Starlink : General Discussion - Thread 2

[ulm_atms]

is going to get the foot in the door in as many places as it can to get ahead of competition.

Sorry, who do you mean by a competitor??

all fiber or satellite via GSO are not competitor...

That's a good question. Is anyone else doing, or about to do, low-latency satellite broadband direct to consumers? Kuiper seems to be the only one.

ISTM overseas customers are getting service faster because the sats have a lot more available bandwidth over those areas than they do over North America. https://starlinkstatus.space/ supports this, with UK/FR/DE and AU customers typically getting significantly better download speeds than US and CA over the last couple months .

So is it an amount of sats issue or a GW bandwidth/number of sats each GW can feed issue?  I'm leaning towards the GW side from everything I have read to date but always willing to hear other peoples interpretation.  There seems to be enough sats over the US at any given time but without the laser interlinks, the GW's have to handle all traffic and there are only so many gateways in the US....

I mean...I'm waiting as I have no other choice, but saying "chip" issue for the CPE is the reason the rollout is slow but then them seeming to add dishys at many supercharger stations instead of people who already put money down just plain looks bad IMO IF...and I stress the IF....the reason is because they can't make dishys fast enough.

Don't get me wrong, I am not really being impatient about it....but Starlink really needs to work on their customer service at this point.  I know they hired someone specifically for that it seems....but it really needs work.  Just a truthful update once a month or two would be quite welcome and would quite a lot of the people really screaming about it.  I signed up for beta as soon as I possibly could.  I pre-ordered Feb 9th @ 8am.  I have gotten exactly 2 email since I signed up for beta...the day I put my deposit down and yesterday.

I just don't understand what they gain by being so secretive about it personally.  They build the next gen rockets/engines in the open for all to see both good and bad and be fully transparent in almost all regards...but then act like BO's PR team with Starlink. 

[Mandella]

is going to get the foot in the door in as many places as it can to get ahead of competition.

Sorry, who do you mean by a competitor??

all fiber or satellite via GSO are not competitor...

By competitor I mean anybody that can get real broadband to rural areas at a competitive price. Speaking for myself, that could be cable (ha ha out here), that could even be Viasat upping my cap and lowering my price (right now I am paying $165 for 100 gigs a month), that could be Verizon putting up an extra cell tower so that I could actually get 4G, it could even be a WISP.

I'm assuming the same holds true in other countries. Starlink may well spur the deployment of competitive options, which is great for the people who have been underserved, but not great for Starlink.

That's not even considering the half UK owned OneWeb, or am I wrong in considering them a competitor?

[Tomness]

is going to get the foot in the door in as many places as it can to get ahead of competition.

Sorry, who do you mean by a competitor??

all fiber or satellite via GSO are not competitor...

By competitor I mean anybody that can get real broadband to rural areas at a competitive price. Speaking for myself, that could be cable (ha ha out here), that could even be Viasat upping my cap and lowering my price (right now I am paying $165 for 100 gigs a month), that could be Verizon putting up an extra cell tower so that I could actually get 4G, it could even be a WISP.

I'm assuming the same holds true in other countries. Starlink may well spur the deployment of competitive options, which is great for the people who have been underserved, but not great for Starlink.

That's not even considering the half UK owned OneWeb, or am I wrong in considering them a competitor?

Hopefully you have a Electric Co-op running Fiber to house and get that sonner

[Mandella]

is going to get the foot in the door in as many places as it can to get ahead of competition.

Sorry, who do you mean by a competitor??

all fiber or satellite via GSO are not competitor...

That's a good question. Is anyone else doing, or about to do, low-latency satellite broadband direct to consumers? Kuiper seems to be the only one.

ISTM overseas customers are getting service faster because the sats have a lot more available bandwidth over those areas than they do over North America. https://starlinkstatus.space/ supports this, with UK/FR/DE and AU customers typically getting significantly better download speeds than US and CA over the last couple months .

So is it an amount of sats issue or a GW bandwidth/number of sats each GW can feed issue?  I'm leaning towards the GW side from everything I have read to date but always willing to hear other peoples interpretation.  There seems to be enough sats over the US at any given time but without the laser interlinks, the GW's have to handle all traffic and there are only so many gateways in the US....

I mean...I'm waiting as I have no other choice, but saying "chip" issue for the CPE is the reason the rollout is slow but then them seeming to add dishys at many supercharger stations instead of people who already put money down just plain looks bad IMO IF...and I stress the IF....the reason is because they can't make dishys fast enough.

Don't get me wrong, I am not really being impatient about it....but Starlink really needs to work on their customer service at this point.  I know they hired someone specifically for that it seems....but it really needs work.  Just a truthful update once a month or two would be quite welcome and would quite a lot of the people really screaming about it.  I signed up for beta as soon as I possibly could.  I pre-ordered Feb 9th @ 8am.  I have gotten exactly 2 email since I signed up for beta...the day I put my deposit down and yesterday.

