It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house. It's a cool sight to see because there are up to 60 of them crossing the sky at the same time in a line.
That was unexpectedly splendid: my city isn't covered by StreetView, with the sole exception of the interior of the city museum in the old palace. So according to the simulated view tomorrow at 0612 I can look for a string of pearls gliding across the gilded baroque ceiling of my unaccustomedly spacious bedroom.
Most users will let the site use their device’s gps. Having the first step to be ”input your gps coordinates” would alienate a HUGE portion of the possible users.
The site's most important feature is Street View, and a postal code doesn't allow Street View to work. Neither does geoip.
I used to display only the 3D globe by default, with a gigantic bright green button to switch to street view. The majority of people never saw the Street View feature even though it was only one button press away. The button even had an animated effect to draw attention. If you also had to type in some text before seeing Street View, hardly anyone would bother.
I don’t have data backing this, but I can’t imagine the vast majority of people aren’t totally fine giving their location to a site like this if they’re interested.
Your way seems like it just adds a step and possible side effects like people thinking less of the site for not having their correct location or not seeing the improve location option after being turned off, etc.
It's the old browser, not anything to do with your privacy settings. Sorry, when you decide to use an old and uncommon browser version the price you pay is that sites aren't going to be testing compatibility with it.
I had the same issue the first time I loaded the page on iOS 13.3 safari. Reloading the page fixed it. Having things be too automatic causes failures to be catastrophic rather than mild.
Firefox 60 is from May 2018. It's 12 major versions behind. You may not like it, but it's a fact that web browsers change quickly these days. Mozilla may support ESR for a year but I don't. This is a side project and my test matrix is already too large; I don't have time to test uncommon versions of each browser.
I'm just a little surprised that Firefox would have changed enough since last May to break your site.
And there's also the other tweaks I've made. For example, I don't allow WebGL or WebRTC. And I spoof referrer to a site's root. Plus other stuff that I don't recall offhand.
But anyway, now I'm curious, so I'll test in some otherf VMs, with different browsers.
The site doesn't work at all on the iPad I'm reading HN with right now, but I'm not complaining about it because it's running iOS 10.0.1. I expect lots of sites to not work correctly -- and they often don't!
I wasn't really complaining. I just mentioned it. And that was unnecessary, and distracted from my real point. I only mentioned it to explain why I couldn't see behavior after answering the popup about location permission.
Yes this was my immediate thought. Especially if I want to check multiple locations for e.g. family. When I declined to share location I got an exception.
...suddenly I'm shy about listing my finger printable browser details online. I'll tell you I'm using brave.
I still can't use the app because the location denial is permanent, so I'll have to clear something in the browser...might be a bug worth addressing.
Edit 2: Jesus Christ man I had no idea I was giving you my fucking address. That's a little too granular for my taste, a warning would be nice. You could just use the zip code or prompt for the address, but seeing Google go straight to my address in streetview really rubs me the wrong way. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt but it looks like you're harvesting PII.
The address is used to show you a google street view pointing in the exact direction and part of the sky the satellites will cross. It's a super useful feature because it would otherwise be really hard to tell what angle or what part of the sky to watch. And accusing the guy of harvesting PII? Get a grip.
Look I can't edit the comment now but this isn't the kind of information that could be collected without the warning. Especially since an address with an IP can be deanonymizing.
I didn't click the "notify me" button but I imagine it's asking for either a phone number or an email.
If this is truly innocent I'm sorry for my reaction, but you should be asking people first, given the current state of advertisement and surveillance on the net. We both read HN.
> Edit 2: Jesus Christ man I had no idea I was giving you my fucking address. That's a little too granular for my taste
So the accuracy of the location being provided depends entirely on your device. From a website (or any other app) perspective, they simply request the client provide it's location.
Now if you happen to have a strong GPS lock on your device with 5m or less accuracy, that's not something the website (or app) knows ahead of time.
> If this is truly innocent I'm sorry for my reaction, but you should be asking people first, given the current state of advertisement and surveillance on the net. We both read HN.
Not trying to victim blame here, but if you're claiming more technical audience and concerns about privacy, are you genuinely unaware that this is how location services and permissions works? If so, I guess this is a painful learning experience for you. You're gonna have a bad time now as you think about how many different apps you've given location permissions too, because a lot of those apps will have a bunch of third party trackers involved that are connecting your IP, location, along with device identifier and any other information they can use to add to a much larger database to identify exactly who you are and everyone you know (think I'm exagerating on the last part? Have you ever shared your contacts list with an app like Whatsapp to find other contacts?)
The internet today sucks. I don't think this particular author is the person you want to be pooping hard on, they're highly unlikely to be part of the problem.
As a matter of fact I default to explicitly turning off all location permissions. I've gone to great pains to practice clean opsec. This is effectively a forced breach. I clicked on something cool expecting to be promoted for a zip code.
That's fine, but as GP said, the browser geolocation API asks for location data from the device, and this is what it gives you back. Every app and website that has a "use my location" button will provide your latitude and longitude as accurately as possible, which is usually high enough to know not only your address, but also that you are currently in your downstairs bathroom. I'm also a bit surprised that you are technically savvy enough to maintain strict opsec but you didn't know how geolocation services work on a smartphone. Regardless, the developer of the website does not deserve your ire for using a common browser API. The app could be improved by offering a UI for entering a zip code, but they didn't set out to steal your PII.
For this to be a forced breach, the website must be intentionally exploiting a security issue on the device to expose exact location coordinates. If so, I’d suggest perusing the source code, as there might be bug bounty money there. Or patching your device. EDIT: to be clear, this would also be a dick move by the website author and they should be publicly shamed more than this.
Alternatively, they may be accidentally triggering a vulnerability (more bug bounty money or reasons to patch)
Alternatively, you accidentally gave the permission for location services when prompted.
Alternatively, your IP has a GeoIP location that is at / very close to your home address. If this is the case, GeoIP databases are like telephone directories of yore. Except not only are they globally public, you also cant opt out.
And I suspect that you're using a VPN service, given the comment about deanonymization.
But really, this is exactly why it's kinda sorta pointless to use VPNs and Tor browser on smartphones. All it takes is one slipup, and your anonymity is toast.
hmmm, I'm in Firefox with NoScript. I received no warning about trying to use my location. According to the the street view, it placed my location at city hall in downtown. I actually live about 10 miles from there.
I'm confused about the reports of showing street view without entering a location. If you deny the location permission, it won't show street view unless you explicitly type in an address. Are you sure you didn't do that? Or maybe you visited the site sometime in the past and already granted location permission?
leolabs.space - does something similar for tracking low Earth orbit satellites. The great thing with this tool is that you can modify the velocity and filter the data.
Your site is exceptional, thanks for creating it. I used it a few weeks ago to see a Starlink pass over my area. I like how you added the simulated view in Streetview, I think that will help a lot of people understand what to look for that aren't necessarily astronomy types.
I saw the L2 group go over my house tonight! It was fantastic.
All my previous experience has been viewing the ISS, and watching the Starlink satellites go over was a much different experience. Each was only visible for a handful of seconds, but they kept coming one after the other in a perfect line, each equidistant from the next.
I didn't stay out to watch them all go by but it was a fantastic experience that I'd recommend to anyone.
I'd just like to say thank you so much for posting this link! Because of you, I went to a beach bonfire in New Zealand tonight, and had a beautiful view of Starlink at 10:02 pm. I was so excited when I saw it that I disturbed many other conversations, but other people were equally amazed!
I'm working to implement alerts via calendar events right now actually. I already have alerts based on web push, but frankly the web push notifications API sucks. You only get the notifications on one device, they are delayed by random amounts of time (hours in some cases), the UI for enabling them is spammy and lame, and Safari doesn't support them.
Calendar events suck too because there's no standard way to add an event to a system calendar across platforms. Even the same browser on different platforms acts differently.
Times are always displayed in your local time zone according to your OS/web browser settings. Now that you mention it, I should put an "add to calendar" link in there.
I finished the "add to calendar" feature, and also I started converting and displaying time zones (if you choose a location that's outside your local time zone).
Oh that's great. Now I can better aim my Elon-Sattelite-fryer device.
I already collected 25 old microwave ovens which I plan to operate as phased array to produce a collimated beam of microwaves directed at the satellites to fry their electronics. I might have a better chance If know the exact frequency their receivers are tuned to. Does anybody know more?
The reckless littering of our precious LEO must end here!
I work remotely and would love to live in a rural area but I'm largely tethered to suburbia for the internet speeds. I can't express how excited I am at the possibilities coming from satellite internet.
fwiw, I appreciated it. I just wrote this in a separate forum:
> don't miss out on this chance to see Elon Musk's secret plans for world domination before he goes full megalomaniacal evil Iron Man, when we can still naively look up in the sky and pretend it's nice
While I'm sure this is mostly not-that-likely, I totally agree that a discussion about the vulnerability of such systems would be intriguing. What kind of cyberpunk future are we developing as a check against the inevitability of some billionaire's less-than-wholesome private interstellar armament? I'm sure such a discussion may provide a modicum of comfort to Johnny Depp's ex-wives, at least.
It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house
This must be made up. I have been assured repeatedly on HN that Starlink is a visual non-factor, and that nobody would notice them in the sky, they won't get in the way of astronomy, stargazing, or just enjoying the night sky like humans have done for thousands of years.
The satellites are much more visible when they were just launched, when they are in a “low drag” configuration. It takes some time for them to reach operational altitude, at which point they shift to a “low brightness” configuration.
And I don’t think anyone ever (credibly) said they don’t affect astronomy. They do. Fortunately SpaceX is working with the astronomy community to minimize the effect.
If I do look up in the nights sky and see many faint little points, it’s still something to marvel at. But I think once at operational altitude they will be difficult to see with the naked eye.
