Is anything know about the power consumption of the Starlink antenna? Does the maritime version use less power than the conventional unit?
The fixed-location version of Starlink consumes around 60 to 100 W constantly which is problem if you want to e.g. use solar panels on a sail boat to supply the device.
Not really. You won't run it all the time on a cruising yacht. Just when you need it. You probably don't care about having internet constantly under passage just for short times to get weather and to send out updates to friends and family.
I think at those prices you'd have a boat big enough to have the power budget. It's clearly aimed at commercial or scientific use with a side of super yacht.
I'm guessing a more affordable version more like the RV product will become available for cruising sailors in time. I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.
> I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.
Sure, just like Tesla Autopilot is right around the corner, Starship will be flying this year, the Cybertruck has been released 2 years ago etc.
This is different. The problem of providing offshore satcom with LEOsats is a quantified engineering problem. IOW, the industry knows quite well what technologies will solve the problem and Starlink has those technologies in place. The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be.
None of that is true for the self-driving car problem. That problem still contains a multitude of unknowns, including unknown unknowns.
Cybertruck is yet another kind of problem. I don't know what the issue with that is but I'd guess it's about manufacturing capacity.
> The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be.
Those communications are still an unsolved and hugely difficult engineering problem. It will be awesome if SpaceX has actually achieved this: getting the kind of precision required to communicate over direct laser links between specks of dust hundreds of km apart traveling at thousands of km per hour is no easy feat.
Yes, you are right. I had not seem the price tag when I posed the question. This product is for merchant ships or yachts and does not make any sense for small boat owners.
If you're set up for electric propulsion that's not too bad. That plus my work machine would be under half what a properly sized motor should draw at 50% throttle. It only needs to work for ~6-7 hours a day.
You can approximately half the power consumption by eliminating starlink's wifi router and using a DC POE injector to power the square terminal. I have not done it yet but have seen others report ~30 watts.
-- If I had to guess part of the reason would maybe be carrying capacity - a house that doesn't move is predictable - RVs & boats move so the per satellite bandwidth predictability of that class of object is lower - i think meaning the requirements for redundancy are higher - redundancy is expensive? - just a guess --
Starlink RV is only currently meant to be used while stationary and can't track while in motion, which is why the hardware is identical to the home unit. They're supposed to be coming out with new hardware that allows use while in motion. It was only a week ago that the FCC approved the application for "vehicles in motion."[1] It will be on airplanes as well, soon.
What I really want is hardware that is mounted on RV roof and can be deployed and folded with a press of a button. While I don't care if it works in motion, I do care about setup convenience, and I'm not getting current version because setting it up is just too cumbersome.
Or even better: just flat beam-forming antenna on the RV roof. Once thing there is enough on the roof is space.
Yeah would be possible with a larger antenna that has a wider FOV. The current dish has too narrow a FOV to simply recess it into the roof/enclosure unfortunately.
Ehh, we just got an RV unit for Search and Rescue use in remote areas[0]. Setup is about three steps and just a couple minutes. Waiting 5-15 minutes for it to connect to the constellation takes longer.
When you setup RV, you already have to do a lot. Every extra thing counts. On top of that you can’t really leave this unit deployed and leave - the risk of it being stolen is relatively high.
Would only work near shore, this must mean they have some capability to go beyond the one hop to a station. Edit: from the coverage map it looks like this is only coastal waters…
They can't do satellite to satellite yet. Just terminal -> sat -> ground station. Starlink is in low earth orbit, so the visibility any one satellite has is (relatively speaking) pretty limited.
The majority of their satellites just bounce the signals back down to a nearby ground station. Their version 1.5 sats, which they started launching about a year ago, include laser links to allow sat->sat communication. Their plan is for the remaining 3/4th of their fleet to have laser links.
One interesting side-effect of the laser links is that they can open up connections between stock exchanges and trading houses that are faster than direct fiberoptic lines. Milliseconds count in high frequency trading.
Predictability and stability count a lot as well. I think the starlink-as-low-latency-trading-medium is sort of like "blockchain for real estate" - it's not actually a real thing.
You can simply use multiple links to send same data. The fastest one wins, so if there's a temporary hickup on one of the links, you still get somewhat bounded latency. When things work fine, you get to reap the latency benefit.
So I think it's plausible for intercontinental links.
Yeah SpaceX will have a very hard time beating the current routes; they're further from the surface and the intersatellite links won't be travelling in a straight line all the time. The best bet is if they can provide those links across oceans that can't be rigged with microwave towers.
The HF radios are transatlantic and transpacific using 10-30 MHz radios. The terrestrial microwave links (several GHz) have been around for a decade, and HF radio is fairly recent. Starlink will have higher bandwidth, but also higher latency.
> Interesting. I didn't know that coverage was limited. I assumed satellite == pretty much all of earth.
The low orbits that give Starlink its low latency compared to geostationary satellite internet services also mean that each satellite can only see a small part of the earth at any given time. This is why they need so many satellites to provide reliable coverage.
Right now each satellite has to communicate directly to a uplink station, so it's only possible to provide coverage to areas where a satellite can simultaneously see the user and the uplink.
This is where SpaceX's planned inter-satellite link capability comes in to play, they claim they will be able to use lasers in a free-space optical network (think fiber without the fiber) to relay data directly from satellite to satellite, allowing service more than a single hop from a uplink station. This will also hypothetically allow for direct user to user connections over the satellite network that do not traverse the terrestrial internet, which would be huge for both military and business applications. Lots of words have been written about intercontinental high frequency trading for example.
Supposedly every satellite launched in 2022 has the capability but as far as I'm aware it hasn't been openly demonstrated to work yet. Making it work reliably within a single orbital ring is a hard problem and the claimed ability to cross-connect between adjacent rings is an absurdly hard problem. Neither are impossible, but I'll believe it when I see it.
This whole "yea inter-sat free space fiber links are totally going to happen" charade smacks of the same hype baiting as "full self driving by end of year" nonsense that Elon has been spouting since 2018.
The Starlink "team" did an AMA on reddit[0] last year and it was comical how empty the answers were. People asked about the space lasers and the answers were all "yea it's a really hard problem, BTW we're hiring!" which honestly felt like an admission from HR that they're looking for engineers willing/able to cash the checks marketing already wrote.
It's not that hard of a problem to do fast free-space optical in space within a single orbital shell. The only thing that makes it hard for SpaceX is the relatively small mass and volume budgets on their satellites to do precision pointing with, and that you'd really want each satellite to be able to do multiple links and that's taking up a lot of space.
The laser part seems easy, the targeting part seems hard. I'm imaging some type of gimbal, is there a better way?
Also seems likely that if they can find a way to make small sats with the ability to accurately point a laser at another sat, that would have pretty obvious implications to the defense dept. SpaceX is a military contractor after all.
> The laser part seems easy, the targeting part seems hard. I'm imaging some type of gimbal, is there a better way?
Here's the design 101 from base principles:
In practice, you need a big-ish telescope on both ends to control beamspread and to collect light from a big aperture. Aperture is a given based on link budget (and you can trade off power to make the aperture smaller, but halving the aperture diameter on both sides means you'll need 16x the power); if you target F/2 then it'll be twice as long as the aperture. Maybe think about a 6cm aperture and 12cm long telescope for a starting point. This will get you a 6 arcsecond wide beam @ 1000nm.
Then, you need to slew this at pretty fast rates-- perhaps 15 degrees per second for acquisition, and control the pointing within 3 arcseconds while tracking at peak rates of a few degrees per second. Yeek! This pretty quickly takes you towards some kind of direct drive fork mount that is very gimbally-looking.
One bit of fun is that you need to have a lot of bandwidth on your reaction control system on the spacecraft, too-- because when you snap one of these telescopes around, the whole craft is going to want to counterrotate, so the reaction control wheels (and/or other telescopes for links in other directions) will need to react. Feedforward is advised.
I was thinking of a gimbal to point the laser, but now that you've introduced mini telescopes and the jerk plus reaction control systems on the rx side of this equation I'm out. For inter-sat comms directional / beam formed RF feels like a better solution. The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.
> For inter-sat comms directional / beam formed RF feels like a better solution.
You can't get the same degree of directivity. As wavelength decreases, you get more directivity for a given aperture. Light has 1/5000th the wavelength of plausible radio links, so both the sender and the receiver can have much higher gains. You also can have much more bandwidth, and thus you obtain many orders of magnitude higher data rates per unit of power used.
E.g. a 6cm telescope has 82dB of gain on each side for 1000nm light.
A 1 meter aperture (about what a 3.2x1.6x0.2m Starlink satellite can likely present to another satellite) has 53dB of gain on each side.
So for equivalent power, you have 6 orders of magnitude more signal strength, and you can occupy 10x the bandwidth, too, even if you have a very large phased array.
> The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.
This kind of system has very little in common with how I would build an anti-satellite laser system.
Let's see. NASA downlinked from the moon to the ground, through the atmosphere at OC-12 rates back in 2013-- so about 100x the distance, with the added penalty of traversing the atmosphere. NFIRE did 5.6 gigabit/sec LEO to ground (again through the atmosphere) in 2011-- shorter distances but higher angular rates which is the "hard part". And EDRS does 1.8gbit/sec over longer distances in geostationary orbit. Both flown and proven.
> are you really comparing the moon to the earth with two satellites at much closer distances moving rapidly?
I'm comparing to LEO to ground, which has a higher rate of angular movement (e.g. harder to point at) than LEO-to-LEO in the same shell, among other things.
I've built systems that point to sub-arcsecond precision at satellites in LEO. It's not quite an off-the-shelf controls problem (e.g. good luck getting a COTS motion controller to hit-a-fast-moving-target-at-a-chosen-time, rather than follow a track and not care about time) but it's not super hard, either.
Citation needed, for Facebook: A) spent billions of dollars on this specific problem (free space optical links in space), and B) couldn't solve it.
Given that there's systems that have successfully flown doing links from GEO to LEO (e.g. high angular rates again), using several year old conservative technology, it's not so bad.
There's a million little details, of course. Just conduction cooling for fast optical transceivers is going to be annoying in space, for instance.
SpaceX started a LEO system as ambitious as SpaceX for its time back in 2013. again, GEO to LEO is not LEO to LEO, and is also not moon to earth. there are no successful examples of 20+Gbps between LEO satellites. The million details is why SpaceX has yet to turn them on for production.
