere" at 150km.
They can't do satellite to satellite yet. Just terminal -> sat -> ground station. Starlink is in low earth orbit, so the visibility any one satellite has is (relatively speaking) pretty limited.
The majority of their satellites just bounce the signals back down to a nearby ground station. Their version 1.5 sats, which they started launching about a year ago, include laser links to allow sat->sat communication. Their plan is for the remaining 3/4th of their fleet to have laser links.
One interesting side-effect of the laser links is that they can open up connections between stock exchanges and trading houses that are faster than direct fiberoptic lines. Milliseconds count in high frequency trading.
Predictability and stability count a lot as well. I think the starlink-as-low-latency-trading-medium is sort of like "blockchain for real estate" - it's not actually a real thing.
You can simply use multiple links to send same data. The fastest one wins, so if there's a temporary hickup on one of the links, you still get somewhat bounded latency. When things work fine, you get to reap the latency benefit.
So I think it's plausible for intercontinental links.
Yeah SpaceX will have a very hard time beating the current routes; they're further from the surface and the intersatellite links won't be travelling in a straight line all the time. The best bet is if they can provide those links across oceans that can't be rigged with microwave towers.
The HF radios are transatlantic and transpacific using 10-30 MHz radios. The terrestrial microwave links (several GHz) have been around for a decade, and HF radio is fairly recent. Starlink will have higher bandwidth, but also higher latency.
-- coverage is literally perfect for anywhere I take my (imaginary) yacht! - south of france? check! italian riviera? check! miami? Check! LA? Check! $5k a month? In YachtLand $5/mth is pocket change --
And for us actual realistic ones - a lot of anchorages around Europe have pretty decent LTE to work with. You won't be able to work while on passage anyway.
We did a month of boat touring around Italy/ex-Yugoslavia last year and mobile coverage in anchorages is very much hit or miss. Generally ok for browsing but video calls worked ok may be 30% time. Essentially you can't count that you can take work call and have decent experience. Huge inconvenience. I had a few "can't miss" calls and essentially I had to get to city 1-2 hours beforehand and then look for hotel/coffeeshop with decent wifi .
They don't need any new development or that kind of stuff for wide coverage, just the intersatellite links, and they have launched 15 groups of them in the first 6 months of this year.
Iridium launched with inter-satellite links in 1997.
Swapping radios out for lasers isn't that much harder, there is some difficulty in tracking/alignment but it's space - things tend to stay where you put them, with whatever momentum you left them with.
Completely different ballgame to Autopilot which basically requires advancing the field of AI by another quantum leap before it's ready.
They've launched satellites that have lasers, but I don't think they've actually demonstrated they have the ability to aim those lasers precisely enough to actually communicate between satellites in orbit.
This statement is meaningless as written. You can emit as much or as little with a laser as you like. You could say "a lot of power is required for a reliable inter-satellite optical link", to which I would say "citation needed".
Iridium has been doing inter-satellite links since the late 90s and moving from RF to optical doesn't change the game that much.
The data rate has very little to do with the complexity of the satellite-to-satellite links, and steering RF and optics isn't as different as you might think.
that's partially true. the data rates have a lot to do with frequency reuse, which means more complicated designs. starlink is complicated in the dynamic conditions, but the beamforming is relatively simple.
It’s only five boat units a month and ten boat units for setup.
It’s no where near worth it for me because normal phone/wireless data works well where I sail (in addition to iridium network fwiw) - the prices would need to be at least an order (orders) of magnitude cheaper for me to even consider it. Not sure about parent comment though.
Boat ~~ bust out another thousand
Edit: I took parent comment as a joke but ya never know
No. I just think that their other products and their talk around this was out of touch. They were responding to people who are average cruisers saying it was coming soon. It ended up being a joke.
Always a treat to see the urban HN crowd comment with great confidence on anything outside of their immediate area. While hopefully eventually SpaceX will bring this down and be more disruptive, right now they simply cannot possibly meet demand, they are very rightfully anxious to get revenue going for Starlink, they're in a completely unique level of performance for maritime, and HELLO FOLKS, here is a taste of what actual maritime internet costs, quoting myself from elsewhere:
A BGAN terminal like an Inmarsat 9202 is ~$3k, which gets you capability of around 450 kbps. Something like an Iridium can bring that to 700 kbps for a ~$5k. Want multimegabit? No problem, KVH will be happy to help with something like a TracPhone for a mere $18000-50000! And then you pay a mere $5/megabyte, or you can get a monthly plan and save!