I saw the first Starlink set a couple of weeks ago, looking up from a city street. It is amazing sight, a line of moving stars, not very bright, stretching horizon to horizon. When all the satellites are in orbit, it will drastically change the night sky, especially in the early evening when they reflect the most light from the Sun.
>"Hundreds of cities and dozens of countries, fine for living but previously entirely unsuitable for a place of business, will blink from red to green on the map once Starlink goes live."
this reads like a marketing piece rather than actual analysis. Throughput of a single satellite is 20Gbps. The finished constellation if I recall correctly is supposed to be about 12k satellites. So about ~250.000Gbps. So assuming you offer everyone a 100MB/s connection, that's... one city? And that doesn't account for transmission between the satellites or satellites not in range and so on, and the fact that those satellites are short-lived and need to be replaced.
How is this supposed to be economical or scale compared to regular terrestrial networks?
And one point on the social impact. We have heard this idea that you just need to 'connect people' over the internet to somehow give every disadvantaged place economic opportunity for decades now. This isn't how the real world works. Everyone still runs to California/their national equivalent You can count the areas where the VC money goes on one hand. Putting a satellite in the sky over Siberia isn't going to upend the social realities of geography.
No ISP actually allocates enough upstream and peering connections for every customer to use their connections at full speed at the same time, just as no cellphone provider build their network out so every customer can be on the phone at the same time.
In both setups, there are multiple levels of bottlenecks. The bottom line is that a properly configured network makes sure they can cover their usual peak usage easily, and has enough spare capacity that special events don't impact much of the customer base, and those it impact it doesn't do so much.
Consider that ISPs that offer gigabit speeds can't easily put in individual (or even paired) networking equipment that can serve thousands of people at that speed, because such equipment doesn't exist or is far too expensive to be using all over the place in the network. What you really see is that 100 people on gigabit circuits during peak usage (likely Netflix prime time in the evening) will use less than even a fiftieth or h undredth of their allocated capacity (unless you're steaming 4k all the time, and then you'll probably use about a fortieth of a gigabit sustained). As usage goes up, ISPs allocate more resources and shift traffic around to make sure they can supply for the demand. If done well, you don't ever notice.
You can also see this in highways and freeways. No highway is build to serve all the possible people that could use it at the same time, it's built to service what the number of people expected to use it in a specific time period is. This is also a good idea of what it's like when planning fails, as these works require a long lead time and a lot of accurate forecasting that's hard, so you often see vastly under-provisioned systems, and even by the time they upgrade them, they are sometimes already under-provisioned at the new size (or the time until it's under-provisioned is relatively short).
There are scant details about what the launched product will look like in practice, but keep in mind that urban and suburban areas are spoiled by high-speed 4G LTE and wired gigabit. The vast majority of the US, by land area, has to chose from dial-up and very expensive pre-Starlink satelite Internet service. Even 1 Mbit is a huge improvement over 56 kbps.
I'm haven't looked into the economics of running fiber everywhere, as compared to launching an extensive constellation of satellites but I will note that SpaceX has the competitive advantage of having at-cost access to reusable rockets, compared to an outside party paying SpaceX market rates for transit to space.
The pre-starlink stuff isn’t just expensive. It’s slow, has crazy high latency, and low transfer caps (the biggest you can get for geosynchronous might be 20GB a month no matter how much you want to pay.)
Really anything is better than what’s currently available in the rural US. Having grown up there I’m kind of mad that we give so much spectrum to cell companies who block people from setting up terrestrial radio networks in places like this.
I live in the greater Washington DC metro area (Census-defined) and don't have internet access at my farm. No cable and no DSL available. I connect through a wireless 4G hotspot. This is really inadequate, my kids can't get online and we can't do any connected household stuff like Alexa or Ring. Our entire community is praying for Starlink!!!
I don't agree. I grew up (partially) before DSL, as did everybody before Gen Z, and I'm very thankful for it. I don't think always on internet is necessary for a fulfilling childhood. There's so much more to the world than the internet.
It's not if society is generally structured around that, sure.
But if the only way to find out what your homework is is a website, and that homework is posted as a multimegabyte PDF (this is how it's working for my kids, not a hypothetical), then lack of an available internet connection immediately affects your ability to effectively attend school, for example.
Now we can have a discussion about whether school is necessary for a fulfilling childhood, of course. :)
On one hand, as other sibling posts are pointing out, you're comparing true network capacity with subscribed ("sold") capacity; those are massively different by orders of magnitude (depending on how shitty your ISP is.)
On the other hand, it's far worse than "20G per satellite." Bandwidth is limited by available RF spectrum, and that's not magically gonna increase with satellite count. Best thing they can try is limit the coverage area of each radio as much as possible, but there's limits to that and now you have an onslaught of handovers since the satellites are moving quite fast.
I honestly am too lazy to do the math, but my gut says this may work great for larger areas with lower population density (let's say the Amazon, U.S. Midwest, Australia, Sibiria, etc.) but it's not gonna replace high-density broadband access.
Also, just for comparison, current optical network technology (in the market, not research) puts 50G on a single wavelength on an optical fiber. There's 80 wavelengths in a medium-density DWDM setup, so that's 4T ... on a single strand. A low-density cable has 12 cores (that's what you deploy on the outskirts of your network), so, uh, 48 terabit/s with current technology. Infrastructure cables are commonly 144 cores, that's 576 terabit/s...
(These are obviously "maximum" numbers, you rarely see all 80 wavelengths or all 144 strands in use, and there's gonna be slower links like 10G occupying some wavelengths too.)
> "On the other hand, it's far worse than "20G per satellite." Bandwidth is limited by available RF spectrum, and that's not magically gonna increase with satellite count."
That's not true. More satellites allows you to put them in lower orbits, increasing spatial multiplexing. Yes, even for the same spectrum.
This is not like mobile where the phones have fairly omnidirectional antenna (improving to a handful of elements under 5G). The user terminals will have dozens if not hundreds or thousands of phased array elements, allowing connections to multiple satellites simultaneously and very narrow beamwidths. The satellites also have phased arrays with lots of elements.
I agree that dense cities and optical fiber will still be able to beat out Starlink (and similar), but there is PLENTY of room for using the same amount of RF spectrum for vastly greater bandwidth using spatial multiplexing and phased arrays on both ends and multiple, cooperating satellites in view simultaneously.
That's true for dedicated circuits but no residential or even small business Internet plans are dedicated. You can put at least 200 customers on a 1 gigabit connection and they'll still get 100 Mbps+ speedtests even during peak usage times of the day.
My ISP seems to share your optimism, but I fear it must be grossly overprovisioned, or they have no intention of providing the agreed upon and advertised speeds.
Probably they're overselling at a much worse ratio than I described, or there are other problems in their infrastructure causing poor performance (likely both). It's not at all uncommon for ISPs to put even like 10,000 customers on a 10gbps line. 10 years ago that actually would have been fine, but bandwidth usage per customer has increased since then and naturally ISPs don't upgrade fast enough.
I've been on connections where the ISP (AT&T) tried this due to an ancient backhaul where it grossly over-committed on bandwidth. The neighbors would have kids home after school streaming three netflix 4k streams, and we would watch our speeds tank. Some bizarre QOS config seemed to prioritize their connection over ours. It ticked me off enough I almost started deauthing their devices because I couldn't load a simple web page.
On the other hand, we finally got FTTH and it's great. So nice to have good speeds.
They have approval for up to 42,000 satellites, most internet connections are shared at homes and businesses, and broadband is over subscribed anyway.
One way to look at it is up to 42 million 4k streams at the same time. But, a significant fraction of the constellation will be over the ocean or other minimally inhabited regions so something like 25% of total bandwidth is likely utilized at any one time. However, that’s spread around the globe with some areas like Hawaii having much better than average available bandwidth.
I don't think there is a treaty about it. These satellites are in space, not in the air. Around 100km usually is used as the boundary or, more practically, as high as your anti-aircraft missiles can go. It does not really make sense to claim everything up in a cone from your country to infinity. Multiple countries claiming different planets at different times would be weird.
SpaceX got approval to launch these satellites from the FCC.
Wasn't some time ago a Chinese satellite blown from their orbit by a missile? I think current technology allows you to blow stuff up from sky quite more then just 100 Km.
Why? Market forces dictate that they should charge _more_ (likely have less competition there; will also be able to provide better service than in densely-populated areas).
Regarding the social impact, while likely overstated it has the possibility of making a real impact. Rural communities in upstate NY (Catskills, Adirondacks) have had their tourist season drop to ~6 weeks in the summer, basically because people can't take so much time off while being out of contact (there is limited internet and cell phone service. Not having either is the norm). Being able to work remotely from those types of locations will extend that tourist season and help the local economies there. For some areas, this may be enough to move the economy from depressed to prosperous.
Out here it is purely economics and population density. I live in West TN and the nearest cell phone tower is 7 miles in a straight line from my house. There is one provider that works here, and a good signal is 2 bards, but usually, 1 is normal and things like 4g or LTE rarely work.
I offered $1/yr lease to the providers, all of them, to put a tower on my farm and not one of them is even a little interested.
I am willing to bet that changes once Starlink is within the finish line. My dad talks of a small town here in Canada that refused to upgrade the towers and when a private citizen started applying to create his own company magically it was suddenly economic for Telus to put up a tower.
I know that I feel ripped off every single day by what we pay for mobile data compared to the rest of the world. If Starlink suddenly shows up there is an alternative to Bell Rogers Telus. They should be shaking in their boots. It should be easy for Starlink to undercut their business because they made a business out of customer gouging.
Obviously you meant “bars” but I found myself wondering what kind of throughput a single Bard has, assuming they sing at maximum speed...
