Ah ok thx. At some point in the future, I would like to move further into the sticks and go mostly off-grid, but I would still like internet. It needs to be low latency (ssh, games, voice, etc) and high throughput. I am hoping that this network can meet those needs. Otherwise I have to be close enough to a city for cable modems...
> What proof is there that he did it use Starlink for real?
None, but I can't imagine him joking about something that seems very important to him.
> Considering he turned his twitter account into a joke [1] after SEC investigation [2].
I challenge you to scroll down his timeline until before the SEC investigation. He was spreading memes way before that ever happened. Also, the SEC investigation was regarding Tesla and him running a public company. SpaceX is not a public company and he doesn't really have a history of tweeting nonsense about SpaceX projects.
I'm really excited about this technology for selfish reasons. I love disconnecting and spending time in remote wildernesses. But paradoxically, being disconnected from technology gives me a lot of anxiety about technology. Working on devops roles over the last decade, I've almost never had a time when I can just forget about it all. Even when I'm not on call, and no matter how well I try to document things, I'm often the one with the answers. When things break, I need to be able to step in. Being able to go off the grid, while still being able to step in when SHTF, would increase my quality of life significantly.
I do. I have a Garmin inReach, and it helps. But it takes ~5 minutes for one exchange of a text message. It's not enough to diagnose and fix a complex problem remotely.
Iridium Certus is something that may be an option. Their new constellation just recently came online. I am uncertain of end device availability/support though.
May I suggest to put a curb on your availability every now and then? I fully understand the urge to help out in times of need but I also know this creates a situation where you're always on call - whether scheduled or not. It also gives those who get to depend on your availability a false sense of security in assuming you will be there to help out, negating any impetus to find alternative sources. In the end you will be assumed to be available (and might get shit for not being there to help) and the distinction between 'work time' and 'leisure time' will fade.
To me one of the lures of the wilderness is the fact that I can go 'off-line' there. I paddled the Yukon from Whitehorse to the Bering Strait without being connected to the outside world, my only means of communication being the letters I sent to friends and family. The experience would have totally changed - and been markedly less - had I been in constant communication with the outside world, having a communication device go 'bleep' while running some rapids, sending that photo of that elk swimming in front of the canoe to whatever social network I might use for my share of likes and instant gratification.
Unless you want to keep living that way I would highly recommend to do hard disconnects from time to time. From my experience there will be a short disruption but then other people will step up and overall things will keep working nicely. You may also get seriously sick one day and then things will get forced too.
I have had a lot of times when I thought I was indispensable but things were just fine without me. This can be liberating because you can now focus on other things and don’t get stuck with the same stuff.
I saw something interesting the other day that I had previously missed:
Starlink has the potential to provide lower latency around the globe than terrestrial fiber because light travels faster in vacuum than in optical silica fiber.
"Delay is Not an Option: Low Latency Routing in Space"
"We conclude that a network built in this manner can provide lower latency communications than any possible terrestrial optical fiber network for communications over distances greater than about 3000 km."
Yeah pretty interesting. The primary use-case I imagine that it will improve is voice and video real-time communications. Anything that lowers the round-trip time during a human conversation is going to be very significant to improving the user experience.
Because there are billions of dollars/year of money in it.
Things that happen outside New York have an impact on stock prices in New York. Much of HFT is essentially companies racing each other to be the very first to act on external news/stock movements.
Pretty neat. I guess they could vendor out to Google. GCP Spanner relies on reliable low ping fiber between zones so this might be a clear throughput win for them.
A high bandwidth dynamically directed laser-based mesh network of 12k-42k tiny satellites 340 km above the earth is a pretty ballsy concept to begin with.
I'm curious about who came up with this idea. It's kind of brilliant.
Sure, we owe Clarke a great deal of gratitude for that (the concept of the geostationary satellite 35k km from earth, from way back in 1945!), but this is something else and new.
It follows pretty logically from any kind of work in the wireless business. There’s a very direct correlation between transmitter altitude, and how likely it is that the transmitter will be able to connect to any given client. It follows that the best transmitter is one that is in space, which is why communications were one of the first commercial uses of satellites.
The current generation of Starlink satellites don't have satellite-to-satilite links, but I haven't seen any indication that that feature is canceled for future iterations.
They have not cancelled the plans to use lasers, but have delayed the introduction of lasers until "satellite version 2.0", whatever that means.
