I wonder if they needed more powerful hardware in v1 due to a lower number of available satellites?
Fewer satellites means potentially a further distance to beam the signal to. Now that SpaceX has had a while to roll out more sats, they can use less powerful radios that need less heat dissipation and thus save weight.
Pure speculation on my part as I am not a hardware person, but I'd be interested to know!
"However, one drawback to the second-gen dish is the lack of a built-in Ethernet port, which can be found on the original Starlink dish. Instead, the company is selling an Ethernet adaptor for the dish via the Starlink online shop. "
Maybe it makes sense if the whole device needs to be installed in an inaccessible place frequently and most people would be unlikely to take advantage of a wired connection. Or maybe their statistics of the common usage of the equipment actually support it. Or both, I don't know.
In any case, since you're already being sold $2000 worth of equipment for the absurdly low price of $500, I'm not quite sure that a complaint about some adapter is in order.
>In any case, since you're already being sold $2000 worth of equipment for the absurdly low price of $500, I'm not quite sure that a complaint about some adapter is in order.
kinda agree. i remember watch or read a tear down on the original Starlink dish. it wasn't cheap to make but maybe Starlink should charge more for its dish instead?
"To connect a 3rd party router or mesh system, you will need to purchase the Ethernet Adapter from the Starlink Shop to allow for a wired connection to the network. Bypass functionality is coming soon, and we are actively working on development of a Starlink mesh product."
Previously, you could just throw out their shitty falling over WiFi thing to connect what you want. Now it's a dongle.
The connector is actually the easier thing to weather proof the issues I’ve seen were always due to an inappropriately selected cable. Even without damage to the cable sleeve you can have moisture creeping up the inner core through condensation at that point capillary action takes over and your cable becomes a hose.
IP68 (completely dust tight, continuous immersion under 3ft of water without ill effects) plastic screw cap adapters for Ethernet are common. The new modem is "IP54 rated, configured for indoor use" (hard for dust to enter but dust can cause malfunction, low pressure water sprays for 5 minutes should not cause malfunction) i.e. "don't actually stick it outside but if you hit it a few times with your plant spray bottle it should be fine"
I think the article may be confused (or...wrong). The picture clearly shows a non-weatherproof RJ-45 cable plugging into the WiFi "modem". They also mix up "dish" with "WiFi router" several times. The dish has nothing to do with WiFi.
My best guess is that Starlink has cost-reduced the setup by integrating the PoE injector / PSU with the router (which previously was a regular router they packaged in a fancy case). Dropping the wired Ethernet port saves some cost since most users don't use wired networking today.
I'm skeptical that they have made the "modem" into an ODU (outdoor unit) because putting anything outdoor that you don't absolutely have to is a bad plan, and ... why would you want your WiFi AP to be outside the building envelope? Also a bad idea.
Where they may be "pulling an Apple" is that with the old design you could directly peer with the dish from your own router (and not use the Starlink-supplied router at all). It sounds like this arrangement won't be possible with the new design, at least not without buying the Ethernet adaptor.
I don't think so, no, what they're calling an "ethernet adapter" for ordinary consumers is just going to be the power over ethernet brick that goes to the IP68 rated outdoor cable. They're calling it that because ordinary non technical end users don't know what serious PoE is.
The 1st gen starlink terminal has a big beefy (above 802.3bt!) PoE injector that comes with it. Resembles a gaming laptop power supply.
The network connection, DHCP lease, default route on a starlink terminal comes from the antenna unit itself, not the indoor router. You can plug any ordinary 1000BaseT 1500 MTU DHCP client into a starlink PoE injector and get a default route outbound through the cgnat.
The router that comes with them is just some very basic openwrt based thing.
In the 2nd gen it looks like what they might have done is combined the router and PoE injector into one unit, the 1000BaseT dongle shown in the new accessories guide is quite small. I do hope that it lets the user disable the wifi entirely if they have their own setup, to avoid interference.
The first gen dish the cable isn't detachable at the dish, it's permanently fixed, so they've solved that by using some new connector that they probably think is better than 8P8C/RJ45.
A big complaint for the first dish was that the cable was hardwired in, which made snaking it through walls, etc. hard to do. I wonder if this updates that.
Yea, it appears to address that, but the new cable doesn’t seem user replaceable/fixable and it doesn’t appear possible to extend it, as the original cable was (albeit with difficulty).
Unless I'm misunderstanding their online shop (which annoyingly requires a login to view) shows replacement cables of 75 foot or 150 foot length (for $60 and $85 respectively). The gen 1 dish had a 100 foot cable that wasn't made to be (easily) user replaceable.
