Latency to where? One of the promises of starlink is reducing latency over mid distance - say transatlantic or even across the states, due to using vacuum rather than fibres. Will be interesting how HFT use it.
Starlink network is nowhere near complete so I’d expect things to only get better (until customers start piling on)
Why would HFT even consider using it? They are located as close as possible to the exchange they operate on, not across states or halfway across the world.
The satellite mesh is not, a straight line from point A to point B is not possible most of the time, given the number of satellites available and range of laser communication in space.
I am not praising anything, I am correcting your statement that much of the financial industry is a waste of human ingenuity. That "waste of human ingenuity" enabled us to build the modern world.
I think you can argue on the whole is a waste, but I do believe it does have some advantages. EG efficient HFTs can reduce bid ask spreads which does save a lot of money for retail traders.
They make trades at one exchange based of prices at another. For that reason there has been a lot of microwave relays set up between New York and Chicago, for example. Starlink could reduce latency from New York to London, another important center of trade.
Too lazy to watch it -- does it take into account the multiple criss-crossing satellite hops?
I watched it -- no it doesn't :)
It is comparing fiberoptics latency with straight line light propagation.
So the worst case scenario of non-existing inter-satellite communication could easily be worse than fiberoptics.
But I guess if the hedgefunds knew exactly which packet travels in a straight line, they could send one packet via Starlink and others via fiberoptics.
HFT have installed microwave relays between Chicago and New York and between London and Berlin to arbitrage on the 47% fiber optic delay between the exchanges. A LEO satellite relay serves the same purpose. I can see London to New York, New York to Tokyo fiber connections being superceded by LEO satellite.
Quite surprised why LEO for cross exchange arbitrage was not already done. Microwaves were not super with weather conditions the last time taking an arbitrary interest.
If you mean Deutsche Börse AG, than that would be Frankfurt am Main and not Berlin which is a slight difference of about 400 km. Frankfurt to London is actually a shorter distance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_exchanges
If I understood it correctly Starlink doesn't send between satellites yet, only sat<->ground. Sat<->sat is a big point of starlink and when they roll that out the latency should go down, especially for starlink<->starlink comms I imagine.
Judging from their high launch cadence, it seems satellite-satellite communication was just a means to excite the fanboys and motivate their employees, the same way the peddle the Mars stuff.
I don't understand how this is meant to lower the latency. Currently:
ground <--> satellite <--> ground
With satellite links:
ground <--> satellite <--> satellite <--> ground
How can the latter possibly be faster?
Edit: Thanks for all the responses. I'd been assuming it was a test of Starlink latency only, but if it's Starlink -> ground station -> open internet -> ISP then it would make sense how that would be slower than a pure Starlink connection.
i.e. the sat-to-sat link should be faster than the ground-to-ground link, on the basis that light transmitted in vacuum goes faster than light transmitted in glass. That's the theory at least.
Light travels through glass (fiber optics) at 2/3 of the speed in vacuum. So as long as you are skipping some ground links by doing similar length links in space it is faster.
Low altitude orbits mean that the hops up and down can be compensated by faster hops across.
That all of course is not there yet and depends on Starlink implementing the cross sattelite links.
They need sat-sat links for that, I think the current generation of starlink doesn't have that so initial customers will not see that kind of benefit, their data will be bounced back to a ground station from the same satellite.
Count yourself lucky you don't live in either South America, Africa or Asia, where +100ms latency is more common than not. Fortunately I can count on one hand the applications that don't work with +100ms latency (not counting gaming). Usually it's the fault of the application developers (or rather the infrastructure team) where they put too low timeouts for requests rather than letting the requests go for a bit longer.
Sub 100ms for satellite internet is incredible, hopefully it'll be cheap enough for people to actually get, compared to the current satellite internet we have.
Can't wait for humanity to become a multi-planet species, as then application developers would have to start taking multi-minute latencies into account, and hopefully that'll help me as someone with ~500ms latency to most services.
Depends on where on the +100ms range we're on. Once you start hitting 1s latency, lots of applications (or rather, their servers) have a hard limit on 1s for every request. So when loading data from the backend, you have to continue to retry the request until it gets below 1s and then you will finally get the data.
I think Adobe been one of the worst companies I've dealt with personally, as many of the endpoints have ridiculously low timeouts (for someone with really shitty latency).
Gaming and video conferencing come to mind. Videoconferences need bandwidth for obvious reasons but it's also nice if you don't have any delays in when you says something and when the other side hears it. I've been in some calls lately with very noticable delays. Especially people joining from mobile phones tend to be affected (shit latency, variable bandwidth).
Anything that requires real-time interaction between a client and a server and other clients, e.g., gaming, stadia/geforce now, videoconferencing, ...
< 100ms is usually the "minimum", > 150ms is often "unusable", and for a smooth experience you might need < 30ms depending on the application (e.g. depending on the game you might need < 90ms or <60ms or <30ms).
Depends how much you care about people talking over one another. If your call is a presentation/lecture/class with few switches between speakers, latency's no problem.
But if your calls normally have lively discussion where someone different jumps in any time there's a pause, the higher the latency the more likely people will say "meeting in person is much better"
Likewise, with things like remote desktop, 100ms of latency isn't a dealbreaker but it'll certainly leave some of your users saying "things that run locally just feel snappier"
For mobile phone networks, >20ms latency in audio is "unacceptable" from the point-of-view of standards conformance and a client "accepting" the hardware of some vendor.
Up to 100ms is kind of ok-ish barely-sluggish, but over 100ms latency, it becomes extremely annoying to maintain a conversation.
Video conferencing often makes this worse, because it is what people use for meetings, etc. and that involves more than 2 people maintaining a conversation, so latency becomes even more important there.
Otherwise 3-4 people start talking over each other, and none of them notices until they receive what the others are saying. Which is extremely annoying.
> Can't wait for humanity to become a multi-planet species, as then application developers would have to start taking multi-minute latencies into account, and hopefully that'll help me as someone with ~500ms latency to most services.
Stuff that requires realtime (or near realtime) communication simply won't be possible.
What remains is bulk data transfer, here I guess the only viable way is:
1) on both ends in both directions, massive buffers (at least bandwidth x 4)
2) massive FEC (of course it will reduce the net bandwidth, but there's no real other way to avoid lots of retransmissions)
3) sender station transmits the data in blocks, with each object of data having a specified number of blocks
3) receiver station checks all the data blocks for integrity, places it in buffers, and transmits back a list of broken blocks and a list of successfully received blocks
4) sender station receives the list of broken/successful blocks, deletes successful blocks from its buffer and retransmits those marked as broken
5) receiver station waits until all the blocks for an object of data have been successfully transmitted, and delivers the message to the recipient system
Yeah, in short: content-addressable systems are needed if we're ever to send data between planets on a larger scale. Systems like IPFS and alike solves this problem nicely, at least in my tests with high-latency scenarios.