You may not be aware that Iridium has been doing inter-satellite links since the late 90s. Using optical rather than RF doesn't really change the game that much.
> Using optical rather than RF doesn't really change the game that much.
The precision required for aiming is directly related to the wavelength. Iridium NEXT satellites use Ka band with a wavelength around ten millimeters where anything light related has a wavelength measured in hundreds of nanometers.
The forward/backward links are a lot easier than the inter-plane links, but it's still not trivial because you're trying to hit an object the size of a small car with a laser from over 1000 miles away. Not impossible by any means, but there's not a lot of margin for error when they're looking to be able to transfer around 100 gigabits per second over this link. Other FSO systems work at significantly lower bandwidth and/or shorter range. That's not even getting in to the inter-plane links, where the target is constantly moving even in a relative sense.
You'd need an excessively powerful transmitter to use an omnidirectional antenna. In the context of a satellite, where power efficiency is crucial, it makes much more sense to use a lower-power transmitter and a directional antenna / beamforming.
A bit? It doesn't really change the nature of the problem, just the tolerances. It's nowhere near the intractable problem that some people make it out to be.
I mean, we are all aware each extra 9 of precision/uptime/etc. is far more expensive than the last. If the lasers require an order of magnitude more precision (and I could imagine it being higher), it would be a far far harder problem.
What I mean by openly demonstrated to work is some sort of public demo that would require use of the inter-satellite links. The linked article just says they've started testing and been able to move data, which means nothing about how well it actually works.
I'd even be satisfied by specific claims of test results that could be validated once the capability is officially activated.
At 550km altitude, each Starlink satellite in low-earth orbit has a visible horizon of only about 700mi, and I suspect usable range that is much smaller, probably low 100’s of miles. To extend range to a ground-station beyond that will probably take multiple peer satellite hops - I suspect that inter-satellite bandwidth is a a precious commodity - and priced as such.
I think you're confusing the horizon of places on the surface of Earth that you can see with the distance to another satellite you can see.
6900km from the center of Earth. Figure you don't want the link to point within 150km (6500km) of Earth, to not pass through much atmosphere and to not see too much atmospheric glow (even with narrow filters, this matters).
Effectively you have an isosceles triangle with 6900km on the common side and an altitude of 6500km (tangent to "top of atmosphere" at 150km.
The antenna is electronically steered. The pictures do not show any gimbal but they probably had to add an IMU to measure the motion of the boat (antenna) and adjust the antenna beam steering to compensate.
The phased array can probably only do so much and a gimbal might still be needed to compensate for movement outside of what the phased array can handle?
It can at least go horizon to horizon now. The satellites aren’t geosynchronous. I generally only have one satellite overhead at a time. They take about 5-10 minutes to fly by.
Doesn't the normal Starlink have an Az-El motor for rough positioning? Beam steering only gets you so far, and the more off-boresight you get, the worse the performance.
I imagine this has a larger array. The more antennas, the greater the resolution. I’m sure they’ll use the motor for rough positioning but I doubt they’ll add a gimbal. That seems overkill.
The beam steering only operates in one dimension. The dish has to physically rotate and tilt so that the beam steering line coincides with the satellites orbit.
phased array antenna, so its either a software switch or they simply detect if your station moves too much without paying for the privilege and disable/throttle you.
It’s only five boat units a month and ten boat units for setup.
It’s no where near worth it for me because normal phone/wireless data works well where I sail (in addition to iridium network fwiw) - the prices would need to be at least an order (orders) of magnitude cheaper for me to even consider it. Not sure about parent comment though.
Boat ~~ bust out another thousand
Edit: I took parent comment as a joke but ya never know
No. I just think that their other products and their talk around this was out of touch. They were responding to people who are average cruisers saying it was coming soon. It ended up being a joke.
-- coverage is literally perfect for anywhere I take my (imaginary) yacht! - south of france? check! italian riviera? check! miami? Check! LA? Check! $5k a month? In YachtLand $5/mth is pocket change --
And for us actual realistic ones - a lot of anchorages around Europe have pretty decent LTE to work with. You won't be able to work while on passage anyway.
We did a month of boat touring around Italy/ex-Yugoslavia last year and mobile coverage in anchorages is very much hit or miss. Generally ok for browsing but video calls worked ok may be 30% time. Essentially you can't count that you can take work call and have decent experience. Huge inconvenience. I had a few "can't miss" calls and essentially I had to get to city 1-2 hours beforehand and then look for hotel/coffeeshop with decent wifi .
They don't need any new development or that kind of stuff for wide coverage, just the intersatellite links, and they have launched 15 groups of them in the first 6 months of this year.
They've launched satellites that have lasers, but I don't think they've actually demonstrated they have the ability to aim those lasers precisely enough to actually communicate between satellites in orbit.
This statement is meaningless as written. You can emit as much or as little with a laser as you like. You could say "a lot of power is required for a reliable inter-satellite optical link", to which I would say "citation needed".
Iridium has been doing inter-satellite links since the late 90s and moving from RF to optical doesn't change the game that much.
The data rate has very little to do with the complexity of the satellite-to-satellite links, and steering RF and optics isn't as different as you might think.
that's partially true. the data rates have a lot to do with frequency reuse, which means more complicated designs. starlink is complicated in the dynamic conditions, but the beamforming is relatively simple.
Iridium launched with inter-satellite links in 1997.
Swapping radios out for lasers isn't that much harder, there is some difficulty in tracking/alignment but it's space - things tend to stay where you put them, with whatever momentum you left them with.
Completely different ballgame to Autopilot which basically requires advancing the field of AI by another quantum leap before it's ready.
- This is a more niche product (just due to sheer numbers). Therefore, supporting it for each user will have higher overheads.
- Competition is expensive, e.g. BGAN at $284/GB of data transfer or more, while offering lower speeds (700 Kbps for a $6.5K Cobham Explorer 710, Vs. 350 Mbps for this).
- Competition likely won't be able to directly compete on offering for a while.
The next step will likely be commercial aircraft over the ocean. "Because they can [charge this]" is obviously the primary reason, but if you go look at what is available in this space right now, this isn't nuts, far from it.
Internet over the ocean is an incredibly hard/expensive problem. You cannot directly compare it to over-the-land offerings where the consumers are 1:1M.
Astrospace is also planning mobile broadband trough the satellites, their target audience also rural areas, I wonder they will support ocean as well, if so that would help competition.
People do install normal starlink on boats [1]. The $10K/$5K price tag really has me scratching my head about what they are thinking. Does look like they plan to cover the entire ocean, so at least there is a specific benefit they can point to. They're definitely giving up a lot of everyday coastal business in hopes of making it up with a few whales.
I think Starlink is looking for more money. They've raised prices on everyone 11% after about a year. They've introduced Starlink RV at a 23% premium over their regular Starlink service (and a 36% over the original Starlink price point).
I think Starlink doesn't want to use too heavy a hand with customers using their equipment not as intended (as is the case with most companies), but it does look like they're trying to increase their average billings.
I'd guess that they're trying to pick up a lot of commercial business. While it only covers coastal areas at the moment, it'll cover the North America/Europe/North Africa/Asia parts of the ocean in 6 months and substantially everywhere in 9 months. For a shipping company looking to replace their old-school satellite service, $10,000 for equipment and $5,000/mo is probably nothing. For every rich person with a yacht, that's basically nothing. It seems like a great way for Starlink to grab a lot of additional revenue in areas where there won't be a lot of congestion - and from people who are used to paying much more outrageous rates.
And they haven't said that they're going to be heavy handed with people grabbing a $600 Dishy and putting it on their boat by the coast. Maybe they will be, but we haven't seen that yet.
I'd also note that it's likely that the equipment is a lot better to withstand the motion and environment of being at sea. These are going to have to withstand a lot of salt-water air and spray while maintaining their motors in good working order. They'll probably also need to be rated for a longer lifespan given the amount of movement the motors will be doing compared to a stationary one (not just the travel of the vessel, but also the waves).
I'd guess that Starlink is assuming that small boat owners will just grab a regular Dishy and service and Starlink will ignore it as long as they're relatively near land. This will add 45x the revenue for those who can afford it - shipping companies, rich people with yachts, etc.
I've seen videos of people using starlink on boats. Without compensation for the boat movement it performs poorly/unpredictably. I really wonder if they'll just tolerate the people that do it anyway since they're unlikely to convert those to the higher price point for something that works well.
A colleague of mine has Starlink on his boat using one of the clever stabilization modifications out there. It works "good enough" that I don't see him upgrading to Maritime...
> I'd also note that it's likely that the equipment is a lot better to withstand the motion and environment of being at sea. These are going to have to withstand a lot of salt-water air and spray while maintaining their motors in good working order. They'll probably also need to be rated for a longer lifespan given the amount of movement the motors will be doing compared to a stationary one (not just the travel of the vessel, but also the waves).
The dish cost has some good engineering explanations.
The 40-50x service cost increase, at least in territorial waters, is all about competition.
Number one complaint from seafarers is lack of good internet. Ship owners are always looking for cheap ways to keep this crew happy and loyal, they will be lining up to get this installed.
If the pricing is that low for commercial customers then it will sell out before you know it.
It's a lot more than a "few whales". Commercial shipping, oil rigs, military (even if only for the recreational/non-operational traffic) will be a much bigger pie than yachts.
The maritime coverage map shows coastal coverage around countries with inland coverage right now, i.e. they are bouncing the connection via one of their satellites to a nearby groundstation.
Starting in Q4/2022 they want to cover mid-latitudes around the globe. That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? (This is a bit surprising - on one hand, this step extends coverage towards higher and lower latitudes but on the other hand not as much as they already have inland-coverage (cf. Brazil). It also extends longitudinally around all of the globe?).
Coverage above mid-latitudes requires satellites in polar orbits to join the network. (Their non-polar orbits have an inclination of 53° which means that satellites go no further north or south than that (plus a bit whatever their range is)).
If they stationed them near the edge of current coverage, the ship could be the inter-satellite link until the actual inter-satellite links are working.
That would only buy you one increment of offshore range gain; it wouldn't cover the whole ocean unless you had a huge network of ships and used multiple up/down hops. And at that point the overall latency would suck so bad your customers might be better off with GEO.
It would depend on how fast the internal relay latency is on the ground terminals.
