1. Redmond office site
2. North bend, colocated with CenturyLink long haul fiber hut
3. Brewster, commercial teleport facility, as a tenant, larger site is run by USEI. This is also a TT&C (tracking, telemetry and control) site for starlink space segment network operations.
4. Prosser, also colocated with CenturyLink fiber huts.
It is also worth noting that one of the first major internet traffic exchange points which the starlink AS has joined is the SIX (Seattle internet exchange). It's my theory that their IP network and other common ISP-like infrastructure is the most fully developed in Seattle.
If you take a look at their peeringdb page it will give you an idea of where they're publicly announcing availability for peeing and PNIs. Presently only Seattle.
It's worth pointing out that this will probably be something only people in rural areas will be interested in. "High speed" is in reference to the utter garbage available to these people. The throughput won't be close to what you can get from copper/fiber in an urban/suburban setting.
If you want to stick it to Comcast+co, this is unlikely to help you cut your cable [internet]. We'll still need to vote and apply pressure to end this oligopoly.
> "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers."
> Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1128834111878193155?s=20
> That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiyver started out.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132903914586529793?s=20
from wikipedia
https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/verizon-partners-aws-to-br...
A good approximation would be 200 km/ 1 ms instead of 300 km/ 1 ms for speed of light in a vacuum/ microwave links.
My friend is right now swimming under sail somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and she'd definitely benefit greatly from an affordable high speed internet connection.
1m*$80 per month=$80m per month ~= $1b per year
If the project costs the estimated $10b, the capital cost and operations cost should be covered, or close to it, at ~ 1 million subscribers.
This looks like a milk run to me, but I guess we’ll have to see how subscriptions go.
When you look at what subscribers pay worldwide for internet, it varies, but in the U.S., I currently pay $50/month for 3mbps/0.768mbps DSL (Yuck!) in the countryside. When I'm traveling, ATT is charging around $100/month for unlimited LTE at 8mbps/8mbps. If Starlink can give me 10mbps/10mbps or better at $80/month, I'll take interest. Even more so if Starlink can replace an Iridium go when out at sea.
I'm not sure how Starlink will price services around the world. It'll be interesting to see how they work out the terms/pricing globally. If they are competitive though, I think there are enough customers in the U.S. to make it a profitable project.
“As confirmed by the company, Starlink will be able to provide speeds of up to a gigabit per second with latencies ranging from 25 milliseconds to 35 milliseconds. Elon Musk has previously stated that it has been designed to run real-time, competitive video games.”
It will be plenty good to replace anything else available out there for home internet.
Elon Musk has admitted this himself, and the problem gets worse over time (bandwidth requirements grow every year, but satellites capacity is fixed), so the 20gbps they have now will seem even more limited in 3-5 years when the satellites are becoming EoL.
This is not to say that Starlink is fundamentally flawed, it has great potential for rural access.
I'm currently on an 5Mb down 1Mb up LTE connection with a total data limit of 250Gb/Month for the low price of 100 bucks a month. I do have very low latency < 20ms, but last month my friends kid was over and managed to burn through 95 gigs playing and updating some game called PubG that ended up putting me over my limit and I got to pay an extra 50 bucks for the next tier of usage.
If I get the opportunity to try out Starlink I will be more than happy to do so as it's very frustrating being forced to use an ISP monopoly provider, especially when there is fiber available to properties less than 5 miles away from mine.
$25 per month if you join a party, which takes about 5 minutes after searching for "Visible Party".
Stadia can easily burn through tens of GB per hour in bandwidth, and needs low latency, so it’s a good test of my 5G mobile connection. Good thing I have unlimited data!
When I dropped cable TV and phone 4 months ago, I also dropped my internet speed from the 600 I had, figuring I’d start low and then raise it to what I need.
Options were 25, 100, 200, 300, 600, 1000, or 2000, for 50, 55, 70, 80, 90, 100, or 300 $/month.
I went with 100...and am still there 4 months later. The only times I notice it’s slower than my old 600 is OS and sometimes large app updates. (And for mobile devices, the difference is even less because my WiFi was a lot closer to 100 than 600).
It hasn’t affected working from home at all (I’ve been WFH for a couple years now so have plenty of prior experience with that at 600). I do occasionally need large downloads from work, but I’ve never gotten more than 20 Mbps out of our servers hosted at AWS.
