When do you think they will transition to including the inter-satellite links?
Without lateral coms each bird in the constellation will only act as an aggregation point for the users within its reception area and will need to downlink to a ground station for further transmission. This has been discussed but I’m not sure there been discussion of the implications.In his FCC application for the new architecture Elon seems to be positioning as an alternative com for disasters and is focusing on the southern US. This sucks as a full business model but makes sense as a wedge to justify the new plan. Ok, he has a deadline to get something up and running or he doesn’t get the license. Is there any FCC criteria for minimum usability or is it just some number of sats that can transmit/receive?I’m trying to figure out a viable business model without lateral coms and am drawing a blank. Can’t claim low latency. Can’t claim to serve sparsely populated areas unless they have a local ground station which means there has to be a backbone in place somewhere in the area. This makes the constellation a glorified cell tower.The only thing I can come up with is hitting FCC numbers to secure the license and an R&D platform for the real constellation. Even if he hits the FCC numbers with a ‘minimally viable system’ and gets the license, without lateral coms he doesn’t have a product to sell. So, I’ve been trying to figure out how the system currently in progress could evolve into a real system and that leads me to a question. Is it possible to salt some minimum number of sats WITH lateral coms into a higher orbit and make it work? What I picture is something like this. Customer connects through a non-lateral sat which in turn connects to a ground station. The ground station connects to a lateral type sat which in turn relays through other lat sats and eventually to a ground station which either hits copper or a non-lat sat for the last mile. Latency would not be the absolute best but ok for most uses. More lat-sats would enter the system over time as would customer connect sats with lateral capability. The lat sats could evolve into something different than the customer sats, aggregating traffic like the local ground stations which would eventually become redundant. If placed on one of the higher orbits they would be positioned To do lateral coms to other far off lat sats keeping hops to a minimum and latency down. And they would do high volume downlink to data centers.The down side is two different sat designs. As a counter, the customer connect sats would be relatively simple and inexpensive. The lateral com sats would be larger, heavier, more power hungry and more expensive, but fewer in number. Being on higher orbit they’d stick around longer. The most important plus this gives is an evolutionary path from what seems to me to be a lame system without ditching the early lame sats.What alternatives can we come up with?Phil
I'm going to talk to someone in Valdez about sat coverage in a few days. They're about 61N with a big honkin range of mountains to the south that limits geo availability. Has anyone created any sort of table to let people know about when Starlink sats might be available at different latitudes and antenna elevations? I've been too lazy to figure out how high the hills are from town when I'll just be able to measure them shortly. I know it's still guesswork with their deployment plans changing.
Quote from: OTV Booster on 09/12/2019 06:37 pmWithout lateral coms each bird in the constellation will only act as an aggregation point for the users within its reception area and will need to downlink to a ground station for further transmission. This has been discussed but I’m not sure there been discussion of the implications.In his FCC application for the new architecture Elon seems to be positioning as an alternative com for disasters and is focusing on the southern US. This sucks as a full business model but makes sense as a wedge to justify the new plan. Ok, he has a deadline to get something up and running or he doesn’t get the license. Is there any FCC criteria for minimum usability or is it just some number of sats that can transmit/receive?I’m trying to figure out a viable business model without lateral coms and am drawing a blank. Can’t claim low latency. Can’t claim to serve sparsely populated areas unless they have a local ground station which means there has to be a backbone in place somewhere in the area. This makes the constellation a glorified cell tower.The only thing I can come up with is hitting FCC numbers to secure the license and an R&D platform for the real constellation. Even if he hits the FCC numbers with a ‘minimally viable system’ and gets the license, without lateral coms he doesn’t have a product to sell. So, I’ve been trying to figure out how the system currently in progress could evolve into a real system and that leads me to a question. Is it possible to salt some minimum number of sats WITH lateral coms into a higher orbit and make it work? What I picture is something like this. Customer connects through a non-lateral sat which in turn connects to a ground station. The ground station connects to a lateral type sat which in turn relays through other lat sats and eventually to a ground station which either hits copper or a non-lat sat for the last mile. Latency would not be the absolute best but ok for most uses. More lat-sats would enter the system over time as would customer connect sats with lateral capability. The lat sats could evolve into something different than the customer sats, aggregating traffic like the local ground stations which would eventually become redundant. If placed on one of the higher orbits they would be positioned To do lateral coms to other far off lat sats keeping hops to a minimum and latency down. And they would do high volume downlink to data centers.The down side is two different sat designs. As a counter, the customer connect sats would be relatively simple and inexpensive. The lateral com sats would be larger, heavier, more power hungry and more expensive, but fewer in number. Being on higher orbit they’d stick around longer. The most important plus this gives is an evolutionary path from what seems to me to be a lame system without ditching the early lame sats.What alternatives can we come up with?PhilThe latency will still be quite low without lateral comms, at least regionally, and it won't be worse than ground internet for transoceanic distances. The idea as I understand it is that every satellite will be in reach of a ground station if it is near land, and that ground station links the satellite into terrestrial internet. So still far far better latency than bouncing everything off GEO.What you lose without the interlink is reaching remote areas far from a ground station, most particularly mid ocean. Plus you lose the possibly ultra low latency from transoceanic communications.It could still be quite a viable competitor to existing GEO satellite dishes in rural areas though, depending on pricing and bandwidth caps.