Geostationary satellites are up at around 35,000 km. Starlink is about 500-600km - you can get a whole lot of hops between Starlink satellites and terminals before you're looking at the same distance.
There's talk that they might be able to use either existing terminals, or a special set of terminals to do this, without the need to deploy them in fixed locations.
They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too.
There's enough of those around to provide a massive network of potential relays.
But they are deploying inter-satellite laser links on newer launches, so those will come on and provide more coverage too.
>They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too.
Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?
> Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?
The thing that makes Starlink so appealing to airliners is that they can now do real-time telemetry of virtually every sensor on the plane without going bankrupt from the satellite data cost - not just for disaster recovery, but also for regular maintenance. Think of some random but unimportant component failing and the airline can dispatch a spare part and a repair crew to wait for the plane and do the maintenance right when it lands.
highly unlikely, the per day cost of operating a medium sized ship in an offshore environment with actual human staffing, fuel, maintenance, purchase or lease cost of the ship itself is extreme.
the one thing any satellite operator absolutely does not want is absurd ongoing monthly recurring costs to run their earth stations.
They are charging $5k USD per month per customer for this per TFA. Depending on demand (and 350Mbps downlink can generate a lot of demand) that may still be feasible.
Cargoships have operation costs in the 10s to 100s of thousands per h. Sure you could bring that down for what's required here, but you'd still sink a lot of money into these ships. How many maritime subscribers would there be?
$5k USD a month is significantly less than the monthly cost for any usable bandwidth allocation to a current tech ku band geostationary maritime vsat terminal, such as for the smallest "expedition" cruise ships, nevermind a big one.
Starlink should rent space on oil rigs at least those areas could have a "ground station" in a way. Oil rigs don't have physical undersea comm lines to land. But it can be a repeater since more power available on a rig.
Call me confused, but if these satellites are not geostationary, why are the both the inland coverage and coastal coverage mostly limited to political boundaries? Shouldn't coverage be available anywhere there are satellites overhead?
Just because something is technically possible doesn't make it legally possible, yet. They still need regulatory approvals where they operate because EM spectrum is a public resource.
But its also related to groundstations, the satellites bounce the signal down to land. They're transitioning to satellites with the capability to network between themselves which will reduce the need for groundstations.
I don't know how much they really limit coverage due to borders. Like if you get one in colombia and just move it to venezuela, does it still work? They dont have permission in venezuela but they might just not region lock it until venezuela actually complains or something.
I know for a fact that other sat internet providers do work cross border in this exact situation.
My family is using a directv antena bought in colombia and paying service in colombia, in Venezuela, so I'm pretty sure the market will try to do that as soon as they lunch in colombia
Normal satellite TV services work by restricting the area the signal is broadcast to. It has limitations on how precise it can be, and the receiver is pretty much passive.
Starlink is an active two-way system. Not only are they using high precision beam guidance on both ends, the receiver also has a GPS antenna and will report it's location back to the network.
Starlink is capable of turning off groundstations that are not where they're supposed to be. Not only capable, but for 'fixed location' groundstations (i.e normal service), they actually do block service if you move too far from where your assigned service area is.
The user terminals have a GPS receiver in them and would be able to determine where they are in the world with attendant precision. This would allow SpaceX to enforce fine-grained availability restrictions.
it's a political problem because right now you need a starlink earth station in a cooperative location (politically and economically) with access to decent fiber based terrestrial ISPs
for instance right now without fully operational satellite-to-satellite laser links, if you wanted to have live starlink services in afghanistan, you theoretically could, but you'd need to have a starlink earth station in somewhere like Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Or Peshawar, Pakistan. Or southeastern Uzbekistan. All politically problematic and very protective of their own domestic telecom companies.
Not the sort of place you can just drop a starlink earth station and buy a protected 100Gbps protected DWDM circuit to the nearest major city for an IX point, as starlink has done with their earth stations colocated with DWDM ILAs in the US pacific northwest.
Looking at the orbits for Starlink, they are currently not flying over the north / south pole directly. I don't know if there's plans to do so later, probably if the investments start to pay off and they can afford more launches and sattelites. But for now it's a big money sink and I'm sure the service isn't yet paying for itself - if it ever will.
> But for now it's a big money sink and I'm sure the service isn't yet paying for itself - if it ever will.
Given that the estimated cost of building and launching the satellites is estimated at only 600 million dollars [1], it is estimated to take something around two or three years until it's been paid off, followed by two years of generating profit and the next five-year cycle starts (assuming that their estimate of five years life time per satellite holds [2]).
Personally, I think Starlink was the best bet SpaceX ever made. That thing will be a permanent cash cow.
If only - it doesn’t appear so. Connectivity in the Antarctic is laughable - McMurdo has 17Mbps iirc, and it flakes out not infrequently, Amundsen-Scott is “when a satellite is visible”, and being on a ship in the polar regions is typically even worse, as more often than not you’re dealing with crappy weather and a rolling vessel, and a poor and intermittent iridium signal.
It also all costs an absolute fortune - iridium is about $1000/mo for 100Mb, and $10 for each additional Mb - and there are surcharges for use in polar regions.
Musk could probably bankroll all of starlink just by serving the scientific communities in Antarctica.
If you zoom in on the coverage map, you notice that it's splines manually drawn by whoever made the map.
This isn't the output of some fancy RF model figuring out exactly where you'll get coverage. Nor is it circles of a specific diameter around ground stations. Or even hexagonal cells where coverage will be allowed/denied in their backend config.
In places it seems to follow countries territorial waters (which would be expected due to regulatory issues), but in others it spills out into international waters.
Overall, the map has sufficient 'oddities' that I think there is a good chance it's a rough hand made 'guestimate' coverage map, and won't perfectly reflect where coverage will really be delivered.
Yea, I found the price point really disappointing. This only makes sense for large commercial users - leaves cruisers and small commercial customers high and dry.
Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't try and at least segment commercial pricing versus personal. I cannot imagine many people with personal boats under like 60 feet would stomach 5k a month for internet and there are far far more boats under 60 feet than ones bigger than that (At least in chicago harbors where I am at).
Please share your math. At $15M to launch 50 v1 satellites costing $250k each to build, they are looking at $320k per satellite
At $110/mo with 500k customers, they can afford to launch roughly 170 satellites per month. That is about break-even for their average launch cadence over the last 3 months.
They announced they are not launching any more v1s, and they cannot launch v2s on current hardware.
That is not to say that, even when they can launch new birds, they will be able to make a profit on regular peon service. They probably will depend utterly on top-dollar accounts. Don't be surprised if your peon bandwidth gets disappointingly slow as they add more customers, and more who are more important than you.
They also said that v2 has 5x more weight, and 10x more "capacity". Not sure what capacity is, and why falcon 9 isn't enough for something that's giving them 2x more "capacity" per unit mass.
Capacity is supposed to mean something like bits per second, although of course there are lots of other numbers that are important. One wonders who they have farmed out the packet handling to. Shoveling a commercial router on there would probably be a mistake, because of the "harsh" orbital environment, the restricted power budget, and the extremely variable routing environment.
Garmin and Iridium will still sell well with the people who are cruising in relatively low cost sailboats. These people can't afford $5000/mo just for internet access.
Garmin doesn’t operate a satellite network. They produce devices and on sell subscriptions to other satellite services. This won’t really impact them at all. They could pivot to use another network if it becomes more feasible.
Commercial and military vessels have contracts with Iridium/Inmarsat etc for mission critical stuff.
An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
Neither iridium nor Inmarsat provides capabilities of starlink: low latency, high bandwidth, asat-resistant, jamming-resistant infrastructure, all this proven in a real world conflict. They are ‘only’ missing coverage. Military will pay top dollar for this, Musk is in the name-his-price territory here. It’s become mission critical overnight. If they manage to cover the full globe, you’ll see the DoD quietly spending billions to have access and more billions to deny any other military the option.
I used to be a naval officer in the Dutch navy, this is the type of capability that we would love to have. It was always a mess to divide satcom bandwidth between operational and recreational purposes, so if we could put all non-essential traffic on Starlink (for only 5k/month/ship too!) that would be a huge win and free up massive operational bandwidth on the more serious satcoms.
Would there be any concern that you are essentially advertising your location at all times to some third party corp? Or is that only a concern during certain times and you can just turn off the commercial system at that point?
All surface maritime vessels, military or not, need to advertise their location to anyone who can listen for the purpose of collision avoidance. If they didn't that would probably violate a treaty.
Military vessels are exempt from that particular treaty. That would not be a significant worry. But yes, when you go into serious operations, the ship typically enters "black hole" operations where all non-essential communications are blocked. In the ships we were at they just pulled the network cable for the non-operational comms, very effective at preventing anyone from emailing back home.
All the existing commercial maritime comms providers will happily sell separate bandwidth for crew use, or let them meter/throttle it, so I assume the challenges the Dutch navy has with their existing setup are related to specific security and/or procurement restrictions preventing them from just installing the same solutions commercial vessels use. Probably less about broadcasting location and more about what is and isn't allowed on their vessels
By the time NATO partners can no longer trust each other with the position of their naval vessels you have serious problem already. The official satcoms are all NATO-shared satellites anyway, so you could probably derive their positions from that.
With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" operations that block any non-essential comms. I no longer work for the navy but I can imagine that would involve physically cutting power to the starlink dish.
>With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" operations that block any non-essential comms.
As a practical matter as well, both in theory and based on usage in Ukraine, Starlink appears to be a somewhat challenging target too. A phased array doing 10-12 GHz is a fairly tight beam and it's tracking very fast across the sky, jumping around between LEO@550km (and in the future VLEO@~350km) sats. In a naval setting it's not clear that'd be much of a limiting factor: something capable of seeing that would probably need to be at such an altitude and angle to ships on the ocean that it could also just plain see any surface naval vessel directly optically or via radar. The stealth ship proposals Skunkworks suggested back around the F-117 never went anywhere since the US Navy is dumb^Wtraditional.
But as you say either way they can always just turn it off as needed. It'd be very helpful the much higher percentage of time that things are boring.
Another commenter here mentioned that Starlink user terminals include a GPS receiver, and report their coordinates back to Starlink. That'd create an alternate vector for locating maritime users – exfiltrate that position information from their servers.
