Starlink Internet

That is a high price for equipment and monthly charge. In order to succeed, they must attract plenty of subscribers. That's not going to happen.

Satellites are expensive. How can they make this work?

dobs108

For the most part the reason for no Starlink service in an area is a ground station. The low orbit satellites connect between you and the ground station. That's why the customer dish is geo locked. That may go away in the future so that it will become portable for RV owners for example.

From the videos posted it appears that most are very pleased with the service. It is not for folks with another good internet connection available. Friend of mine recently bought a vacation property. It has satellite internet. Not Starlink. It's absolutely horrible. More expensive then Starlink. Latency is extremely high. Pings of 400 to 500 ms. Data limits with extremely high overage charges. He has applied to get the Starlink system.

I'd be reluctant to consider the offering until such time as it is out of beta. In the beta phase I would certainly want the right to cancel before parting with the $499. There are some reviews, one in particular at https://www.theverge.com/22435030/starlink-satellite-interne....

The review summary states "But right now it is also very much a beta product that is unreliable, inconsistent, and foiled by even the merest suggestion of trees."

Considering it is beta, I can understand most of the concerns, but the comment "foiled by even the merest suggestion of trees" is a potential nail in the coffin.

The equipment cost will come down with time. There will also be rental plans available, similar to some satellite TV companies.

I don't know what the average cost of internet service is today. I know it's cheaper if bundled with other services. Unfortunately, none of these companies are available in my rural area. In my case, I pay Verizon $70 per month for their crappy DSL service. Unfortunately, it's my only option. Outages are frequent and the speed is ridiculously slow.

To me, it's a no brainer to pay $29 per month more for almost 10 times the bandwidth. Many won't agree and the service isn't for everyone but Starlink looks to be a godsend for those of us who live in the sticks.

You missed a key line in the review

I've watched various SpaceX efforts with interest for years. I signed up for Starlink as soon as I could, and took delivery on my dish and extra installation equipment in late April.

I was able to install the dish at a position on my roof from which there are zero trees or other obstructions that reach 25 degrees above the horizon. That turns out to be better than needed in all directions except north.

The trickiest part of installation was the necessary hole in my wall. I fretted about possibly hitting a power line or such, but used a stud sensor with extra capabilities to gain pretty good confidence that my chosen location next to the hole by which cable comes into my house was safe.

In Albuquerque, NM, I am almost as far south as SpaceX has yet shipped service routinely in the USA, and in the early months I suffered several minutes per day of service interruption due to no satellites usefully in view. As of August 3, that has stopped altogether, as more satellites have been launched, and more of those already launched have precessed and burned their way to their intended operating orbits.

As Musk himself says, this system is not intended to be a competitive option in well served urban areas. It lacks the user density capacity to serve more than a tiny fraction of potential users in a place such as the LA basin. It is more expensive to the end user than good fiber is in many locations in the world.

But it is fabulously superior in price and performance to available options for many people around the world who are as a little as a mile away from the beaten path.

If you are happy with your current Internet service and are paying less than $100/month for it, don't even consider Starlink. If you live in a cabin "out there", and have horrible Internet service at a high price, and can see your way to putting your antenna in a location with a good view of the sky, it may just be the happiest purchase you have made.

Since we are on a GPS forum, it should surprise no one that the Starlink signals, which are even higher frequency than our GPS signals, can't "see" through much of anything. Unlike GPS, Starlink is currently only trying to connect to one satellite at a time, so any obstruction (yes, a leaf on a tree is an obstruction) within the candidate stretch of sky is a problem. But lots of people who have bought the service have been able to get to zero obstructions. I have, just by choosing a good place on my roof. Some others have had to cut some trees, or build a bit of a tower, or ...

Don't count on the equipment cost going down soon. SpaceX has stated the cost of end user equipment is just over $1,000.

