£89 and no, it's consistent all the time. I can't remember the last time it dropped below 200Mbps
There are always at least two satellites in view. If you click on the link Kalvin posted and then zoom right in, you can see in real time where all the satellites are.
£89 and no, it's consistent all the time. I can't remember the last time it dropped below 200Mbps
There are always at least two satellites in view. If you click on the link Kalvin posted and then zoom right in, you can see in real time where all the satellites are.
£89 (approx. EUR 100) is probably reasonable for that speed in rural area.
Just checked that a 200Mbit/s cable connection in a city costs here typically around EUR 20, and 400Mbit/s connection costs around EUR 30. Internet access in rural areas in Finland are mostly based on the mobile network, and the price range is between EUR 25 (4G, 200Mbit/s) - EUR 35 (5G, 400Mbit/s), depending of the maximum speed advertised. The maximum speed you actually will get may not be what you pay for though, if the distance to the mobile base-station is long, or the base-station is not yet updated etc. etc. Same thing goes with the connection reliability. So, £89 may not be too bad after all, if the alternative is no network at all, or a very slow or unreliable internet connection.
The million dollar question is, how many of those people are there, and what percentage of them would be willing to pay the price. A trillion dollar market? I seriously doubt that, unless the technology can accommodate higher user density and they offered cheaper options. I bet they would definitely get 10x the users if they dropped the price to $25 (even if the speed was also 4 times slower). Again user density will cause issues.
The numbers for target user density are pretty questionnable.
To get a trillion dollar annually at current prices they would need to have 833mln users. If the target constellation size is 42000 satellites that's over 19.8k users per satellite on average. Even if we very generously assume the users are dispersed evenly (and they will not be) and we need 100Mb available bandwidth per user. This gives us almost 2Tb throughput per satellite. That's a lot of data!
Starlink uses QAM modulation (up to 64QAM) and 240MHz down link bandwidth. This has maximum theoretical throughput of 1.44Gb (really a lot less). So we would need over 1400 down links per satellite to serve 19.8k users 100Mb each. Is that possible with Mimo? I'll believe when I see it.
Cap is just that, a cap. One can always purchase a higher cap. Just like housing, food, clothing, you get what you can afford and judge how much this is worth to you verses other needs. Broadband (for now anyway) is for all. Where there is a market, someone will fill that with or without Starlink. The customer will judge if they want it or not. If no one provide a cap high enough, one can always purchase additional accounts/lines. As many lines as one sees fit to purchase.Really? Then why rural areas even in US are living without internet or with something that barely works while people are ready to pay insane money? Do you think everyone lives in cities where you can affordably connect people to the cable? In mountainous areas a mobile phone without any internet is a problem.
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If the governments wants to keep the rural regions inhabited in the future, it would be a good idea to provide compensation for the high network connection fees.
The performance -massively- exceeds that stated in the video. I get between 330 and 380Mbps down and between 22 and 28Mbps up. Latency is consistently below 30ms, and I've had -one- outage since July and that was in the middle of the night and lasted a couple of minutes.
The big question is - how will those numbers be, when the system goes out of beta and lots of people sign up.
We had a sat provided internet service offering (don't remember, like 20 years ago?), with sat downlink and modem(landline) uplink. It worked great at first, but as soon as more people signed up, the speed dropped to below regular modem speed. You can only have that much bandwidth between sat network and base stations, which obviously has to be shared...
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Think also of the rural USA, where you have vast areas with low population, so there is little incentive to provide more than a POTS line out there, and this long line does not support DSL at all, and barely does voice. Nobody is going to lay a 100km length of fibre for possibly 50 subscribers, and there are plenty of places even 3G, 4G is barely usable, and massively overloaded per cell, with nothing ever going to be done about it.
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Pity, I love seeing those Iridium flares in the evening sky.