I had a hard time finding confirmation of this online (lots of hits about Starlink potentially being used _as_ a GNSS), but one of the photos of this teardown of a terminal highlights the GPS receiver: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teard...
These vessels still have people on board who want to watch YouTube.
This will be amazing for retaining crew while sitting at anchor outside of Panama for day 27 of who knows how long.
You can prepare for a 7 day cruise between ports when you're going to be pretty busy anyway. The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe.
> The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe.
I sat through a Vodafone presentation at a maritime comms conference a couple of years ago and he quoted just how high a percentage of the world's commercial shipping traffic was within range of his LTE networks. The ability to provide high speed internet within sight of [most] land has been around for a while, at lower costs than Starlink. If providers haven't added it to their crew internet provision, it's not because they've been waiting for Elon.
I feel like cruise ships will use this a lot. They're one of the last things on the planet that don't have cell service or internet that isn't 25$ a minute.
Iridium Go is 2.4 Kbits/s compared with 350 Mbps here, and data is charged in minutes (i.e. the slower/worse the connection the more it costs). Apples and oranges.
Iridium GO is cheap, but that's all you can really say positively about it. It is arguably not even offering "internet" in the normal sense, since loading a website would be incredibly expensive/bad and is therefore restricted to low data rate messaging and plain text weather updates.
Is $5K/month a niche product? Undeniably yes, and I hope to see more flex offerings later, but this isn't a good comparison.
globalstar is a bad joke and not a viable option for maritime services (or over-ocean aviation services) because unlike iridium or inmarsat, its satellite terminal-to-earth-station architecture is a bent pipe.
there is zero globalstar mid ocean coverage.
there is a reason you will see lots of competing options for people integrating the iridium embedded modems into things designed to go on top of $40 million business jets and just about zero globalstar.
An Iridium embedded modem is one of the things we came across in the wreckage of a small plane we were recovering the pilot's remains from[0].
It was for his Spidertracks[1] flight tracking system. (Which, with the ADSB track, helped us hone in on the possible location. The wreck ended up being right in line with the last few pings.
there's iridium SBD modems for low data rate/non-realtime comms (like position trackers) and full featured iridium voice/data modems integrated into a vast array of products now, in the land mobile, aviation and maritime segments.
one thing iridium has actually done really well is provide the developer documentation to make this fairly straightforward, there's a set of 600 page PDF files with every detail you could possibly need to make a very tiny embedded linux system talk to an iridum modem over a UART.
The Garmin inReach[0] line of satellite communicators are another example of a 3rd party Iridium partnership. Given the size/form factor, I wonder if they're using more custom hardware than just an off-the-shelf module for their integration.
They're another example of exorbitant fees for tiny bits of data. (Though, being able to text pretty much anywhere on the globe on a tiny device is really nice - even with a 20minute RTT.)
Is Iridium really competitive for business jets? The bandwidth of even their next-generation satellites does not seem competitive with the GEOs, and I'd guess bizjets should be mostly fine with their latitude limitations.
I'd expect most of them to go with one of the Ka band these days; they have pretty small antennas available these days as far as I know.
a small to medium sized business jet can easily mount an iridium terminal on top of it, where even the smallest/least capable geostationary vsat cannot.
you can fairly easily integrate iridium into something as small as a cessna 172...
at the minimum iridium will provide the ability to make phone calls to/from the PSTN while in the middle of an ocean on its smallest terminal. go up in terminal size a bit and you get something good for 500kbps of data.
for very large business jets that would be crossing the atlantic or pacific, that's a different market (overlaps somewhat with the same aviation VSAT terminals you would see on a 737-900 MAX)
Iridium Go is designed to hit a price point. Whats the cheapest way to get data out in the middle of the Atlantic and is basically plug and play. It has leapfrogged SSB packet radio as the preferred, low cost data service.
Also data is not charged in minutes, it's theoretically unlimited. The voice plans are charged in minutes and I don't think worth it.
Just like the RO water-makers in the past, I believe this is the opening salvo in bringing data prices down on the high seas. A few providers have been the only players in this field (Inmarsat and Iridium) and it shows. Prices haven't budged in ages.
> Also data is not charged in minutes, it's theoretically unlimited.
If you buy the 'medium plan' for $119/month [1] you get 150 Minutes of 'Data, Standard Voice or combination of both' and can buy additional data for US$0.42/min. And the 'light plan' [2] at $57/month includes just 5 minutes.
Data seems to a "call via the Iridium GO! Access number" like old school dial-up.
It's only if you buy the 'heavy plan' for $149 [3] that you get the 'Unlimited Data'
Maybe, though there are 43830 minutes in a month and that package offers 150-mins. Guessing there better bulk min plans, but at the 0.42 a min over the 150-mins, that’s $18345.60 + the monthly fee.
Any given ship in the shipping industry probably burns that in fuel per day. Or half day. I think the value proposition is in line. I'll admit it seems expensive from the perspective of our dream sail around the world whilst coding and collecting benjamins from various hustles.
Thanks for the clarification; I didn’t want to overspeak. Next question though, how do they onboard 42x that much fuel for a 6 week transpacific journey?
I'm planning on moving onto a sailing boat this year, I'd be very interested if it was something an mere mortal could afford but at that price I'm sticking to 5G mobile broadband. Marine Starlink would have given me a broader range of places I can stay (especially remote areas) but the cost is far too high.
I thought they went bankrupt and had to deorbit all the satellites so I googled them. They have 1.7M subscribers. Seems they are doing something right.
Well, there hasn't been a lot of competition in their space traditionally. Many of those subscribers (I've been one) use it because they need it and there is no better option, but don't exactly enjoy it...
They did go bankrupt, and Motorola (their original main funder) lost billions on the initial investment [0]. But shed of debt and reborn with new investors, they are now profitable [1]. They have now deorbited the first generation satellites, but since 2017 they have launched the Iridium NEXT constellation and that is what is functioning now [2].
Or vessels working offshore industry… having that kind of uplink speed could really change how the industries work. More ‘over the horizon’ control for equipment, immediate upload of huge point cloud files from as built surveys, constant video comunication with onshore engineers and project managers…
The second sentence in the paragraph at the top of the home page is pricing.
Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction.
Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you when you waste my time.
Not if you're loading from a UK IP they don't (I'm assume they geotarget pricing; the non-maritime pages display prices in GBP and the maritime just gives a max download speed)
Not all products are as much of a commodity as bandwidth.
This is something SpaceX does extremely well in general. Check out https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ for example: fill in your orbit, payload mass and earliest launch date and it will give you a quote. This is to me the gold standard of what I would love to have (but is remarkably difficult to get) from any industrial supplier.
Call for pricing is usually B2B. Best case they want a salesperson to twist your arm, worst case the price is as much as they can squeeze out of you. If you ask why they waste people's time like this they'll say they're actually delivering maximum value. It's dishonest and archaic.
B2B sales is a different game that can be a two-way conversation rather than just supply and demand curves intersecting at a price. Often there is competitive analysis involved before choosing among alternatives and a vendor will want to make sure their product is best represented in that view. It’s also a chance for them to learn any other decision factors (besides price) they might be able to address. In this case, I suggest the novelty of pricing out a rocket launch is partly clever promotion, though also aspirationally a first step towards regularly booked space services.
I think this is a matter of perspective. I founded a company that sold b2b software and experimented with removing pricing from my website. The challenge is the cost to complete each sale was highly variable which made it difficult to advertise fixed pricing. Consider the following:
If the buyer is an enterprise they expect a discount. The buyer may require the seller to use a supplier management tool like Arriba which has a monthly subscription fee. The buyer may purchase through a reseller, in which case the reseller expects a percentage of the transaction. The buyer may require custom contracts which can cost thousands of dollars in legal fees. The buyer may require extensive audits, pages of questionnaires and more which can take significant time and resources to complete. The buyer may hold back payment for up to 180 days.
So from my perspective, the problem is not the seller, the problem here is the enterprise buyer. If the buyer was willing to purchase from a website, with a credit card, and accept standard terms and pricing without modification, you would probably see much more transparent pricing and encounter fewer "contact sales" buttons.
I appreciate seeing a perspective from the "other side" on this. Still, as a small business operator occasionally making B2B purchases, I still find "call for pricing" annoying and assume it will mean that the product is way out of my price range.
Could there be some middle ground? Could you do something like "prices start at $X; additional fees may apply?" At least give us a ballpark number; something from which I can decide if it's worth my time to investigate further.
Could you share a screenshot? I don't see pricing anywhere on the page, though near the bottom it says "PAY AS YOU GO". Likely geolocation, though I'm curious what I'm missing.
EDIT: used VPN.
Canada version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea.
US Version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea. $5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals.
Interesting. I wonder why. If it really is a problem with pricing in local currencies, they could have explicitly listed the prices in USD/US$ or something.
The usual reason for that pattern is that they want to do variable pricing depending on how much their product is worth to you, but yeah, it's never a good sign...
My favorite is when they have a form to fill out for them to contact you and the form explicitly asks your preferred method of contact. Despite selecting email they immediately disregard your preference and call you.
With WiFi Calling feature of recent phones, you should also be able to send and receive phone calls/SMS as usual too. Tried this on my camping trip to great effect.
Always a treat to see the urban HN crowd comment with great confidence on anything outside of their immediate area. While hopefully eventually SpaceX will bring this down and be more disruptive, right now they simply cannot possibly meet demand, they are very rightfully anxious to get revenue going for Starlink, they're in a completely unique level of performance for maritime, and HELLO FOLKS, here is a taste of what actual maritime internet costs, quoting myself from elsewhere:
A BGAN terminal like an Inmarsat 9202 is ~$3k, which gets you capability of around 450 kbps. Something like an Iridium can bring that to 700 kbps for a ~$5k. Want multimegabit? No problem, KVH will be happy to help with something like a TracPhone for a mere $18000-50000! And then you pay a mere $5/megabyte, or you can get a monthly plan and save!
Keeping mind this will have 500-1500+ms latency as well. This is what they are competing against. They're offering 2x terminals for this, probably based on those $2500 heavier duty much bigger business class ones, and they have to have at least some consideration for hardening vs saltwater which is the great destroyer of all things. Since I don't see any particular stabilization platform like others use my assumption is they're making use of 2x and electronic steering to maintain constant contact, though they may well have some additional sensors in there or interfacing capability with a ship's gyrocompass.