Keeping mind this will have 500-1500+ms latency as well. This is what they are competing against. They're offering 2x terminals for this, probably based on those $2500 heavier duty much bigger business class ones, and they have to have at least some consideration for hardening vs saltwater which is the great destroyer of all things. Since I don't see any particular stabilization platform like others use my assumption is they're making use of 2x and electronic steering to maintain constant contact, though they may well have some additional sensors in there or interfacing capability with a ship's gyrocompass.
But at any rate this looks extremely competitive once the full intersat mesh rolls out, and it's interesting to see hard numbers on that. While it'd have been cool if they could have launched something suitable for users right down to sailboats (officially vs unofficial use of residential ones), I doubt that'd be the right business decision until well after they have v2 flying on Starship for a while. What they're charging actually doesn't even seem to put much if any premium on the massive bandwidth advantage and flat out beating fiber optic in latency over enough distance. Plenty of businesses will be interested in this. And while sure no doubt it'll become standard on rich yachts, think more serious cargo shipping, oil/gas drilling platforms, etc. SpaceX themselves will be eager to dogfood this and have already been doing so for their drone ships, but they have plans for refurbing old platforms into Starship sea launch as well. The military will absolutely be very interested if they aren't deep into discussion already. I could see a major premium being charged there for priority in ports or other congested areas, maybe even special hardware.
Also having the mesh up also means a lot of other cool stuff, from coverage to remote islands or other areas for which no close ground station is feasible to special low latency intercontinental offerings on land (HFT and enterprises may be interested in).
Having worked in two way satellite for many years it is always very amusing to see the HN crowd who've never implemented remote terminals in physical reality...
They should definitely go price some Inmarsat I-4 or I-5 based BGAN services or gyro stabilized maritime C/Ku/Ka band VSAT terminals before thinking this is expensive.
You can easily spend $130,000 on a fairly basic geostationary VSAT terminal for something like a small cruise ship or large yacht.
Also lots of amusing comments from people who've never been 100% dependent for months or years at a time on 1:1 SCPC or oversusbcribed, contended geostationary based access at latency anywhere from 492ms to 1250ms and $ per Mbps cost of $2000 per dedicated Mbps as a floor figure.
Thanks so much for your comments over the years on this, I've read a lot of them with great interest and to my edification since I'm not remotely as deep in the field as you are. It's a little frustrating though to see comments just rushing to compare it to their cable modem or something, like even if one has zero knowledge surely there'd be some intellectual curiosity over the cool and difficult problems one would have to solve to get packets to the middle of an ocean and back? If going to geostationary like ViaSat that's ~36000km out, that's a long ways for a wireless signal! The conditions are fairly intense, ships travel all over the place through massive storms and temperature differences and very heavy seas, saltwater is massively corrosive. Wondering about that would lead someone to a bit of basic searching and in turn to pricing, platform stabilization etc. Or wondering how Starlink can possibly track LEO sats, just 500km away but moving at something like 17000 miles per hour, and then learning about electronically steerable phased arrays. The terminals themselves already represent a really cool achievement in bringing something like that down to consumer prices. Heck, I'd love to see that brought elsewhere, it'd be a treat for terrestrial 11-60 GHz PtP/PtMP links even if they could just perfectly aim themselves and correct with near zero technician requirements, merely roughly pointing it in the right direction, for $500. Doing intersat optical links is also amazing, everything about the system really helps to reinforce other aspects, it's a heck of a vision executed well.
"[A]imed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd" really? :(. And Starlink is an amazing experience, it's been life changing for a few clients even just in rural New England. The only "high speed" improvement they'd gotten over 20 years was the offer of a 10 Mbps connection for $300/month. People dump on even regular Starlink pricing anyway. Having to live constantly on dial up or regular MEO/HEO satellite then moving to Starlink is eye opening already and gave me at least a tiny taste of what it might be like for people on ships or platforms way out there (I've done multiweek zero connected expeditions too but that's not doing "regular business" or work it's a different mental space). And at least in this case it's possible to drive an hour and then have a solid net connection somewhere, so like for big software downloads one could work around it a little. No such luck at sea.
Absolutely everyone can (and does) have an opinion on how to run the entire economy. At least you guys can say a bunch of stuff specific stuff and 99% of everyone will have to take you at your word and pretty much shuts up, lol.