So all it will do at first is cover the last mile, er last ~1000km. With an unknown cost for customer hardware, but guesses of around $200 or more, it doesn’t sound compelling unless the rates are great. Of course everybody seems to want to ditch their current provider so there is some hope.IIRC The pics of ground stations show dish antennas. This would have to move to phased array for production units I expect. What would the footprint of a ground station be? I’m trying to figure out the economics of this. What you describe seems technically sound but I’m skeptical on the business case. It is admittedly an interim solution.
Without lateral coms each bird in the constellation will only act as an aggregation point for the users within its reception area and will need to downlink to a ground station for further transmission. This has been discussed but I’m not sure there been discussion of the implications.In his FCC application for the new architecture Elon seems to be positioning as an alternative com for disasters and is focusing on the southern US. This sucks as a full business model but makes sense as a wedge to justify the new plan. Ok, he has a deadline to get something up and running or he doesn’t get the license. Is there any FCC criteria for minimum usability or is it just some number of sats that can transmit/receive?I’m trying to figure out a viable business model without lateral coms and am drawing a blank. Can’t claim low latency. Can’t claim to serve sparsely populated areas unless they have a local ground station which means there has to be a backbone in place somewhere in the area. This makes the constellation a glorified cell tower.The only thing I can come up with is hitting FCC numbers ......What alternatives can we come up with?
Quote from: OTV Booster on 09/12/2019 06:37 pmWithout lateral coms each bird in the constellation will only act as an aggregation point for the users within its reception area and will need to downlink to a ground station for further transmission. This has been discussed but I’m not sure there been discussion of the implications.In his FCC application for the new architecture Elon seems to be positioning as an alternative com for disasters and is focusing on the southern US. This sucks as a full business model but makes sense as a wedge to justify the new plan. Ok, he has a deadline to get something up and running or he doesn’t get the license. Is there any FCC criteria for minimum usability or is it just some number of sats that can transmit/receive?I’m trying to figure out a viable business model without lateral coms and am drawing a blank. Can’t claim low latency. Can’t claim to serve sparsely populated areas unless they have a local ground station which means there has to be a backbone in place somewhere in the area. This makes the constellation a glorified cell tower.The only thing I can come up with is hitting FCC numbers ......What alternatives can we come up with?Yes, the initial, no interlinks sats mean that latency across the Atlantic or Pacific is no better than the routes in use today.Yes, showing a working system to potential customers, investors and the Federal regulators is highly important, even if it is a loss leader. But, you have mis-estimate the utility of large swaths of North America being able to get high speed internet based upon the minimal constellation. It will only take a minimum of 3 ground stations to serve all of the US (depending on usage). There are many "fly over states" in rural areas where internet access is ludicrously expensive and very poorly implemented. The RV market alone could be a significant start at a customer base.