Assuming a single (very talented) bard can sing five words per second at maximum speed, and assuming each word is a few bytes, plus some kind of checksum occasionally, we are looking at very roughly 200 bps.
So “two bards” is about 400 bps, or far, far slower than my first modem :)
Each letter in sensible english sentences carries only about 1 bit worth of information. So assuming 5 words per second and each word is 5 letters on average, it's just 25 bps per bard.
If it's not sensible, I'm sure the speed will also be correspondingly slower.
This honestly sounds more like an issue of social policy.
The big ISPs make things like municipal broadband very hard to bring about. This leaves connectivity of these communities in the hands of an executive many miles away, and they will always place more attention to the massive profits of bringing 5G to people in rich cities (themselves included) than servicing low or even no-profit markets.
At this point some level of internet access could and maybe should be considered a public utility.
I often wonder how Tesla will make use of Starlink. Such a huge data stream up and down will enable all sorts of interesting things. Maybe each car won't need a brain, maybe one huge brain will drive all cars. Sync all the cars up, make them act like a single giant distributed being.
It's a shared medium, as is internet via cable. The 100MB/s or whatever they'll offer will be the peak throughput you can achieve.
Aside from that they already have plans to send up 30.000 more satellites [1] and of course future satellites might also have a significantly higher throughput.
I think he meant 100 Mb/s, which is much more reasonable but still pretty high for a single person. The average bitrate of a youtube video is about 6mbps.
An average constant bitrate per person in the evenings is perhaps around 10 Mb/s. So 25 million people could use this assuming 100% satellite use.
Even at 100-1000x oversubscription, this doesn't seem like a solution for the "half of humanity" that the article claims this will affect (~3.9B people as of today).
I certainly find Starlink interesting, but I think its impact will be a lot smaller than the author does.
I may be biased as the CTO of a company that connects rural, small subsaharan African farmers with financing, but the role out of cell infrastructure has definitely changed the world in a good chunk of rural Kenya at least.
Contrary to what Musk & co's claims it doesn't look like this will help the people/countries who actually need access, at least not with the prices that they are saying they will charge. Someone scatter-plotted the GDP of countries and internet penetration, and it turns out none of the countries who need access can afford starlink internet. (There are many other similar calculations out there on the interwebs).
Doesn't it also depend on how wealthy your neighbors are?
For an extreme example, an area with extremely low population (like the middle of the ocean), the bandwidth (at least surface to satellite bandwidth) will be wasted if no one is using it. The price could be much lower.
A poor community in a rich and population dense area probably would be priced out.
Will be interesting to see how it shakes out in practice. I could see it go both ways honestly.
Starlink will sell at pretty much whatever price it needs to, since serving data has effectively no marginal cost. The only unavoidable one is the ($300) base station, but people can share.
For the average bandwidth usage of a city to be 100 MB/s per user, the average monthly total per user would have to be 263,974 GB. Obviously the real figure is much, much less than that.
Sure not everyone is always going to be using it at the same time, but streaming times are going to be around the same because most people will clock off at around the same time, and new technology such as Google Stadia, the introduction of 4k streaming, etc. mean that it's very likely that people will start needing more bandwidth soon, no?
Also the target audience of this, the people that will be able to afford it, are going to be highly paid people (assumption: it's going be charged higher than 30£/month, or even £60/mo) who will be more likely to do those sorts of activities due to having more free time.
Unless the comment has been edited, they never claimed they were "the average".
The claimed that most people aren't going to use 100 MB/s 24/7/365 and gave themselves as an example.
Their data point is useful, as the chance of the typical user downloading 263,974 GB a month when they download 4 GB is incredibly low.
Even if they were an outlier, it's far more reasonable to think that they are an outlier by using far more data, not far less data, then typical. Their data point remains useful even if they are an outlier.
To reiterate - they never claimed to be average or an outlier, in fact there is no claim like that at all.
I'll allow it... According to this 2018 article even a lot of "Unlimited" plans are actually around a 20 GB/month cap before they start throttling speeds. [0]
- Verizon’s Beyond Unlimited plan is capped at 22GB of high-speed 4G LTE data per month, while the Above Unlimited is curbed at 75GB.
- AT&T caps both unlimited plans at 22GB of data per billing cycle, after which it may slow your speeds down
- Sprint will throttle your speeds if you exceed more than 50GB of data in a month but, as you can see, your speeds are throttled from the get-go for most things anyway.
- T-Mobile One includes 50GB of high-speed 4G LTE data. Once you go above that, as with other carriers, T-Mobile can drop this to slower speeds.
I'm also interested to see what kind of throughput they can achieve with a 'briefcase sized' terminal. Our company makes satellite terminals for military, and from that experience I can't really see the physics working for hundreds of Mbps with some type of panel antenna (phased array, etc.) that small at any kind of decent spectral/power efficiency...
>How is this supposed to be economical or scale compared to regular terrestrial networks?
I don't think it is. People think they're going to get unlimited data, gigabit connection, etc etc and I think they're all highly delusional.
Starlink is not meant to replace wired internet, it's meant to give HughesNet customers something that is actually usable. It's meant to give people in remote areas with no wired connection available something that actually allows them to meaningfully interact with the internet.
Realistically I see it like this:
I think the bulk of the customers will always be companies working in remote areas such as ships, oil rigs, mining operations, gas stations primarily serving semi trucks in rural areas along highways etc. Also, first responder agencies as it will be handy in grid-down natural disasters for command centers.
Then you'll have RV parks, camp sites, rest stops, EV charging locations in remote areas, etc reselling access by subscription or in time increments.
Then you'll have folks that just live in rural areas that want something better than HughesNet and possibly THOW/vanlife folks that work remotely and move frequently.
Then you'll have low-profit/served-at-cost customers that will be schools in developing nations, especially in rural areas.
Do you think California would be prosperous without connectivity?
It’s not 100% of it, but it is absolutely an essential prerequisite. Slow or no internet makes places a nonstarter. Having a fallback option to a single national telco lets lots of places start the long process of building an information economy that they cannot begin at all without it.
it's a prerequisite sure I don't disagree. But it's actually funny in how many ways California is mismanaged, from lack of public transport to infrastructure to rent cost and tax burden and silly regulations and still people run there. The human network-effect is insanely substantial.
If you were to do napkin math on which cities have the best internet speeds and the lowest cost of doing business, and the best regulations then probably we'd all have moved to Estonia by now, but people are still more likely to go to Israel, a place in the middle of a warzone.
So for that reason, I find hyping technology up as the great equalizer very cynical. It's mostly still people and culture at the end of the day.
The human network effect is substantial, but constantly decreasing with increasing connectivity. It’s getting easier and easier to get the same benefits online without much of the downsides.
If people can fall in love online, they can certainly collaborate without having to smell each other.
That is correct, as someone looking for a remote job opportunity, 95+% of the "remote" job posts are still restringed to residents of specific countries/zones. Having good connectivity or being in the same time-zone matter very little.
I solved this by incorporating a company (b2b consulting) and spending time periodically in the cities my clients live/work in. Work onsite for a couple weeks, then go home and finish the project.
If you’re remote, they shouldn’t care where you are. It’s just a sales issue, then, and can be overcome like any other sales objection.
> If you’re remote, they shouldn’t care where you are
It depends on whether you are an employee or contractor. For a contractor, it mostly shouldn't matter. (Some countries, especially countries with which the HQ country has difficult relations, may represent unacceptable risk even for a contractor.)
With an employee, the employer has to be registered to pay tax in the country; they need to familiarise themselves with the labour laws of the country to ensure they comply with them; they may need to make various arrangements with respect to benefits (insurance, retirement, etc); usually to do all this they need to have a legal entity set up in the country, which in turn also needs things like local bank accounts, directors appointed, accounting and auditing contracts, etc. For the first employee in a country, that can be a lot of overhead. If some manager wants to hire some random person in country X where there are currently no employees, it probably isn't worth it unless they plan to hire more people in country X, or that person is someone very special.
A workaround some places use is contract with some sort of agency who acts as the employee's legal employer and handles all those local legal/tax/benefits/etc issues. However, that adds overhead costs, and if a firm doesn't already have a relationship with such an agency, they probably aren't going to start one just because some manager wants to hire somebody in a country in which there is no legal entity.
You can do a lot of business with much less bandwidth than that. Isn’t this more about getting them ability to send emails and read text and information and not things like livestream?
The throughput per satellite is not fixed. The constellation is designed to be refreshed and upgraded (more beams, more phased array elements, better back-end) about every 4-5 years. Geosynchronous satellites can have up to 1 terabit per satellite (and increasing). The size of the constellation may eventually be up to 40,000 satellites, many at an even lower altitude which increases gain in each direction. So on the order of 40Petabit/s throughput is doable in the medium-term.
And of course, people don't use 100MB/s constantly. The ratio is not uncommonly 1:100 in max vs average throughput, and this ratio is higher the greater the max bandwidth (average used throughput increases sub-linearly with max throughput). So say about 1Mbps average per user with 40Pbps constellation-wide, and you're looking at on the order of billions of connections possible at the largest scale.
Still about 12Pbps possible at 12000 satellites. Enough for billions of connections still.
Even at 20Gbps and 12,000 satellites and 1Mbps average usage per connection, that's still on the order of a hundred million connections.
More likely, they'll have fewer-than-billions of connections with more available average bandwidth than 1Mbps. But it definitely is a gamechanger in rural internet capability.
I agree with the social impact point. The wording reminds me a lot of what Zuckerburg's mission for Facebook was for the longest time: connect people and everything will be great. I think this is amazing and definitely going to change the world, but we in the tech world need to curb our hubris because it's bitten us before, and if unchecked, it will bit us again.
