The thing with satellite internet (up and downlink) is mostly to do with jitter. You can get pretty good rates on a nice day, but you can’t control air refraction 2 miles off the ground doing weird stuff to your signal. I experimented with many things, but the best solution I had was using TCP over UDP with a server in a data center able to resend TCP (over UDP) packets if they were dropped. I think http3 will help out immensely here.<p>Source: I ran a small satellite ISP on a base in Afghanistan.
Is anyone else amazed that we are sending data to a satellite orbiting in space and getting a response that is 50-100 times faster (down) than the T1 links (1.544 mbps) our schools paid crazy amounts for when I was in high school almost 20 years ago? I mean that's pretty cool when you look at what Space X has done.
What seems to be missing from these discussions is the gigantic bet that SpaceX is making on Starlink. They performed 15 launches for this constellation already that they paid for themselves. If the internet service business doesn't generate revenue the launcher side will see a majority of its launch manifest evaporate and book enormous loss.<p>From the outside it seems that a commercial failure of Starlink would bankrupt all of SpaceX.
Did they tell what gonna happen with geofencing after the beta?<p>I know a few people who would probably want that thing installed on their boats. For marine applications, it needs to work globally without any fences. Geofencing-wise, international waters == nowhere. In territorial or internal water you normally have some 4G from the land, not much need for satellites there.
Sounds pretty awesome! Anyone know how much performance might be expected to degrade as the number of users increases? Most of these people probably have the entire Starlink RF spectrum to themselves in whatever location they’re testing in.
How are they getting latency so low? I used satellite internet for a month back in 2009 and it was brutal. Minimum 500ms. Literally had to break my lease to move to another place that offered broadband so I could actually work. I see starlink satellites are orbiting much lower but that would seem to only account for maybe 25% (?) of the gap between 20ms and 500ms.
how many satellites are up now & how many users are there?<p>what happens to get to the next 10x users? 100x?<p>it's cool that latency seems good.b that is the very first hurdle to viabity. but what hope there is for the future for this being real, useful, affordable broadband I think is still completely unknown.<p>whatever is happening today is being done at a radical loss, with a radically undersubscribed batch of satellites that is in no way going to reflect what kind of numbers people see if this goes anywhere, succeeds. maybe it can keep acting growing accommodating, providing magnitudes more bandwidth to people. maybe. while retaining this so far moderate price. maybe it's possible this works. but how it grows to serve orders of magnitude more folk, well, there are some constellation size asks, some guidelines, but it's very much indeterminate that the price point & offering now is viable, is really for real. there's a lot more finding out to do.
The current Starlink launch is limited to the US and parts of Canada. What would happen if I sign up there and then physically ship my dish to Saudi Arabia/China/North Korea? Would the service keep working (subject to satellite availability, which will obviously not be great), or are there geoblocks in place?
I think it's disingenuous of ArsTechnica to report two of the worst case posts on the Starlink subreddit as if they were common.<p>The source used for the comment "every 5-10 minutes" doesn't fully clarify that point. Many users in the Reddit subreddit post that is quoted stated that the person likely installed it incorrectly and the cutouts were from trees blocking the signal. So "every 5-10 minutes" is not what most people are seeing. Source reddit post the article uses: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jsnd52/starlink_day_one/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jsnd52/starlink_d...</a><p>Key reply:<p>> Based on the disconnects every 5-10 minutes. I would definitely say the obstructions are causing issues. I had the same problem last week and timing between disconnects. Put mine a little too close to the house. Moved it yesterday and today my connections were holding with no disconnects for anywhere from 2 to 3 hours with maybe a short 10-30 second disconnect between.
Something feels very wrong about covering the entire planet in satellites just so rural residents of the developed world can get faster internet.<p>Sure, in theory, the entire world can have access but that won't come for free and won't be in any way affordable by the vast majority of the world population.