I was worried a bit about upload. Nominally it was 15 for the 600 plan and is 5 for the 100 plan. Comcast over-performs in my area, so actual is about 19 for 600 and 7 for 100. (Download for those two is actually about 620-640 and 124). But the only large uploads I do aren’t very large. They are just large enough that on the old plan I would overlap them with other work rather than wait...so now I just get more other work done during the upload and still don’t really notice the wait. I get the same total work accomplished in the same time as before, just sequenced slightly different.
I thought I might be going to 300 if it turned out that streaming TV ran me into Comcast’s data cap and I needed to go unlimited. That would have been an extra $50/month, so 100 unlimited would be $105/month. But they also had an option where you could get unlimited for much less but only if you rented their modem. Total was $25/month, but it was only available on 300 or faster plans. A 300 plan with the modem/unlimited bundle would be $105/month, same as the 100 plan with my own modem and added unlimited. Still wouldn’t need 300, but if it is the same price as 100 why not?
But it turns out that even in my bingiest COVID lockdown month I only hit about 300 GB. Also, Comcast has since raised the cap from 1000 GB to 1229 GB, and dropped unlimited to $30/month, so I now anticipate staying at 100 indefinitely.
6Mbps/768kbps DSL
make sure you have some decent AQM (qos) like cake or fq_codel. isp-gear probably has not. IQRouter was one of the first but there are others https://www.stoplagging.com/
I pay $75/month for 30/30. So that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
But you're not going to have just one satellite per city. Consider that Starlink already has approval for 12,000 satellites. And has applied for 30,000 more! At 20 Gbps each, that’s a lot of bandwidth.
When fully built out, any given point on the ground should have coverage from dozens (hundreds?) of satellites at any given time, spreading the load in regions of heavy demand.
I think they'll just make it more expensive than internet in cities. That way it's still the best option for rural areas without attracting too many customers in cities.
There may be niche customers in cities (data redundancy/resiliency etc), but in general, the biggest advantage will be for rural/remote customers who currently pay above the odds for substandard service.
Can this be upgraded in future versions of the sats? Is it a major undertaking requiring new ground station hardware, or something relatively easy that will increase with each "new" version of the sats?
I think I saw a photo of a 5 Tbps Netflix POP recently.
How many beams per sat? What's the minimum angle/distance between them?
The math just doesn't add up. It's a similar problem to why 4G/5G isn't a viable replacement for home internet service (yet) in many areas, apart from its much worse as it's easier to add new 5G base stations to densely cover cities than add new satellites.
That doesn't sound right. A satellite doesn't have to be directly overhead to be reachable. The coverage map below suggests that each satellite can cover a region 800-1000km in diameter, so with a fully deployed constellation of 12,000 to 42,000 satellites, there should easily be 50+ sats visible from any metro area. Perhaps even more than that.
This means satellites are going to cover a very large area. There might be 50 sats to cover the area from Boston down to Washington DC. That's 1tbit/sec of bandwidth to cover 100m potential customers.
Considering beta service afiak is using 600-1200 sats I imagine sat penetration will be significantly less. Considering cell towers between 4G and 5G can offer 20gbps _per tower_ these days I can't see 20gbps working across an entire state. Especially when it has been hyped as better than terrestrial internet. Even with a small number of users it will degrade rapidly at peak times when you get 1-3k users watching netflix.
> Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband.
> The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said.
> So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.
1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
In many ways those of us in this scenario get the worst of both world because infrastructure spending / subsidies for rural Internet improvement gets used in real remote places, while most people don't realize that if you drive one street over from the suburbs, out into the farmland, you're unlikely to even be able to get low quality DSL. It's simply not available to me. When the sprawl finally brings the bulldozers in to build McMansions around me, I guess that's when the fiber lines will come in...
No, because there won't be any urban users on Starlink. It doesn't make any sense for them (ignoring a small number of vocal fanboys).
At least initially, this is going to primarily be a rural and/or mobile warrior type of service.
And I don’t believe those latency figures at all until I see them working in the wild. It will be significantly better than geosynchronous satellite service, but the question is by how much.