This was my reaction as well. It seems that looming existential threat the tech industry is currently grappling with is a direct result of the laissez-faire idealism of the early internet pioneers. Obviously the internet is a net-benefit to the human race but we really should learn from our previous mistakes. I'm not sure what the solution is but we shouldn't pretend that there won't be some criminals and terrorists among the ~3Bn people who suddenly find themselves connected.
They don't have to serve the whole city to generate a benefit - they just have to offer competition so that the incumbents can't abuse their monopoly position.
Because they can reallocate satellite time to a new region quite cheaply, they could have approximately zero customers while forcing ISPs around the globe to behave sensibly.
Is the optimism about being able to bypass censorship really valid? SpaceX may be resistant to the censorship demands of some governments, but a lot of other things need to happen to get someone online.
To begin with you need to acquire Starlink's receiver, which probably makes it inaccessible to North Koreans for example, and difficult to acquire for citizens of any country that has efficient import controls.
Then you have to use it without being detected. I have no idea whether that is easy or hard -- can you put the receiver in a covert location? Can the government drive a van around your neighborhood and detect signals going to and from the receiver, or triangulate it in some other way?
If it bypasses existing censorship infrastructure in a given country and Starlink refuses to comply with censorship, you can guarantee that country will make it illegal, and in some cases introduce some scary penalties for using it (i.e. prison).
So, I think you're mostly right, but not for these reasons. People have been sneaking forbidden things past borders for a long time. Think of the drug trade. Every country has a chemical drug trade it seems, even countries where the penalty is death such as Thailand. Then you also have to think that countries like China... Will be the countries making those Starlink receivers, so Chinese people looking to bypass the firewall may not have to get the equipment around any borders. They might be able to pick them up at the back of the factory, or when they "fall off a truck".
I also think it might be somewhat difficult to detect and track receivers down. You need specialized equipment to triangulate receivers, multiple vehicles. AFAIK Starling satellites use phased array antennas, which, if I understand correctly, might mean that they can sort of direct a beam towards you, and your dish will be pointed at the sky, not wasting power directing waves in every direction. That makes triangulation significantly harder than it would be for a cellphone.
That being said, Elon Musk can't just enable Starlink everywhere. China has enormous political leverage and a powerful military, and Tesla just finished building a new factory there. He can't just give them the middle finger. The official policy will be to either comply with the Chinese filtering rules, or not offer Starlink in China. Still, if Elon does care about censorship, maybe he will leave some kind of backdoor... Maybe it will be surprisingly easy to "crack" your Starlink receiver and set it to a fake country code, and suddenly have access to unfiltered US-region internet from anywhere (think mod chips). Then, China and other countries may not care enough to crack down. People routinely bypass the Chinese firewall using VPNs, and as far as I know, they're not going to prison for it. Hopefully it remains that way.
> You need specialized equipment to triangulate receivers, multiple vehicles
It's not "specialized", more like just dedicated, because those devices are pretty simple to create. Also, mathematically, one "running" vehicle is enough, but two is minimum for the sake of precision and efficiency.
> AFAIK Starling satellites use phased array antennas,
Phased arrays do leak signals all over the place ("side lobe"). If transmit power is high enough, this can be detected miles away. Say, during military exercise, activating phased-array based FCR randomly rings RWRs of nearby jets (if the signal is not whitelisted beforehand).
> maybe he will leave some kind of backdoor... Maybe it will be surprisingly easy to "crack" your Starlink receiver and set it to a fake country code, and suddenly have access to unfiltered US-region internet from anywhere
I don't get where people get this kind of blind optimism. The reality is that traffic control can be imposed based on physical location of satellite. Plus, VPN is cheap and works just okay, except occasional take downs. This new internet won't cause any kind of paradigm shift that some people desperately try to push.
> Phased arrays do leak signals all over the place ("side lobe")
I would expect the intensity of those signals to be constantly varying, given that multiple satellites are moving in the sky on different orbital planes. I'm also assuming that said "side lobes" are not equal in intensity in every direction. That has to be significantly more difficult to triangulate than a cellphone or an AM radio emitter. In other words, you would need trained crews specifically trying to locate Starlink users.
> The reality is that traffic control can be imposed based on physical location of satellite.
Satellites don't have enough fuel to constantly dodge specific countries. We're talking about low earth orbit satellites, that's one orbit every 1.6 hour. You could adjust your orbital planes to optimize coverage for some countries and not others, but once the whole Starlink fleet is up there, you will still have coverage basically everywhere.
> This new internet won't cause any kind of paradigm shift that some people desperately try to push.
Probably not, but it will be one more means of global communication, with more coverage than anything we've seen before.
> I would expect the intensity of those signals to be constantly varying
The problem is mostly with the frequency band, because it's regulated (or should I say pre-allocated for certain purposes). It's just too easy to notice if someone is using satellite communication, how many and where.
> Satellites don't have enough fuel to constantly dodge specific countries
I'm not saying they should avoid certain countries. It's just about network policies - routing and filtering - which happen on software level.
> Probably not, but it will be one more means of global communication, with more coverage than anything we've seen before.
True. This is a progress. What I'm saying is that this is just one step, not a leap by itself.
I just can't stand people's indistinction b/w progress and paradigm shift, because it's the major source of hype. You know, it takes so many steps for technology to become magic, so why can't we just sit tight and watch, instead of going full frenzy every time something happens. I mean, that's how I see all those futurology stuffs.
Phased array can sort of beam the waves towards satellite, but leaks still happen.
SpaceX would need a strategy how to import and distribute their gear if they wanna bypass censorships. Satcom existed long before them and is strictly regulated in most dictatorships (you'd be surprised how long the list is).
Sadly, such optimistic posts are probably gonna do more damage to few who's going to be beheaded by regime...
I agree, but for yet another reason - you legally need permission from the country to transmit in its spectrum. This is normally handled by the ITU so that there is global consistency, but that doesn't mean that a country can't withdraw its permission in some way, e.g. by leaving the ITU. There may even be less nuclear options - I'm waiting for the expert to return to the office to consult...
>access to the global network, intelligent and resourceful people located virtually anywhere can operate on substantially similar footing to anyone else
Great article, but this part is just false.
Africa is blanketed with internet access already - often way ahead of 1st world (I recall reading an article about Seattle getting LTE-A and thinking...wait...got that a year ago). It doesn't quite create the magic the author implies. A bit like writing code doesn't mean you can create the next big app. A lot of ingredients go into it
Do you have any data on the true prevalence of cell data coverage in Africa? A coverage map would be cool, but an estimate of the % of people who live in a covered location would also be useful.
To take a random example I'm familiar with Uganda has 97%+ LTE-A population coverage, which is as good if not significantly better than the US.
External bandwidth costs are also coming down massively as loads of new submarine fiber cables are connecting africa.
However, even a basic smartphone will cost 400%+ of many people's monthly income. Penetration of feature phones is high though as they are so cheap.
Starlink imo will not be transformational for these places. It will be extremely useful for somewhat niche cases like rural broadband in the US, cruise ships and planes. It won't work well in cities or even suburban areas (20gigabit per sat is only 2,000HD video streams - which a small city of 100k will completely swamp).
Uganda is much smaller than the USA, and more densely populated. Country-wide LTE makes a lot more economic sense there, especially when you consider that mobile internet is the primary way of connecting to the Internet in Africa.
"HFT firms will be the first customers, seeking a few-millisecond reduction in the transmission of realtime data between markets. Starlink has already said as much, and I think they rely on this as their first and primary source of revenue."
I am not sure this is a good prediction ... the shaving of milliseconds that has been pursued by HFT firms (and other such actors) has progressed to the point where they are measuring cable lengths inside the datacenter.
Even at a greatly reduced orbit, I can't believe that bouncing up and down via satellite as part of your link could be any part of a time-arbitrage recipe in 2020 and beyond ...
> I am not sure this is a good prediction ... the shaving of milliseconds that has been pursued by HFT firms (and other such actors) has progressed to the point where they are measuring cable lengths inside the datacenter.
You're conflating optimisation of latency within a colo - how quickly can you send an order in response to seeing an event on that exchange - with latency between colos - how quickly can you send an order in response to seeing an event on another exchange.
Within a colo, latency is measured in microseconds and fractions of a microsecond. Between colos, it's milliseconds. Some random source here has 4.13 ms for New York - Chicago:
At the moment, to play that game, you need to build a microwave network. Someone needs to build towers in a line between your two exchanges - buy the land, get planning permission, placate the locals, build the tower, install microwave antennas, hope the weather is okay. That's expensive!
With Starlink, there will be a reasonably direct path between any two points on earth - on demand! The path will be longer than a dedicated microwave chain, although some of it will be in vacuum, which will save some time, but it will cost the end user no money and no time to build. If you come up with a trade idea that needs a low-latency path from Moscow to Stockholm, you can send a request to the Starlink API and just get one in moments. You can be up and running with your trade months or years before a tower-building competitor even joins the game.
The thing is people have already built most of those microwave tower paths here on earth and in addition SpaceX probably isn't going to set it up as a mesh where intra-Starlink traffic stays goes directly. And even if they do you have to go up then across (probably in a zig zag) then back down which will always be higher latency than the point to point microwave distance.
>people have already built most of those microwave tower paths here on earth
I can assure you that lucrative paths like New York-London and New York-Tokyo have not been built yet. In fact, the vast majority of lucrative trading paths have not been built yet due to geographical restrictions. Yes, fiber optic links exist, but those only go up to 0.7c.
To a trading firm, the choice between a satellite link that does ~0.9c and a fiber optic link that does <0.7c is obvious.
That all depends on Starlink supporting point to point inside their network. Also that path will be more zig-zaggy than the great circle fiber path and importantly will vary during the day as the satellite tracks shift relative to earth. [0]
[0] Unless their in a harmonic orbit I guess not 100% sure abou that one. There should always be some jitter in the connection time just from the satellites moving even if their ground tracks are very stable.
