Starlink fundamental cost per GB equation (and comparison to competition)

[Michael S]

I just got the latest Verizon phone deal. About $90 for 75GB high speed, but only 30GB of that is hotspot. 600k after that runs out.

The company I work for has the "phone over the Internet"(I must admit this is a bit beyond my knowledge). if the latency we have been hearing about can be maintained as the customer base is increased, could Starlink work as a 'reverse hotspot'? Or, is this a stupid question?

You should be able to use Starlink just like any wifi phone service. The problem I was talking about would be using it for a wider phone service with a bunch of customers. There are some pretty Byzantine laws about supplying voice service as a business. Using Starlink as a telco pipe for areas already authorized for service by that telco should be simple. The hard part will be dealing with regulators who got the job by flunking out of Walmart greeter school.
 I'm pretty out of date too, and wasn't that good when I was in date, but you use to get good latency and small buffer size for voice over internet phone services by the internet provider supporting a higher class of service for your call to keep the data flow nice and smooth. It gave voice calls higher priority than people watching cute kitten videos and kept the data buffer as small as possible.
 Can't say I really know what you mean by "reverse hotspot".

My apologies, it made sense in my head. My thought, if you can create a hotspot with your phone so you can have internet to watch cute kitten videos on your laptop; could one use a high quality internet connection (Starlink) to have a Voice Over Internet Phone, but with a cell phone within range of the wifi, anywhere on the planet?  For example, when you travel to Ecuador to scout for a new launch site southeast of Quito.

Edit: I'm starting to realize that you are talking about is a scaled up application of what I was talking about and already exists,  and that I am way behind on this subject and need to do some reading.

[rsdavis9]

They could still broadcast like a regular cable or satellite company does. That way if 1000 people in the beam are watching the Super Bowl or whatever, they don't need 1000x the bandwidth. But streaming video (like youtube) uses normal bandwidth.

I would bet that streaming video is already the majority of data usage for broadband. I have regularly wondered if it might eventually make sense to keep a nearline Netflix cache on Starlink satellites once the satellites get larger.

Yes! I have wondered the same. Currently there are caching services for the wired internet. Such as akamai. If there is a large data cache on the satellite then it would make sense for these companies to rent the space.

[niwax]

I just got the latest Verizon phone deal. About $90 for 75GB high speed, but only 30GB of that is hotspot. 600k after that runs out.

The company I work for has the "phone over the Internet"(I must admit this is a bit beyond my knowledge). if the latency we have been hearing about can be maintained as the customer base is increased, could Starlink work as a 'reverse hotspot'? Or, is this a stupid question?

You should be able to use Starlink just like any wifi phone service. The problem I was talking about would be using it for a wider phone service with a bunch of customers. There are some pretty Byzantine laws about supplying voice service as a business. Using Starlink as a telco pipe for areas already authorized for service by that telco should be simple. The hard part will be dealing with regulators who got the job by flunking out of Walmart greeter school.
 I'm pretty out of date too, and wasn't that good when I was in date, but you use to get good latency and small buffer size for voice over internet phone services by the internet provider supporting a higher class of service for your call to keep the data flow nice and smooth. It gave voice calls higher priority than people watching cute kitten videos and kept the data buffer as small as possible.
 Can't say I really know what you mean by "reverse hotspot".

My apologies, it made sense in my head. My thought, if you can create a hotspot with your phone so you can have internet to watch cute kitten videos on your laptop; could one use a high quality internet connection (Starlink) to have a Voice Over Internet Phone, but with a cell phone within range of the wifi, anywhere on the planet?  For example, when you travel to Ecuador to scout for a new launch site southeast of Quito.

Edit: I'm starting to realize that you are talking about is a scaled up application of what I was talking about and already exists,  and that I am way behind on this subject and need to do some reading.

Since LTE, all voice calls are simply IP data. Voice over wifi has also been available for a long time depending on phone and provider, if you're on wifi right now chances are your calls are actually being routed over that. So it could be as simple as connecting your phone to Starlink and you'll be able to receive calls.

[RedLineTrain]

A few notes to an informative discussion:

(1) Wouldn't they be able to drive to greater than 4% capacity utilization, even in the short term?  I'm thinking about Canada and the coasts of the U.S. (the satellite doesn't have to be over land in order to serve coastal areas).  This assumes that SpaceX will get its Canadian approval shortly and that the 25-degree or lower angle above the horizon for user terminals will be approved by the FCC shortly.