Consistent 30ms would be pretty excellent, and make it useful for many things. Consistent 50ms, similarly. It starts to get a bit more of an issue at 80ms or 100ms, but my worry is more that jitter may be huge, and 30-100ms is a huge jitter window that could limit usefuless not just for games, but also many other things such as voice calls.
A 100ms ping is perfectly playable in everything except twitch-based shooters. In voice calls you will notice it, but it won't get in the way like say a 1-2s delay would (like you get if you phone from one end of the world to the other). It's really a very good result bearing in mind that this can work absolutely anywhere.
I don't think that's still true with 802.11ac. My Wi-Fi adds only 1 or 2 ms latency. There is way more jitter, but it doesn't really matter if the total is always under 10ms.
The shared medium (frequency spectrum) is what can add latency. If a device wants to talk over Wifi but another device is transmitting it has to wait. This introduces (variable) latency, aka jitter.
Here's an anecdotal example for you, in practice with actual equipment:
1) Mac pro via ethernet to router:
# ping -c 5 -S 192.168.1.88 192.168.1.1
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) from 192.168.1.88: 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.413 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.396 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.417 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.553 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.514 ms
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.396/0.459/0.553/0.063 ms
2) Same machine via wifi over Unify AP to router:
# ping -c 5 -S 192.168.1.72 192.168.1.1
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) from 192.168.1.72: 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=2.992 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=4.136 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.873 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=2.293 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=2.552 ms
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.873/2.769/4.136/0.774 ms
That's an average of 2.3ms extra latency, or 6x higher.
I speak a lot with customers on satellite phones more or less every day. When they are calling from a BGAN terminal the latency can be a problem. Latency is around 1000-1500ms. But when speaking on a VSAT Ka-band terminal the latency is less of a problem. Data latency is around 600-800ms on VSAT. So I doubt latency of 100ms would be a problem at all. Most VOIP solutions have some mechanisms to reduce the perceived latency.
I'm struggling to imagine a network path that could induce a 1-2 second delay from one side of the world to the other. Even at just 50% of c-in-vacuum that's only a tenth of a second.
There's a lot of active gear introducing delays between those ends. Pinging www.govt.nz, which is about 17000km from me and as close to the antipode as I can find in a quick search, pings at around 300 to 400ms, so only at about 15 to 20% of c.
Even in an FPS unless you are trying to play at a pro level or something 100ms will be barely noticeable. Your reaction time is already probably over 300ms
One thing that may be a game changer: inter-satellite relaying. With the whole network, Starlink client to Starlink client latency might actually drop.
That really is surprising considering it’s just an island (or a few islands? I can never remember wether Ireland/isle of man is included.) It’s weird how expensive housing can get when there’s so much empty space.
Part of the island of Ireland, Northern Ireland, is part of the UK the rest being the Republic of Ireland (which everyone not in NI refers to as just Ireland).
The Isle of Man isn't part of the UK, though it is a Crown Dependency.
This got me thinking... people _will_ start putting infra into space sooner or later, just for the better latency. Imagine the new availability zones in aws/gcp/azure :)
Could definitely lead to more investment into space, more money to SpaceX / Blue Origin / etc for their new-gen lift vehicles.
Would that not be impossible because of the lack of effective cooling in space? The only way to get rid of heat in space is by radiation, which is a very inefficient process. Assuming temperatures cannot rise above 100°C, every square meter of radiator fin emits at most a kilowatt. And because half the orbit is spent in direct sunlight, a significant part of the surface area will have to be reflective, making it useless for radiating heat.
Also, where'd you get the power? Solar panels will only yield a kilowatt per square meter at most, for half of the orbit. Beam it up from Earth?
This is amazing. I know there will be latency issues, but for majority of web browsing, videos, etc, it shouldn't matter.
We are entering the era of spacenet and the future looks bright.
Imagine having devices as small as phones or set-top boxes that can directly access internet using satellites. It would lead to a revolution in many industries.
Could you expand on which industries will be improved? My normal life is covered entirely by 4G, with 5G now appearing.
I guess you mean things like internet on planes, shipping internet, off-shore rigs? But what things can't they do at the moment because of prohibitorily slow/costly satellite internet?
Here's one: Teleoperation / autonomy in remote areas. Forestry. Mining.
Not sure how big this, objectively speaking money-wise, but for teleop/autonomy it sure does enable new things when there is true 100% coverage everywhere on earth.
> it sure does enable new things when there is true 100% coverage everywhere on earth
But there won't be. Not with Starlink at least. Even at their envisioned full constellation size of 40000 satellites, coverage won't be 100%. The Arctic and Antarctic regions won't have any coverage at all, for example.
Already being done with existing satellite services.
Starlink is cool and al, but satellite internet isn't new. Both forestry, mining and farming is utilising existing satellite services for monitoring and operations.
Starlink is better than all existing services, but with some drawbacks. Like it will be really expensive to provide service in really remote areas until sat to sat relay is possible as there must be a ground station within 500 km radius of the satellite. This means that to provide service in the Amazonas SpaceX will have to build ground stations in the Amazonas. To provide service in the Pacific and Atlantic SpaceX will have to deploy several floating ground stations in the middle of the oceans.
Again, not taking anything away from Space X. Starlink is really cool and will be a wake up call for the satcom industry, but satcom is not a new thing and Starlink have significant drawbacks for the time being.
Logistics: already done via gps receivers and low bandwidth spot style satcom. SpaceX hasn't designed for mobile/vehicle mounted ground stations either.
Shipping: already done via AIS
Real Time Weather: already done by satellites with the required features. SpaceX is not building this.
Real Time Video: again, there's no way you're getting animal scale images out of a starlink scale sat.
I swear people have taken the usual Elon hype with this and gone to absolutely absurd lengths. This is not your iphone suddenly works globally. This is not a star trek communicator. This is an alternative to sat internet like Dish network et all. Is your hiker really gonna be hauling around a giant freakin' dish?
It's going to be a premium priced broadband service for rural customers and institutions that can afford it. If you know anything about the market you know DoD is gonna be the customer they focus on.
>Logistics: already done via gps receivers and low bandwidth spot style satcom
Imagine being able to see live video, or AI enhanced video (movement detection, etc). A lot more bandwidth will open up many areas for innovation.
Imagine being able to get real-time data of patients being transported in planes or ground vehicles.
>Real Time Weather: already done by satellites with the required features.
But there is not much data about wind patterns, directions, barometric pressure, etc. Satellites can observe on a macro level. If you can combine that with micro level ground data, perhaps predictions for weather would be more accurate.