Cap is just that, a cap. One can always purchase a higher cap. Just like housing, food, clothing, you get what you can afford and judge how much this is worth to you verses other needs. Broadband (for now anyway) is for all. Where there is a market, someone will fill that with or without Starlink. The customer will judge if they want it or not. If no one provide a cap high enough, one can always purchase additional accounts/lines. As many lines as one sees fit to purchase.Really? Then why rural areas even in US are living without internet or with something that barely works while people are ready to pay insane money? Do you think everyone lives in cities where you can affordably connect people to the cable? In mountainous areas a mobile phone without any internet is a problem.
Really. Yes, people will decide what they can afford and buy to the extend they feel cost and benefit balanced. Of course there are some that will buy a car or a house that they have no possibility of affording based on their income. That is how some behave.
Except the pollution of low orbit, I have no quarrel with Starlink. If people like them and purchase them, good all around.
See the attached photo from Scientific Americans, the photo was taken November 2019, just a handful of SpaceX/Starlink "dark" satellites.
If you guys think selling us the equipment to make that happen in the middle of nowhere at a 50% loss to the company and only charging $99 a month is a scam, please suggest to me a better service that can do it cheaper.
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Think also of the rural USA, where you have vast areas with low population, so there is little incentive to provide more than a POTS line out there, and this long line does not support DSL at all, and barely does voice. Nobody is going to lay a 100km length of fibre for possibly 50 subscribers, and there are plenty of places even 3G, 4G is barely usable, and massively overloaded per cell, with nothing ever going to be done about it.
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Pity, I love seeing those Iridium flares in the evening sky.
Besides internet/3G/4G, other inconveniences exist. I've lived in areas where police, hospitals, fire stations are almost an hour away... Good that that was for a short time only. That is what make rural rural. It may not have much, but it has its charm.
I think Starlink as back-haul for tel-comm may have a market there but a shrinking one. People are more likely to use phones over laptop these days. 4G tower to Satellite may be a viable connection method. This, plus some local residence/business with satellite may make a viable market. But since rural areas are disappearing, shrinking market for sure.
Cap is just that, a cap. One can always purchase a higher cap.
Except your numbers are totally useless since Starlink is not targeting receiving a 1 trillion annual revenue to begin with. Their target is $30 billion.
EDIT: and your 100mbps per user assumption is simply stupid. As if everyone uses full bandwidth constantly. If this was true, none of the existing networks could possibly work.
However, they can, and probably will limit the number of users per area if they start getting too many.
QuoteExcept your numbers are totally useless since Starlink is not targeting receiving a 1 trillion annual revenue to begin with. Their target is $30 billion.
EDIT: and your 100mbps per user assumption is simply stupid. As if everyone uses full bandwidth constantly. If this was true, none of the existing networks could possibly work.Is 100Mb full speed? No, it isn't. People report full speeds of uo to 380Mb so I used less than a third. Also, I said clearly users will not be dispersed evenly between satellites and in my calculations I assume they are. One satellite may have 5 users another may attempt to serve 100k. How big are starlink target coverage "cells" going to be(not user geofencing, actual area served by one satellite) ? A 100km by 100km(again optimistically) ? That's 10000sq km. 10 users per sq km is not that far fetched. So averaging this to slightly under 20k users and 100Mb is not stupid. However, they can, and probably will limit the number of users per area if they start getting too many. They will also throttle traffic etc. In time Starlink will be the same as any other "broadband" provider. Use it while you can if it works well for you.
QuoteExcept your numbers are totally useless since Starlink is not targeting receiving a 1 trillion annual revenue to begin with. Their target is $30 billion.