But at any rate this looks extremely competitive once the full intersat mesh rolls out, and it's interesting to see hard numbers on that. While it'd have been cool if they could have launched something suitable for users right down to sailboats (officially vs unofficial use of residential ones), I doubt that'd be the right business decision until well after they have v2 flying on Starship for a while. What they're charging actually doesn't even seem to put much if any premium on the massive bandwidth advantage and flat out beating fiber optic in latency over enough distance. Plenty of businesses will be interested in this. And while sure no doubt it'll become standard on rich yachts, think more serious cargo shipping, oil/gas drilling platforms, etc. SpaceX themselves will be eager to dogfood this and have already been doing so for their drone ships, but they have plans for refurbing old platforms into Starship sea launch as well. The military will absolutely be very interested if they aren't deep into discussion already. I could see a major premium being charged there for priority in ports or other congested areas, maybe even special hardware.
Also having the mesh up also means a lot of other cool stuff, from coverage to remote islands or other areas for which no close ground station is feasible to special low latency intercontinental offerings on land (HFT and enterprises may be interested in).
It isn't a BGAN terminal competitor until and unless the intersat mesh rolls out though.
At the moment it's a competitor for specialist yacht 4G packages, and whilst they're also eyewateringly expensive to anyone benchmarking them against mobile phone contracts, Starlink certainly isn't undercutting them.
Which they've now put a hard number on for end of this year in primary latitude band and global first quarter of next year, and they've gone ahead and filed with FCC for permission to activate polar satellites which depend on it [0]. If we were talking years out sure, but this is an early launch for something they're promising in <6 months and looks more like a matter of regulatory approval. They're launching satellites with updated optical links regularly and look to be reaching MVP for mesh density at this point. Obviously anyone who'd depend on using it blue water would wait for that to be ready, but in terms of what they're aiming for global is absolutely the target and always has been.
We'll see if they their mesh fulfils its promises in the next couple of years. If it does and there's ocean coverage which is reasonably robust, I think we'll see prices rise accordingly though...
Presumably you'd spend most of your time close or in harbor/coast, which would mean that you would have other ways of internet access (starlink RV, normal 4/5g, harbor wifi, etc).
I'm of course guessing that if you moved onto your boat you wouldn't spend the majority of the time far out at sea.
Having worked in two way satellite for many years it is always very amusing to see the HN crowd who've never implemented remote terminals in physical reality...
They should definitely go price some Inmarsat I-4 or I-5 based BGAN services or gyro stabilized maritime C/Ku/Ka band VSAT terminals before thinking this is expensive.
You can easily spend $130,000 on a fairly basic geostationary VSAT terminal for something like a small cruise ship or large yacht.
Also lots of amusing comments from people who've never been 100% dependent for months or years at a time on 1:1 SCPC or oversusbcribed, contended geostationary based access at latency anywhere from 492ms to 1250ms and $ per Mbps cost of $2000 per dedicated Mbps as a floor figure.
Thanks so much for your comments over the years on this, I've read a lot of them with great interest and to my edification since I'm not remotely as deep in the field as you are. It's a little frustrating though to see comments just rushing to compare it to their cable modem or something, like even if one has zero knowledge surely there'd be some intellectual curiosity over the cool and difficult problems one would have to solve to get packets to the middle of an ocean and back? If going to geostationary like ViaSat that's ~36000km out, that's a long ways for a wireless signal! The conditions are fairly intense, ships travel all over the place through massive storms and temperature differences and very heavy seas, saltwater is massively corrosive. Wondering about that would lead someone to a bit of basic searching and in turn to pricing, platform stabilization etc. Or wondering how Starlink can possibly track LEO sats, just 500km away but moving at something like 17000 miles per hour, and then learning about electronically steerable phased arrays. The terminals themselves already represent a really cool achievement in bringing something like that down to consumer prices. Heck, I'd love to see that brought elsewhere, it'd be a treat for terrestrial 11-60 GHz PtP/PtMP links even if they could just perfectly aim themselves and correct with near zero technician requirements, merely roughly pointing it in the right direction, for $500. Doing intersat optical links is also amazing, everything about the system really helps to reinforce other aspects, it's a heck of a vision executed well.
"[A]imed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd" really? :(. And Starlink is an amazing experience, it's been life changing for a few clients even just in rural New England. The only "high speed" improvement they'd gotten over 20 years was the offer of a 10 Mbps connection for $300/month. People dump on even regular Starlink pricing anyway. Having to live constantly on dial up or regular MEO/HEO satellite then moving to Starlink is eye opening already and gave me at least a tiny taste of what it might be like for people on ships or platforms way out there (I've done multiweek zero connected expeditions too but that's not doing "regular business" or work it's a different mental space). And at least in this case it's possible to drive an hour and then have a solid net connection somewhere, so like for big software downloads one could work around it a little. No such luck at sea.
Absolutely everyone can (and does) have an opinion on how to run the entire economy. At least you guys can say a bunch of stuff specific stuff and 99% of everyone will have to take you at your word and pretty much shuts up, lol.
I totally get it though, has to be frustrating. I was really shocked at the price but when its put into perspective _if_ it works it's clearly going to be a significant improvement.
as mentioned previously, I worked on exactly this for 15 years, and I also don't understand how people with knowledge of the industry believe SpaceX is going to be profitable on starlink without some course correction.
nobody is debating that a under-provisioned service can be great during the honeymoon phase. but this won't last. they're strapped for cash and these enterprise plays are purely to keep afloat while the consumer business is burning cash
Their launch costs are orders of magnitude lower than anything their competitors are paying, so it stands to reason their service costs can be a lot lower too.
It also sounds like they're mass producing the Starlink sats for a fraction the price of "regular space".
SpaceX sells a launch to customers for $50-70M. they make an estimated 10-30% profit, depending on your source and whether the rocket is reused. that is nowhere near an order of magnitude.
yes, SpaceX sells launches to anyone who will buy them since it's their only profitable business at the moment. this is why viasat is using them to launch this year or next. I just gave you the cost, and it's public on their website too.
Just FYI GTO sats' launch costs on the higher end of that range when buying from SpaceX (if not higher), while Starlink launches had internal cost 30M BEFORE current very high launch rate, which will bring costs down more.
So not quite an order of magnitude, but 5 times difference in launch costs should already be achievable.
And Starship will bring another 5-10 times cost reduction when measured per kg, even when you assume pessimistic mass margins and costs / launch rates.
this was the industry I worked in for over a decade and your comment comes off as someone that doesn't know the economics. there have been many, many articles of people in this industry showing that SpaceX cannot sustain this burn rate without major changes. their capacity is nowhere near the cadence they said, they're not keeping up with demand (in a bad way), and the ISL is not working yet. so far they've been fortunate to win rdof money, but for the amount of highly paid engineers they have it won't last long enough.
your post only has "what ifs", but none of that is working yet, and coastal coverage isn't going to win contracts with cruise ships and real customers.
$5000 a month? That's pretty embarrassing, isn't it? That indicates they aren't doing satellite-to-satellite and are using some kind of specialized hardware to simply send the signal to coastal satellites from farther away.
Inmarsat is the only viable alternative for smaller boats that offers unlimited data plans, has higher latency due to being geostationary, much lower bandwidth, and charges about $8000 for a gigabyte…
I‘m not sure what Ku or Ka band GEO providers charge, but I doubt you can find anything competitive there either, and these require very large antennas.
Compared to what their architecture should enable. Sure, it's more satellites consumed per request but there aren't _that_ many satellites between some random point in the Pacific and the nearest base station. Certainly seems like it's not scaling that well if the price jumps from ~$120 to $5000.
It seems more of a question of supply and demand than a limitation of their technology. If the competition currently charges more than $5000, why should they charge (much) less?
Considering the coverage map is mostly coastal waters, private LTE and 5g are the 'budget' competition (for now). In some areas like the Gulf of Mexico, a not insignificant portion of the water is serviced by LTE that you can roam onto using a conventional TMobile, Sprint or AT&T SIM, often without an additional cost.
Agreed, currently it does not seem to be competitive (Inmarsat also offers significant discounts on their coastal plans for the same reason). But with their projected coverage in Q4 2022 and Q1 2023, it's a very different story.
Or maybe it's the Tesla Roadster of this particular long-term plan. Some scoff, others wait for the price on the upcoming tier that's not quite 350 Mbps...
It is! But their architecture should enable them to hit a much lower price point. Maybe it's just charging what the market will bear? If this is what they need to charge to be profitable, though, that indicates the satellite-to-satellite approach doesn't scale well, or they've been losing money.
If you selling a service that doesn't yet exist (or where you are an order of magnitude cheaper than the competition), usually you want to charge as much as you can while still selling all your inventory.
Wow they are now clearly selling a product that depends upon starlink 2.0 satellites which depend upon starship for launch. Starship tests haven't even attempted a static fire on their launch platform let alone a stacked launch attempt.
Not to mention, their launch calculations include re-use based upon a completely invented and also untested catching apparatus.
It's not clear to me whether this means physically or economically; i.e., could the 2.0 satellites be put into orbit by Falcon but not at a cost that would make it worth it?
It is always a mistake to assume his tweets mean anything specific. He means they won't be launching 2.0 birds on Falcon, full stop. Reasons are slippery things.
The V1.5 Starlink sats have the laser interconnects, and I suspect they would be able to launch enough of those with Falcon 9 to cover at least the most popular corridors (North America <-> Europe crossing).
Musk companies have a habit of going all in, then claiming they didn't when the bill comes due. So far it has worked, but I wouldn't bet on the coverage expanding much for the next 2 years.
Right: coverage will increase to places that would add the shitload of high-ticket subscribers they will need to be able to continue operating at all, once the first tranche of birds drops out.
I've been looking forward to marine starlink with the thought of being able to work remotely while sailing. Then I saw the pricing!
I guess they're aiming for the megayacht crowd not average shmoes on small boats.
I’ve been doing the same, and I was personally hoping it would follow the same standard price + $30 that the RV crowd has gotten. I’m pretty disappointed with the cost, and I would fear that they’ll use geolocation to force you to maritime billing if they detect you’re on a boat.
It looks like my sailboat remote life is still on hold for the time being.
I worked remote while sailing. my personal advice.... cruising is relatively cheap once you leave the dock. turn off your computer and go sail a while and plan on taking contracts during extended periods in port.