Yeah I have the first gen dish, and about 60 feet of network cable from the dish spooled up in a closet. It's not very tidy and sort of a pain to deal with. I could probably cut it down and put a new end on it, but I worry that shortening the cable will screw it up, or it'll screw up the PoE since it's not really 100% standard PoE (so I've read) to the dish due to the higher power draw.
I talked to a guy yesterday who was looking forward to Starlink GA so he could get reliable uplink from an arduino sensor array on a boat used to service aquaculture farms in the middle of the ocean.
I'm pretty optimistic about how much of the world this is going to connect.
That makes little sense to me. Satellite links have been around for ages. They are totally fine for an application like that where latency is no issue.
Maybe said person is pushing many megabytes/month of data and not thrilled about data pricing from iridium or whatever other company. Or maybe they want to switch and support competition to decrease prices?
It's kind of an odd choice unless significant power/energy is available. An iridium modem + Arduino doesn't need all that much power, but the starlink phased array antenna does.
I'm in downtown Chicago and I can't get wired Internet from anyone. I was looking at Starlink, but T-Mobile had a better price - free equipment and $50/month for 200Mbps download.
Where are you? My condo building in the loop has several choices of providers, including a a gigabit ethernet port from Google Webpass. (which is apparently serviced via point-point microwave link on top of our building)
Either way Starlink won't be very useful with too high a user density (just basic bandwidth math), so it's not a good fit for urban areas. 5G/LTE (which you are using) is a much better option since there are cell antennas like every block.
If they were to put a few GB of memory on these terminal dish things, and (say) a few PB on each satellite, they could have satellites broadcast a cache of what a lot of people in the service area are watching, saving a lot of up-and-down traffic. Broadcast, so all the terminals are listening to identically the same packets arriving.
The flagship use for such a capability would be for World Cup games, where not much actual storage would be involved, because almost everybody is interested only in the latest few seconds of the game.
It looks like launches of Starlink satellites are volume-limited, not mass-limited, so adding a few kg to each for the PB or so of SSDs would be cheap (albeit x17k for that many satellites). But they are going to be bandwidth-limited pretty soon, and eliminating a whole bunch of high-traffic up-and-down streams will be worth a lot.
I think right now the on-board lasers in the last one (or two?) launches just point to the satellite immediately in front and behind in the same orbit. (Please correct me if I am mistaken.) Probably soon they will have extra lasers on board that can track satellites in other orbits, with galvanomically controlled mirrors, to be able to route traffic and, usefully, share content of on-board SSDs, multiplying the available cache capability by splitting it among subsets of the satellites.
Of course it will need app-level adaptations to be able to take advantage of this sort of caching, but it needn't be complex, mostly like a redirect to a proxy running in the dish. Strictly speaking, RAM on the dish hardware is not strictly necessary, given custom software running in the clients, but everything gets a lot easier if the client software is maximally simple.
With the increasing prevalence of TLS traffic (https et al), any cache almost certainly needs to be an explicitly configured proxy which is a user configuration issue with all it's associated support and compatibility problems.
Add to that the power consumption on a satellite is often a limiting factor, the security issues, the added latency, the ever decreasing fraction of traffic that is cache-able, etc etc ... it's very much not clear that this is a good idea.
I see that you replied before reading the final paragraph.
Whatever is the power consumption of broadcasting to all receivers in the cell, it is much, much less than transmitting the same data to each of the receivers individually, and less again than receiving it over and over again from the fiber terminal, even if you have to power up an SSD for it.
45 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadFewer satellites means potentially a further distance to beam the signal to. Now that SpaceX has had a while to roll out more sats, they can use less powerful radios that need less heat dissipation and thus save weight.
Pure speculation on my part as I am not a hardware person, but I'd be interested to know!
The 0.425x (or 42.5%) reduction in weight described in the article is not quite that impressive, but is still quite a respectable achievement.
Dishy McFlatface Jr?
Dishy McSquare face?
https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkInstallGuide_R...
Did they just pull an apple here?
In any case, since you're already being sold $2000 worth of equipment for the absurdly low price of $500, I'm not quite sure that a complaint about some adapter is in order.
kinda agree. i remember watch or read a tear down on the original Starlink dish. it wasn't cheap to make but maybe Starlink should charge more for its dish instead?
Inside is a giant 21-inch round-ish circuit board, with 600+ mini antennas on one side, and 600+ driver chips on the other.