I totally get it though, has to be frustrating. I was really shocked at the price but when its put into perspective _if_ it works it's clearly going to be a significant improvement.
as mentioned previously, I worked on exactly this for 15 years, and I also don't understand how people with knowledge of the industry believe SpaceX is going to be profitable on starlink without some course correction.
nobody is debating that a under-provisioned service can be great during the honeymoon phase. but this won't last. they're strapped for cash and these enterprise plays are purely to keep afloat while the consumer business is burning cash
Their launch costs are orders of magnitude lower than anything their competitors are paying, so it stands to reason their service costs can be a lot lower too.
It also sounds like they're mass producing the Starlink sats for a fraction the price of "regular space".
SpaceX sells a launch to customers for $50-70M. they make an estimated 10-30% profit, depending on your source and whether the rocket is reused. that is nowhere near an order of magnitude.
Just FYI GTO sats' launch costs on the higher end of that range when buying from SpaceX (if not higher), while Starlink launches had internal cost 30M BEFORE current very high launch rate, which will bring costs down more.
So not quite an order of magnitude, but 5 times difference in launch costs should already be achievable.
And Starship will bring another 5-10 times cost reduction when measured per kg, even when you assume pessimistic mass margins and costs / launch rates.
yes, SpaceX sells launches to anyone who will buy them since it's their only profitable business at the moment. this is why viasat is using them to launch this year or next. I just gave you the cost, and it's public on their website too.
It isn't a BGAN terminal competitor until and unless the intersat mesh rolls out though.
At the moment it's a competitor for specialist yacht 4G packages, and whilst they're also eyewateringly expensive to anyone benchmarking them against mobile phone contracts, Starlink certainly isn't undercutting them.
Which they've now put a hard number on for end of this year in primary latitude band and global first quarter of next year, and they've gone ahead and filed with FCC for permission to activate polar satellites which depend on it [0]. If we were talking years out sure, but this is an early launch for something they're promising in <6 months and looks more like a matter of regulatory approval. They're launching satellites with updated optical links regularly and look to be reaching MVP for mesh density at this point. Obviously anyone who'd depend on using it blue water would wait for that to be ready, but in terms of what they're aiming for global is absolutely the target and always has been.
We'll see if they their mesh fulfils its promises in the next couple of years. If it does and there's ocean coverage which is reasonably robust, I think we'll see prices rise accordingly though...
this was the industry I worked in for over a decade and your comment comes off as someone that doesn't know the economics. there have been many, many articles of people in this industry showing that SpaceX cannot sustain this burn rate without major changes. their capacity is nowhere near the cadence they said, they're not keeping up with demand (in a bad way), and the ISL is not working yet. so far they've been fortunate to win rdof money, but for the amount of highly paid engineers they have it won't last long enough.
your post only has "what ifs", but none of that is working yet, and coastal coverage isn't going to win contracts with cruise ships and real customers.
Presumably you'd spend most of your time close or in harbor/coast, which would mean that you would have other ways of internet access (starlink RV, normal 4/5g, harbor wifi, etc).
I'm of course guessing that if you moved onto your boat you wouldn't spend the majority of the time far out at sea.
Can anyone explain how the ping is so low on starlink? I always assumed satellite internet was always going to be inferior for online gaming, but everything I find online says that starlink is great for it.
I guess I don’t have a specific question. It’s just one of those engineering marvels that I never thought I’d see. No wires, but still frag people at <90ms ping.
The Starlink satellites orbit closer to the earth than other comms satellites (iridium, oneweb). Closer distance = faster times, in addition to laser links between sats and other spectrum differences.
Downside to lower orbit means they won't last as long (a few years) before they are pulled down into earth's atmo. Which is fine since their rocket company will just send up some more cheaply.
In theory, the laser links may bring Starlink below terrestrial latency for point to point communications beyond a certain distance. Light travels through fiber at 7/10ths of the speed of light, but pretty much the actual speed of light through a vacuum. Once you get past the 340km * 2 round trip on both ends, you're actually moving bits around much faster than is physically possible with fiber. Probably even faster than that considering that fiber optic backbone isn't a straight line between you and your destination.
Chances are, you, dear reader, will not get any of this sweet, sweet, low latency.
Most likely these laser links only go from each satellite to the one ahead and the one behind, in the same orbit. That is good enough. For example, there is an orbit that goes right over New York, London, and Hamburg.