>Real Time Video: again, there's no way you're getting animal scale images out of a starlink scale sat.
Perhaps, but periodic photos, would be possible, and that would be enough for many innovations.
>I swear people have taken the usual Elon hype
Even I have the after taste of Hyperloop. However, this is different because there are billions being spent to send actual satellites to space. That is not hype. I would not cast aside Elon's vision so easily, especially if he has committed and spent so much on the idea and is actually building out the infrastructure.
>This is not a star trek communicator.
But Imagine if you could have one.
>Is your hiker really gonna be hauling around a giant freakin' dish?
Would it be too far fetched to think that those can be shrunk down, perhaps to the size of a suitcase or a backpack?
>It's going to be a premium priced broadband service for rural customers and institutions that can afford it. If you know anything about the market you know DoD is gonna be the customer they focus on.
Sure, that would be one revenue source. But many innovations in the world are made possible due to what is available. Would an app store be possible without the iPhone? But, when the iPhone was made, the app store, as a concept was at best, a theoretical idea in Jobs' mind.
> Imagine being able to see live video, or AI enhanced video (movement detection, etc). A lot more bandwidth will open up many areas for innovation.
For what benefit?
> Imagine being able to get real-time data of patients being transported in planes or ground vehicles.
This is a very niche use case.
> But there is not much data about wind patterns, directions, barometric pressure, etc. Satellites can observe on a macro level. If you can combine that with micro level ground data, perhaps predictions for weather would be more accurate.
I'm sorry but this is incredibly ignorant. There's a huge volume of data that's fed into several global weather modeling supercomputers continuously. That's literally where the weather forecasts on your tv come from.
> Perhaps, but periodic photos, would be possible, and that would be enough for many innovations.
You still aren't getting it. There are fundamental physical limits to image resolution based on the size of the optics. You'd have trouble resolving individual creatures even with a telescope the scale of Hubble/KeyHole. Starlink changes nothing about this.
> However, this is different because there are billions being spent to send actual satellites to space.
The hype is people speculating on applications like the above that are entirely implausible and unrealistic. It's on the same scale as thinking the next Tesla is going to be a flying delorian with fusion power.
> But Imagine if you could have one.
But you just aren't fantasizing, you're claiming these fantasies will become real in the short term without understanding the limitations that preclude them.
> Would it be too far fetched to think that those can be shrunk down, perhaps to the size of a suitcase or a backpack?
Yes, it is too far fetched. You cannot shrink a wavelength. In addition, starlink's design requires the transmission/received lobes have a certain maximum beam width. The global capacity of the system depends on this parameter. That means they need phased arrays of a certain minimum size in terms of array area and number of array elements to meet their specs.
> But, when the iPhone was made, the app store, as a concept was at best, a theoretical idea in Jobs' mind.
There were examples of app stores before iPhone. That wasn't a unique new concept.
Imagine the military setting up an internet base station and releasing remote controlled drones for surveillance or military operations. Having satellite based high speed internet would be a game changer for remote locations.
Imagine being able to conduct a robot controller surgery in Africa, by a doctor in the US. Currently, not possible, but with high speed satellite based internet, it could be.
Imagine an electrical engineer being able to help his colleagues in Africa, with specific issue, over VR or Video calls, enabled by Satellite based internet.
I can see a number of possibilities and opportunities.
> Imagine being able to conduct a robot controller surgery in Africa, by a doctor in the US.
Highly unlikely for many reasons: latency too high, cost of equipment way too high, only very few hospitals are even equipped for remote surgery even in the West, let alone underdeveloped countries...
> Imagine an electrical engineer being able to help his colleagues in Africa
That's already possible even without satellite-based internet and doesn't require it at all.
The only point I agree with is the military - surveillance and remote controlled drones could benefit from greatly from low-latency high-bandwidth satellite internet.
> only very few hospitals are even equipped for remote surgery even in the West, let alone underdeveloped countries...
You're talking about today, which is the lowest potential time scenario. How about the time frame of 15-20 years from now? It'll take years just to fully build out Starlink's constellation, then many more years to fully spread its use. Remote surgery will continue to expand, becoming increasingly common, and the prices will come down. As that process unfolds, you will increasingly see the major robotic-assisted surgery companies donate (or otherwise massively subsidize) equipment to poorer nations, exactly as is done with very expensive drugs now. Also, while today robotic-assisted surgery costs are very high (dominated by companies like Intuitive or Stryker), China and others will eventually fully knock down that door and flood the market with lower cost systems that are 85% good enough and will become very widely used.
It's also more likely that it'll be highly skilled doctors in one less developed nation doing work in another less developed nation. That will help keep the costs down more than the parent's example. US doctors will likely do most of their remote work within the US (other than charitable work), where they can command far higher fees.
>That's already possible even without satellite-based internet and doesn't require it at all.
Maybe in developed countries. In India, most Power Plant construction sites don't even have dial-up internet. There are a lot of projects going on in a lot of remote places, where there is simply no infrastructure available for internet. StarLink could be rented for a while and perhaps used after that.
But most of this is already being done with existing satellite services. Starlink is cool and better than existing providers in many respects, but it's not a total game changer.
In my experience (multiple clients in rural area) low speed (1.5 Mbps) with low (50 to 80 ms) latency will outperform 40Mbps/800 ms latency connections for video.
Web browsing, of course, isn't really affected by latency.
Web browsing can be super slow if you have a high latency. Between the DNS requests, the TCP handshakes, the TLS handshakes, it takes forever before you start receiving the actual content.
When you say video, do you mean video conferencing? I don't see how latency would affect video streaming significantly, other than the initial buffering time. In fact I would say high latency affects general web browsing much more than video streaming.
Where are you getting the 800 ms latency though? That's what Geo stationary satellite internet provides due to the physical distance they have to operate at (35786KM), but Starlink and OneWeb and other mega constellations are operating at 550KM which easily gets you below 100ms and likely close to 30 ms without sat to sat comms.
I'm not sure that's revolutionary outside of very rural areas or in a desert.
Smart phones and set-top boxes etc can already access the internet without satellites, and often with much better latency.
What would satellites add for urban or sub-urban applications?
I do appreciate the extra competition that satellite internet brings. Especially in parts of the world with suppressed competition (like the US..) this could have huge practical effects without having to be a big deal in any technical sense.
Smart phones use 4G networks. And now there is another alternative.
Cellular networks have limited coverage. Imagine tracking a truck traveling across the US, or a ferry, across the English channel. Currently, that's not possible with 4G. But with a satellite driven internet system, it very well could be.
As for urban and sub-urban applications, not much.
True, for now. There was a time when a cell phone was the size of a brick.