Have you tried any latency sensitive use cases, like gaming? I mean it's better than having really slow (< 1 Mbit) in some parts of the US, but I'm wondering how is it.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink

“… Internet traffic via a geostationary satellite has a minimum theoretical round-trip latency of at least 477 milliseconds (ms; between user and ground gateway), but in practice, current satellites have latencies of 600 ms or more. Starlink satellites are orbiting at 1⁄105 to 1⁄30 of the height of geostationary orbits, and thus offer more practical Earth-to-sat latencies of around 25 to 35 ms, comparable to existing cable and fiber networks. …”

That means total up-and-down latency is 100 ms to 140ms. The components are 1) a trip up, 2) a trip down, 3) usual latency of ground ISP to website host and back, 4) up, and 5) down. When they say earth-to-sat I presume that they don't mean earth-to-sat-to-earth.

“… In October 2020, SpaceX launched a paid-for beta service in the U.S. called "Better Than Nothing Beta", charging US$499 for a user terminal, with an expected service of "50 Mbps to 150 Mbps and latency from 20 ms to 40 ms over the next several months". …”

“… SpaceX has made applications to the FCC for at least 32 ground stations in United States, and as of July 2020 has approvals for 5 of them (in 5 states).[199] SpaceX's ground stations would also be installed on-site at Google data-centers world-wide. ...”

This is less clear but I infer that here they they are saying that the total up-and-down latency is 100 ms to 160 ms, about the same.

Does the immediate satellite that you are connected to also connect directly to the a ground station? If it is not directly connected then you have to add satellite to satellite communications and latency in two directions.

Perhaps all ~3,000 Starlink satellites, all in low earth orbit, will directly connect to a ground station. I don’t know.

That sounds kinda expensive for a beta tester. Do you also have to hire someone to install the dish? That's typically not a DIY although it can be done.

While laser links between satellites have been part of the plan from the beginning, they turned out to be expensive to develop and are currently flying only on a couple of experimental birds and one batch of ten in polar orbit.

So the current operational reality is that the user terminal talks directly to just one satellite at a time, and that one satellite talks directly to a ground station, which in turn is connected to the backbone Internet. The choice of satellite for your terminal is reconsidered once every 15 seconds, and you can easily spot the frequent actual changes by abrupt shifts in latency.

As they don't plan to get a network of ground stations in either Antarctica or the far north, the higher inclination orbit birds will all have laser links from the very beginning, with one first batch of 10 having already launched. The last disclosed plan was for about six launches of polar inclination satellites with laser links before the end of this year, but some recent rumblings suggest that phase may be being put off a bit.

As I mentioned, this thing is not really aimed at residents of apartment buildings in high density urban areas. A large fraction of the suitable customer base seems to find the installation effort surprisingly easy. I read a user forum extensively, and have come across very few cases of people hiring someone else to do their installation. Tens of thousands of us have done our own, including me. (72-year old man with back trouble)

More people have been troubled by finding that their trees or other obstructions require significant investment to achieve an obstruction free installation position.

Here is a video by someone that seems to be a fair review. Crude initial install to see if it works. Speed testing and and a good explanation why it's better then what he had.

https://youtu.be/9ypyDyOUc98

At our age, stay off the ladder. As a ladder professional, a former member of a ladder company in a busy city fire department, I have routinely climbed 100-foot (31 meters) ladders, extension ladders, used safety harnesses, and rappelled down the side of buildings. All of this under conditions such as winter ice, smoke, flames, and wind.

I no longer climb ladders at my house and pay a pro to do the job. Recently in the next county, a pastor fell off the ladder while cleaning gutters at his church. He was one story up and was killed instantly.

Elon Musk tweeted 100k terminals shipped.

Gwynne Shotwell (who currently spends a good bit of her time on Starlink, while Elon is mostly spending his SpaceX time on Starship) has repeatedly said that User Terminal production has been held back in recent months by electronic parts availability (apparently even though the antenna physical structure is pretty interesting, they can build those faster than they can buy the parts to populate the huge circuit board). Just a few days ago she mentioned in a speech that she expected the parts availability to get a lot better about October.

More User Terminals won't help them to add users in currently filled up cells (for that they need more satellites), but there are many, many places where the currently operating satellites could serve more users than they have.

No pun intended but it would have been appropriate

I read it but it doesn't apply. My house is in the middle of a former cornfield with no nearby trees.