EDIT: and your 100mbps per user assumption is simply stupid. As if everyone uses full bandwidth constantly. If this was true, none of the existing networks could possibly work.Is 100Mb full speed? No, it isn't. People report full speeds of uo to 380Mb so I used less than a third. Also, I said clearly users will not be dispersed evenly between satellites and in my calculations I assume they are. One satellite may have 5 users another may attempt to serve 100k. How big are starlink target coverage "cells" going to be(not user geofencing, actual area served by one satellite) ? A 100km by 100km(again optimistically) ? That's 10000sq km. 10 users per sq km is not that far fetched. So averaging this to slightly under 20k users and 100Mb is not stupid. However, they can, and probably will limit the number of users per area if they start getting too many. They will also throttle traffic etc. In time Starlink will be the same as any other "broadband" provider. Use it while you can if it works well for you.
Typical wireline broadband oversubscription (port rate vs. subscribed rate) ratios are 1:32 to 1:64, depending on technology. The actual average bandwidth used by a single subscriber is in single-digit Mbps, and this is what they will plan the network around, in fact the ratio tends to get higher the closer you get to the core of the network. You can serve a lot more than 1000 1Gbps subscribers over a 100Gbps link (which is what your 100mbps would suggest) - by a couple orders of magnitude. For network planning it's also important to notice that increasing maximum subscriber speed virtually doesn't affect the average rate; users are still behaving the same, their usage just becomes a bit peakier. So yeah, using 100mbps as an average per-subscriber rate for planning purposes is totally absurd.
That said, I don't see any way that Starlink is able to serve even suburban density areas, there are just far too many subscribers even at a high oversubscription ratio. I don't believe they've published their ground station -> satellite link speeds, but I'd guess it's in the single-digit Gbps, so they can probably serve a couple thousand users per satellite at 100mbps-ish speeds. Per cell, it'd be further constrained by what rate the user terminals are capable of. A typical suburb is maybe 800 people per km^2, and I believe they've said something on the order of 20km x 20km for the minimum cell size. So you're talking about 100,000s of people and 10,000s of potential subscribers per cell. With napkin math, it seems quite viable rural areas, but not viable at all in anything bigger/denser than a small suburb. But that's fine, because those areas can be efficiently served with FTTH anyway.
Regarding Starlink the biggest thing I'm curious about is how they accomplish the routing and ground station uplinks. It seems they talk a lot about intersatellite laser links, but most of traffic will go from users to terrestrial Internet, not between users.
Fine, I realise your typical wired broadband runs a 1:20~1:50 contention ratio and probably average user usage is in single digit MB (less than 10). However, isn't that what we call a pretty bad service? Whenever I had typical suburban(or small town) DSL in the past I wasn't happy with it (in UK) until I got Virgin cable service. That run really great. This was in the days of pre-HD YouTube and Netflix was a new thing. I can only imagine how bad your typical 1:50 (or as you say 1:64) contented DSL runs now.
Regarding Starlink the biggest thing I'm curious about is how they accomplish the routing and ground station uplinks. It seems they talk a lot about intersatellite laser links, but most of traffic will go from users to terrestrial Internet, not between users. The satellites that happen to pass over ground stations will have to handle a lot of backbone traffic. Then that traffic will have to be handed over to the other satellite when the first one goes out of range etc. We all know how shitty LTE is when one is on a fast train and cell handovers happen very frequently. This is the same problem, but with a lot more difficulty.
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By your narrow-minded thinking you completely miss that Starlink can reverse that. You can have many benefits of a town, yet live in a rural area. You can run your internet based business from a middle of nowhere and be successful at that. Many people live in cities and towns because they need it, not because they like it. And COVID restrictions remove those remaining benefits of living in urban area.
4G tower for 50 people, or Starlink dish for each household, what is more affordable and works better?
QuoteRegarding Starlink the biggest thing I'm curious about is how they accomplish the routing and ground station uplinks. It seems they talk a lot about intersatellite laser links, but most of traffic will go from users to terrestrial Internet, not between users.
Maybe the satellites are the backbone. Users uplink to whatever passing satellite and the constellation routes to the appropriate downlink for the service connected to. Vice-versa for the uplink. So ground stations would be close to sources to minimise ground links.