(2) As SpaceX keeps mentioning in its filings, it is authorized for the v-band for gateways and user terminals, even on these early sats.  I wonder when SpaceX will get that figured out and implemented and how much mass that will add to a satellite.  That should at least triple the available bandwidth to any particular area.  Also, it appears that SpaceX can go down to 5-degrees above the horizon on the v-band.

(3) SpaceX has also applied for the e-band, adding lots of available bandwidth (at least on the gateways).  Also in the application, SpaceX asks to use the Ka-band for user terminals.  That hasn't yet been taken up by the FCC, so it could be a year or two before SpaceX gains approval.

[RedLineTrain]

The fundamental problem that I have with comparing to Viasat-3 is that it will be maybe mid-2022 before the first one is operational.  Meanwhile, Viasat's customers are suffering on an earlier version and SpaceX is pushing rapidly-improving Starlinks uphill at a furious pace.

[Robotbeat]

The fundamental problem that I have with comparing to Viasat-3 is that it will be maybe mid-2022 before the first one is operational.  Meanwhile, Viasat's customers are suffering on an earlier version and SpaceX is pushing rapidly-improving Starlinks uphill at a furious pace.

Totally agree. I think a lot of industry regulars have vastly underestimated the speed at which SpaceX has executed Starlink and this impacts their comparisons.

[Lar]

Interesting, the 1-4 cents per GB for Viasat 3 and the starlink number of 10 cents per GB in the OP is consistent with a ratio that Mark Dankberg presented and that I saw recently. Those numbers were a low end of $10,000 per gbps-month for starlink and something like $~3,000 per gbps-month for ViaSat 3.

See ~7:49 in the following video


This is marketable bandwidth, so some assumptions about landing rights and that kind of thing while the GEO satellite just targets all of its capacity where it is projected to be needed and useable.
 

In a shocking development, the head of Viasat thinks his slideware offering is better than something that already exists in limited form and will be getting better and better over time as more and better birds are lofted, but his numbers don't actually check out since latency matters.

[Robotbeat]

Don’t speak too bad about Viasat. They have booked a Falcon Heavy launch.

SpaceX benefits from competition!

[Mandella]

The fundamental problem that I have with comparing to Viasat-3 is that it will be maybe mid-2022 before the first one is operational.  Meanwhile, Viasat's customers are suffering on an earlier version and SpaceX is pushing rapidly-improving Starlinks uphill at a furious pace.

Totally agree. I think a lot of industry regulars have vastly underestimated the speed at which SpaceX has executed Starlink and this impacts their comparisons.

I know I did. No way I thought I might have limited service rolling out in my area (~33 Lat) by Jan. Even if it slips to later spring I am really impressed.

As for expense, if it works I will be saving my ViaSat bill ($165.00) plus if I can route phone over internet I will finally ditch my landline ($45.00) plus a back up 3G hotspot ($10) for a savings of $121.00 per month.

Yeah I don't mind that $500.00 up front charge.

[ncb1397]

In a shocking development, the head of Viasat thinks his slideware offering is better than something that already exists in limited form and will be getting better and better over time as more and better birds are lofted, but his numbers don't actually check out since latency matters.

Sort of. According to TestMy.net, Hughes Network Systems actually beat Starlink in raw bandwidth yesterday December 9th(on a 4 year old satellite). Viasat was close. So, not exactly a "slideware offering". Latency doesn't really matter in terms of cost per bit, which is the subject of the thread and what Dankberg was referring to.

Hughes (download December 9th): 22.7 megabits
https://testmy.net/hoststats/hughes_network_syste

Viasat (download December 9th):  14 megabits
https://testmy.net/hoststats/viasat

Starlink (download December 9th): 17.6 megabits
https://testmy.net/hoststats/spacex_starlink

Starlink still has a big advantage in upload by a factor of  ~7. And this is the first time that existing geostationary was beating starlink, who knows if that will continue or was a blip.