Who wants low latency most is hedge funds. It would be surprising if Starlink did not make anyone who wants it pay through the nose to get traffic one millisecond faster than fiber, 100x that for 2ms, 100x that for 3ms, and on up for longer links. What they would really be buying is not so much getting their own packets N milliseconds ahead of the fiber crowd, which is OK, but rather for their slightly poorer competitors to get packets only N-1 milliseconds ahead, which is super-great.
In fintech, they like to say a microsecond is an eon, a millisecond an eternity. When they can get a millisecond jump on the competition, that can mean millions of dollars every day. So, they will pay it. Gladly.
So stupid question but I guess it isn't worth it to somehow push them up with small corrections/booster-like things? At least to save it for a few more years? What happens when they fall? Do they more or less burn up?
> So stupid question but I guess it isn't worth it to somehow push them up with small corrections/booster-like things? At least to save it for a few more years?
Yes, they send them up with a certain amount of propellant to do that, once that runs out they fall down.
> What happens when they fall? Do they more or less burn up?
Yes. They're small enough to burn up completely, and low enough to do that quickly rather than creating a space junk problem.
Low orbit and it's currently just a bent pipe / single hop design. Your message just bounces off of a single LEO satellite and lands at a ground station nearby to you, as though you had a fixed-wireless point to point link to that station.
Note that latency isn't as good as Starlink advertises. My residential service is supposed to get 20-40ms latency. In reality I get 40-80ms (as measured with ping to 8.8.8.8) and it's highly variable.
Starlink latency is still quite good and a completely different category of service than any geosync satellite ISP. But they've got a ways to go to improve it. A lot of gamers seem unhappy with it right now, FWIW.
I know you're usually here to promote starlink, but all ookla data shows starlink is 40+ms on average. it's dishonest to pretend 20ms will ever be normal.
I'm usually here to promote starlink? Before yesterday go through my comment history for weeks or months into the past and find how many times I mention it... Sheesh
For the record if oneweb or kuiper or telesat's proposed LEO networks existed as a viable, usable product right now and worked similarly I'd be equally enthused about them. (Yes, I know about Oneweb beta tests in Alaska)
it's not an attack, you are always pro starlink and I'm always anti starlink (in a business sense). there's nothing wrong with different opinions. I just don't agree with the comments that the latency, speed, or cost will stay the same in a positive way.
what you're experiencing is what everyone in the industry already knew, but we got slammed by musk fans for pointing it out years ago. the ping will never be 20ms for most people. path loss is only a small part of a ping.
Starlink sats orbit at around 550 km altitude; other services are over 35,000 km high. That's 2 ms for a transmission to make it up (or down) versus 120 ms. Multiply by four to get the theoretical minimum ping, not including any computation/processing or routing on the ground, and the difference becomes enormous.
Makes you wonder if this could eventually lead to Datacenters in space, say for financial or latency sensitive applications, and the kinds of exotic architectures that would be needed for 17,000 MPH servers to shuffle traffic around.
Ping depends on physical distance and quality of the signal. Low orbit satellites are much closer to Earth than geostationary ones. So latency is lower as well. And in space itself signal travels between nodes faster than through any cable.
The satellites are a lot lower than you'd think - something like 200-400km (compared with 35000km for conventional communication satellites).
(Although having run the calculations, that implies that conventional satellites should only be adding 200ms in the best case, which shouldn't be so bad?)
We still need a 12v solution for the peasants that boat offshore. The current monthly fee represents a full year of boat payments. Definitely not targeted at consumers.
You can easily use an inverter to go from 12v to 110V/240V and just use the stock adapter. Alternatively, you can get your hands dirty and do what I did [1]. However, I'm fairly certain that the non-maritime accounts won't be able to use the service on water (most likely geofenced) so that Starlink can sell their maritime version.
Maybe....maybe not... It depends if it will work using the new sat tech if it ever comes out. As it stands you just have a different (I wouldn't even say better) version of 4g....
I think the "rv model" supports 12V. It's not officially supported on moving vessels by SpaceX, but you can find a lot of Youtube videos where people have installed terminals on their boats.
Everyone is assuming this caters to the rich yacht owner. While I'm sure that's a component of the target market, there are also plenty of other customers. Commercial fishing boats, coastal freighters, offshore oil platforms, cruise ships, various charter vessels, etc. It'd be worth it for a lot of businesses. And once it's available in the middle of the ocean, an enormous armada of freight vessels. $5k/mo is nothing for many of those commercial customers, both for improved logistics and metrics gathering and for keeping the employees/guests happy.