I just don't understand what they gain by being so secretive about it personally.  They build the next gen rockets/engines in the open for all to see both good and bad and be fully transparent in almost all regards...but then act like BO's PR team with Starlink. 

I do see your point. But I also see the counterpoint that any communication other than "your dish is shipped" is going to be seen by many (very many) as "just an excuse." It's really a danged if you do, danged if you don't situation.

I know COVID happened that slowed everything down. I know that there is a chip shortage that is affecting a lot more than just Starlink. I know that general manufacturing and shipping is pretty much a disaster right now. I've waited for nearly a year for a new freezer before finally cancelling my order. I'm having trouble getting basic supplies for my own business.

So yeah, they got what they got and they're trying to serve all their obligations -- and I bet those dishes at the Supercharger stations are in existing cells that have already been opened. And they need dishes for countries that they have previously made arrangements with or maybe lose those arrangements.

But I do understand -- I was hoping against hope that I'd get my Dishy this summer. Now next summer seems more likely. But as a businessguy who is also having to disappoint some customers I'm also understanding Starlink's problems.

[envy887]

is going to get the foot in the door in as many places as it can to get ahead of competition.

Sorry, who do you mean by a competitor??

all fiber or satellite via GSO are not competitor...

That's a good question. Is anyone else doing, or about to do, low-latency satellite broadband direct to consumers? Kuiper seems to be the only one.

ISTM overseas customers are getting service faster because the sats have a lot more available bandwidth over those areas than they do over North America. https://starlinkstatus.space/ supports this, with UK/FR/DE and AU customers typically getting significantly better download speeds than US and CA over the last couple months .

So is it an amount of sats issue or a GW bandwidth/number of sats each GW can feed issue?  I'm leaning towards the GW side from everything I have read to date but always willing to hear other peoples interpretation.  There seems to be enough sats over the US at any given time but without the laser interlinks, the GW's have to handle all traffic and there are only so many gateways in the US....

I mean...I'm waiting as I have no other choice, but saying "chip" issue for the CPE is the reason the rollout is slow but then them seeming to add dishys at many supercharger stations instead of people who already put money down just plain looks bad IMO IF...and I stress the IF....the reason is because they can't make dishys fast enough.

Don't get me wrong, I am not really being impatient about it....but Starlink really needs to work on their customer service at this point.  I know they hired someone specifically for that it seems....but it really needs work.  Just a truthful update once a month or two would be quite welcome and would quite a lot of the people really screaming about it.  I signed up for beta as soon as I possibly could.  I pre-ordered Feb 9th @ 8am.  I have gotten exactly 2 email since I signed up for beta...the day I put my deposit down and yesterday.

I just don't understand what they gain by being so secretive about it personally.  They build the next gen rockets/engines in the open for all to see both good and bad and be fully transparent in almost all regards...but then act like BO's PR team with Starlink. 

It's probably a combination of several issues, but ISTM gateways don't seem to be a problem.

I think beam repointing adds enough overhead that they can't open all the cells at once with the number of satellites they have. There are around 200 cells per satellite antenna right now, so even if the repoint is 10 microseconds activating them all would be at least 10% wasted bandwidth that could be going to customers in denser cells. They just need more sats to open all the cells.

If that is accurate (and this is only my speculation, to be clear) if you're stuck in a closed cell, it doesn't matter when you signed up... you aren't getting a dish until the cell is opened, and there has to be enough demand in a cell to justify opening it and adding the overhead of beam repointing into that cell. So being in a very sparsely populated cell probably would work against you.

That would also explain why dishes are going to areas where the sats have dead time and they can open more cells, and continue filling the ones that are open.

[Todd Martin]

FWIW, I paid my deposit on February 13th and was told mid to late 2021.  Now with their 2nd email in 9 months, the schedule was delayed to mid 2022.  Waiting 15 months for a product with no way of knowing your place in line, seeing the line is not first come first serve after all but whoever they feel like shipping product to is not acceptable IMHO.  So, I cancelled my subscription.  They would have handled this much better if they thought many customers would leave.

[vsatman]

So is it an amount of sats issue or a GW bandwidth/number of sats each GW can feed issue?  I'm leaning towards the GW side from everything I have read to date but always willing to hear other peoples interpretation.  There seems to be enough sats over the US at any given time but without the laser interlinks, the GW's have to handle all traffic and there are only so many gateways in the US....