I don't know enough about their infrastructure, but presumably SpaceX could offer that as a premium service? "Most direct" path for your data at a much higher dollar-per-MB cost vs the mesh offering?
1. Signals travel faster through the air and vacuum of space than they do fiber optic cables or electrical cables.
2. If there is an HFT trader based in the U.S. looking to trade based on events happening in Spain or Japan, they still want to get data across continents in the fastest way possible.
EDIT: Apparently other posters traded on the information arbitrage opportunity of replying to your post several seconds faster than I did. gg.
>Even at a greatly reduced orbit, I can't believe that bouncing up and down via satellite as part of your link could be any part of a time-arbitrage recipe in 2020 and beyond ...
Really? Just some rough napkin math here, but only photonic bandgap fiber reaches near light speed (~99.7%) and I'm not aware of any large real world deployments of that or even near future ones. Regular fiber is only around 70% c. Transmissions through air (and obviously near vacuum as it exits the main atmosphere) are very nearly c. So from a latency perspective Starlink should in principle have up to a 42% inherent raw transmission speed advantage right? So that then has to go against the extra RTT to get up to a satellite and back. It looks like the lowest V-band shell is planned to be at just 210 miles, with another shell at 340 mi, and a final Ku/Ka-band shell at 710 mi. I don't know if the lowest shells are supposed to have any point to point mesh capability or must go to a higher shell first, but if they can that's only about a 420 mi inherent RTT penalty. For a link over 1400 miles, that seems like it might give them an advantage. Of course, there will be other routing factors, but then again on the fiber side only a few links (NYC to London for example) are actually really point to point optimized, most routes around greatly separated parts of the world have their own extra distance penalties due to transmissions having to take the legs of triangles rather then the hypotenuse.
I'm not an HFT person, but I assume there is probably arbitrage to be done between, say, NYC/London and Tokyo or other Asian exchanges and the like too. A lot of those are 6000 to 7000 mi, something like NYC to Sydney (ASX) approaches 10,000 mi. At those kinds of distances even if the signal has to go all the way up to the outer shell to mesh it looks to me like it could still beat a conventional fiber transmission right? I don't know if HFT firms will be that core as customers or how important they are in the scheme of things here, but a rough check certain seems to indicate there should be potential there in terms of the physics and what infrastructure is current deployed.
Light in fibers travels at around 2/3rds of the speed of light, while in air or vacuum it travels at (approximately) the speed of light. So a path through space can be 50% longer, and your signal will still arrive at the same time.
Consider that the distance between New York and London is ~5500km, and these satellites are only ~500km up, that gives you quite a bit of margin to be faster.
The same argument is true of WiFi over a network cable. Depends on the packet loss on the way down. You also potentially might have to send more data for security reasons too.
Also, if the satellite is halfway between them (without taking the curvature of the earth into account, assuming a flat earth and the signal only goes through one satellite), the signal still has to travel 5590 km to cross the Atlantic (at almost c). Probably a solvable problem but not a trivial one.
It might be if you're arbitraging markets against each other. Starlink orbits are at 340 km, i.e. 1.1 ms altitude; if you're sending data between London and New York, you can afford 2.2 ms of uplink/downlink if it allows your signals to travel at c instead of 0.7c.
These first satellites don't have the free-space lasers I modelled in that paper, but my simulations show they can still beat fibre on many paths without inter-satellite links, by relaying via groundstations:
Later satellites will have inter-satellite links, but probably not till near the end of this year, and most of the first phase will already be deployed by then.
Indeed, and I mention microwave links in the paper linked above. But those are relatively short distance: New York - Chicago, London-Frankfurt, and similar. Where Starlink and Kuiper can provide real latency benefits is on long distance paths, trans-oceanic, or passing over countries where it's geographically or politically infeasible to built microwave links.
To me the article misses the bigger deal: SpaceX launched 60 satellites in a single launch & ~250 in ~8 months! Under 9000 satellites have ever been launched in 756 months, since 1957. That’s a launch rate increase from 12/month to over 31/month.
They've gone for a large constellation of small satellites with short lives, which is a set of design choices that all feed into each other.
Satellites are traditionally designed to last for a long time because they're so expensive to launch. As such they're also expensive to make, and it's slow to iterate on them.
Being in low-earth helps the launch cost (on top of the existing SpaceX advances). Putting out 60 per launch helps too.
As someone with very little background (but a lot of interest) in space tech, could you share a little about what results that growth in launch rate will have?
Not OP but basic economics dictates that high demand = high supply (i.e. low prices). The entry barrier to launching a satellite is lower today than it ever has been before. Civilian entities from private companies to high school clubs have successfully launched cubesats from SpaceX rockets.
We will basically see what happened to computing happen to space. Remember the mainframes of the 70s that cost millions and only governments and megacorps could afford? Remember how those gave way to the personal computer, the laptop, and eventually the smartphone and tablet?
Now, it's pretty unlikely that every citizen in the country will get their own cubesat, but what is more likely is that if you are a normal private citizen who has an idea predicated on having a satellite overhead (think: localized aerial surveys, more accurate GPS, real time weather updates), you will be able to put together the capital needed to get that satellite launched.
Personally I'm excited to see the rise of satellite "cloud" services, like AWS, in which one satellite can use its sensors and cameras to serve hundreds of thousands of customers at once. How cool would it be to spend $20/mo to host a global satellite based chat service for you and your friends?
I have heard wildly differing estimates of the potential bandwidth Starlink will offer to individual consumers, at what prices, and how efficient/effective their mesh networking and ground station strategy will be. I'm taking a wait and see attitude, but it would be very cool if they actually came up with a telecom killer.
I don't think the purpose is to battle fiber and copper being laid on the ground. There are a lot of places where that is too expensive too do or the situation is not politically stable enough to do so.
Land-based solutions are going to be cheaper and faster for many situations and people, but this gives us another tool to expand connectivity.
I’m expecting it to start as a service for rural subscribers and maybe people who travel? I tried to calculate it at one point and got something like 250/mo for 25-100mb/s, iirc. No claims on accuracy though.
I'm not convinced that Starlink will provide access to the "half of the human beings (who) are not online yet." Of course that would be good, yet my guess is that Starlink will target people in developed nations who are in rural areas, or people who want low latency.
Maybe Starlink could serve people w/o internet if a whole village buys a subscription, or if a cell provider uses Starlink as backhaul for voice? Still seems expensive for the third world that the author is talking about.
These aren't geostationary satellites. There's no opportunity cost to selling service when flying over poorer countries. Of course, the price has to include the backhaul, and even poor countries have rich residents, but in any event it would be silly to fly over whole landmasses in silence.
He however owns a significant percentage of both companies.
Countries already do this to pressure countries and/or individual entities. Trade embargoes are against entire countries, trade sanctions are over certain industries/companies/specific individuals.
I clear international freight through customs for a living, when I have a shipment containing something coming from/made in a sanctioned country I have to search the OFAC sanctions list for every party mentioned on the shipment https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
China, or Fictionaltopia, could easily put pressure on one company to influence another if they have a significant investor in common.
> in any event it would be silly to fly over whole landmasses in silence.
It wouldn't if the satellite network is operating at capacity, and therefore you can't guarantee service.
Satellites communicate with one another to send information around the world. Most servers are not in developing nations— a lot of them are in the US, for example. Satellites from all over the world will all try to reach the ones that are near the US, so those will dictate the actual capacity of the entire network.
If the network operates at capacity, prices will rise so low-profit customers leave and make space for high-paying ones.
So you assume Starlink will relay the data primarily between satellites and will avoid handing them over to ground till close to destination? Why?
Consider the inter-satellite relay is still in development and current mode of operation was described as "bent pipe". Even when it will be developed, it makes sense to offload data to nearest convenient fiber-connected ground station instead of satellites around the globe.
Their costs are mostly fixed and bandwidth is limited by the number of satellites overhead so will be as high in Mali as New York. If they want to maximize their profits they'll price their bandwidth so that they're able to supply most of the resulting demand in both places.
Why wouldn't it trickle down? I feel like all new technologies start out with rich people/early adopters subsidizing mass adoption costs (refrigerators, TVs, computers, cell phones, electric cars)
The problem is that rich people live in areas that have good mobile coverage, and Starlink won't be very attractive to them. LTE can offer transfers better than 600 Mbps with lower latency today, and covers 99% of population (in the developed countries). 5G will get over 1 Gbps per sector and it's coming soon.
Rich people have boats, by definition these are people with too much money to spend and is a huge market. Airplanes? This will revolutionize coverage on long haul non-polar flights.
Trains? Buses? These both have density issues with the existing cellular network. How many times have you come to a halt in a traffic jam only to have horrible cellular coverage due to the local cell site being overwhelmed?
5G doesn't solve any of these use-cases. There is plenty of room for adoption of starlink at premium prices.
With enough people in once place, Starlink will suffer from congestion just like a cellular network. I don't think it's fundamentally different in that regard. But great for boats indeed!
> Maybe you could roam on another LEO provider. There are over a dozen companies from a number of countries planning their own Starlinks.
I mean, they're planning their own internet satellite constellations. None of them are anywhere close to the 12k satellites in the original Starlink proposal. If you added everyone else's proposals together, you might make 1 more Starlink, but probably not.
5G may hit 1 Gb/s peak, but I'm 100% sure that the major US carriers will throttle the crap out of it so that you don't get anywhere near that. I'm on Verizon in a decent sized city, and any streaming is throttled heavily. Speedtests work fine because the carriers know how to game them. But actual throughput on cellular sucks.