That is, the initial constellation (my guess, the first 800 satellites) goes up without intersat links and acts as a bent pipe only. Lasers are still very much a plan for the later parts on the constellation, and the laserless satellites will eventually be replaced with ones with the lasers once they age out, but the laser links were simply not ready yet and their spectrum license essentially forces them to put the birds up on as quick a schedule as they can.
The laserless sats will not use radio to communicate with each other, but rather will use it to communicate with customers and fixed earth stations.
minor correction, they have delayed the laser interlink for version 1.0, which should be the next launch. the first launch is considered by spacex to be version 0.9 satellites
I wonder how the Starlink latency compares to the current microwave technologies used by high frequency trading firms. Any slight latency improvement is a game-changer in the HFT industry.
Why yes I make random shit up about how people plan to finance their low latency satellite constellations allla damn time. Ya got me. It's a fair cop guv.
I don’t recall SpaceX explicitly stating who they expect their customers to be, but fans quickly dredged up currency and remote stock trading as one potential major source of funding (single customers with huge budgets, rather than hundreds of homes on the cheapest plan)
Distance is still a huge problem. The Starlink signal still needs to travel up to the satellites 500 KM up, and then another 500 KM back down. That should be around 2 ms (thanks user jobseeker990, corrected from previous 15ms) of added latency, so anything that is already below 4 ms of latency probably wouldn't be improved.
Lower latency across the globe is likely irrelevant to people that colocate in the same data centers as the exchanges to reduce latency.
Then again, maybe it's useful for arbitrage between different exchanges, where they would likely have equipment next to each exchange, and have a wide distance between them.
Radio jamming will work in case a particular govt is capable enough. In other cases just a simple imports and use ban on such devices without a license.
No. Starlink will follow all local laws, including licensing the bandwidth they are using. They are not going to run a pirate internet network.
Due to complications in US laws, this actually means that Starlink cannot directly offer service in much of the world, instead having to let a local company resell access. (Because SpaceX as a US company cannot do certain kinds of filtering without running afoul of US laws.)
How do the satellites know the precise location of the client? Wouldn't it possible to buy a subscription in one country and go use it in another country?
Well, if you are going to demand payment of the service you need to be able to ID each client, so just apply filtering according to the rules for the country of that user.
Also, you presumably keep track of where your antenna is pointing anyway.
See, this is very easy to overcome. In Eastern Europe, the mafia will start a re-sell operation by opening an account to every single babushka and smuggling the devices alongside with the contraband cigarettes.
I find it very interesting because the governments see the control(or lack of) of the internet as an existential issue.
I am hoping for a censor-fee internet but I don't believe that it's possible. Someone will blow up these satellites if anyone happens to create a free(as in freedom) global communication network.
Starlink animations depict each sat servicing a narrow cone below. Remember, these operate much closer to the ground than geosynchronous; they'll have a much better idea where the client is than just which hemisphere.
Radio wave propagation is a little more complicated than what the animations depict. It would probably be easy to pretend to be somewhere else by pointing a more directional antenna at the horizon.
All Starlink communication is already extremely directional. The spot size of the beam coming from the satellite is ~1.5km on the ground, and the receiver is also directional with similar accuracy. The entire principle of Starlink is based on extreme SDMA.
If you try to communicate with a satellite on the horizon, you will not hear it, and it will not listen to you.
I checked it out, it says each satellite covers area with 550km diameter on the land. That's about a few countries at a time and possibly deep penetration into the larger ones.
They will have to turn off the sattelites over Austria to prevent connections in Turkey.
1.5km vs 550km is not necessarily mutually exclusive when using phased array antenna: the beam may be 1.5km wide, but it may be steered across a 550km area. Ergo sat could service both Austria and Turkey, without blurring - it knows which country it's "pointing" at during any millisecond, so could service each without legal conflicts.
But the point remains: The Starlink satellites do not just radiate omnidirectionally. Nor could they; the system is intended to eventually serve a meaningful fraction of the entire population on earth. This is not possible on non-steered RF. The only reason their plan has any sense is that every transmitter and receiver is directional, allowing efficient SDMA, where the same frequency can be used by multiple people simultaneously to communicate withe the same satellite, because the satellite can discriminate between their signals by the direction from which they were received.
Because of this, in order for Starlink to be able to communicate with you, it has to have a pretty good idea of where you are.