Gateways are not a problem.
1) The Gateway has a parabolic antenna of 1.5 m and the link budget shows that the spectral efficiency in the Gateway - Satellite channel is 5+ bits per Hertz, and for the satellite - terminal line - only 3.
2) the GW works with both polarizations. User  Terminal with only one
3) The gateway has 9 antennas and will support 4 satellites at the same time without any problems. 2 antennas per satellite and one  in reserve may be "hot" reserve.
4) now in the USA 30+ gateways are already approved by FCC and 60+ filed
5) 75..80 satellites are now visible over the USA at any moment of time. (It need only 20 GWs)
6) GWs are located in such a way that each satellite at any given time can operate ("see")  3 gateways (this is for a gateway reservation)

[vsatman]

By competitor I mean anybody that can get real broadband to rural areas at a competitive price. Speaking for myself, that could be cable (ha ha out here), that could even be Viasat upping my cap and lowering my price (right now I am paying $165 for 100 gigs a month), that could be Verizon putting up an extra cell tower so that I could actually get 4G, it could even be a WISP.

That's not even considering the half UK owned OneWeb, or am I wrong in considering them a competitor?

1) Viasat operate from Geostacionary  orbit with latency about 700 ms. It is ANOTHER internet that you normaly mean -  forget about online games and  VPN..

2) OneWEB / OneWEb don`t have solutions for individual user . Look on Internet Point from OneWEb for small town in Alaska or Kymeta Terminal for ships or auto with price 5000+ USD

[Mandella]

By competitor I mean anybody that can get real broadband to rural areas at a competitive price. Speaking for myself, that could be cable (ha ha out here), that could even be Viasat upping my cap and lowering my price (right now I am paying $165 for 100 gigs a month), that could be Verizon putting up an extra cell tower so that I could actually get 4G, it could even be a WISP.

That's not even considering the half UK owned OneWeb, or am I wrong in considering them a competitor?

1) Viasat operate from Geostacionary  orbit with latency about 700 ms. It is ANOTHER internet that you normaly mean -  forget about online games and  VPN..

2) OneWEB / OneWEb don`t have solutions for individual user . Look on Internet Point from OneWEb for small town in Alaska or Kymeta Terminal for ships or auto with price 5000+ USD

I already have Viasat (thus my pricing comment), and while not the same type of service as Starlink I would consider staying with them if they lowered their price and upped their bandwidth. And some internet games are playable if you can adapt to the lag -- shooters obviously are not going to work well, but MMO's aren't too bad. VPNs work fine now, although I understand that was a problem for a while, and even video conferencing works as long as you don't have too many attendees, and of course you have to get used to talking over one another sometimes.

OneWeb may not have a residential solution, but I was assuming for the sake of argument that somebody decided to set up a station nearby and sell a community option -- not that that is very likely.

[su27k]

https://twitter.com/Megaconstellati/status/1464398344093061120

[email protected] expand Starlink's IP backbone as POPs in Chicago, NYC (incl @DECIX), Atlanta, Dallas, São PauloFlag of Brazil, Stgo de QroFlag of Mexico & LagosFlag of Nigeria show up in
@PeeringDB (https://peeringdb.com/net/18747), more prefixes announced & upstreams added (https://bgp.he.net/AS14593#_asinfo). Moving away from @googlecloud?

[cosmicvoid]

Hopefully you have a Electric Co-op running Fiber to house and get that sonner

Ha Ha. About a year ago, our Public Utility District was advertising along the road to my neighborhood that fiber service was available, call for info. So several of the people on my road (a private gravel road with less than a dozen properties) inquired. To run fiber from the local school district feed, down 2 miles of road to my neighborhood would total about $170K USD, so assuming 10 homeowners went in on the offer, that's $17K per house, not counting the cost of having a contractor run a fiber tap from the nearest utility pole, underground to your house, perhaps another few $K. Then, the ISP would charge $80/mo for 100Mb/s or $120/mo for 1Gb/s. So we all said "no thank you". And when Starlink took reservations in February, I jumped on it immediately. Eight months later, I got my kit. I geuss my cell was neither too empty nor too full.

[Mandella]

Hopefully you have a Electric Co-op running Fiber to house and get that sonner

Ha Ha. About a year ago, our Public Utility District was advertising along the road to my neighborhood that fiber service was available, call for info. So several of the people on my road (a private gravel road with less than a dozen properties) inquired. To run fiber from the local school district feed, down 2 miles of road to my neighborhood would total about $170K USD, so assuming 10 homeowners went in on the offer, that's $17K per house, not counting the cost of having a contractor run a fiber tap from the nearest utility pole, underground to your house, perhaps another few $K. Then, the ISP would charge $80/mo for 100Mb/s or $120/mo for 1Gb/s. So we all said "no thank you". And when Starlink took reservations in February, I jumped on it immediately. Eight months later, I got my kit. I geuss my cell was neither too empty nor too full.

I didn't even want to get into all the "plans" I've heard from providers to service this area with broadband in the past twenty years. At least about five or six years ago they stopped promising and just laugh and say "never" when I enquire.