Also having packed a few offshore miles at this point... I have never had much luck being productive doing "work" while actually on passage. The ocean has a funny way of sticking to its own agenda anyway, despite our best plans.
Most of your time cruising is hanging on the anchor anyway. Depending on where you are there is pretty decent cell coverage a lot of places, or hotel wifis you can get from your anchorage.
I'm doing it an a mono-hull right now. I have not tried to work on passage, but I think it would be totally doable on a cat where you could sit relatively stable and keep a watch while working.
Depending on the type of sailing you do, probably can get away with using the RV service. If you're sailing within their current maritime coverage map https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map.... you're just using the direct CPE-Starlink-Uplink Station connection. Provided you're still in that coverage cell, there is really no difference to the entire system if you're 10 miles from shore inland or at sea.
Requiring an unobstructed view of the sky is pretty incompatible with sailboats anyways, unless you stick it at the top of the mast (where I expect it won't last long).
Then there's also the power requirements, which I haven't seen yet, but they'll probably be exceedingly difficult to meet for your average sailboat.
Genius price segmentation. Of course it costs them little more to provide the service than for home users on land, but easily worth the 50x higher price for this market
The Starlink IPO will provide hundreds of billions in funding for Starship and Mars
Seems unlikely, more probable is that you’ll have other problems. I suspect there are other differences in the equipment and service delivery to tolerate ocean conditions.
Don't know, but it will definitely stop working once you get a few miles off shore in an ocean. That requires intersat communications which the RV plan doesn't provide.
(Inland lakes should work fine except perhaps for the very biggest ones like Lake Superior or the Caspian Sea. If lakes don't work with the RV plan, it's not for any technical reason.)
> That requires intersat communications which the RV plan doesn't provide.
Intersat (laser links) comms is not available at the moment. Fairly sure they simply geofence non-maritime accounts. As you can see from the maritime map, it only covers water next to the shore which is a good indicator that they still use ground stations directly to provide service.
EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.
532 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadThe fixed-location version of Starlink consumes around 60 to 100 W constantly which is problem if you want to e.g. use solar panels on a sail boat to supply the device.
The additional load of the Starlink, relative to the chillers, water makers, and other onboard systems would be nothing.
I'm guessing a more affordable version more like the RV product will become available for cruising sailors in time. I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.
Sure, just like Tesla Autopilot is right around the corner, Starship will be flying this year, the Cybertruck has been released 2 years ago etc.
None of that is true for the self-driving car problem. That problem still contains a multitude of unknowns, including unknown unknowns.
Cybertruck is yet another kind of problem. I don't know what the issue with that is but I'd guess it's about manufacturing capacity.
Those communications are still an unsolved and hugely difficult engineering problem. It will be awesome if SpaceX has actually achieved this: getting the kind of precision required to communicate over direct laser links between specks of dust hundreds of km apart traveling at thousands of km per hour is no easy feat.
wow! Why cant you just take your normal starlink with you on your boat? Don't people do that with RVs?
-- If I had to guess part of the reason would maybe be carrying capacity - a house that doesn't move is predictable - RVs & boats move so the per satellite bandwidth predictability of that class of object is lower - i think meaning the requirements for redundancy are higher - redundancy is expensive? - just a guess --
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/fcc-approves-spacex-starlink...
Or even better: just flat beam-forming antenna on the RV roof. Once thing there is enough on the roof is space.
[0] https://www.instagram.com/p/CfUUWVfJKo1/
One interesting side-effect of the laser links is that they can open up connections between stock exchanges and trading houses that are faster than direct fiberoptic lines. Milliseconds count in high frequency trading.
So I think it's plausible for intercontinental links.
The low orbits that give Starlink its low latency compared to geostationary satellite internet services also mean that each satellite can only see a small part of the earth at any given time. This is why they need so many satellites to provide reliable coverage.
Right now each satellite has to communicate directly to a uplink station, so it's only possible to provide coverage to areas where a satellite can simultaneously see the user and the uplink.
This is where SpaceX's planned inter-satellite link capability comes in to play, they claim they will be able to use lasers in a free-space optical network (think fiber without the fiber) to relay data directly from satellite to satellite, allowing service more than a single hop from a uplink station. This will also hypothetically allow for direct user to user connections over the satellite network that do not traverse the terrestrial internet, which would be huge for both military and business applications. Lots of words have been written about intercontinental high frequency trading for example.
Supposedly every satellite launched in 2022 has the capability but as far as I'm aware it hasn't been openly demonstrated to work yet. Making it work reliably within a single orbital ring is a hard problem and the claimed ability to cross-connect between adjacent rings is an absurdly hard problem. Neither are impossible, but I'll believe it when I see it.
This whole "yea inter-sat free space fiber links are totally going to happen" charade smacks of the same hype baiting as "full self driving by end of year" nonsense that Elon has been spouting since 2018.
The Starlink "team" did an AMA on reddit[0] last year and it was comical how empty the answers were. People asked about the space lasers and the answers were all "yea it's a really hard problem, BTW we're hiring!" which honestly felt like an admission from HR that they're looking for engineers willing/able to cash the checks marketing already wrote.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jzozv3/every_answ...
Also seems likely that if they can find a way to make small sats with the ability to accurately point a laser at another sat, that would have pretty obvious implications to the defense dept. SpaceX is a military contractor after all.
Here's the design 101 from base principles:
In practice, you need a big-ish telescope on both ends to control beamspread and to collect light from a big aperture. Aperture is a given based on link budget (and you can trade off power to make the aperture smaller, but halving the aperture diameter on both sides means you'll need 16x the power); if you target F/2 then it'll be twice as long as the aperture. Maybe think about a 6cm aperture and 12cm long telescope for a starting point. This will get you a 6 arcsecond wide beam @ 1000nm.
Then, you need to slew this at pretty fast rates-- perhaps 15 degrees per second for acquisition, and control the pointing within 3 arcseconds while tracking at peak rates of a few degrees per second. Yeek! This pretty quickly takes you towards some kind of direct drive fork mount that is very gimbally-looking.
One bit of fun is that you need to have a lot of bandwidth on your reaction control system on the spacecraft, too-- because when you snap one of these telescopes around, the whole craft is going to want to counterrotate, so the reaction control wheels (and/or other telescopes for links in other directions) will need to react. Feedforward is advised.
You can't get the same degree of directivity. As wavelength decreases, you get more directivity for a given aperture. Light has 1/5000th the wavelength of plausible radio links, so both the sender and the receiver can have much higher gains. You also can have much more bandwidth, and thus you obtain many orders of magnitude higher data rates per unit of power used.
E.g. a 6cm telescope has 82dB of gain on each side for 1000nm light.
A 1 meter aperture (about what a 3.2x1.6x0.2m Starlink satellite can likely present to another satellite) has 53dB of gain on each side.
So for equivalent power, you have 6 orders of magnitude more signal strength, and you can occupy 10x the bandwidth, too, even if you have a very large phased array.
> The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.
This kind of system has very little in common with how I would build an anti-satellite laser system.
?
> if it wasn't there would be existing examples.
Let's see. NASA downlinked from the moon to the ground, through the atmosphere at OC-12 rates back in 2013-- so about 100x the distance, with the added penalty of traversing the atmosphere. NFIRE did 5.6 gigabit/sec LEO to ground (again through the atmosphere) in 2011-- shorter distances but higher angular rates which is the "hard part". And EDRS does 1.8gbit/sec over longer distances in geostationary orbit. Both flown and proven.
I'm comparing to LEO to ground, which has a higher rate of angular movement (e.g. harder to point at) than LEO-to-LEO in the same shell, among other things.
I've built systems that point to sub-arcsecond precision at satellites in LEO. It's not quite an off-the-shelf controls problem (e.g. good luck getting a COTS motion controller to hit-a-fast-moving-target-at-a-chosen-time, rather than follow a track and not care about time) but it's not super hard, either.
Given that there's systems that have successfully flown doing links from GEO to LEO (e.g. high angular rates again), using several year old conservative technology, it's not so bad.
There's a million little details, of course. Just conduction cooling for fast optical transceivers is going to be annoying in space, for instance.
I don't understand what this means. If you mean Facebook-- Facebook didn't drop billions of dollars in to free space optical comms.
> GEO to LEO is not LEO to LEO
Yes, GEO-to-LEO is worse in every way (assuming the LEO satellites are in the same inclination and have the approximate same orbital period):
* Longer link distances. (More path loss, worse link budgets)
* Higher peak angular rates for pointing.
LEO-to-Earth is mostly worse:
* Shorter link path, but atmospheric dispersion (More path loss, worse link budgets, plus things like multipath).
* Higher peak angular rates for pointing.
* Less demanding pointing precision due to shorter path, though.
The hard part isn't the optical comms in space. The hard part is fitting multiple precision-pointed transceivers into a tiny volume and mass budget.
The precision required for aiming is directly related to the wavelength. Iridium NEXT satellites use Ka band with a wavelength around ten millimeters where anything light related has a wavelength measured in hundreds of nanometers.
The forward/backward links are a lot easier than the inter-plane links, but it's still not trivial because you're trying to hit an object the size of a small car with a laser from over 1000 miles away. Not impossible by any means, but there's not a lot of margin for error when they're looking to be able to transfer around 100 gigabits per second over this link. Other FSO systems work at significantly lower bandwidth and/or shorter range. That's not even getting in to the inter-plane links, where the target is constantly moving even in a relative sense.
Additionally there's the issue that their operating licenses don't allow inter-satellite communications.
This is of course a much easier problem to solve than putting a dynamic mesh network in space.
They did a test in late 2020[0], and all launches since June 2021 have been Starlink v1.5 with lasers[1].
0: https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-laser-test/
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_launches
I'd even be satisfied by specific claims of test results that could be validated once the capability is officially activated.
6900km from the center of Earth. Figure you don't want the link to point within 150km (6500km) of Earth, to not pass through much atmosphere and to not see too much atmospheric glow (even with narrow filters, this matters).
Effectively you have an isosceles triangle with 6900km on the common side and an altitude of 6500km (tangent to "top of atmosphere" at 150km.
sqrt((6900^2 - 6500^2)) * 2 =~ 4600km
Marine starlink needs to compensate for rolling, pitching, and forward motion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_measurement_unit
https://www.reddit.com/r/SailboatCruising/comments/vovaxs/st...