They throttle, because there is much more demand than available bandwidth. However in cellular networks, you can add more bandwidth relatively cheaply by adding more nodes in high demand areas, and the total bandwidth of a single node is already higher than the promised 600 Mbps of Starlink. Therefore Starlink is not a competitor to cellular networks, because it can't compete by throughout nor latency. It competes with coverage though, but I'm not sure of there are enough rich people in boats to cover the investment.
Industrial sensing equipment, airliners, high-frequency traders could all be some of the 'rich' first customers. They are all underserved by the LTE networks and have the money to pay for a reliable, low-latency connection.
Latency will be higher than LTE just because of the distance.
And I'm not sure if a long distance satellite link would be more reliable than a local LTE link with a dedicated antenna.
It's all going to depend on prices and we don't know how they will be set.
Having a backup way of communicating can be important, even if you don't use it much. Land lines are expensive. If there is a low enough monthly fee, maybe a backup connection via Starlink will be feasible?
Unless you mean a village with just two houses, typical villages are covered by cellular networks just fine. Starlink looks like a system for people in deserts or people in third world where LTE doesn't exist. Not sure if this is big enough market.
There are huge swathes of rural Australia with non existent or very spotty mobile reception same with broadband band other than sat that is geo stationery which are frankly garbage.
The US DoD has paid SpaceX to proof of concept having hundreds of Mb/s of low latency connectivity in fighter aircraft. Lucrative market based on historical DoD satellite communications contracts.
> Billions of people, blocked from accessing the Internet due to lack of infrastructure or local greed or fraud related to same, are presently kept from participating in the global knowledge economy. Starlink will remedy this, to some extent.
Isn't covering the world in a blanket of satellites from a single company the epitome of a global Monopoly?
I'm worried about such a future controlled by SpaceX...
There are multiple competitors with similar plans on the drawing board already. And unlike with geosynchronous orbit, there's no practical limit to the number of satellites in very low-earth-orbit.
If Starlink is profitable, I would fully expect multiple competing networks before long.
Competitors won't achieve until there's competition for SpaceX launch service. Bezo seems to be most ahead, but also super far from offering commercial launches.
Even if it does have a monopoly on space based internet (there are some good counter-arguments in the sibling comments), that doesn't mean it has a monopoly on internet access as a whole.
Lots of us could benefit from Starlink without ever paying a subscription - just look what happened with US internet providers in cities where Google Fiber launched. Once they had some reasonable competition they suddenly discovered that they could deliver a much better quality of service. Starlink will force the wired carriers to compete properly, for maybe the first time ever.
> Isn't covering the world in a blanket of satellites from a single company the epitome of a global Monopoly?
shivers.
My gripe with this comment is the subtle neo-colonial undertone it has too. "The world needs saving from their inefficient local authorities! It's their fault other countries don't enjoy the spoils of modernity. Luckily this charitable Westerner will bring you under their efficient global empire... ermm, company".
> SpaceX will be pressured by the governments in the jurisdictions where their staff reside (where their physical threats of enforcement can be carried out) to selectively censor/blackout or otherwise wiretap use of the system,
It's easier than that.
To provide a low latency service satellites can't just forward the signal to other satellites and beam it down to a base station on the other side of the planet and back. It would take too long.
StarLink needs base stations (on Earth) close to the terminals of their users: terminal -> satellite -> base station -> internet -> base station -> satellite -> terminal
So if a country doesn't want its citizens to use StarLink it only has to deny permissions to build base stations there. Of course that's useless for small countries with a base station in a nearby country, but it's OK for large countries. Or they could welcome a base station: it will be connected to the local internet and be subject to all the usual monitoring and censorship.
A different take to the same issue: probably StarLink has to apply as an ISP in every country they want to service (take money from people there). This means a base station there or not.
From [1]
> 2019 April - SpaceX files for 6 base stations for Starlink. Locations: North Bend WA, Conrad MT, Merrillan WI, Greenville PA, Redmond WA, Hawthorne CA, Brewster WA
> 2020 - Service to be offered across the contiguous United States and Canada
Latency will be lower for intercontinental distances if its forwarded from satellite to satellite, as the signal propagates at light speed in a direct line rather than 2/3rds in a non direct fibre.
Inmarsat technocrat offsr broadband to North Korea, they aren’t registered there. Some countries won’t let you import a bgan, but if you do you can get access.
I am skeptical of anything like 600Mbps being offered to anyone at anything like an affordable price, but overall, sure, globally-available internet seems like a good thing.
Too bad we have to give up the night sky for it, though.
I don't think we give up the night sky for this. naked-eye observers will never notice except close to sunrise and sunset, and even if astronomers are complaining about it now, there are solutions for their issues, either in image processing or with better scheduling (scheduling is straightforward if you have tracking data, so I imagine they're doing both already to some extent). Also, better heavy-lift capabilities will likely make space telescopes easier to manufacture and deploy.
We're going to have a lot of satellites and even space stations (hopefully) in our future, its just the way it is.
>Also, better heavy-lift capabilities will likely make space telescopes easier to manufacture and deploy.
Exactly. If ITS/BFR/whatever it is right now actually starts launching in the next 10-15 years we'll be able to deploy (relatively) cheap space telescopes of all variety.
Even better, if it does get operational, we'll be able to build one or more observatories on the moon where you'll basically have a 14 day night at any point and they could be operated entirely remotely and actually be upgraded/changed as needed with manned missions showing up to swap out instruments.
You could even go drop a bunch of smaller-optic telescopes on the moon and use optical aperture synthesis to do some pretty impressive stuff. Spread little clusters all around the moon and you'd have an optical astronomer's dream come true. Similarly you could distribute a bunch of relatively small radio telescopes on the far side of the moon and aside from some communication relay satellites (which you could use lasers for) you'd have virtually no interference from Earth.
While it's certainly said for research from Earth right now, if Starlink gets profitable it gives SpaceX more money to develop better launch technology which opens up space for far cheaper science.
I'm also skeptical. A single LTE node can have a total bandwidth of 1+ Gbps. In Poland there are probably over 20k such nodes. Yet, the average speed you get is about 25 Mbps.
With Starlink we're talking about covering the whole world, not a 40 million country. So I believe it may be usable for rich people in rural areas, but in densely populated areas it stands no chance to LTE (and 5G is coming and promises lower latency than physically possible with Starlink).
> I'm also skeptical. A single LTE node can have a total bandwidth of 1+ Gbps. In Poland there are probably over 20k such nodes. Yet, the average speed you get is about 25 Mbps.
I imagine usage is not evenly distributed between those nodes!
Also LTE connections are limited by the speed of the connection running to the base station. even worse, if that base station is on a microwave link to another tower that then has fiber running to it, expect slower speeds.
Also there is the phone hardware. Take Wi-Fi for a minute, which is a more controlled environment, the performance difference between different chipsets rated at the same speed can be huge! Firmware, drivers, and just how the chip is wired up. Plenty of opportunities to screw things up, sometimes even with the same chipset between different laptop manufacturers.
And finally, there is going to be a power trade off, I wonder how inefficient those LTE chips are when running full bore! Now I am curious as to what that graph looks like. :) Some sort ∩ shape I imagine where it starts being more efficient as you download faster so the radio is on for a shorter period of time, and then getting less efficient as you try to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the chipset.
Not the night sky, you can't seem them at all at night. You can see them during twilight, when they aren't in the shadow of the earth.
Work is ongoing to reduce their visibility during twilight, and even during twilight it's not giving up the sky, just making a minor alteration.
For comparison, there are as many planes in the sky at any time as their second phase plan of 12,000 satellites, and planes are much more concentrated around where humans are. There is also something like 5000 satellites already in orbit.
Giving up some of the night sky for the billions of humans that live in rural areas, or live in countries where the physical internet is controlled by oppressive governments hellbent on withholding information from its citizens is worth it. The trillions of dollars it would take to build out infrastructure (and maintain) in Africa and India is worth it. In fact, even 20 Mbps would be life changing in bringing information to ~10-15% of humans is worth it.
I'm glad you think it's worth it. I'm not as sure, personally. Especially since your examples don't hold water with me.
Oppressive governments that don't like the internet aren't going to just allow the transceivers. They need line of sight to the sky and even if you hide them, detecting them would be trivial. Super rural areas and 3rd world areas have their own set of problems. I'm thinking of the OLPC type issues here. I'm all for spreading knowledge, but these areas have far bigger issues than internet access.
Personally, I view this as just another bulldozing a place of nature to build a hospital or something like that. Is that hospital useful? Undoubtedly. Is it worth having one less place of nature? Debatable.
The only difference is scale. We're talking about the destruction of a place of nature for the entire world. Over dramatized? I don't think so- there are many examples of people talking about looking up at the stars in wonderment, driving them to great things. Maybe that will still happen when there are thousands of satellites streaming by, but nobody has that foresight.
Yeah, all that talk about free internet for all the poor and oppressed sounds pretty suspicious set beside the claims that starlink is supposed to make money too. How will a rural Guatemalan farmer that cooks on a three stones fire provide any sort of profit?
Don't underestimate how cheap smartphones + solar is and how cheap Starlink actually is.
Sure he cooks on a fire because it's practical. You don't need to fetch gas/fuel for your stove. Now with Starlink you won't need to go to town once a week to check your bitcoin transactions.
You’ve missed out on irony and bitcoin and guatemala farmer (cant find it right now). Also you are underestimating the needs of impoverished people. Part of impoverishment is lack of connectivity and facilities to charge phone. Not other way around.
It's just gonna be routed thru China. Probably each country internet is going to go first thru local provider, unless you've got some sort of privilege (same as it is now with VPN's).
We won't give up the night sky. Starlink won't be very high so majority of satellites will be in the shadow except close to sunrise/sunset.
Starlink satellites are quite small and probably won't be very visible even when deployed. SpaceX is working to reduce "glare" so this will probably be further improved.