So yeah Elon gets to keep my 99 bucks for right now. I've seen the satellites passing overhead in a train and I know I'll get to use them someday, and I have no animosity for either SpaceX or a customer who got their kit before me.

A little envy, but no animosity...

[envy887]

So is it an amount of sats issue or a GW bandwidth/number of sats each GW can feed issue?  I'm leaning towards the GW side from everything I have read to date but always willing to hear other peoples interpretation.  There seems to be enough sats over the US at any given time but without the laser interlinks, the GW's have to handle all traffic and there are only so many gateways in the US....

Gateways are not a problem.
1) The Gateway has a parabolic antenna of 1.5 m and the link budget shows that the spectral efficiency in the Gateway - Satellite channel is 5+ bits per Hertz, and for the satellite - terminal line - only 3.
2) the GW works with both polarizations. User  Terminal with only one
3) The gateway has 9 antennas and will support 4 satellites at the same time without any problems. 2 antennas per satellite and one  in reserve may be "hot" reserve.
4) now in the USA 30+ gateways are already approved by FCC and 60+ filed
5) 75..80 satellites are now visible over the USA at any moment of time. (It need only 20 GWs)
6) GWs are located in such a way that each satellite at any given time can operate ("see")  3 gateways (this is for a gateway reservation)

What is the physical limitation on the number of user link beams per satellite? They have 8 channels with 2 polarizations. Shouldn't they be able to run at least 16 antennas per satellite instead of 4?

[su27k]

Leaked Elon email confirms Starlink V2 needs Starship, plus some other Starlink news:

The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.

In addition, we are spooling up terminal production to several million units per year, which will consume massive capital, assuming that satellite V2 will be on orbit to handle the bandwidth demand. These terminals will be useless otherwise.

[M.E.T.]

Leaked Elon email confirms Starlink V2 needs Starship, plus some other Starlink news:

The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.

In addition, we are spooling up terminal production to several million units per year, which will consume massive capital, assuming that satellite V2 will be on orbit to handle the bandwidth demand. These terminals will be useless otherwise.

This is about schedule alignment. If Starship is only ready a year later, then millions of terminals and thousands of V2 satellites will sit idle, not generating any revenue.

So Elon is rightly cracking the whip.

[Andy Bandy]

Leaked Elon email confirms Starlink V2 needs Starship, plus some other Starlink news:

The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.

In addition, we are spooling up terminal production to several million units per year, which will consume massive capital, assuming that satellite V2 will be on orbit to handle the bandwidth demand. These terminals will be useless otherwise.

This is about schedule alignment. If Starship is only ready a year later, then millions of terminals and thousands of V2 satellites will sit idle, not generating any revenue.

So Elon is rightly cracking the whip.

Musk mentioned the dreaded "B" word. Assuming he's not lying or exaggerating for effect, this is a more serious issue than a schedule alignment. Starlink, NASA's lunar landings and Mars colonization all depend on Starship and Super Heavy and getting Raptors to work as envisioned. The problems there led to a dismissal of the guy leading the Raptor program last week. 

[JayWee]

A slightly bit offtopic - regarding Elon's mail:
If the current V1 satellites are financially weak (I guess not enough capacity) and V2 (much bigger) are required, what does it mean for other satellite constellations (Kuiper, OneWeb)?

[rsdavis9]

A slightly bit offtopic - regarding Elon's mail:
If the current V1 satellites are financially weak (I guess not enough capacity) and V2 (much bigger) are required, what does it mean for other satellite constellations (Kuiper, OneWeb)?

Elon did say about starlink at one point something like this:
LEO satellite constellations have all gone bankrupt on the first try before(iridium).
So the challenge is not to go bankrupt on the first try.
So raptor is currently not looking good on the balance sheets.
He needs raptor to be reliable and reusable and cheap to manufacture to close the economics case.
 

[soltasto]

Assuming he's not lying or exaggerating for effect

It's not really an assumption I would bet on...

[OTV Booster]

A slightly bit offtopic - regarding Elon's mail:
If the current V1 satellites are financially weak (I guess not enough capacity) and V2 (much bigger) are required, what does it mean for other satellite constellations (Kuiper, OneWeb)?

Elon did say about starlink at one point something like this:
LEO satellite constellations have all gone bankrupt on the first try before(iridium).
So the challenge is not to go bankrupt on the first try.
So raptor is currently not looking good on the balance sheets.
He needs raptor to be reliable and reusable and cheap to manufacture to close the economics case.

"...reliable, reusable and cheap..." Pick any two. That's the way it usually works. If it's reliable and reusable, cheap isn't quite so important. IIRC Elon targeted $250k. If it comes out three times that with incredible robustness and a 50 flight lifetime, would it be a show stopper? I doubt it.


Elon is frakked and probably over reacting. Once he cools off he'll keep flogging himself and the crew because it works.


I wonder what the specifics are. Eric, are you listening? Will there be another book?