With WiFi Calling feature of recent phones, you should also be able to send and receive phone calls/SMS as usual too. Tried this on my camping trip to great effect.
Garmin and Iridium will still sell well with the people who are cruising in relatively low cost sailboats. These people can't afford $5000/mo just for internet access.
Garmin doesn’t operate a satellite network. They produce devices and on sell subscriptions to other satellite services. This won’t really impact them at all. They could pivot to use another network if it becomes more feasible.
Eventually they will enable inter-satellite links.
But they could also quite easily support global coverage by bouncing data off other users dishes. The latency would be a bit higher and the service reliability a bit lower, but I would guess the result would still be far better than alternatives for maritime comms.
I'm actually really surprised they haven't done this already - it seems like something they could easily support, and it means they could deploy to anywhere in the world with mere hours notice, at least for a basic level of service.
Imagine the possibility of a demo sitting in the office of say the telecoms minister of venezuela... "So today, we have no infrastructure in your country. But we have something we'd like permission to deploy. Do you give us permission to transmit to your office to give it a demo? Yes. [Nods to engineer who types a few commands...]. Okay, it's enabled. Here it is working - this is the internet your citizens can get anywhere in the country tomorrow if you give us approval."
Just curious. Does anyone know anyone who has received their terminal who is not a SpaceX employee or opted for Mobile/RV? I keep hearing about how they're being deployed, but the only people I know who have received their terminals are SpaceX employees or people who agreed to the more expensive Mobile/RV service.
Me (for a client). I got it in January 2021 and deployed a few weeks later. At 10 below zero F in a fairly stiff wind natch, quite memorable :). Deployed up near 45°. This was of course a generation 1 circular unit, which actually turned out to be superior IMO since it has zero need for their router though it does have a fixed cable. I used an SFP<>ethernet adapter to bring the signal the rest of the way to our OPNsense router and bypass any grounding issues in that respect, it's functioned continuously ever since. First few months as warned there were occasional dropouts, but I could watch those steadily become rarer and rarer as the weeks went by, and the bandwidth go up as well as more sats came online. There was nothing significant long before it went officially public.
Less anecdotally, Starlink passed 400,000 customers as of a month and a half or so ago [0]. I wouldn't be surprised if it was pushing towards the half million mark now or fairly soon. They're limited now in terms of terrestrial cell density primarily, and that cannot be solved without more and more powerful sats which can actually shrink the physical cell size and improve beam count and bandwidth. Mobile/RV is therefore useful for them because it's lower priority with no guarantees, but that's ok for that usage model. The times where it will tend to be very important are in remote areas where cells are not full, and the times where cells are full there is also more likelihood of LTE, and RV can by definition move around if necessary. Maritime (or aircraft for that matter) obviously also fits those current limits, the oceans are near empty of Starlink right now and it's high revenue per user given the competition.
I was visiting some rural family in Alberta Canada and there's a bunch of them running with starlink setups now. I feel they're prioritizing rural first because there isn't really service to compete with / target demographic?
Yeah, their product compares very favourably to competition in rural but I suspect the other reason is density. They don't have enough satellites with enough bandwidth to provide high speeds for a lot of people in a small area (like a city) but the more spread out their customers are the more efficiently they make use of their fast moving satellites.
I received mine in the first batch, have been using it for ~a year now. Have used it for everything from 4K Netflix to gaming to work, ama I guess. My experience has been overall good relative to the rest of the options in this space (most other companies are still offering limited 500kbps/high-latency plans for twice as much), but you can definitely still push it hard enough to reveal that it's still satellite internet underneath. It's worth it if your other options are HughesNet or a data-capped WISP.
Is anything know about the power consumption of the Starlink antenna? Does the maritime version use less power than the conventional unit?
The fixed-location version of Starlink consumes around 60 to 100 W constantly which is problem if you want to e.g. use solar panels on a sail boat to supply the device.
I think at those prices you'd have a boat big enough to have the power budget. It's clearly aimed at commercial or scientific use with a side of super yacht.
I'm guessing a more affordable version more like the RV product will become available for cruising sailors in time. I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.
Yes, you are right. I had not seem the price tag when I posed the question. This product is for merchant ships or yachts and does not make any sense for small boat owners.
> I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.
Sure, just like Tesla Autopilot is right around the corner, Starship will be flying this year, the Cybertruck has been released 2 years ago etc.