What a fucking joke. "coming soon" means nothing to me coming from a Musk company.
Compare to the iridum network: https://www.groundcontrol.com/us/knowledge/calculators-and-m...
Granted, iridium is much slower. But $5k a month for barely any coverage is an insult.
Boat ~~ bust out another thousand
Edit: I took parent comment as a joke but ya never know
Tesla Autopot also requires "just" a few software updates.
This statement is meaningless as written. You can emit as much or as little with a laser as you like. You could say "a lot of power is required for a reliable inter-satellite optical link", to which I would say "citation needed".
Iridium has been doing inter-satellite links since the late 90s and moving from RF to optical doesn't change the game that much.
Swapping radios out for lasers isn't that much harder, there is some difficulty in tracking/alignment but it's space - things tend to stay where you put them, with whatever momentum you left them with.
Completely different ballgame to Autopilot which basically requires advancing the field of AI by another quantum leap before it's ready.
- Competition is expensive, e.g. BGAN at $284/GB of data transfer or more, while offering lower speeds (700 Kbps for a $6.5K Cobham Explorer 710, Vs. 350 Mbps for this).
- Competition likely won't be able to directly compete on offering for a while.
The next step will likely be commercial aircraft over the ocean. "Because they can [charge this]" is obviously the primary reason, but if you go look at what is available in this space right now, this isn't nuts, far from it.
Internet over the ocean is an incredibly hard/expensive problem. You cannot directly compare it to over-the-land offerings where the consumers are 1:1M.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHHCK6aARn0
I think Starlink doesn't want to use too heavy a hand with customers using their equipment not as intended (as is the case with most companies), but it does look like they're trying to increase their average billings.
I'd guess that they're trying to pick up a lot of commercial business. While it only covers coastal areas at the moment, it'll cover the North America/Europe/North Africa/Asia parts of the ocean in 6 months and substantially everywhere in 9 months. For a shipping company looking to replace their old-school satellite service, $10,000 for equipment and $5,000/mo is probably nothing. For every rich person with a yacht, that's basically nothing. It seems like a great way for Starlink to grab a lot of additional revenue in areas where there won't be a lot of congestion - and from people who are used to paying much more outrageous rates.
And they haven't said that they're going to be heavy handed with people grabbing a $600 Dishy and putting it on their boat by the coast. Maybe they will be, but we haven't seen that yet.
I'd also note that it's likely that the equipment is a lot better to withstand the motion and environment of being at sea. These are going to have to withstand a lot of salt-water air and spray while maintaining their motors in good working order. They'll probably also need to be rated for a longer lifespan given the amount of movement the motors will be doing compared to a stationary one (not just the travel of the vessel, but also the waves).
I'd guess that Starlink is assuming that small boat owners will just grab a regular Dishy and service and Starlink will ignore it as long as they're relatively near land. This will add 45x the revenue for those who can afford it - shipping companies, rich people with yachts, etc.
The dish cost has some good engineering explanations.
The 40-50x service cost increase, at least in territorial waters, is all about competition.
If the pricing is that low for commercial customers then it will sell out before you know it.
https://twitter.com/joeyscarantino/status/154516393155921510...
Starting in Q4/2022 they want to cover mid-latitudes around the globe. That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? (This is a bit surprising - on one hand, this step extends coverage towards higher and lower latitudes but on the other hand not as much as they already have inland-coverage (cf. Brazil). It also extends longitudinally around all of the globe?).
Coverage above mid-latitudes requires satellites in polar orbits to join the network. (Their non-polar orbits have an inclination of 53° which means that satellites go no further north or south than that (plus a bit whatever their range is)).
https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map....
Or maybe they'll have stationary ships with "ground"-stations until the inter-satellite thing is working.
Geostationary satellites are up at around 35,000 km. Starlink is about 500-600km - you can get a whole lot of hops between Starlink satellites and terminals before you're looking at the same distance.
There's talk that they might be able to use either existing terminals, or a special set of terminals to do this, without the need to deploy them in fixed locations.
They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too.
There's enough of those around to provide a massive network of potential relays.
But they are deploying inter-satellite laser links on newer launches, so those will come on and provide more coverage too.
Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?
They may not track/keep that information, but there's no reason they couldn't.
The thing that makes Starlink so appealing to airliners is that they can now do real-time telemetry of virtually every sensor on the plane without going bankrupt from the satellite data cost - not just for disaster recovery, but also for regular maintenance. Think of some random but unimportant component failing and the airline can dispatch a spare part and a repair crew to wait for the plane and do the maintenance right when it lands.
the one thing any satellite operator absolutely does not want is absurd ongoing monthly recurring costs to run their earth stations.
Is it saying that in Q1/2023 the top of the earth (rest of Canada, etc) should be covered?
That's how I read it.
Legally: no.
But its also related to groundstations, the satellites bounce the signal down to land. They're transitioning to satellites with the capability to network between themselves which will reduce the need for groundstations.
I don't know how much they really limit coverage due to borders. Like if you get one in colombia and just move it to venezuela, does it still work? They dont have permission in venezuela but they might just not region lock it until venezuela actually complains or something.
I know for a fact that other sat internet providers do work cross border in this exact situation.
Starlink is an active two-way system. Not only are they using high precision beam guidance on both ends, the receiver also has a GPS antenna and will report it's location back to the network.
Starlink is capable of turning off groundstations that are not where they're supposed to be. Not only capable, but for 'fixed location' groundstations (i.e normal service), they actually do block service if you move too far from where your assigned service area is.
for instance right now without fully operational satellite-to-satellite laser links, if you wanted to have live starlink services in afghanistan, you theoretically could, but you'd need to have a starlink earth station in somewhere like Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Or Peshawar, Pakistan. Or southeastern Uzbekistan. All politically problematic and very protective of their own domestic telecom companies.
Not the sort of place you can just drop a starlink earth station and buy a protected 100Gbps protected DWDM circuit to the nearest major city for an IX point, as starlink has done with their earth stations colocated with DWDM ILAs in the US pacific northwest.
My South Pole colleagues would love to have a better network.
Given that the estimated cost of building and launching the satellites is estimated at only 600 million dollars [1], it is estimated to take something around two or three years until it's been paid off, followed by two years of generating profit and the next five-year cycle starts (assuming that their estimate of five years life time per satellite holds [2]).
Personally, I think Starlink was the best bet SpaceX ever made. That thing will be a permanent cash cow.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2022/02/14/starlin...
[2] https://subspace.com/resources/spacex-is-giving-the-internet...
It also all costs an absolute fortune - iridium is about $1000/mo for 100Mb, and $10 for each additional Mb - and there are surcharges for use in polar regions.
Musk could probably bankroll all of starlink just by serving the scientific communities in Antarctica.
This isn't the output of some fancy RF model figuring out exactly where you'll get coverage. Nor is it circles of a specific diameter around ground stations. Or even hexagonal cells where coverage will be allowed/denied in their backend config.
In places it seems to follow countries territorial waters (which would be expected due to regulatory issues), but in others it spills out into international waters.
Overall, the map has sufficient 'oddities' that I think there is a good chance it's a rough hand made 'guestimate' coverage map, and won't perfectly reflect where coverage will really be delivered.
At $110/mo with 500k customers, they can afford to launch roughly 170 satellites per month. That is about break-even for their average launch cadence over the last 3 months.
That is not to say that, even when they can launch new birds, they will be able to make a profit on regular peon service. They probably will depend utterly on top-dollar accounts. Don't be surprised if your peon bandwidth gets disappointingly slow as they add more customers, and more who are more important than you.
Why does it matter if they are covered or not?
I thought there were plans for polar orbiting Starlink satellites to cover polar bases.
Even so it should be a map of the full planet
RIP Garmin, Iridium, etc...
As to why it is expensive? Well, they did their homework and found out is a lucrative market (one doesn't need a lot of hindsight for that, though).
Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income.
In other terms, Iridium Go is still the best value around and truly global for the time being.
More like: commercial and military vessels
An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" operations that block any non-essential comms. I no longer work for the navy but I can imagine that would involve physically cutting power to the starlink dish.
As a practical matter as well, both in theory and based on usage in Ukraine, Starlink appears to be a somewhat challenging target too. A phased array doing 10-12 GHz is a fairly tight beam and it's tracking very fast across the sky, jumping around between LEO@550km (and in the future VLEO@~350km) sats. In a naval setting it's not clear that'd be much of a limiting factor: something capable of seeing that would probably need to be at such an altitude and angle to ships on the ocean that it could also just plain see any surface naval vessel directly optically or via radar. The stealth ship proposals Skunkworks suggested back around the F-117 never went anywhere since the US Navy is dumb^Wtraditional.
But as you say either way they can always just turn it off as needed. It'd be very helpful the much higher percentage of time that things are boring.
I had a hard time finding confirmation of this online (lots of hits about Starlink potentially being used _as_ a GNSS), but one of the photos of this teardown of a terminal highlights the GPS receiver: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teard...
This will be amazing for retaining crew while sitting at anchor outside of Panama for day 27 of who knows how long.
You can prepare for a 7 day cruise between ports when you're going to be pretty busy anyway. The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe.
I sat through a Vodafone presentation at a maritime comms conference a couple of years ago and he quoted just how high a percentage of the world's commercial shipping traffic was within range of his LTE networks. The ability to provide high speed internet within sight of [most] land has been around for a while, at lower costs than Starlink. If providers haven't added it to their crew internet provision, it's not because they've been waiting for Elon.
But over a few years, if Starlink delivers on it's ambition, I'd expect a steady stream of converts.
Well that's the least important analysis compared to looking at what should be available in a year.
Iridium GO is cheap, but that's all you can really say positively about it. It is arguably not even offering "internet" in the normal sense, since loading a website would be incredibly expensive/bad and is therefore restricted to low data rate messaging and plain text weather updates.
Is $5K/month a niche product? Undeniably yes, and I hope to see more flex offerings later, but this isn't a good comparison.
https://www.inmarsat.com/en/solutions-services/maritime/serv...
Or Globalstar.
https://www.globalstar.com/en-us/blog/articles/satellite-sol...
there is zero globalstar mid ocean coverage.
there is a reason you will see lots of competing options for people integrating the iridium embedded modems into things designed to go on top of $40 million business jets and just about zero globalstar.