Maybe we will not see such miniaturization, but I can safely assume that a small backpack size device should be light and last long enough for meaningful high speed internet with StarLink.
Genuine question - why is it a given that there will be latency issues? It looks like the satellites are only ~350 miles, or a little less than 2 light-milliseconds, from Earth's surface.
User -> Satellite -> multiple hops between satellites (as they are orbiting earth and the right one has to be selected to relay data to -> earth DNS servers -> multiple hops across internet -> satellite -> user
Additional latency is introduced due to satellites and the grid between the satellites, as well as complications from rotation of satellites.
> User -> Satellite -> multiple hops between satellites (as they are orbiting earth and the right one has to be selected to relay data to -> earth DNS servers -> multiple hops across internet -> satellite -> user
All of that in general is comparable to the costs incurred on the ground from any other kind of network.
> complications from rotation of satellites
As far as a single routed packet is concerned, the satellites are stationary.
On some games (Rainbow 6: Siege being the one I'm most familiar with) latency actually helps you, as the enemy has an out of date picture of where you are.
That's an unfair comparison though. Everyone used to play with high latency. There's a clear advantage to you if your ping is 20 ms and mine is 300 ms.
Whether there's a clear advantage to having 50 vs 20 ms ping I can't answer. I'm quite certain that's an advantage I personally can't make any use of, but a Quake pro might be able to.
Also, today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago.
> That's an unfair comparison though. Everyone used to play with high latency.
I played a lot of Quake and that was not remotely close to being the case. There were the high ping and low ping players, with not much of a % inbetween. In 1996-1997 the vast majority of people were playing Quake online via dial-up modems. The best players had low pings and were playing over ISDNs or better (a lot of players were on fast university or corporate networks).
> today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago.
The pro-level players in the later half of the 1990s were as elite as anything that exists today in the FPS space. They were playing like it was a job even when it wasn't, and they had been doing it for a while (Doom LAN competitions were common before that). Quake clans were prolific. They also had professional caliber competitions / tournaments back then, see: the 1997 Red Annihilation Quake tournament in Atlanta, where Dennis Fong won Carmack's Ferrari.
We're already doing literally down/up as your traffic goes from your computer on a above-ocean-level altitude, into the ground, eventually probably into the ocean floor and then up into some other building (at least considering transocean traffic)
Nothing specific, I think they are still figuring that out, but Gwynne Shotwell, the president of Spacex, is hinting a bit I think with:
> Shotwell said millions of people in the U.S. pay $80 per month to get “crappy service.” She didn’t say whether Starlink will cost more or less than $80 per month but suggested that would be a segment of the public the company would target as well as rural areas that currently have no connectivity.
I'm not sure if you can take that testmy.net source for granted. It mis-reported my "internet" speed by about 30Mbps. I get around 50Mbps on fast.com and speed.cloudflare.com - those two speedtests are enough for me to consider it "internet" speed.
Can someone explain the physical layer aspects of starlink? Is the spectrum same as mobile data spectrum or does it work with different part of spectrum. If it is different part, do we need specific hardware to receive and transmit?
Are there any interference/loses issues that might popup when scaled?
What is stopping spaceX to provide internet outside US?
> Can someone explain the physical layer aspects of starlink? Is the spectrum same as mobile data spectrum or does it work with different part of spectrum. If it is different part, do we need specific hardware to receive and transmit?
Almost certainly has its own slice of spectrum. You need a pizza-box sized antenna set up, so it's not quite person-portable yet, but not too bad for installing on a vehicle.
> Are there any interference/loses issues that might popup when scaled?
Each satellite only has so much bandwidth. So the more people using it in the same area, the worse it's going to get. In theory they'll add more satellites as needed, but it's never going to be much good for towns/cities.
> What is stopping spaceX to provide internet outside US?
Ground stations and regulations. Once they have satellite-satellite communications running the ground stations become less of an issue (though there's a latency penalty if your signal has to go a long way round the satellites before getting to the ground).
Well, I would add that both satellite and ground receiver have phased arrays antennae. These allow emitting multiple focused beams simultaneously.
Since the angular resolution of these beams is limited, they each cover a fixed ground area (let's say 20km across). If more than one customer sits in that area, they will have to share airtime with the others.
Now, it's probably easier for the satellite to perform (time-division or other) multiplexing, since it knows how much data each node is going to receive.
I guess it's a lot more involved when it comes to sharing upload bandwidth with another client you can't see.
Anyway, this makes it easy to scale in rural areas, and pretty much a no-go for cities.
Now, a question of my own: do SpaceX satellites already have HW for sat-to-sat communication?
This is only a few Mbps slower than my Fibre-to-the-Cabinet broadband in the UK provides. And I'm living in a town; plenty of rural areas are much slower.
Yeah it sucks, but I think it is kind of inevitable that someone was going to do this, and even Iridium had similar problems. Now that we have at least 3 companies pouring in serious money, it seems likely that the economics will keep pushing for it.
My hope is that this will lower the cost of access to space with another magnitude, which should allow a serious scale up of the amount of astronomy done from space.
I don't think SpaceX would break Earth satellites. Isn't it trivial to remove a light streak from a picture? Satellites were a problem before SpaceX and I'm sure it's 1 click in some software astronomers use. The surface area of a streak of light must be less than 1% of the total surface area so virtually no information is lost. If you use multiple exposures it's even less. Seriously, an astronomer who can't deal with this problem should just give back their PhD. The idea that humanity should be prevented from extending internet access to the entire planet because an astronomer finds it too inconvenient to click a button is example of entitled behaviour on a scale I've never encountered in my life.
I would also be glad, if you could just look at the sky and don't be disturbed by satellites and air and light pollution. I think, SpaceX and others will eventually manage to make the satellites less or mostly not disturbing. But lets face it, SpaceX actually enables better professional astronomy because launching a telescope into space is now much more affordable. Also all those remote locations, where normal earth based astronomy still kind of works will have a usable internet connection to transfer the results e.g. for computation and further instructions. Also scientists will be able to e.g. video-talk home which should make these long trips into nowhere more socially acceptable in their respective families. I can imagine, that would make some of that research more surmountable.
Fantastic. I'm keenly curious on how this will work with national regulations. Having a single global ISP is very attractive on the surface and that's with the huge caveat on monopoly, but as an additional option. I'm just not sure how this will interact with some nations' policy/restrictions. Looking at this aspect very much.
It's going to be very interesting for me. I plan to live on a sailing yacht and travel the world permanently, StarLink will make my working options a lot more flexible. Presently people are forced to see out their contracts over potentially dodgy marina WiFi.
