Millions of people across the country have little to no access to broadband internet. Millions more around the world have little to no access to broadband primarily due to a lack of infrastructure or the excessive cost required to establish that infrastructure. Starlink is a company Elon Musk has promoted to resolve that issue and bring broadband internet to virtually every point on the planet. I'd not seen an actually, working, consumer, version of the product....until now. To me, this could be a gamechanger given the untapped customer base around the world. It could even dole out a beating to some DSL providers and cable companies that provide crappy service for premium prices.

We often get caught in debates about Tesla and its potential impacts to markets, but I truly believe Starlink is the Musk company that has the most potential to change many current paradigms and re-shape the communications markets. Will it be for everyone? Of course not. But it will be for millions that cable and DSL providers either can't reach, or don't want to reach. Starlink isn't the only player in this space as Jeff Bezo also has a company attempting to penetrate this market, but Starlink does appear to be in the lead currently getting product to market.

Have a look at the video below and let's chat about what Starlink potentially means for the future of communications.

Astronomers hate the idea. More space junk to ruin the view.

I've been watching this for a few months now.
I'm real eager to see the final result and how well it actually performs (especially in bad weather)

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:
Astronomers hate the idea. More space junk to ruin the view.

Well, maybe they can learn to code.

It's not offered in my area or I'd try it. I despise ATT and Comcast but I have to use one of them.

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:
Astronomers hate the idea. More space junk to ruin the view.

Yup

Pretty much spot on. Some astronomers have calculated that 35% of the night sky will be i useable for astronomy once his ‘constellation’ is finished.

If he wanted to make a name fir himself he should solve the problem of orbital debris rather than adding to it

I plan to acquire a base station and sign up for the service as soon as I can. My providers, Fios and Cox can stick it in their ears, decades of high-priced, slow, unreliable service.

As far as "the future of communications" goes, I think the biggest effect will be on away from home access to broadband, in your car, in your boat, in your camper, in your plane, and on public transport. Ubiquitous networking. It will make as much difference in daily life as the cell phone has for voice communications. Watch old movies, and see the hoops people had to jump through to make a phone call, and how much more they had to plan in advance for contingencies should they be out of communications.

They are going to have to come up with an antenna that can be mounted on a car, or carried in a pocket, and lose the geo-locking "feature." Or, perhaps, you'll just have to pay more to have "Starlink Anywhere" service.

quote:

Originally posted by mrvmax:
It's not offered in my area or I'd try it. I despise ATT and Comcast but I have to use one of them.

I'd love Comcast at this point. Right now, my 2 options are long-range wifi that is bounced 3x from town - 4Mbps dn/750kbps up or Hughesnet, which rhymes with screwsnet.

I checked into starlink last year & it was unavailable. Now it says late 2021 for my address.
$600 bucks for hardware (shipping & tax) + $99 a month is a little salty, but I'll likely try it for >10X what I currently have.

We are somewhat rural. about 10 miles from town. We do not have access to even POTS, much less cable or broadband internet. Right now all we have is the Home wifi of 4gLTE, which is ok. we use Ubifi and it was a game changer.

I have signed up and paid my $99 and we are supposed to get the system sometime this year. Pretty excited.

I'm in a rural area, my internet options today are 4G or Century link offers a DSL service that will get me a whopping 5 MB download and about 300K uploads.

Huges net and the other satellite providers won't offer service at my house, telling me there are too many trees around. (house sits in the middle of about 2 acres that have been cleared)

Something relatively affordable, with no data caps and high speed would be great here.

Are the Starlink signals better than traditional Dish or HugesNet signals?

While I understand that traditional wired connections are only an accident away from being disrupted, the weather up here seems to reek havoc on the satellite signals more often.

As a remote (work from home) employee, that would be a big factor for me.

While it looks like it provides awesome speeds, these are the earliest customers to the network. What will the bandwidth look like in several months or years as more and more customers connect to the network?

quote:

Originally posted by Orguss:
While it looks like it provides awesome speeds, these are the earliest customers to the network. What will the bandwidth look like in several months or years as more and more customers connect to the network?

That's why they're planning on putting 42,000 satellites up.

The claim is that they can maintain the bandwidth and latency for basically any reasonable expectable number of subscribers.

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:
Astronomers hate the idea. More space junk to ruin the view.

Yup

Pretty much spot on. Some astronomers have calculated that 35% of the night sky will be i useable for astronomy once his ‘constellation’ is finished.

If he wanted to make a name fir himself he should solve the problem of orbital debris rather than adding to it

Total agreement. His attempt to "darken" these glittering balls has been a joke as well.

quote:

Originally posted by Gibb:
Are the Starlink signals better than traditional Dish or HugesNet signals?

While I understand that traditional wired connections are only an accident away from being disrupted, the weather up here seems to reek havoc on the satellite signals more often.

As a remote (work from home) employee, that would be a big factor for me.

The star link satellites are in a lower orbit and there are lots of them (eventually shit tons of them, 42000 I think). They are interconnected and supposedly negate the regular satellite issues.

I was interested but T-mobile started offering 4g internet for $50. We got 2 accounts to ensure the house was covered with a kid gaming/school and both of us working from home. But it’s met all our internet and television needs. I think it’s a precursor to 5g. I got an email for star link being available now or soon at my address but I think I’ll hang tight for now.

Unless there is a SIGNIFICANT difference in the technology that Starlink uses, I expect it to little different from other satellite based internet providers.
LOTS of latency (gamers will hate it, VPN users may find it useless)
Data packages that do not offer real world solutions to traditional wired services.
I was on satellite for several years. ANY wired service was better simply because of lower ping times, lower latency, and the ability to actually stream an entire movie in HD before getting throttles back.

I find the 20ms ping times hard to believe. Maybe, I dunno. Usually the issue with the satellite services is the “burst” technology they use to emulate the higher speeds. This burst is also what drives up the ping times, makes secure websites slow, and wreaks havoc on VPNs.

But I haven’t seen it work in person. I’ve only used the older Hughesnet and other services. I used bonded T1 lines for a while, preferring the expenses for solid bandwidth over the spotty satellite service. Once DSL came to my area I haven’t looked back.

quote:

Originally posted by hudr:
Unless there is a SIGNIFICANT difference in the technology that Starlink uses, I expect it to little different from other satellite based internet providers.
LOTS of latency (gamers will hate it, VPN users may find it useless)

Hughesnet uses around 20 satellites at an orbital height of 22,000 miles (so even under absolutely perfect conditions, up to the satellite and back down is about 240 milliseconds, and a round trip - request up and down, result up and down - is going to be over 1/2 second).

Starlink currently has over 1000 satellites, with over 40,000 planned, all at orbital heights of a few hundred miles (heights will vary, I think all the ones so far are around 300 miles).

They've already demonstrated that, at least with small numbers of customers, they have no problem meeting their advertised latency goals.

This isn't really the time to debate what latency or bandwidth will be for the system as it grows. That will come with documented service levels. My focus with Starlink is more that millions of people living in rural areas could eventually have a communications solution that offers them realistic bandwidth to do the things many of us do every day. And as someone who would eventually like to get away from an urban setting into a rural one, this product 'might' provide the internet access I'd still want in that rural setting. Again, it's not a solution for everyone, though it may cause some pain and suffering to some of the DSL and cable providers, something I personally would enjoy seeing happen.

This is quite relevant to me. I'm moving to a relatively rural location and understand that Hughesnet might be my only option. Seems I might be able to get Starlink hardware sometime this year.

This is a real map of all the known space junk; what’s 42,000 more pieces of it? The link below let’s you see it in 3-D.



http://stuffin.space/