It was for his Spidertracks[1] flight tracking system. (Which, with the ADSB track, helped us hone in on the possible location. The wreck ended up being right in line with the last few pings.
[0] https://lompocrecord.com/news/local/experienced-solvang-bush...
[1] https://www.spidertracks.com/
one thing iridium has actually done really well is provide the developer documentation to make this fairly straightforward, there's a set of 600 page PDF files with every detail you could possibly need to make a very tiny embedded linux system talk to an iridum modem over a UART.
They're another example of exorbitant fees for tiny bits of data. (Though, being able to text pretty much anywhere on the globe on a tiny device is really nice - even with a 20minute RTT.)
[0] https://discover.garmin.com/en-US/inreach/professional/
I'd expect most of them to go with one of the Ka band these days; they have pretty small antennas available these days as far as I know.
you can fairly easily integrate iridium into something as small as a cessna 172...
at the minimum iridium will provide the ability to make phone calls to/from the PSTN while in the middle of an ocean on its smallest terminal. go up in terminal size a bit and you get something good for 500kbps of data.
for very large business jets that would be crossing the atlantic or pacific, that's a different market (overlaps somewhat with the same aviation VSAT terminals you would see on a 737-900 MAX)
Also data is not charged in minutes, it's theoretically unlimited. The voice plans are charged in minutes and I don't think worth it.
Just like the RO water-makers in the past, I believe this is the opening salvo in bringing data prices down on the high seas. A few providers have been the only players in this field (Inmarsat and Iridium) and it shows. Prices haven't budged in ages.
If you buy the 'medium plan' for $119/month [1] you get 150 Minutes of 'Data, Standard Voice or combination of both' and can buy additional data for US$0.42/min. And the 'light plan' [2] at $57/month includes just 5 minutes.
Data seems to a "call via the Iridium GO! Access number" like old school dial-up.
It's only if you buy the 'heavy plan' for $149 [3] that you get the 'Unlimited Data'
Or am I misunderstanding things?
[1] https://www.satphone.co.uk/product/iridium-go-post-paid-serv... [2] https://www.satphone.co.uk/product/iridium-go-post-paid-serv... [3] https://www.satphone.co.uk/product/iridium-go-post-paid-serv...
There's no competition up there, GEO sats are too far north to see the Pole.
I'd argue it is inherently very limited – 2.4 kbit/s is really not a lot, even sustained over a whole month ;)
Very Low Sulfer Fuel Oil (VLSFO) is running, depending on where the ship is loading up, 850 to 1150 USD a tonne.(July 7 2022)[1]
In round numbers, say, USD 1,000 a tonne, USD 10,000 an hour, USD 250,000 a day, and for a 20 day trip, USD 5,000,000.
[1] https://shipandbunker.com/prices
[2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/how-many-gallons-of-fuel-d...
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-rise-a...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-14...
[2] https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/iridium-next.htm
Probably targeted more are commercial shipping vessels, cruise ships, and even militaries. I imagine that number would make the venture worth it.
350mbit can be sold ands split across 1000pax in on a cruise ship at $5/day so you’d have the fee covered on day 1.
Tankers, cruise ships, etc.
Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction.
Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you when you waste my time.
Not all products are as much of a commodity as bandwidth.
https://www.rocketbuilder.com/start/configure went up in 2016
If the buyer is an enterprise they expect a discount. The buyer may require the seller to use a supplier management tool like Arriba which has a monthly subscription fee. The buyer may purchase through a reseller, in which case the reseller expects a percentage of the transaction. The buyer may require custom contracts which can cost thousands of dollars in legal fees. The buyer may require extensive audits, pages of questionnaires and more which can take significant time and resources to complete. The buyer may hold back payment for up to 180 days.
So from my perspective, the problem is not the seller, the problem here is the enterprise buyer. If the buyer was willing to purchase from a website, with a credit card, and accept standard terms and pricing without modification, you would probably see much more transparent pricing and encounter fewer "contact sales" buttons.
Or been on HN too long :)
Could there be some middle ground? Could you do something like "prices start at $X; additional fees may apply?" At least give us a ballpark number; something from which I can decide if it's worth my time to investigate further.
EDIT: used VPN.
Canada version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea.
US Version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea. $5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals.
A BGAN terminal like an Inmarsat 9202 is ~$3k, which gets you capability of around 450 kbps. Something like an Iridium can bring that to 700 kbps for a ~$5k. Want multimegabit? No problem, KVH will be happy to help with something like a TracPhone for a mere $18000-50000! And then you pay a mere $5/megabyte, or you can get a monthly plan and save!
Keeping mind this will have 500-1500+ms latency as well. This is what they are competing against. They're offering 2x terminals for this, probably based on those $2500 heavier duty much bigger business class ones, and they have to have at least some consideration for hardening vs saltwater which is the great destroyer of all things. Since I don't see any particular stabilization platform like others use my assumption is they're making use of 2x and electronic steering to maintain constant contact, though they may well have some additional sensors in there or interfacing capability with a ship's gyrocompass.But at any rate this looks extremely competitive once the full intersat mesh rolls out, and it's interesting to see hard numbers on that. While it'd have been cool if they could have launched something suitable for users right down to sailboats (officially vs unofficial use of residential ones), I doubt that'd be the right business decision until well after they have v2 flying on Starship for a while. What they're charging actually doesn't even seem to put much if any premium on the massive bandwidth advantage and flat out beating fiber optic in latency over enough distance. Plenty of businesses will be interested in this. And while sure no doubt it'll become standard on rich yachts, think more serious cargo shipping, oil/gas drilling platforms, etc. SpaceX themselves will be eager to dogfood this and have already been doing so for their drone ships, but they have plans for refurbing old platforms into Starship sea launch as well. The military will absolutely be very interested if they aren't deep into discussion already. I could see a major premium being charged there for priority in ports or other congested areas, maybe even special hardware.
Also having the mesh up also means a lot of other cool stuff, from coverage to remote islands or other areas for which no close ground station is feasible to special low latency intercontinental offerings on land (HFT and enterprises may be interested in).
At the moment it's a competitor for specialist yacht 4G packages, and whilst they're also eyewateringly expensive to anyone benchmarking them against mobile phone contracts, Starlink certainly isn't undercutting them.
----
0: https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
I'm of course guessing that if you moved onto your boat you wouldn't spend the majority of the time far out at sea.
They should definitely go price some Inmarsat I-4 or I-5 based BGAN services or gyro stabilized maritime C/Ku/Ka band VSAT terminals before thinking this is expensive.
You can easily spend $130,000 on a fairly basic geostationary VSAT terminal for something like a small cruise ship or large yacht.
Also lots of amusing comments from people who've never been 100% dependent for months or years at a time on 1:1 SCPC or oversusbcribed, contended geostationary based access at latency anywhere from 492ms to 1250ms and $ per Mbps cost of $2000 per dedicated Mbps as a floor figure.
"[A]imed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd" really? :(. And Starlink is an amazing experience, it's been life changing for a few clients even just in rural New England. The only "high speed" improvement they'd gotten over 20 years was the offer of a 10 Mbps connection for $300/month. People dump on even regular Starlink pricing anyway. Having to live constantly on dial up or regular MEO/HEO satellite then moving to Starlink is eye opening already and gave me at least a tiny taste of what it might be like for people on ships or platforms way out there (I've done multiweek zero connected expeditions too but that's not doing "regular business" or work it's a different mental space). And at least in this case it's possible to drive an hour and then have a solid net connection somewhere, so like for big software downloads one could work around it a little. No such luck at sea.
Absolutely everyone can (and does) have an opinion on how to run the entire economy. At least you guys can say a bunch of stuff specific stuff and 99% of everyone will have to take you at your word and pretty much shuts up, lol.
I totally get it though, has to be frustrating. I was really shocked at the price but when its put into perspective _if_ it works it's clearly going to be a significant improvement.
nobody is debating that a under-provisioned service can be great during the honeymoon phase. but this won't last. they're strapped for cash and these enterprise plays are purely to keep afloat while the consumer business is burning cash
It also sounds like they're mass producing the Starlink sats for a fraction the price of "regular space".
How much does Immarsat of Iridium pay for a launch?
Who are they buying launches from? How much are they paying for those launches?
So not quite an order of magnitude, but 5 times difference in launch costs should already be achievable.
And Starship will bring another 5-10 times cost reduction when measured per kg, even when you assume pessimistic mass margins and costs / launch rates.
starship won't be around anyone soon, and they need the money now.
your post only has "what ifs", but none of that is working yet, and coastal coverage isn't going to win contracts with cruise ships and real customers.
Inmarsat is the only viable alternative for smaller boats that offers unlimited data plans, has higher latency due to being geostationary, much lower bandwidth, and charges about $8000 for a gigabyte…
I‘m not sure what Ku or Ka band GEO providers charge, but I doubt you can find anything competitive there either, and these require very large antennas.
350mbps is _insane_ for this
Your actual cost is irrelevant.
Not to mention, their launch calculations include re-use based upon a completely invented and also untested catching apparatus.
Talk about going all in...
Are the new satellites too big for the current rockets?
"Falcon neither has the volume nor the mass [to] orbit capability required for Starlink 2.0," Musk said.
They have almost 1000 laser satellites up now. I had no idea.
Interestingly it does look like people are putting starlink on sailboats with ok results: https://www.reddit.com/r/SailboatCruising/comments/vovaxs/st...
It looks like my sailboat remote life is still on hold for the time being.
Also having packed a few offshore miles at this point... I have never had much luck being productive doing "work" while actually on passage. The ocean has a funny way of sticking to its own agenda anyway, despite our best plans.
Most of your time cruising is hanging on the anchor anyway. Depending on where you are there is pretty decent cell coverage a lot of places, or hotel wifis you can get from your anchorage.
Then there's also the power requirements, which I haven't seen yet, but they'll probably be exceedingly difficult to meet for your average sailboat.
The Starlink IPO will provide hundreds of billions in funding for Starship and Mars
(Inland lakes should work fine except perhaps for the very biggest ones like Lake Superior or the Caspian Sea. If lakes don't work with the RV plan, it's not for any technical reason.)
Intersat (laser links) comms is not available at the moment. Fairly sure they simply geofence non-maritime accounts. As you can see from the maritime map, it only covers water next to the shore which is a good indicator that they still use ground stations directly to provide service.
EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.