*a caveat is that the starlink data is dominated by a couple of users doing automated testing every hour/half hour. The other services tend to have more diversified results (naturally, having more customers currently hooked up).

edit: If you remove the data for starlink from 2 users that shall not be named (one oddly seemingly shows a throttling to 25 mbps and the other shows weird variability), you get an average of 66 megabits/second download which is much better, but still about a ~4x improvement over Viasat with far fewer customers putting load on the system.

[Hamish.Student]

Everyone has data caps, although nowadays they’re usually “soft” data caps where they’ll throttle you after you’ve used up 150GB or 1.2TB or whatever.

 
 
This is not true. 
My ISP(Aussie Broadband) has unlimited plans, and there is no mention of exceeding it in their fair use policy.  My household pretty regularly goes over a TB in a month, and ive never heard anything from them, nor had my connection shaped.
 
There are upper limits to unlimited, but in reality for people to hit them is evidence they need a higher tier connection, or purposeful abuse which violates fair use.   
Fair use != Data caps.

[Robotbeat]

The reason ISPs put restrictions in the terms of service is because the plans are unlimited and they need some other way to control data flow. So the “fair use” restrictions, as you call them, are a way to sort of cap usage without customers getting too mad...

[dlapine]

How many customers can the planned total satellite network support? How many per satellite?

Apologies if this is answered elsewhere

[Robotbeat]

How many customers can the planned total satellite network support? How many per satellite?

Apologies if this is answered elsewhere

This is hard to say as they plan to increase capacity of each satellite over time (currently 20Gbps but Starship could allow much greater capacity per satellite... 1Tbps?). The answer could be hundreds of millions. Particularly as the add inter satellite links and gain customers all over the world.

Take the total number of satellites (1000 now, climbing to over 40000?), multiply by capacity of each satellite (20Gbps now, climbing to 1Tbps?), divide by a number between 4 and 20 for the proportion of time the satellites are over customers (start at 20 and reduce to 4 over time), and divide the whole thing by the average data usage per person (may be between 1 and 10 Megabits/second... Comcast’s average is closer to 1 megabit/s, although peak speeds might be 100 or 1000Mbps).

That’s 1 million users now, each using 1Mbps average, climbing eventually to 1 billion customers using on average 10Mbps (the same as about 10 average Comcast users combined).

[Lar]

In a shocking development, the head of Viasat thinks his slideware offering is better than something that already exists in limited form and will be getting better and better over time as more and better birds are lofted, but his numbers don't actually check out since latency matters.

Sort of. According to TestMy.net, Hughes Network Systems actually beat Starlink in raw bandwidth yesterday December 9th(on a 4 year old satellite). Viasat was close. So, not exactly a "slideware offering". Latency doesn't really matter in terms of cost per bit, which is the subject of the thread and what Dankberg was referring to.

Hughes (download December 9th): 22.7 megabits
https://testmy.net/hoststats/hughes_network_syste

Viasat (download December 9th):  14 megabits
https://testmy.net/hoststats/viasat

Starlink (download December 9th): 17.6 megabits
https://testmy.net/hoststats/spacex_starlink

Starlink still has a big advantage in upload by a factor of  ~7. And this is the first time that existing geostationary was beating starlink, who knows if that will continue or was a blip.

*a caveat is that the starlink data is dominated by a couple of users doing automated testing every hour/half hour. The other services tend to have more diversified results (naturally, having more customers currently hooked up).

edit: If you remove the data for starlink from 2 users that shall not be named (one oddly seemingly shows a throttling to 25 mbps and the other shows weird variability), you get an average of 66 megabits/second download which is much better, but still about a ~4x improvement over Viasat with far fewer customers putting load on the system.

Latency matters, a lot. You are just bound and determined to always put the most negative spin on everything related to SpaceX, aren't you? And a partly deployed network compared against one that's been in place for a while isn't a fair comparison either.

I'm comfortable with my characterization of Viasat's new plan as "slideware"

[Robotbeat]

Not to mention, ncb's figures are *extremely* cherry-picked (whether he did that intentionally or unintentionally is unclear... but I doubt he would've said anything if he had picked a day to check that site when Starlink was clearly superior). The average capacity of Starlink on those same exact links is 40.6Mbps down (10.5Mbps up). Hughes' average is ~17.6Mbps down (1.4Mbps up). Viasat average looks to be about 12Mbps (1.5Mbps up).