Can you quote the information? I couldn't find this in the document. I am sceptical that they can have that narrow beams and track the users(as the sattelite passes over them) from non-geostationary low earth orbit satellites. I would like to investigate this.
> Advanced phased array beam-forming and digital processing technologies within the
satellite payload give the system the ability to make highly efficient use of Ku- and Ka-band
spectrum resources and the flexibility to share that spectrum with other licensed users. User
terminals operating with the SpaceX System will use similar phased array technologies to allow
for highly directive, steered antenna beams that track the system’s low-Earth orbit satellites.
Gateway earth stations also apply advanced phased array technologies to generate high-gain
steered beams to communicate with multiple NGSO satellites from a single gateway site.
Details of the downlink beams is found at A3:
> All Ku-band downlink spot beams on each SpaceX satellite are independently steerable over the full field of view of the Earth.
Since these satellites are in low earth orbit, the satellites currently overhead will be changing very frequently. It's possible the satellites will actually not transmit at all over certain countries. The receivers will also know their location based on what's currently overhead.
This is all technical assumptions at this point since the service isn't rolled out, but being in LEO instead of GEO simplifies things greatly.
> but being in LEO instead of GEO simplifies things greatly
It may simplify some things, but it also introduces lots of complications like managing satellite handovers, telemetry tracking for thousands of satellites, accident avoidance in space, etc.
Elon has a lot of money in Tesla. Tesla currently makes, and is moving to make a lot more, money in China. If they want to continue that in China then when China asks them to turn off their Earth facing equipment on the satalites over China they are going to. Unless Elon wants to get into censorship himself, which I don't think he does. They can leave their laser links running between the satalites.
This is an amazing time to be alive. Starlink opens up bandwidth potential and global service reliability to bring completely new business models and capabilities. There is no more edge for trading on fiber under the ocean wires either (It seems so to me at least).
At the worst it doesn't impact me at all, at best it means a large number of people are going to be able to get online for cheap who previously weren't.
Given the cesspool of trolls, advertisements, fake media, bullshit social media (all of it), mass surveillance, the harvesting and sale of your personal information at every turn, and what is essentially unchecked psychological warfare taking place all across the net, I'm not sure just dumping people on it is the best thing
I'm not denying the bad things the Internet brings but are you saying because of those things you listed, it's better to have remote/poor people with limited access in third world countries remain disconnected?
A large number of people moving to this network means a majority of the internet is routed via the United States. Local service providers will die out and in the end the internet is owned and operated by one corporation which is willing/required to hand over anything to the state. Total surveillance, total control. This is a nightmare.
From a technical perspective, from what i've seen SpaceX is planning on eventually having them communicate as a web across themselves. So your "average" communication will be something like "user>base station>sat>sat>sat>base station near destination>destination". Or if the destination is nearby, something like "user>base station>sat>base station>destination"
I haven't seen anything claiming that they are going to route all internet through the US. I've actually seen the opposite about how they are planning on using this system to do intercontinental communication at faster latency than undersea fiber can currently do. And to me that implies that they will be taking the most optimal path, which means if neither the source nor the destination is in the US, the communication wouldn't have any reason to enter the US.
From a legal/political perspective I could see where you are coming from. It's a US based company, and they comply with US laws, so if push comes to shove they are going to do what the US requires them to. But I very much doubt that SpaceX will end up being a monopoly on internet access. They aren't the only player in this game (OneWeb and Eutelsat are 2 others I know off the top of my head that are working on similar products), and even if they were to become the only "fast satellite internet" company, they aren't targeting "all the internet".
For the foreseeable future, the base stations required to communicate with Starlink are expected to be large and power hungry enough that you won't see them in cars or phones or anything super mobile. They hope to get it down to the size of a pizza-box one day. They also don't have the bandwidth to handle all the world's internet access, and likely won't ever have that much bandwidth. Fiber in the ground is still significantly cheaper, faster (unless you are talking intercontinental), and more reliable for most usecases.
If things start to look like they could possibly end up at a total monopoly by SpaceX as "the internet company", i'd be right there with you about how this could be a nightmare. But i just don't see that happening, and until it does this is just another ISP.
Why not look at this from a humanity perspective? Imagine connectivity being extremely fast, reliable and cheap for all? Isn't that a good thing? Why is this even debatable as not a good thing? It's like debating if electricity is a good thing or not for all. Yah duh it is. I guess if its improperly used maybe. But that's the only argument IMO.