The Starlink app projects a perfect signal.

Like you, I know too many people who have been killed or injured in ladder related falls.

I'm 74 and gave up using anything but a stepladder. 10 years ago, I installed a safety ladder system from my deck up to the roof. I use it to service several pieces of equipment I have mounted up there.

Great post! Pretty much explains it all.

Thanks for your personal experience.

A few years ago when my wife and I were house shopping, we passed on a house we really liked in a nearby small town because they had few options for Internet, and all of them would have been a significant downgrade from what we were used to at the time. Maybe if Starlink had been available then we would have given consideration to that property.

Indeed. Starlink and its future competitors will have a dedicated customer base from people not connected with fiber or terrestrial broadband. If technology improves to require smaller antennas (not likely, but who knows what physics magic awaits us), then there are fare more use cases besides providing internet to buildings.

After 9 months on the wait list, Starlink finally shipped my equipment. The install was a simple DIY project which took an afternoon since the system is pretty much plug & play. The only challenge was finding the right spot to mount the dish.

I know high speed internet is no big deal for many here and most seem to take it for granted these days. For me however, it's a godsend. No more buffering when streaming a movie with my crappy old DSL service. No more pauses or lost connections when using Zoom. No more error messages when trying to send large files via email... etc, etc.

I used to put off downloading the latest Garmin maps and would only do it every couple of years. With DSL, the files would take many hours with server disconnects often causing failures. Most of the time I would download overnight and hope for the best in the morning.

With Starlink, I'm getting speeds from 100 to 300 mbps down & 10-20 up. With DSL, I was lucky to get .8 down & .2 up. I can now update a GPS map file in less than 15 minutes depending on how busy the Garmin servers are at the time.

My earlier prediction that the Starlink equipment price would drop with time doesn't seem to be happening. In fact, it went up to over $600. The monthly service charge also went from $99 to $110/mo.

Yes, it's expensive but it's also the only game in town for me. Until a cheaper alternative becomes available, it's a price I'm willing to pay.

They are NUTS !

Interesting - although more than what I need.

Elon Musk made the Starlink system available for Ukraine. One of its uses is to direct drones targeting Russian positions:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/starlink-helps-u...

bdhsfz6, thanks for the comments. I'm not a Starlink user (don't need it), but I understand your frustration before and your happiness after you got Starlink wi-fi up and running.

Phil

I have had Starlink Internet service for very nearly a year now. While generally the service has been quite good, very recently we've had more network disruptions that I've seen in months.

I do wonder whether the Russians are trying to take some measures against the network as a whole. If so, they haven't succeeded in creating much more than a minor annoyance.

People who don't do the math have suggested that the Russians could just shoot down the satellites, not realizing how very many satellites there are. Elon has suggested that probably SpaceX could launch new satellites faster than the Russians down, but that he hopes the experiment will not be tried.

As of this morning https://planet4589.org/space/stats/star/starstats.html reports there to be 2097 Starlink satellites in orbit, of which 2067 are in functioning condition, and 1683 are in actual operational service provision. interfering with the system by going after the individual operational satellites would be a losing proposition.

I wonder what is going to happen with the forecast massive sunspots in the coming months with StarLink????

I'll estimate there to be little if any effect. I think solar activity variation can cause some variation in atmospheric density at the satellite altitudes of interest. At operational position, if the density went up quite a bit it would cause more station-keeping fuel to be expended per day, but they have a goodly supply of Krypton on board, and a short-term variation in consumption would have no effect on users, though it could speed end-of-life status years later when the krypton runs out a little sooner than expected.

They did once get caught out when the atmospheric density at initial orbital altitude was so much higher than expected that they actually lost a few dozen birds, But those were weeks away from reaching operation status, so again no effect on users.

I've got no idea of what our modern NASA is like but the old NASA demanded batteries with a serious pedigree. That's why they used lemons with zinc and copper electrodes. I doubt that Musk uses lemon power.

I can't stand it and need to repeat a Tesla joke. Ya know why new Teslas don't have that new car smell? Cause they have the Elon Musk