Starlink average download speed is over twice Hughes and over thrice Viasat and upload speed (relevant to all the video chat we're doing nowadays because of COVID) shows an even bigger disparity of more than a factor of 7 better than either Hughes and Viasat.

And Starlink is still in early Beta, and this is ignoring the massive latency advantage.

And am I cherrypicking? Nope! If you want to avoid cherrypicking, you use averages and the most complete data possible, not just that of a single day.

[ncb1397]

And Starlink is still in early Beta, and this is ignoring the massive latency advantage.

Exactly, you have to rate capacity as #users x average speed, not just the average speed. Being in Beta, the number of users for Starlink is relatively low. For instance, on that website, there were only 19 unique connections on the download side for Starlink on January 21st. There were 69 for Viasat and 446 for HughesNet. This is what you would expect given SpaceX has referenced thousands of invites being sent out repeatedly compared to the 1.6 million Hughes subscribers and .6 million US Viasat subscribers.

You are comparing a couple of 3 year+ old satellites being hammered with 100s of thousands of users compared to hundreds of  brand new satellites being hammers by thousands of users. In that regard, the 3x  advantage Starlink is seing in download over Viasat, isn't necessarily that impressive and could disappear under load. We will see, but the trend over time has been somewhat negative.

[envy887]

In a shocking development, the head of Viasat thinks his slideware offering is better than something that already exists in limited form and will be getting better and better over time as more and better birds are lofted, but his numbers don't actually check out since latency matters.

Sort of. According to TestMy.net, Hughes Network Systems actually beat Starlink in raw bandwidth yesterday December 9th(on a 4 year old satellite). Viasat was close. So, not exactly a "slideware offering". Latency doesn't really matter in terms of cost per bit, which is the subject of the thread and what Dankberg was referring to.

Cost is only half the equation in profit. You have to get someone to pay for that bit, and people will pay more for low latency bits.

[dlapine]

And Starlink is still in early Beta, and this is ignoring the massive latency advantage.

Exactly, you have to rate capacity as #users x average speed, not just the average speed. Being in Beta, the number of users for Starlink is relatively low. For instance, on that website, there were only 19 unique connections on the download side for Starlink on January 21st. There were 69 for Viasat and 446 for HughesNet. This is what you would expect given SpaceX has referenced thousands of invites being sent out repeatedly compared to the 1.6 million Hughes subscribers and .6 million US Viasat subscribers.

You are comparing a couple of 3 year+ old satellites being hammered with 100s of thousands of users compared to hundreds of  brand new satellites being hammers by thousands of users. In that regard, the 3x  advantage Starlink is seing in download over Viasat, isn't necessarily that impressive and could disappear under load. We will see, but the trend over time has been somewhat negative.

Do you have latency comparisons as well? Yes, I know that it's an unfair comparison, but it's just as useful to collect that data, as latency is also important, and often overlooked aspect of networking. Also, do you have data for uploads and not just downloads for comparison and tracking.

[Robotbeat]

And Starlink is still in early Beta, and this is ignoring the massive latency advantage.

Exactly, you have to rate capacity as #users x average speed, not just the average speed. Being in Beta, the number of users for Starlink is relatively low. For instance, on that website, there were only 19 unique connections on the download side for Starlink on January 21st. There were 69 for Viasat and 446 for HughesNet. This is what you would expect given SpaceX has referenced thousands of invites being sent out repeatedly compared to the 1.6 million Hughes subscribers and .6 million US Viasat subscribers.

You are comparing a couple of 3 year+ old satellites being hammered with 100s of thousands of users compared to hundreds of  brand new satellites being hammers by thousands of users. In that regard, the 3x  advantage Starlink is seing in download over Viasat, isn't necessarily that impressive and could disappear under load. We will see, but the trend over time has been somewhat negative.

Wow, you just don't quit, do you? I showed how you cherrypicked the data (conveniently skipping over the averages staring you right in the face), and you make up some other new line of argument without acknowledging what you did. And for your information, the long-term trend is essentially flat for Starlink, neither increasing nor decreasing. Enough with the disingenuous arguments that you keep attempting and then abandoning (without acknowledgement) when they're shown to be full of crap. If you want anyone on this site to consider you engaging in good faith, you're going to have to acknowledge when you're proven wrong.