This is a commercial, privately owned, satellite network. It will probably be available world wide, at least that seems to be the plan. You could compare it to Microsoft, with many critical infrastructure worldwide depending on Windows. Also, a lot of the fiber used for the internet is provided by private companies, a very important network being owned by an Indian company.
Then, there are already multiple satellite networks for positioning (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BDS). Then there are a bunch of spy satellites.
So I don't really understand the problem for non-Americans, which I am too.
Recently there was a flap about a satellite having to move out of a Starlink sat's way because the latter wouldn't.
On the Starlink website they call out the automated collision avoidance system. Seems the Starlink sat would have moved away automatically if there was a risk.
I'd think it could definitely be substantially cheaper than Inmarsat. In a totally crushing way. So much more bandwidth capacity and lower latency.
Note: SpaceX is building out the Starlink coverage in a gradual way - they won't have satellites around the poles early on. Until the have truly global coverage Inmarsat will obviously stilll have an edge.
It will be interesting to see how the pricing plays out for the high latency satellite broadband offerings compared to the low latency Starlink offering.
imagine Elons greatest gift to mankind was a internet that could not be abused or spied on, and you only needed a satellite dish to access it. even if it was too slow to play games on.
111 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] thread[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1176530527290941441
[2] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-219
None, but I can't imagine him joking about something that seems very important to him.
> Considering he turned his twitter account into a joke [1] after SEC investigation [2].
I challenge you to scroll down his timeline until before the SEC investigation. He was spreading memes way before that ever happened. Also, the SEC investigation was regarding Tesla and him running a public company. SpaceX is not a public company and he doesn't really have a history of tweeting nonsense about SpaceX projects.
Closest available is $80/mo satellite internet, 12Mbps & 40GB/mo cap (overage => deprioritized), latency measured in seconds.
While little to go on, assuming Starlink will be aggressively competitive on all factors.
To me one of the lures of the wilderness is the fact that I can go 'off-line' there. I paddled the Yukon from Whitehorse to the Bering Strait without being connected to the outside world, my only means of communication being the letters I sent to friends and family. The experience would have totally changed - and been markedly less - had I been in constant communication with the outside world, having a communication device go 'bleep' while running some rapids, sending that photo of that elk swimming in front of the canoe to whatever social network I might use for my share of likes and instant gratification.
I have had a lot of times when I thought I was indispensable but things were just fine without me. This can be liberating because you can now focus on other things and don’t get stuck with the same stuff.
Starlink has the potential to provide lower latency around the globe than terrestrial fiber because light travels faster in vacuum than in optical silica fiber.
"Delay is Not an Option: Low Latency Routing in Space"
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062262/
http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf
"We conclude that a network built in this manner can provide lower latency communications than any possible terrestrial optical fiber network for communications over distances greater than about 3000 km."
Things that happen outside New York have an impact on stock prices in New York. Much of HFT is essentially companies racing each other to be the very first to act on external news/stock movements.
https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs
I'm curious about who came up with this idea. It's kind of brilliant.
http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/
That is, the initial constellation (my guess, the first 800 satellites) goes up without intersat links and acts as a bent pipe only. Lasers are still very much a plan for the later parts on the constellation, and the laserless satellites will eventually be replaced with ones with the lasers once they age out, but the laser links were simply not ready yet and their spectrum license essentially forces them to put the birds up on as quick a schedule as they can.
The laserless sats will not use radio to communicate with each other, but rather will use it to communicate with customers and fixed earth stations.
Fiber optics of various types are usually on the order of 2 to 3 (closer to 2).
Then again, maybe it's useful for arbitrage between different exchanges, where they would likely have equipment next to each exchange, and have a wide distance between them.
Other countries censor other things, be it on political, commercial or "criminal" grounds.
Can someone explain a bit on these issues? Is the global internet going to be governed on US laws if Starlink becomes a thing?
Due to complications in US laws, this actually means that Starlink cannot directly offer service in much of the world, instead having to let a local company resell access. (Because SpaceX as a US company cannot do certain kinds of filtering without running afoul of US laws.)
Also, you presumably keep track of where your antenna is pointing anyway.
I find it very interesting because the governments see the control(or lack of) of the internet as an existential issue.
I am hoping for a censor-fee internet but I don't believe that it's possible. Someone will blow up these satellites if anyone happens to create a free(as in freedom) global communication network.