Quote from: freddo411 on 09/13/2019 12:48 amQuote from: OTV Booster on 09/12/2019 06:37 pmWithout lateral coms each bird in the constellation will only act as an aggregation point for the users within its reception area and will need to downlink to a ground station for further transmission. This has been discussed but I’m not sure there been discussion of the implications.In his FCC application for the new architecture Elon seems to be positioning as an alternative com for disasters and is focusing on the southern US. This sucks as a full business model but makes sense as a wedge to justify the new plan. Ok, he has a deadline to get something up and running or he doesn’t get the license. Is there any FCC criteria for minimum usability or is it just some number of sats that can transmit/receive?I’m trying to figure out a viable business model without lateral coms and am drawing a blank. Can’t claim low latency. Can’t claim to serve sparsely populated areas unless they have a local ground station which means there has to be a backbone in place somewhere in the area. This makes the constellation a glorified cell tower.The only thing I can come up with is hitting FCC numbers ......What alternatives can we come up with?Yes, the initial, no interlinks sats mean that latency across the Atlantic or Pacific is no better than the routes in use today.Yes, showing a working system to potential customers, investors and the Federal regulators is highly important, even if it is a loss leader. But, you have mis-estimate the utility of large swaths of North America being able to get high speed internet based upon the minimal constellation. It will only take a minimum of 3 ground stations to serve all of the US (depending on usage). There are many "fly over states" in rural areas where internet access is ludicrously expensive and very poorly implemented. The RV market alone could be a significant start at a customer base. The amount of rural America even on the east coast (I am, in particular, thinking about North Carolina and upstate South Carolina) that doesn't have proper broadband access despite being only a few miles out of town is extreme.
In the metro Detroit area most have the choice of AT&T, LTE, Comcast or secondary cable carriers using others infrastructure. Fiber is slowly going in. Very. Slowly.Affordable? 😬Rural? 😬😬Fertile ground.
I think they’ll do continuous improvement, but lock down each flight load of 72 satellites. Improved chipsets or solar panels or improved mechanicals and engines. By the time the constellation is complete the satellites will be completely upgraded, while possibly never undergoing a single major refresh.
"Mass production" is not black and white, and 1000s of units per year is not "mass" in any other industry - it's barely a pre-production run.I bet anything that the satellites will continue to evolve, and the constellation will always be a mix of older and newer-more-capable satellites.
Quote from: meekGee on 09/11/2019 04:14 pm"Mass production" is not black and white, and 1000s of units per year is not "mass" in any other industry - it's barely a pre-production run.I bet anything that the satellites will continue to evolve, and the constellation will always be a mix of older and newer-more-capable satellites.There are plenty of things that are produced in 1000s of units per year. Guessing a little about market size and market fragmentation: MRI machines, spectrophotometers, dental X-ray machines, class II lift trucks. Niche products to some extent, but there are a lot of niche products.So there's plenty of people who know how to do this. The production lines are in between JPL and GM. A lot more hand work and batch processing than you'll see in an auto plant, but a recognizable production line. With good change management the lines are tolerant to many (but not all) incremental changes.
Quote from: docmordrid on 09/13/2019 02:23 amIn the metro Detroit area most have the choice of AT&T, LTE, Comcast or secondary cable carriers using others infrastructure. Fiber is slowly going in. Very. Slowly.Affordable? 😬Rural? 😬😬Fertile ground.While listening to what ya’ll sayin, I’m trying to place myself into the internet consumer spectrum. Fifteen years on the road and everything I got came through my phone either straight or as a hotspot. And little time for much more than email and NSF lurking. Now that I’m retired I’ve been using a local ISP that started out local, got sold a time or three and is now part of a relatively small company with a presence in about five not so big markets in the Midwest.I used the original local company for about a year before the lifestyle change. Never had any problems with the technical end but dealing with the front end was like dealing with the old ma bell. They were sphincters. This incarnation seems to be very business like and competent. Install was on time and later a dead router replaced no question. So I don’t feel the pain I hear about with the big boys.With unlimited bandwidth (they throttle but I never get near the line) for $60/mo, star link would have to offer one hellava deal to make me look twice. I realize I’m atipical and am starting to see the attraction for a lot of rural areas, especially if the lower 48 can be covered by three (I’ll say 3-5) ground stations. If the price is right. And in a lot of cases even if the price is not quite so right. Good thing Elon doesn’t listen to me. He’d be wasted as a shoe salesman.Phil
Without lateral coms each bird in the constellation will only act as an aggregation point for the users within its reception area and will need to downlink to a ground station for further transmission. ...Can’t claim to serve sparsely populated areas unless they have a local ground station which means there has to be a backbone in place somewhere in the area. This makes the constellation a glorified cell tower.