Even with a full grid deployed, I doubt you would see more than a dozen satellites at any given time. Someone probably has numbers so please correct me or chip in.
Even in small areas we have CSMA (listen before talk) collisions in 2.4/5G bands that create high latency variance [1]. You can only have one transmitter per channel.
With Starlink there will be many ground-based transmitters that can't do CSMA (because they are directional). How many channels are available could depend on the dedicated bandwidth, but I have a hard time believing we won't see significant transmit collision issues.
> Moreover, interference is not some inherent property of spectrum. It's a property of devices. A better receiver will pick up a transmission where an earlier one heard only static. Whether a new radio system "interferes" with existing ones is entirely dependent on the equipment involved. Consequently, the extent to which there appears to be a spectrum shortage largely depends not on how many frequencies are available but on the technologies that can be deployed. Many regulations intended to promote harmony of the airwaves have instead, by putting artificial limits on technology, created massive inefficiency in spectrum utilization.
> For reference, my last flat in Berlin (the capital of the largest economy in the EU), on the ground on a main street in the city center, was serviced with approximately 14MBps ADSL, and this was the fastest offering available from any vendor.
14Mbps in Berlin? How is this possible?
I had 20Mbps in Mexico City almost a decade ago. A family member who lived in the same building at the time had 100Mbps symmetrical.
Mostly policy. Spain deployed a lot of fiber in the las 10 years that we've got little towns with multiple symmetric 600mbps offerings. If it can be done in Spain, it can be done in Germany.
No, 14mbps in Berlin is an outlier.
The average bandwidth in Germany is higher than that.
In my city in large areas i can get 400mbps via cable and 250mbps via VDSL.
Pretty soon cable providers in Germany will upgrade their entire network to DOCSIS 3.1 enabling gbit bandwidth.
I am actually pretty excited for it. My parents don't have access to high speed internet (that is reliable) outside of 4G (which is either very expensive or has tight data caps,) so finally they might be able to get themselves Netflix, etc.
What this article didn't mention is the potential for this to significantly disrupt commercial internet monopolies in regional markets. If service is $45/ month for 100GB, a lot of people will drop Comcast in a hurry.
It didn't mention it because that's not true. This is targeted for enterprise, and there are no plans to sell cheap internet at the price the antenna costs.
The article uses no factual basis to back it up, though. In order for it to be competitive against existing internet, it needs to be as cheap. Their current pizza-box phased array antenna was likely too expensive, so now they have a motorized hybrid that moves the phased array on top. That will be significantly more money and less reliable than your existing cable.
There are existing solutions, like o3b to cover underserved areas with high speed internet. They pivoted to cruise ships because the equipment is too expensive. If you have a link other than this blog showing otherwise, please provide it.
Yet people flock to cities en masse and in acceleration. The most technically educated/capable flock to even fewer cities, even where connectivity is terrible. Centralization of technology is a reality and what could be more centralizing than a single-interest entity controlling the global satellite network. Starlink is surely a big deal, but of limited applicability.
Odd, most of the smartest tech people I know fled the cities years ago. The city is where you go when you arent the brightest, because all the easy jobs are there.
They are not equalizers, they are amplifiers. The steel plow fed a man, the cotton gin clothed him, antibiotics cured his cough and an airplane took him from his old country to a new one where he learned how to drive so he could deliver the morning paper.
The goal should never be to lower the ceiling. The goal is to raise the floor.
In the middle of this document is a reference to Joseph Nacchio who appears to be a rare CEO who was punished for respecting his customers' civil rights. Up until that moment he was lauded as a go-getter CEO.
I remember my impression of him at the time was that he was simply a tough CEO who could also be a bit of a jerk to his team. But he refused a government request to break the law and shortly thereafter was arrested. I don't know the merits of the government's case, but it was suspicious that nobody else in his notoriously corrupt industry ever got into trouble for their quite blatant corruption.
Right now there are only 60 and you can already see them? How about when there are 12,000 or 30,000 or however many they wanna put up there? It's going to cover the entire night sky.
I feel claustrophobic just thinking about it. I don't want this and I have a feeling I'm not alone in that.
There is a lot of evidence that the albedo is going to reduce. For one the satellites are climbing higher at the moment. The solar panels are also oriented to catch the light currently as the sun sets.
Honestly I hope someone figures out how to shoot these down. I feel like the planet isn't getting a say. In fact only a few people are getting a say that this network should even exist. Astronomy is dead. A dark sky with just stars, yeah dead.
Because you're thinking of "space" as just boring orbital stuff. Astronomers think of our solar system, deep space, distant stars... a bunch of gadgets blocking the view of that is a legitimate concern.
It's not like the constellation move in unpredictable manner. The orbits are known, the movements are predictable, surely with some processing it shouldn't affect astronomy too much? If astronomers can overcome random atmospheric dispersion, surely they can elimitate starlink from post-processed images too?
I agree with the sentiment of the parent comment. Not because I have a huge passion for astronomy, but because I think we're prioritizing things in a wrong way.
We're prioritizing yet another billionare's networking business over the capacity to study our night's sky. Much like other types of pollution, this is something that could stick around for hundreds of years, even after all its utility is gone.
Cell towers, like most structures, can be brought down, repurposed, updated and altered. We can't do nothing about satellites, and don't know how to clean space pollution.
Firstly, the satellites fall out of orbit automatically within 5 years even if they break because they're in LEO. Secondly, again because they're in LEO they are invisible for most of the night while they are in Earth's shadow, not affecting stargazing or astronomy in the slightest during that time. It's only an hour or so near dawn and dusk where the satellites are visible.
Trying to match up that claim with the claim of https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink that satellites should be visible at 12:10am this Saturday over Boston. 12:10am is nowhere close to dusk in Boston this time of year.
12:10 AM Saturday in your device's time zone. 6:10 PM Friday in Boston's time zone. It's on my to-do list to change the displayed time zone when you select a faraway location instead of your current location, but just figuring out which time zone a given location is in is a non-trivial problem. Time zones are kind of bonkers, as I'm sure you're aware.
I just pushed a fix for timezones. It should convert to the local timezone if you choose a faraway location, and show the correct timezone abbreviation.
I feel that's a super limited point of view of the whole affair.
Starlink is here not because it makes a networking business (although it doesn't hurt).
Starlink is here because on Mars you need reliable communication and positioning over the planet, and you can only do that efficiently with satellites, and Starlink is destined for Mars, not Earth. What we have here is just the testing grounds for the technology.
Personally I'm stoked about pushing 1200 sattelites in orbit to Mars - highly automated, and it would make the current 2 orbiters by NASA as peanuts.
This is such an overly dramatic way of looking at it. Even at its most extreme Starlink will not really hurt our capacity to study our night's sky.
We are talking about a extremely tiny part of the sky that will only be visible very infrequently and the position is known at all times.
This does not impact most of astronomy at all.
Cleaning up space is not a technically impossible problem. It just has not yet been done because nobody had a need for it.
The waste majority of these satellites would fall back to earth, they can not stay 100s of years even in the worst case. Those few that do actually break and are to high up to wait out, can be collected once we have the scale of launch and service infrastructure. Until that point they would be on known location and SpaceX could make sure they don't hit anything.
It seems utterly absurd to me to ignore a massive technological leap for humanity because a tiny part of it hurts research (or is assumed to possible hurt research) and the idea that there is not enough space in orbit and that is not convincing at all.
tl;dr: starlink and its competitors pose serious Earth-based observation problems across the spectrum (§§4.1-4.2) especially for faint variable objects which require long exposures and for which any missed pixels matter.
The missed-pixels problems run around the clock, not just when the sattelites are visibly flaring, as do non-visible-spectrum noise problems.
From a first-principles perspective, it's baffling to me why this would ever be a serious problem. We know the ephemerides of all objects in Earth orbit, and they are traveling at a fast enough angular speed to not linger in an observational spot. We're not working with long-exposure film here - we can manipulate pixels over time. On a technical level it should be trivial to mask out the pixels where satellites are located at each moment. I think 1% is far too high a guesstimate, but say that artificial satellites end up covering 1% of the full night sky (for context the moon takes up under 0.001% of the sky's area). That still leaves you with 99% observability - hardly an effect on the amount of data you can bring in, especially compared to such problems as clouds.
And more complex ones for professional astronomers should still be super simple to implement compared to many of the algorithms astronomers have to wrangle with.
We don't want to manipulate pixels; the goal is not to produce pretty pictures of known things. The goal is to collect as much data as possible about things which are not well understood (because, in part, of a lack of data), especially those that are time-varying on short human timescales.
The objects in question are often extremely faint, and even if one knows a lot of the details of periodic noise, removing the noise does not recover the faint signal.
> baffling
Stand by, there will be lot of professional science communication on this topic in due course.
> moon, 1%, ...
Suppose right now at the very limb of the sun we detect an extremely interesting light curve that is clearly not extragalactic yet still atypical of supernovae, but know that it is in the process of moving directly behind the sun (from our perspective). How do you propose to remove the sun from the image of the suspected supernova?
Here's a list of solar-system objects that moved directly behind the sun in 2019: https://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/index.php?p=transits/transits... This Christmas would have been an interesting time for 2010: The Year We Make Contact's great black spot of Jupiter to appear.
The moon also occults Jupiter fairly regularly. If Jupiter was doing something strange behind the moon, think of the loss for all the Earth-based observatories. Or would it be trivial for them to faithfully reconstruct the unusual behaviour of Jupiter?
Yes, the sun and moon are slow-moving, bright, and high-solid-angle obstructions compared to any spacecraft. However, so is Jupiter and a galactic supernova, and neither of them are usually interestingly variable on the scale of a glitching millisecond pulsar (for example) or the electromagnetic counterparts to a gravitational wave detection.
In short
> algorithms to erase satellite trails
are doing cosmetics, not astronomical or astrophysical research.