The regulatory situation might get quite complicated I think, for example if you're in international waters, connected to the internet by a global ISP whose infrastructure is also outside of territorial limits then whose regulations do you have to comply with (besides your clients)? What's stopping the likes of Google poaching the concept of Radio Caroline, planting a datacentre somewhere in the North Sea and raising a two-fingered salute to any sort of data protection laws?
True, but cellular infrastructure is definitively in someone's territory. If I stick a phone mast up I'm still subject to things like planning permission even if the signal crosses a border. As far as I'm aware, space is pretty similar to international waters in that nobody is sovereign there.
It could lead to a bit of a "wild west" situation with governments giving themselves extraterritorial powers. In the late 1980s the British government gave itself very draconian powers to conduct armed raids on radio ships in international waters for example, they take a really dim view of information outside of state control even if they're not the state controlling it.
Hard question. We will see. Take GDPR, only applicable, though extraterritorial, to EU residents. So if on a yaught or extra-EU for 183+ days? Plus multiple other territories doing GDPR similar.
Interesting to watch. And most of the world does not live on yaughts. I think the answer will be a lot of deals. I'm in China and Elon is putting in a lot of energy here, and with Starlink a big potential conflict of interest with Starlink vs Tesla. Not sure how fickle that is. We will see.
If countries require permission to use slices of radio spectrum over their territory (I don't know to what extent), then they can control whether a radio service operates there.
Does this usually apply to space-based operations? I would guess there must be minimal coordination, or otherwise anyone space-based could degrade the infrastructure of countries in line of sight.
If such regulation exists, then satellite internet either needs to make sure they have all the permission to use their band (bands?) in particular countries, or... I guess they can just ignore the local laws, blast away, and claim no jurisdiction?
The right way of making sure this doesn't become a monopoly is to treat this satellite infrastructure just as you treat the fiber infrastructure in many countries. Where instead of having the ISP owning the infrastructure, they can rent the usage of it, so you can have many competing companies using it.
So Starlink would be the infrastructure and they need to allow others to use it on the same level as the Starlink ISP uses it.
One example of this already working is in Sweden, where Telia-Sonera is owning the actual infrastructure but they have to allow others to use it as well. So in Sweden you have plenty of ISP choice, one of them being Telia-Sonera, but not only them.
The tech who installed my Starry Internet said that they were going to offer Starlink next year in rural areas. Maybe he was confused but he was reasonably knowledgeable.
We were specifically talking about Elon, Starlink and rural Internet. Obviously Starry is a completely unrelated company.
The bigger question is what's the total capacity that is shared by a single neighborhood/city. For example - does this mean that a small city can only use 42Mbps down across all receivers?
I am interested in that. Are there any international treaties that force SpaceX to comply? If SpaceX has no business in totalitarian country X, do they have any way to sue SpaceX for offering service?
I imagine a black market will establish to get access to starlink even if SpaceX doesn't officially sell access.
Can you expand on this topic?
If SpaceX violates ITU policy they risk their licenses globally.
A black market for this service is not possible. The equipment necessary to confirm SpaceX is transmitting into an area, or to radiolocate the ground stations themselves costs a few grand. Even low income nations can afford to monitor and enforce spectrum requirements if they desire to.
But more fundamentally, this is not a goal of SpaceX or Elon. The projection of "hero" onto him and this project is out of control. Elon is doing this to make money, plain and simple.
Is there a way to use this on the go, battery powered? I wonder if it would be a good alternative to using 4g or 5g networks. How does it work indoors? Does the antenna/receiver need line of sight?
It requires line of sight and doesn't work indoors.
It also can't be an alternative to cell networks since the antenna is huge and heavy compared to phones, requires LOS and needs to follow the satellites [1].
Just as a heads up, you'll be downvoted, not because you're mentioning latency, but because your comment is low effort and basically complaining about discussions in a place where discussions are kind of the point.
Is there any new information about latency since before that you want to expand on?
But it's more interesting if we discuss the latency itself, rather than complaining about previous discussions around the latency.
As it seems right now, the latency is more than alright, at least for people who are used to really shitty latency. Sure, it's not gonna replace your home connection if you live in-or-near a city, but for the rest of us, it's much better than what was offered before.
Wait till the service is massively over subscribed and get back to me.
With any luck Starlink operators (Elon Musk?) won't let that happen, but it does tend to be the way of things.
Additions, the unintended consequences haven't revealed themselves fully yet.
One thing I personally dislike about electricity, cable internet, and fibre optic, is what they do to the visual appeal of the built environs. Could be underground, but only areas missed that boat.
Not saying the trade-offs, if any, won't be worth it though.
I don't think putting quotes around the word gamers helps you get your point across particularly effectively - it sounds like you don't really think it's important enough of a usecase to be worthy of much consideration.
Many years ago, before life got so busy, I used to play FPS games online over various forms of dialup and then (somewhat) faster links. Bandwidth was fine, if you were patient about downloads, but latency caused real problems, even on "good" days when you could get close to 100ms on some of the better links. In short, 100ms latency (taken from another thread) is definitely enough to cause problems for many games, and would also make things like stadia/geforce now/playstation now not viable. This doesn't mean it's not useful tech - I can think of many useful applications, but I don't think we can just handwave away all the cases where 100ms of latency might, actually, cause an issue.
Do you have a source? A link in a different thread paints a somewhat different picture. If they can achieve stable ~20ms latency though, that would indeed be excellent.
While latency is more important than bandwidth for most games, jitter is even more important. Lower latency is obviously better, but under what duration? If it fluctuates between 10ms and 50ms, while only being 20ms for short periods, many games will have problems with this, rather than a 50ms constant latency where the game servers can start accounting for it without issues.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadStarlink network is nowhere near complete so I’d expect things to only get better (until customers start piling on)
Light in vacuum is faster than light in fiber.
The satellite mesh is not, a straight line from point A to point B is not possible most of the time, given the number of satellites available and range of laser communication in space.
There are enough satelites and low enough routing on the lasers to mean packets will arrive from London to NY faster than even a great-circle fibre.
In reality how much bandwidth is available is a function of money, and HFTs tend to have a lot of money.
I don’t understand this, why? Does light travel faster than the speed of light in fibre optic glass?
Financial capitalism shouldn't be praised, at the very best it's a lesson, we got useful tools out of it and that is all.
Berkshire Hathway has $1000+ spreads yet you dont see a lot of people complaining.
[1] https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs?t=288 (the whole video is worth watching, but that timestamp answers your specific question.
I watched it -- no it doesn't :) It is comparing fiberoptics latency with straight line light propagation. So the worst case scenario of non-existing inter-satellite communication could easily be worse than fiberoptics.
But I guess if the hedgefunds knew exactly which packet travels in a straight line, they could send one packet via Starlink and others via fiberoptics.
Judging from their high launch cadence, it seems satellite-satellite communication was just a means to excite the fanboys and motivate their employees, the same way the peddle the Mars stuff.