These 632 antennas let them do phased-array beam steering, since the satellites are moving (not geo-stationary)
Teardown: https://youtu.be/iOmdQnIlnRo
https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rect... (page 8)
"To connect a 3rd party router or mesh system, you will need to purchase the Ethernet Adapter from the Starlink Shop to allow for a wired connection to the network. Bypass functionality is coming soon, and we are actively working on development of a Starlink mesh product."
Previously, you could just throw out their shitty falling over WiFi thing to connect what you want. Now it's a dongle.
https://www.amazon.com/Waterproof-Ethernet-Network-Socket-Co...
Here is an outdoor router that uses them:
https://www.peplink.com/products/max-single-cellular-br1-ip-...
There is also the M12 standard.
That parts really not a problem.
Now as an Adult, I realize that roofs, cables, screws and nails are some of the most complicated subjects in the world.
My best guess is that Starlink has cost-reduced the setup by integrating the PoE injector / PSU with the router (which previously was a regular router they packaged in a fancy case). Dropping the wired Ethernet port saves some cost since most users don't use wired networking today.
I'm skeptical that they have made the "modem" into an ODU (outdoor unit) because putting anything outdoor that you don't absolutely have to is a bad plan, and ... why would you want your WiFi AP to be outside the building envelope? Also a bad idea.
Where they may be "pulling an Apple" is that with the old design you could directly peer with the dish from your own router (and not use the Starlink-supplied router at all). It sounds like this arrangement won't be possible with the new design, at least not without buying the Ethernet adaptor.
The 1st gen starlink terminal has a big beefy (above 802.3bt!) PoE injector that comes with it. Resembles a gaming laptop power supply.
The network connection, DHCP lease, default route on a starlink terminal comes from the antenna unit itself, not the indoor router. You can plug any ordinary 1000BaseT 1500 MTU DHCP client into a starlink PoE injector and get a default route outbound through the cgnat.
The router that comes with them is just some very basic openwrt based thing.
In the 2nd gen it looks like what they might have done is combined the router and PoE injector into one unit, the 1000BaseT dongle shown in the new accessories guide is quite small. I do hope that it lets the user disable the wifi entirely if they have their own setup, to avoid interference.
The first gen dish the cable isn't detachable at the dish, it's permanently fixed, so they've solved that by using some new connector that they probably think is better than 8P8C/RJ45.
I wonder if this unit pulls 120-160 watts like the first gen.
The ends look like a proprietary connection with a waterproof uh... double o-ring? I'm sure there's a better word for it and I'm blanking on it. (https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkCable_1100x620...)
https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rect...
I'm pretty optimistic about how much of the world this is going to connect.
It's kind of an odd choice unless significant power/energy is available. An iridium modem + Arduino doesn't need all that much power, but the starlink phased array antenna does.
Either way Starlink won't be very useful with too high a user density (just basic bandwidth math), so it's not a good fit for urban areas. 5G/LTE (which you are using) is a much better option since there are cell antennas like every block.
The flagship use for such a capability would be for World Cup games, where not much actual storage would be involved, because almost everybody is interested only in the latest few seconds of the game.
It looks like launches of Starlink satellites are volume-limited, not mass-limited, so adding a few kg to each for the PB or so of SSDs would be cheap (albeit x17k for that many satellites). But they are going to be bandwidth-limited pretty soon, and eliminating a whole bunch of high-traffic up-and-down streams will be worth a lot.
I think right now the on-board lasers in the last one (or two?) launches just point to the satellite immediately in front and behind in the same orbit. (Please correct me if I am mistaken.) Probably soon they will have extra lasers on board that can track satellites in other orbits, with galvanomically controlled mirrors, to be able to route traffic and, usefully, share content of on-board SSDs, multiplying the available cache capability by splitting it among subsets of the satellites.
Of course it will need app-level adaptations to be able to take advantage of this sort of caching, but it needn't be complex, mostly like a redirect to a proxy running in the dish. Strictly speaking, RAM on the dish hardware is not strictly necessary, given custom software running in the clients, but everything gets a lot easier if the client software is maximally simple.
With the increasing prevalence of TLS traffic (https et al), any cache almost certainly needs to be an explicitly configured proxy which is a user configuration issue with all it's associated support and compatibility problems.
Add to that the power consumption on a satellite is often a limiting factor, the security issues, the added latency, the ever decreasing fraction of traffic that is cache-able, etc etc ... it's very much not clear that this is a good idea.
Whatever is the power consumption of broadcasting to all receivers in the cell, it is much, much less than transmitting the same data to each of the receivers individually, and less again than receiving it over and over again from the fiber terminal, even if you have to power up an SSD for it.