This is different. The problem of providing offshore satcom with LEOsats is a quantified engineering problem. IOW, the industry knows quite well what technologies will solve the problem and Starlink has those technologies in place. The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be.
None of that is true for the self-driving car problem. That problem still contains a multitude of unknowns, including unknown unknowns.
Cybertruck is yet another kind of problem. I don't know what the issue with that is but I'd guess it's about manufacturing capacity.
> The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be.
Those communications are still an unsolved and hugely difficult engineering problem. It will be awesome if SpaceX has actually achieved this: getting the kind of precision required to communicate over direct laser links between specks of dust hundreds of km apart traveling at thousands of km per hour is no easy feat.
Not really. You won't run it all the time on a cruising yacht. Just when you need it. You probably don't care about having internet constantly under passage just for short times to get weather and to send out updates to friends and family.
If you're set up for electric propulsion that's not too bad. That plus my work machine would be under half what a properly sized motor should draw at 50% throttle. It only needs to work for ~6-7 hours a day.
You can approximately half the power consumption by eliminating starlink's wifi router and using a DC POE injector to power the square terminal. I have not done it yet but have seen others report ~30 watts.
Know next to nothing about dynamics and constraints of maritime SatCom, but...
Seen number of comments about the costs, but honestly wondered why the “one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals” could not be replaced with a hand mounted cheaper DIY rig using the existing Starlink terminals. Guessing, though might be wrong, that Starlink already has this happen using the existing coastal coverage.
On the same note, guess most people don’t need 24/7 connections. Why not just charge 0.33 a min, which would still be a 3x over the $5000 month rate and enable Starlink to extend further into the market.
Any thoughts on why this would not make sense aside from whatever Starlink’s biases & business objectives are?
> Any thoughts on why this would not make sense aside from whatever Starlink’s biases & business objectives are?
I suspect the market here is not individuals that want to browse YouTube and check their email.
Market 1: large multi person vessels like cruise ships. At any time someone wants to use the internet, and the ship can 'sublet' out a 2Mbit subset on an time basis.
Market 2: large transport vessels where the owners want a lot of data on what's going on for security reasons. $5k/month and you can have trusted security people keeping a watch over a few dozen cameras 24/7, so you know the crew is doing they job. A bit dystopian but I'd bet there's a market for it.
Genius price segmentation. Of course it costs them little more to provide the service than for home users on land, but easily worth the 50x higher price for this market
The Starlink IPO will provide hundreds of billions in funding for Starship and Mars
I have the regular $600 hardware and $135/month on my live-aboard sailboat on Sea of Cortez. Happy to answer any questions if you are considering getting one for your boat or RV.
I know some commercial fishermen in California and noticed they like to post on social media while at sea. I asked and it turns out they for the most part can get LTE coverage a good distance offshore, to the point that while dragging nets in water 10,000 ft deep they still can use their phone. The cell signals travel much further over water compared to over land.
I will ask one of them for an idea of how far they get when they lose coverage and edit when I hear back. He is on the boat now.
I lived and worked full time on a boat for many years. The answer to your question is in three parts:
1 - normal cell hand held phone use, you can often get (patchy) reception up to 15 (more sometimes) nautical miles off shore if lucky.
2 - setup a wifi hotspot on your phone and pull it up the mast. Range increases, i'm not sure how much to, but at 15nm the reception is good. Can work out further too, i've been on the far side of the channel islands in CA and had (poor) reception
3 - device with directional antenna up the mast - I always intended to do this but never did. I expect probably can get genuinely good coverage at 20nm out, maybe a bit more
Don't know, but it will definitely stop working once you get a few miles off shore in an ocean. That requires intersat communications which the RV plan doesn't provide.
(Inland lakes should work fine except perhaps for the very biggest ones like Lake Superior or the Caspian Sea. If lakes don't work with the RV plan, it's not for any technical reason.)
> That requires intersat communications which the RV plan doesn't provide.
Intersat (laser links) comms is not available at the moment. Fairly sure they simply geofence non-maritime accounts. As you can see from the maritime map, it only covers water next to the shore which is a good indicator that they still use ground stations directly to provide service.
EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.
Seems unlikely, more probable is that you’ll have other problems. I suspect there are other differences in the equipment and service delivery to tolerate ocean conditions.
This is great, because I've always wanted to surf the Internet while using the toilet on my yacht sailing around the ocean. Now all I need's a yacht and the great blue sea.