If you try to communicate with a satellite on the horizon, you will not hear it, and it will not listen to you.
They will have to turn off the sattelites over Austria to prevent connections in Turkey.
The source is the original Starlink FCC filing: https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8174403/S...
But the point remains: The Starlink satellites do not just radiate omnidirectionally. Nor could they; the system is intended to eventually serve a meaningful fraction of the entire population on earth. This is not possible on non-steered RF. The only reason their plan has any sense is that every transmitter and receiver is directional, allowing efficient SDMA, where the same frequency can be used by multiple people simultaneously to communicate withe the same satellite, because the satellite can discriminate between their signals by the direction from which they were received.
Because of this, in order for Starlink to be able to communicate with you, it has to have a pretty good idea of where you are.
> Advanced phased array beam-forming and digital processing technologies within the satellite payload give the system the ability to make highly efficient use of Ku- and Ka-band spectrum resources and the flexibility to share that spectrum with other licensed users. User terminals operating with the SpaceX System will use similar phased array technologies to allow for highly directive, steered antenna beams that track the system’s low-Earth orbit satellites. Gateway earth stations also apply advanced phased array technologies to generate high-gain steered beams to communicate with multiple NGSO satellites from a single gateway site.
Details of the downlink beams is found at A3:
> All Ku-band downlink spot beams on each SpaceX satellite are independently steerable over the full field of view of the Earth.
Just read the entire A3.1 for more details.
(edit: I remembered wrong. 1.5 degrees, or at 550km, ~10 kilometers.)
This is all technical assumptions at this point since the service isn't rolled out, but being in LEO instead of GEO simplifies things greatly.
It may simplify some things, but it also introduces lots of complications like managing satellite handovers, telemetry tracking for thousands of satellites, accident avoidance in space, etc.
At the worst it doesn't impact me at all, at best it means a large number of people are going to be able to get online for cheap who previously weren't.
From a technical perspective, from what i've seen SpaceX is planning on eventually having them communicate as a web across themselves. So your "average" communication will be something like "user>base station>sat>sat>sat>base station near destination>destination". Or if the destination is nearby, something like "user>base station>sat>base station>destination"
I haven't seen anything claiming that they are going to route all internet through the US. I've actually seen the opposite about how they are planning on using this system to do intercontinental communication at faster latency than undersea fiber can currently do. And to me that implies that they will be taking the most optimal path, which means if neither the source nor the destination is in the US, the communication wouldn't have any reason to enter the US.
From a legal/political perspective I could see where you are coming from. It's a US based company, and they comply with US laws, so if push comes to shove they are going to do what the US requires them to. But I very much doubt that SpaceX will end up being a monopoly on internet access. They aren't the only player in this game (OneWeb and Eutelsat are 2 others I know off the top of my head that are working on similar products), and even if they were to become the only "fast satellite internet" company, they aren't targeting "all the internet".
For the foreseeable future, the base stations required to communicate with Starlink are expected to be large and power hungry enough that you won't see them in cars or phones or anything super mobile. They hope to get it down to the size of a pizza-box one day. They also don't have the bandwidth to handle all the world's internet access, and likely won't ever have that much bandwidth. Fiber in the ground is still significantly cheaper, faster (unless you are talking intercontinental), and more reliable for most usecases.
If things start to look like they could possibly end up at a total monopoly by SpaceX as "the internet company", i'd be right there with you about how this could be a nightmare. But i just don't see that happening, and until it does this is just another ISP.
Then, there are already multiple satellite networks for positioning (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BDS). Then there are a bunch of spy satellites.
So I don't really understand the problem for non-Americans, which I am too.
We can compare it to Windows, and the end result is exactly the same: not great.
Recently there was a flap about a satellite having to move out of a Starlink sat's way because the latter wouldn't.
On the Starlink website they call out the automated collision avoidance system. Seems the Starlink sat would have moved away automatically if there was a risk.
Or will prices for internet coverage in remote areas just as expensive as before?
Note: SpaceX is building out the Starlink coverage in a gradual way - they won't have satellites around the poles early on. Until the have truly global coverage Inmarsat will obviously stilll have an edge.
It will be interesting to see how the pricing plays out for the high latency satellite broadband offerings compared to the low latency Starlink offering.
Someone in a third world country can have the same speed as someone in a developed country.
Why should I keep my cell phone?
Will comcast go out of business?