Edit: Thanks for all the responses. I'd been assuming it was a test of Starlink latency only, but if it's Starlink -> ground station -> open internet -> ISP then it would make sense how that would be slower than a pure Starlink connection.
1. Hop count is not one on the ground to go same distance.
2. Speed of light is significantly faster in vacuum.
3. The path is potentially straighter for longer distances.
ground <--> satellite <--> ground <------------> ground
With satellite links:
ground <--> satellite <--> satellite <--> ground
i.e. the sat-to-sat link should be faster than the ground-to-ground link, on the basis that light transmitted in vacuum goes faster than light transmitted in glass. That's the theory at least.
Currently:
With satellite links:Low altitude orbits mean that the hops up and down can be compensated by faster hops across.
That all of course is not there yet and depends on Starlink implementing the cross sattelite links.
I can get satellite Internet right now with 40Mbps down / 5 up, but the latency is 800 to 1000 ms, so it's slow.
Seems like pretty solid latency :)
Sub 100ms for satellite internet is incredible, hopefully it'll be cheap enough for people to actually get, compared to the current satellite internet we have.
Can't wait for humanity to become a multi-planet species, as then application developers would have to start taking multi-minute latencies into account, and hopefully that'll help me as someone with ~500ms latency to most services.
Pardon my ignorance, but what are some exampes of applications that wouldn’t work with +100 latency?
I think Adobe been one of the worst companies I've dealt with personally, as many of the endpoints have ridiculously low timeouts (for someone with really shitty latency).
Around about 100ms things stop appearing instantaneous, beyond the scope that everything starts to suck if you're not a patient person.
< 100ms is usually the "minimum", > 150ms is often "unusable", and for a smooth experience you might need < 30ms depending on the application (e.g. depending on the game you might need < 90ms or <60ms or <30ms).
The other two things on your list are both gaming.
But if your calls normally have lively discussion where someone different jumps in any time there's a pause, the higher the latency the more likely people will say "meeting in person is much better"
Likewise, with things like remote desktop, 100ms of latency isn't a dealbreaker but it'll certainly leave some of your users saying "things that run locally just feel snappier"
Up to 100ms is kind of ok-ish barely-sluggish, but over 100ms latency, it becomes extremely annoying to maintain a conversation.
Video conferencing often makes this worse, because it is what people use for meetings, etc. and that involves more than 2 people maintaining a conversation, so latency becomes even more important there.
Otherwise 3-4 people start talking over each other, and none of them notices until they receive what the others are saying. Which is extremely annoying.
Stuff that requires realtime (or near realtime) communication simply won't be possible.
What remains is bulk data transfer, here I guess the only viable way is:
1) on both ends in both directions, massive buffers (at least bandwidth x 4)
2) massive FEC (of course it will reduce the net bandwidth, but there's no real other way to avoid lots of retransmissions)
3) sender station transmits the data in blocks, with each object of data having a specified number of blocks
3) receiver station checks all the data blocks for integrity, places it in buffers, and transmits back a list of broken blocks and a list of successfully received blocks
4) sender station receives the list of broken/successful blocks, deletes successful blocks from its buffer and retransmits those marked as broken
5) receiver station waits until all the blocks for an object of data have been successfully transmitted, and delivers the message to the recipient system
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5050
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dtn-bpbis-26
Here's an anecdotal example for you, in practice with actual equipment:
1) Mac pro via ethernet to router:
2) Same machine via wifi over Unify AP to router: That's an average of 2.3ms extra latency, or 6x higher.Edit: Surprisingly little of the UK is actually built up areas: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-cover-atlas-uk-1.74...
The Isle of Man isn't part of the UK, though it is a Crown Dependency.
This is all just as confusing as it sounds...
Could definitely lead to more investment into space, more money to SpaceX / Blue Origin / etc for their new-gen lift vehicles.
Also, where'd you get the power? Solar panels will only yield a kilowatt per square meter at most, for half of the orbit. Beam it up from Earth?
We are entering the era of spacenet and the future looks bright.
Imagine having devices as small as phones or set-top boxes that can directly access internet using satellites. It would lead to a revolution in many industries.
I guess you mean things like internet on planes, shipping internet, off-shore rigs? But what things can't they do at the moment because of prohibitorily slow/costly satellite internet?
Not sure how big this, objectively speaking money-wise, but for teleop/autonomy it sure does enable new things when there is true 100% coverage everywhere on earth.
But there won't be. Not with Starlink at least. Even at their envisioned full constellation size of 40000 satellites, coverage won't be 100%. The Arctic and Antarctic regions won't have any coverage at all, for example.
Starlink is cool and al, but satellite internet isn't new. Both forestry, mining and farming is utilising existing satellite services for monitoring and operations.
Starlink is better than all existing services, but with some drawbacks. Like it will be really expensive to provide service in really remote areas until sat to sat relay is possible as there must be a ground station within 500 km radius of the satellite. This means that to provide service in the Amazonas SpaceX will have to build ground stations in the Amazonas. To provide service in the Pacific and Atlantic SpaceX will have to deploy several floating ground stations in the middle of the oceans.
Again, not taking anything away from Space X. Starlink is really cool and will be a wake up call for the satcom industry, but satcom is not a new thing and Starlink have significant drawbacks for the time being.
Shipping - Same as logistics, but across oceans.
Real-Time weather data, from solar powered sensors, spread across the world.
Real-Time video for tracking endangered wild-life.
I think different people can come up with more ideas.
The difference between satellite and cellular networks is coverage.
Imagine if a nature loving adventurer fell into a ravine and can just video call authorities about his location and condition.
https://www.findmespot.com/en-gb/
Edit: Starlink looks fantastic but maybe not for that particular scenario, at least not any time soon.
Shipping: already done via AIS
Real Time Weather: already done by satellites with the required features. SpaceX is not building this.
Real Time Video: again, there's no way you're getting animal scale images out of a starlink scale sat.
I swear people have taken the usual Elon hype with this and gone to absolutely absurd lengths. This is not your iphone suddenly works globally. This is not a star trek communicator. This is an alternative to sat internet like Dish network et all. Is your hiker really gonna be hauling around a giant freakin' dish?
It's going to be a premium priced broadband service for rural customers and institutions that can afford it. If you know anything about the market you know DoD is gonna be the customer they focus on.
Imagine being able to see live video, or AI enhanced video (movement detection, etc). A lot more bandwidth will open up many areas for innovation.
Imagine being able to get real-time data of patients being transported in planes or ground vehicles.
>Real Time Weather: already done by satellites with the required features.
But there is not much data about wind patterns, directions, barometric pressure, etc. Satellites can observe on a macro level. If you can combine that with micro level ground data, perhaps predictions for weather would be more accurate.
