
SpaceX Is Launching 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Tonight - mmohades
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/15/watch-spacexs-60-satellite-starlink-launch-tonight-right-here/
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smcguinness
Scrubbed till tomorrow, May 16th at 7:30pm EST.

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ulkesh
No, 7:30pm Pacific, 10:30pm eastern.

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macintux
And not EST regardless.

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leesec
It would be hard to imagine they don't have a significant advantage in this
massive new space with 4 billion or more potential customers.

Incredible stuff.

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new_realist
Most people live in cities and these satellites can't serve a large number of
simultaneous users. Rural and worse that rural are the best applications.

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taneq
You wouldn't have a Starlink antenna each. You'd have as many Starlink
antennas as was reasonable then everyone would use traditional last-mile
technologies to connect to them. The available bandwidth sounds reasonably
high so it should still result in acceptable speeds unless your population
density is bonkers.

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sliken
For more details:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_\(satellite_constellation\))

In short they are planning to use a low orbit (high drag/low lifetime) to
launch Ku- and Ka-band sats.

I couldn't find anything on what the consumer side of this would look like,
especially since the low orbits means you can't just point a dish at a sat...
at least without some fancy tracking.

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paulsutter
The consumer side will be a phased array “pizza box” that automatically
locates satellites and aims the signal, and should work on vehicles as well as
stationary installations

The most important implication of the low altitude is low latency. As low as
(or potentially lower than) in-ground fiber. It will be the first good
satellite internet.

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new_realist
To the metro fiber is about 2 ms. This is 15-25 ms (I've seen conflicting
numbers).

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gbear605
Yeah, but then another 15-25ms for sat to server while your fiber is another
60ms to server.

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hunter2_
Why is that? I assume you mean a server so far away that the number of hops
(switches, etc) is higher on land than over the air? Without a large hop count
difference, I don't see why air vs ground fiber would be terribly different.
Air takes a direct path but with LEO satellite there's some height, and fiber
takes a slightly less direct path but without height and with switches.

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tlb
Light only moves at about 60% the speed of light in glass fiber.
(Specifically, it goes at C / refractive index)

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itake
Scrubbed till tomorrow 7:30pm Pacific, 10:30pm eastern.

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person_of_color
What's the consumer bandwidth here?

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ulkesh
Scrubbed until tomorrow.