Please share your math. At $15M to launch 50 v1 satellites costing $250k each to build, they are looking at $320k per satellite
At $110/mo with 500k customers, they can afford to launch roughly 170 satellites per month. That is about break-even for their average launch cadence over the last 3 months.
They announced they are not launching any more v1s, and they cannot launch v2s on current hardware.
That is not to say that, even when they can launch new birds, they will be able to make a profit on regular peon service. They probably will depend utterly on top-dollar accounts. Don't be surprised if your peon bandwidth gets disappointingly slow as they add more customers, and more who are more important than you.
They also said that v2 has 5x more weight, and 10x more "capacity". Not sure what capacity is, and why falcon 9 isn't enough for something that's giving them 2x more "capacity" per unit mass.
Capacity is supposed to mean something like bits per second, although of course there are lots of other numbers that are important. One wonders who they have farmed out the packet handling to. Shoveling a commercial router on there would probably be a mistake, because of the "harsh" orbital environment, the restricted power budget, and the extremely variable routing environment.
Yea, I found the price point really disappointing. This only makes sense for large commercial users - leaves cruisers and small commercial customers high and dry.
Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't try and at least segment commercial pricing versus personal. I cannot imagine many people with personal boats under like 60 feet would stomach 5k a month for internet and there are far far more boats under 60 feet than ones bigger than that (At least in chicago harbors where I am at).
YES! I've been waiting for this.
Current starlink systems are a) region-locked (communicate to the same ground station) and b) require a still surface.
This is great :-)
Wow they are now clearly selling a product that depends upon starlink 2.0 satellites which depend upon starship for launch. Starship tests haven't even attempted a static fire on their launch platform let alone a stacked launch attempt.
Not to mention, their launch calculations include re-use based upon a completely invented and also untested catching apparatus.
The V1.5 Starlink sats have the laser interconnects, and I suspect they would be able to launch enough of those with Falcon 9 to cover at least the most popular corridors (North America <-> Europe crossing).
Musk companies have a habit of going all in, then claiming they didn't when the bill comes due. So far it has worked, but I wouldn't bet on the coverage expanding much for the next 2 years.
Right: coverage will increase to places that would add the shitload of high-ticket subscribers they will need to be able to continue operating at all, once the first tranche of birds drops out.
It's not clear to me whether this means physically or economically; i.e., could the 2.0 satellites be put into orbit by Falcon but not at a cost that would make it worth it?
It is always a mistake to assume his tweets mean anything specific. He means they won't be launching 2.0 birds on Falcon, full stop. Reasons are slippery things.
Anyone got ideas whether sattelites like Starlink can be used for military purposes or SigInt? Snowden revelations about goverment agencies and military contracts in Musk companies, one could imagine...
$5000 a month? Who is this for? I'm a little confused. Seems like even the military would be reluctant at that price point, let alone private boat owners who aren't multimillionaires.
While I agree that the military would be unlikely to use this civilian service on warships, it's not because of the price where $5000 would be a rounding error in the operational cost of the ship.
I see this more for commercial operators, like the Ferry between Seattle and Victoria BC - they could sell high speed internet for $10/trip and make a profit if they can sell it to 500 passengers/month.
It's for those vessels already paying $5000+ a month for inferior service. I'm a coastal cruiser myself; obviously I will use the RV package on my boat.
The second sentence in the paragraph at the top of the home page is pricing.
Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction.
Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you when you waste my time.
This is something SpaceX does extremely well in general. Check out https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ for example: fill in your orbit, payload mass and earliest launch date and it will give you a quote. This is to me the gold standard of what I would love to have (but is remarkably difficult to get) from any industrial supplier.
Could you share a screenshot? I don't see pricing anywhere on the page, though near the bottom it says "PAY AS YOU GO". Likely geolocation, though I'm curious what I'm missing.
EDIT: used VPN.
Canada version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea.
US Version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea. $5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals.
Interesting. I wonder why. If it really is a problem with pricing in local currencies, they could have explicitly listed the prices in USD/US$ or something.
Not if you're loading from a UK IP they don't (I'm assume they geotarget pricing; the non-maritime pages display prices in GBP and the maritime just gives a max download speed)
Not all products are as much of a commodity as bandwidth.
Call for pricing is usually B2B. Best case they want a salesperson to twist your arm, worst case the price is as much as they can squeeze out of you. If you ask why they waste people's time like this they'll say they're actually delivering maximum value. It's dishonest and archaic.