>Real Time Video: again, there's no way you're getting animal scale images out of a starlink scale sat.
Perhaps, but periodic photos, would be possible, and that would be enough for many innovations.
>I swear people have taken the usual Elon hype
Even I have the after taste of Hyperloop. However, this is different because there are billions being spent to send actual satellites to space. That is not hype. I would not cast aside Elon's vision so easily, especially if he has committed and spent so much on the idea and is actually building out the infrastructure.
>This is not a star trek communicator.
But Imagine if you could have one.
>Is your hiker really gonna be hauling around a giant freakin' dish?
Would it be too far fetched to think that those can be shrunk down, perhaps to the size of a suitcase or a backpack?
>It's going to be a premium priced broadband service for rural customers and institutions that can afford it. If you know anything about the market you know DoD is gonna be the customer they focus on.
Sure, that would be one revenue source. But many innovations in the world are made possible due to what is available. Would an app store be possible without the iPhone? But, when the iPhone was made, the app store, as a concept was at best, a theoretical idea in Jobs' mind.
For what benefit?
> Imagine being able to get real-time data of patients being transported in planes or ground vehicles.
This is a very niche use case.
> But there is not much data about wind patterns, directions, barometric pressure, etc. Satellites can observe on a macro level. If you can combine that with micro level ground data, perhaps predictions for weather would be more accurate.
I'm sorry but this is incredibly ignorant. There's a huge volume of data that's fed into several global weather modeling supercomputers continuously. That's literally where the weather forecasts on your tv come from.
> Perhaps, but periodic photos, would be possible, and that would be enough for many innovations.
You still aren't getting it. There are fundamental physical limits to image resolution based on the size of the optics. You'd have trouble resolving individual creatures even with a telescope the scale of Hubble/KeyHole. Starlink changes nothing about this.
> However, this is different because there are billions being spent to send actual satellites to space.
The hype is people speculating on applications like the above that are entirely implausible and unrealistic. It's on the same scale as thinking the next Tesla is going to be a flying delorian with fusion power.
> But Imagine if you could have one.
But you just aren't fantasizing, you're claiming these fantasies will become real in the short term without understanding the limitations that preclude them.
> Would it be too far fetched to think that those can be shrunk down, perhaps to the size of a suitcase or a backpack?
Yes, it is too far fetched. You cannot shrink a wavelength. In addition, starlink's design requires the transmission/received lobes have a certain maximum beam width. The global capacity of the system depends on this parameter. That means they need phased arrays of a certain minimum size in terms of array area and number of array elements to meet their specs.
> But, when the iPhone was made, the app store, as a concept was at best, a theoretical idea in Jobs' mind.
There were examples of app stores before iPhone. That wasn't a unique new concept.
Imagine being able to conduct a robot controller surgery in Africa, by a doctor in the US. Currently, not possible, but with high speed satellite based internet, it could be.
Imagine an electrical engineer being able to help his colleagues in Africa, with specific issue, over VR or Video calls, enabled by Satellite based internet.
I can see a number of possibilities and opportunities.
Highly unlikely for many reasons: latency too high, cost of equipment way too high, only very few hospitals are even equipped for remote surgery even in the West, let alone underdeveloped countries...
> Imagine an electrical engineer being able to help his colleagues in Africa
That's already possible even without satellite-based internet and doesn't require it at all.
The only point I agree with is the military - surveillance and remote controlled drones could benefit from greatly from low-latency high-bandwidth satellite internet.
You're talking about today, which is the lowest potential time scenario. How about the time frame of 15-20 years from now? It'll take years just to fully build out Starlink's constellation, then many more years to fully spread its use. Remote surgery will continue to expand, becoming increasingly common, and the prices will come down. As that process unfolds, you will increasingly see the major robotic-assisted surgery companies donate (or otherwise massively subsidize) equipment to poorer nations, exactly as is done with very expensive drugs now. Also, while today robotic-assisted surgery costs are very high (dominated by companies like Intuitive or Stryker), China and others will eventually fully knock down that door and flood the market with lower cost systems that are 85% good enough and will become very widely used.
It's also more likely that it'll be highly skilled doctors in one less developed nation doing work in another less developed nation. That will help keep the costs down more than the parent's example. US doctors will likely do most of their remote work within the US (other than charitable work), where they can command far higher fees.
Maybe in developed countries. In India, most Power Plant construction sites don't even have dial-up internet. There are a lot of projects going on in a lot of remote places, where there is simply no infrastructure available for internet. StarLink could be rented for a while and perhaps used after that.
There is tremendous potential for such a service.
Web browsing, of course, isn't really affected by latency.
Web browsing involves a lot of ping-pong traffic pattern that multiplies latency.
Smart phones and set-top boxes etc can already access the internet without satellites, and often with much better latency.
What would satellites add for urban or sub-urban applications?
I do appreciate the extra competition that satellite internet brings. Especially in parts of the world with suppressed competition (like the US..) this could have huge practical effects without having to be a big deal in any technical sense.
Cellular networks have limited coverage. Imagine tracking a truck traveling across the US, or a ferry, across the English channel. Currently, that's not possible with 4G. But with a satellite driven internet system, it very well could be.
As for urban and sub-urban applications, not much.
You will need a ground station to communicate that isn't going to fit in a pocket.
Maybe we will not see such miniaturization, but I can safely assume that a small backpack size device should be light and last long enough for meaningful high speed internet with StarLink.
And that was already advanced. Portable phones used to be so unwieldy, car phones used to be a thing!
Edit: I've spent a lot of time trying to find alternatives - none are really practical at this time. Starlink looks pretty exciting to me.
Edit 2: We have fantastic line of sight to Edinburgh and you'd think that would give us more options, apparently not...
User -> Satellite -> multiple hops between satellites (as they are orbiting earth and the right one has to be selected to relay data to -> earth DNS servers -> multiple hops across internet -> satellite -> user
Additional latency is introduced due to satellites and the grid between the satellites, as well as complications from rotation of satellites.
All of that in general is comparable to the costs incurred on the ground from any other kind of network.
> complications from rotation of satellites
As far as a single routed packet is concerned, the satellites are stationary.
whippersnappers who complain about 20ms ping should watch some quakeworld or quake 3 cpma where this dude rat used to destroy everyone on 300ms.
Whether there's a clear advantage to having 50 vs 20 ms ping I can't answer. I'm quite certain that's an advantage I personally can't make any use of, but a Quake pro might be able to.
Also, today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago.
I played a lot of Quake and that was not remotely close to being the case. There were the high ping and low ping players, with not much of a % inbetween. In 1996-1997 the vast majority of people were playing Quake online via dial-up modems. The best players had low pings and were playing over ISDNs or better (a lot of players were on fast university or corporate networks).