And if cosmetically you erase the wrong pixel, you miss out lots of observation time of events like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASASSN-15lh#Discovery and end up regretting missing early data (as in e.g. SN 1997D).
A recent tweet is interesting: 'This is, by the way, a discovery made in "astronomical twilight" - one way Itagaki and other amateur astronomers can discovered such events before professional astronomers is by observing fields (galaxies) quite close to the Sun.' (although that's in large part because bigger observatories deliberately aim away from the sun, because it's very noisy and its luminosity may damage sensitive detectors).
I understand the goal is not pretty pictures. But you're not using a hammer to remove random white noise from all your observations, you're using a scalpel to mask out completely predictable errors for very short periods of time. My amateur astronomer link was not meant as a scientific how-to, but as an illustration that even simple hammer-y methods work to mask out satellite trails.
There are very few non-periodic events in the universe that happen over the fraction-of-a-second timescale for which a satellite occludes an area of the sky, the linking of EM to gravitational wave events being perhaps the only notable exception. Meteor impacts on planets happen over the course of seconds. Supernovae occur over the timeframe of hours. Glitches in millisecond pulsars (the millisecond name notwithstanding) occur over the timescale of days.
This is also the issue with using occlusion by the sun and moon as analogy - their occlusions do operate on the timescale of interesting astronomical events. If the moon whipped around the Earth at the same rate as LEO satellites it might occlude Jupiter, but you would have plenty of vision between the shutters to reconstruct events on the timescales we are interested in. I'll also note that the analogy breaks down with the focus on objects in the solar system since they all roughly lie on the ecliptic - you've reduced the occlusions over a 2D sky to occlusions between objects that live on a 1D slice of it. The Sun and Moon both take up 0.3% of the angular diameter of the sky, but only 0.001% the angular area.
Are you losing real data with a sky full of 10's of thousands of LEO satellites? Yes. Is it a significant amount? Not by any reasonable metric. Is it over a significant timescale? No.
An analogy: If you have some video footage and for whatever reason have a punchhole in the corner of every 100th frame, that by no means precludes you from doing analysis on the video. I'd expect the video conservationists to be up in arms about any blemishes on their original film, but I'd argue that that is the position from aesthetics. To answer questions such as "how many times does the ball in this video bounce" or "how does the lighting in this video change over time" or "how does that person's hair react to the wind visible in the video" the hole is insignificant to obtaining the answer, even if the area of interest is directly covered every 100th frame.
I'll close with the acknowledgement that radio interference is a legitimate concern here. But satellites are hardly the only emitters which are increasing in number at an increasing rate, and that commons will be polluted whether we launch them or not.
Even if astronomy isn't affected. Can you imagine a grid/net of fast moving satellites, 80,000 satellites covering the entire globe that are visible for 2 to 3 hours every night. This is the thing that creates global suicides. Mark those words. It will happen.
Sorry this is worth more commenting - I am just imagining this network above us. Every centimeter to an inch "visually" a grid pattern crossing over us for a period of 2 hours a night.
No, a website that tells you when it's coming, ooooh... No this is every single night, and morning, a grid from HELL.
I'm a fairly regular poster, a software engineer, decently intelligent guy - and this future absolutely disgusts me. I hope things change and it ends up not happening. I would rather telephone pole the world.
Not really true:
"For his analysis, he factored in the first leg of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation — about 1,600 satellites — as there are better details about the orbits they’re going to. Based on just that initial batch, he estimated that at a latitude of 52 degrees north (about where London is located), there will be 84 Starlink satellites above the horizon at all times. And for many hours around dusk, dawn, and in the nighttime during summer, 15 of those satellites would be visible in the sky at all times, about 30 degrees above the horizon."
From here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18642577/spacex-starlink-...
Maybe the historical form of amateur astronomy with a telescope in the garden might die out (others have made some reasonable counter-arguments). But maybe instead, space based astronomy will become cheaper and more accessible due to the drop in launch costs? My understanding is that a lot of astronomy research (as distinct from amateur stargazing) is limited by atmospheric concerns, so maybe that would be an improvement.
> SpaceX will be pressured by the governments in the jurisdictions where their staff reside (where their physical threats of enforcement can be carried out) to selectively censor/blackout or otherwise wiretap use of the system, ostensibly for military purposes, in another tragic case of stupid, outdated nationalistic thinking trying to force its way into outer space and cyberspace. They will comply, silently and without fanfare, as all of the other telecommunications carriers have, excepting with great recognition the brave Joseph Nacchio, because they don’t want to suffer the same fate he did.
Anyone remember the SWANsat project,[0] which was going to use a VPN service[1] as its client gateway? They called it "SWANSAT LIBERTY™ Suite".
Somehow, I doubt that Starlink has anything like that in mind. But still, one could use it with any anonymity network, unless that was somehow blocked.
> For reference, my last flat in Berlin (the capital of the largest economy in the EU), on the ground on a main street in the city center, was serviced with approximately 14Mbps ADSL, and this was the fastest offering available from any vendor.
I have unmetered gigabit fiber (1G UP 1G DOWN) In london
I am in the process of building out a boxtruck with solar panels and a big batter and I am eagerly waiting for starlink to roll out public Access so I can get an antenna and park my new home office in very rural areas and work comfortablely.
> * For reference, my last flat in Berlin (the capital of the largest economy in the EU), on the ground on a main street in the city center, was serviced with approximately 14MBps ADSL, and this was the fastest offering available from any vendor.*
That seems really low to me. I was under the impression that Europe had generally better internet access than in the US. Comcast delivers much better speeds than that even to boondocks cities, let alone major metropolitan areas?
It has. I have 100mb/s in Berlin. Seems that his street is not connected well, or he lives too far away from the distribution node, there is also 1gb/s cable in some streets.
Lots of launch providers and various 3rd parties have been providing rideshares for a while. e.g. there's the big thosuand pound payload, with an extra rack of cubesats to take advantage of extra fairing capacity.
The starlink satellites are relatively small, but they're still larger than Sputnik for example. ISRO has launched 100+ satellites at a time, although I believe those were mostly cubesats which are an order of magnitude or two smaller than the Starlink sats
Starlink satellites aren't small cubesats, each one weighs approximately 227kg. They can launch 60 on a single F9 because the satellites have flat panel design for maximum stackability and take full advantage of the size of the payload fairing.
By reducing their "function" until they're basically a battery with a radio repeater strapped onto it. Obviously it's a bit more complicated, but there's very little these satellites actually have to _do_.
The Starlink satellites additionally have krypton ion thrusters for stationkeeping as well as to raise their orbits from their 290 km deployment altitude up to the 550 km service altitude.
ion thruster, star trackers, phased array antennas, reaction wheels, torque rods, solar panels... they pretty much do everything every other satellite does.
The launch today happened on the 3rd flight of the booster. They have a few cores now which have flown 4 times.
At this point, prices are a coming down, and it is effectively assumed that any SpaceX core will fly at least twice. That covers cheap and reusable. Cheap at least compared to the market (I still can't afford it), and 2 flights is re-use.
"Everyday" might be a stretch by the literal definition. But "commonplace" wouldn't be. No one gets super excited about re-flown cores anymore.
SpaceX has ~80 launches and recovered the booster ~40 times so the technology is very real and fully operational.
The "cheap" part is somewhat questionable because current prices are lower but still comparable to those of traditional providers. This is likely because fixed costs are high and there is limited demand from satellite operators.
A big part of the reason SpaceX is jumping into the satellite business is to create demand for itself and fully exploit Falcon 9 technology.
Honestly, I’m just excited for the more mundane future of having an alternative to Comcast/Spectrum and the corresponding drop in prices that will hopefully come along with it.
Companies like Viasat are already offering that. A couple of years ago, they were talking about how they wanted to offer free internet to all passangers (with enough bandwidth that everyone could stream HD movies, thanks to the new satellite they launched in 2017). I'm not sure how the rollout is going, though, or if the airlines want to do this. I guess the airlines can make a fortune overcharging passengers for internet.
I'm a viasat customer. Most days, github.com doesn't exist for me. Anything using SSL is going to fail 30% of the time anyway, and 50%+ of the time after they restrict our bandwidth for the month. Even if they could provide better service, I wouldn't hold my breath in expectation of it.
When I was at Viasat, there was a difference between what was provided to consumers (Exede) and what they were providing to airlines with their new satellite. The new one has much higher bandwidth than their older one. I’m not sure if the new satellites will service consumer internet too as I left the company before Viasat-2 became fully operational.
if there's an option for turning off caching, or "network speed up" in your modem, turning it off helped for me when I was trapped with hughesnet for a while. moved me up to about 75% of GitHub.com requests working.
essentially, their caching mechanism was broken for a ton of the sites I went to visit.
> A couple of years ago, they were talking about how they wanted to offer free internet to all passangers (with enough bandwidth that everyone could stream HD movies, thanks to the new satellite they launched in 2017). I'm not sure how the rollout is going, though, or if the airlines want to do this. I guess the airlines can make a fortune overcharging passengers for internet.
The only thing that makes sense to me right now is what airlines are already doing: serving cached video from a server on the airplane.
Yes, that’s actually what I worked on when I worked for them a few years back (specifically I worked on using satellite internet to update the onboard media libraries), but on launch of their new satellite they were pushing for simply allowing streaming.
I am happily open to alternate suggestions. I am not a designer and my website is a perpetual work-in-progress, so any guidance you can offer there is helpful and appreciated. I used to never post because I didn’t think it was “done” or “ready”, but I decided to ship regularly and work on it as I go. Better is the enemy of good!
It tells you when to go outside and look up to see the satellites as they pass over your house. It's a cool sight to see because there are up to 60 of them crossing the sky at the same time in a line.