I think this is a matter of perspective. I founded a company that sold b2b software and experimented with removing pricing from my website. The challenge is the cost to complete each sale was highly variable which made it difficult to advertise fixed pricing. Consider the following:
If the buyer is an enterprise they expect a discount. The buyer may require the seller to use a supplier management tool like Arriba which has a monthly subscription fee. The buyer may purchase through a reseller, in which case the reseller expects a percentage of the transaction. The buyer may require custom contracts which can cost thousands of dollars in legal fees. The buyer may require extensive audits, pages of questionnaires and more which can take significant time and resources to complete. The buyer may hold back payment for up to 180 days.
So from my perspective, the problem is not the seller, the problem here is the enterprise buyer. If the buyer was willing to purchase from a website, with a credit card, and accept standard terms and pricing without modification, you would probably see much more transparent pricing and encounter fewer "contact sales" buttons.
I appreciate seeing a perspective from the "other side" on this. Still, as a small business operator occasionally making B2B purchases, I still find "call for pricing" annoying and assume it will mean that the product is way out of my price range.
Could there be some middle ground? Could you do something like "prices start at $X; additional fees may apply?" At least give us a ballpark number; something from which I can decide if it's worth my time to investigate further.
B2B sales is a different game that can be a two-way conversation rather than just supply and demand curves intersecting at a price. Often there is competitive analysis involved before choosing among alternatives and a vendor will want to make sure their product is best represented in that view. It’s also a chance for them to learn any other decision factors (besides price) they might be able to address. In this case, I suggest the novelty of pricing out a rocket launch is partly clever promotion, though also aspirationally a first step towards regularly booked space services.
My favorite is when they have a form to fill out for them to contact you and the form explicitly asks your preferred method of contact. Despite selecting email they immediately disregard your preference and call you.
The usual reason for that pattern is that they want to do variable pricing depending on how much their product is worth to you, but yeah, it's never a good sign...
How about we stop sending starlink to Ukraine, deploying it across the worlds oceans and give it to us here in Tennessee who’ve been waiting over a year on the waiting list.
$5000 a month? That's pretty embarrassing, isn't it? That indicates they aren't doing satellite-to-satellite and are using some kind of specialized hardware to simply send the signal to coastal satellites from farther away.
Inmarsat is the only viable alternative for smaller boats that offers unlimited data plans, has higher latency due to being geostationary, much lower bandwidth, and charges about $8000 for a gigabyte…
I‘m not sure what Ku or Ka band GEO providers charge, but I doubt you can find anything competitive there either, and these require very large antennas.
Considering the coverage map is mostly coastal waters, private LTE and 5g are the 'budget' competition (for now). In some areas like the Gulf of Mexico, a not insignificant portion of the water is serviced by LTE that you can roam onto using a conventional TMobile, Sprint or AT&T SIM, often without an additional cost.
Agreed, currently it does not seem to be competitive (Inmarsat also offers significant discounts on their coastal plans for the same reason). But with their projected coverage in Q4 2022 and Q1 2023, it's a very different story.
Compared to what their architecture should enable. Sure, it's more satellites consumed per request but there aren't _that_ many satellites between some random point in the Pacific and the nearest base station. Certainly seems like it's not scaling that well if the price jumps from ~$120 to $5000.
It seems more of a question of supply and demand than a limitation of their technology. If the competition currently charges more than $5000, why should they charge (much) less?
It is! But their architecture should enable them to hit a much lower price point. Maybe it's just charging what the market will bear? If this is what they need to charge to be profitable, though, that indicates the satellite-to-satellite approach doesn't scale well, or they've been losing money.
If you selling a service that doesn't yet exist (or where you are an order of magnitude cheaper than the competition), usually you want to charge as much as you can while still selling all your inventory.
Or maybe it's the Tesla Roadster of this particular long-term plan. Some scoff, others wait for the price on the upcoming tier that's not quite 350 Mbps...
Starting in Q4/2022 they want to cover mid-latitudes around the globe. That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? (This is a bit surprising - on one hand, this step extends coverage towards higher and lower latitudes but on the other hand not as much as they already have inland-coverage (cf. Brazil). It also extends longitudinally around all of the globe?).
Coverage above mid-latitudes requires satellites in polar orbits to join the network. (Their non-polar orbits have an inclination of 53° which means that satellites go no further north or south than that (plus a bit whatever their range is)).
https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map....