> today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago.
The pro-level players in the later half of the 1990s were as elite as anything that exists today in the FPS space. They were playing like it was a job even when it wasn't, and they had been doing it for a while (Doom LAN competitions were common before that). Quake clans were prolific. They also had professional caliber competitions / tournaments back then, see: the 1997 Red Annihilation Quake tournament in Atlanta, where Dennis Fong won Carmack's Ferrari.
> Shotwell said millions of people in the U.S. pay $80 per month to get “crappy service.” She didn’t say whether Starlink will cost more or less than $80 per month but suggested that would be a segment of the public the company would target as well as rural areas that currently have no connectivity.
Are there any interference/loses issues that might popup when scaled?
What is stopping spaceX to provide internet outside US?
Almost certainly has its own slice of spectrum. You need a pizza-box sized antenna set up, so it's not quite person-portable yet, but not too bad for installing on a vehicle.
> Are there any interference/loses issues that might popup when scaled?
Each satellite only has so much bandwidth. So the more people using it in the same area, the worse it's going to get. In theory they'll add more satellites as needed, but it's never going to be much good for towns/cities.
> What is stopping spaceX to provide internet outside US?
Ground stations and regulations. Once they have satellite-satellite communications running the ground stations become less of an issue (though there's a latency penalty if your signal has to go a long way round the satellites before getting to the ground).
Since the angular resolution of these beams is limited, they each cover a fixed ground area (let's say 20km across). If more than one customer sits in that area, they will have to share airtime with the others.
Now, it's probably easier for the satellite to perform (time-division or other) multiplexing, since it knows how much data each node is going to receive.
I guess it's a lot more involved when it comes to sharing upload bandwidth with another client you can't see.
Anyway, this makes it easy to scale in rural areas, and pretty much a no-go for cities.
Now, a question of my own: do SpaceX satellites already have HW for sat-to-sat communication?
I'm not holding my breath... but I had VM before I moved here, and prefer the BT-network service to it.
see: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02480-5
My hope is that this will lower the cost of access to space with another magnitude, which should allow a serious scale up of the amount of astronomy done from space.
The regulatory situation might get quite complicated I think, for example if you're in international waters, connected to the internet by a global ISP whose infrastructure is also outside of territorial limits then whose regulations do you have to comply with (besides your clients)? What's stopping the likes of Google poaching the concept of Radio Caroline, planting a datacentre somewhere in the North Sea and raising a two-fingered salute to any sort of data protection laws?
I think it'll be OK. Cellphone roaming works just fine for example
It could lead to a bit of a "wild west" situation with governments giving themselves extraterritorial powers. In the late 1980s the British government gave itself very draconian powers to conduct armed raids on radio ships in international waters for example, they take a really dim view of information outside of state control even if they're not the state controlling it.
Interesting to watch. And most of the world does not live on yaughts. I think the answer will be a lot of deals. I'm in China and Elon is putting in a lot of energy here, and with Starlink a big potential conflict of interest with Starlink vs Tesla. Not sure how fickle that is. We will see.
Does this usually apply to space-based operations? I would guess there must be minimal coordination, or otherwise anyone space-based could degrade the infrastructure of countries in line of sight.
If such regulation exists, then satellite internet either needs to make sure they have all the permission to use their band (bands?) in particular countries, or... I guess they can just ignore the local laws, blast away, and claim no jurisdiction?
So Starlink would be the infrastructure and they need to allow others to use it on the same level as the Starlink ISP uses it.
One example of this already working is in Sweden, where Telia-Sonera is owning the actual infrastructure but they have to allow others to use it as well. So in Sweden you have plenty of ISP choice, one of them being Telia-Sonera, but not only them.
We were specifically talking about Elon, Starlink and rural Internet. Obviously Starry is a completely unrelated company.
Edit: See https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-starlink-heres-how... and https://www.zdnet.com/article/spacex-starlink-internet-prepa...
So about $80 pm. That's pretty good imo.
This will never be some tool to counteract totalitarian governments.
If SpaceX violates ITU policy they risk their licenses globally.
A black market for this service is not possible. The equipment necessary to confirm SpaceX is transmitting into an area, or to radiolocate the ground stations themselves costs a few grand. Even low income nations can afford to monitor and enforce spectrum requirements if they desire to.
But more fundamentally, this is not a goal of SpaceX or Elon. The projection of "hero" onto him and this project is out of control. Elon is doing this to make money, plain and simple.
Can't use a service that you have no method of paying for...
Awesome!
It also can't be an alternative to cell networks since the antenna is huge and heavy compared to phones, requires LOS and needs to follow the satellites [1].
[1] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0173/8204/7844/articles/GM...
Whatever.
Is there any new information about latency since before that you want to expand on?
At 550k off the deck, my house to Los Angeles isn't that much closer via satellites link that terrestrial fibre, maybe a few hundred kilometres.
But it's more interesting if we discuss the latency itself, rather than complaining about previous discussions around the latency.
As it seems right now, the latency is more than alright, at least for people who are used to really shitty latency. Sure, it's not gonna replace your home connection if you live in-or-near a city, but for the rest of us, it's much better than what was offered before.
Wait till the service is massively over subscribed and get back to me.
With any luck Starlink operators (Elon Musk?) won't let that happen, but it does tend to be the way of things.
Additions, the unintended consequences haven't revealed themselves fully yet.
One thing I personally dislike about electricity, cable internet, and fibre optic, is what they do to the visual appeal of the built environs. Could be underground, but only areas missed that boat.
Not saying the trade-offs, if any, won't be worth it though.
And is latency in Asia or the Caribbean or anywhere else outside of North America that bad? Nah.
In 2020, latency from almost every continent is good enough for 99.99% of use cases.
Good enough that I can sit here in Bangkok and use Vim all day remotely into servers in Texas without any difficulty.
Starlink will be awesome for the majority of the world. Even "gamers" (if the pricing is good).
Many years ago, before life got so busy, I used to play FPS games online over various forms of dialup and then (somewhat) faster links. Bandwidth was fine, if you were patient about downloads, but latency caused real problems, even on "good" days when you could get close to 100ms on some of the better links. In short, 100ms latency (taken from another thread) is definitely enough to cause problems for many games, and would also make things like stadia/geforce now/playstation now not viable. This doesn't mean it's not useful tech - I can think of many useful applications, but I don't think we can just handwave away all the cases where 100ms of latency might, actually, cause an issue.
Elon confirmed the target is <20ms and <10ms over time.
Chrome's devtools will let you simulate this. It's not pretty but it is better than nothing.
* Yes yes yes, Elon promises better than that, but 30-90ms is what it's currently tested at.