The most optimal market is not somewhere like a northern suburb of Seattle with a well-developed Comcast network that also has CenturyLink GPON 1Gbps available, but more rural and fringe areas.
But the mobile network almost never goes down. If something happens to a given cell tower/base station, the connection will seamlessly switch over to another. Performance might degrade a bit but you probably won't notice. There is built in resiliency/redundancy with less single points of failure. I imagine a network like Starlink will be the same.
If they plug a 1gig network into an old 802.11g wireless router or an old 100/10 network card with cat4 cables, you are not getting what you pay for at all.
Rock on over to my parents house. They were paying for 40 and had it plugged into a wireless usb dongle that could maybe manage 2.5 on a good day. That came from the ISP. Bought them a better one and they were getting near the rate they were paying for.
Example rural ISPs. East bay:
https://www.unwiredltd.com/residential-internet.html
(3 up, $50/mo, 6 up, $89/mo, 9mbps up, $129/mo, no caps)
South bay:
https://www.surfnetusa.com/services/
(Lots of plans: 5 up, $40/mo, or 18mbps up, $103/month, no caps)
I’m paying comcast $80 for 6 up, 1TB cap. It’s nominally 75mbps down, but performance is sometimes too slow for netflix 1080p (3-6 mbps down) during prime time. They won’t sell me a cheaper plan.
We live in a somewhat rural area in Mexico (big city is 45 mins away) and we have uncapped 200Mb down / 50Mb up fiber for less than $50 per month.
The word "Jesús" is rarely used nowadays to express a strong emotion like astonishment or disgust. It's something my grandparents would have said. My father is in his 60s and sometimes says it but only jokingly.
It's more common in Mexico but it's also disappearing. When someone sneezes the usual response is "salud".
I agree that the speeds are awful on an absolute scale, but they’re competing with entrenched monopolies that own legal right of ways that will never be developed. This lets them prevent competitors from running fiber.
Starlink is attacking the same ridiculous regulatory problem. Why build an entire reusable launch infrastructure and custom satellites when laying fiber is dirt cheap? Heck, Facebook says they have a robot that will piggy-back 2km of fiber over existing power lines in a day!
In California, deploying the robots would mean getting PG&E to cooperate, but I could see it helping out in other states.
I think it highly depends on what's available in your area.
Given that it is going to pretty be my only option, it would suck if a bunch of city people suck up all the invites.
Starlink's business is probably more successful anyway if they focus on fewer customers but charge those more. Less congestion and lower bandwidth requirements for their ground stations.
We have lots of National Forest / BLM land and it usually has almost no reception.
If they aren’t too expensive I hope to have one on a rural property as well as on the RV/truck I drive to get there.
Rural areas with sparse populations would make sense rather than dense urban areas with greater populations. Even if like GPS there are several satellite overhead even a dozen may be too few for large cities.
The perfect customer is one person who lives in a rural area that doesn't have trees and it doesn't snow.
Total covered area: 400 000 000 km2/ 40 000 satellites / 650 users = about 15km2 per user
i.e. starlink users should be on average 4km or 2,5mi apart
Cellular is also spotty, so its not a good option either. Very hilly terrain with low population density. All of my cellular service at home is over wifi via the DSL connection.
Comcast has no interest in running cable/fiber the 2.5 miles needed to get to us. No ROI.
For okanogan, Google NCI datacom, they're a wisp that covers much of the county. But not out to the fringes. Okanogan county itself and the PUD have fiber along the highway all the way from Brewster to the Canadian border, with POPs in the towns along the way. Several WISPs make use of it.
If you were using either of those counties as an example because you actually know people who are finding it difficult to get last-mile broadband, let me know and perhaps I can help put them in touch with the right people.
If we were going to use a very rural Washington State location as an example of where starlink might do well, somewhere such as people who live on acreages outside of Republic might be a better example. Or somewhere like Stehekin.
If I had to guess, the reason why Washington state is a good test market for them, is a combination of relatively low cost and easy to provision lit transport services they can buy from each earth station back to Seattle, reasonable driving times and hassle for people to come and go from the Redmond facility to the test sites for physical install and modification of equipment, and a fairly good sized base of consumers in very rural locations presently dependent on hughesnet/wildblue type cheap consumer VSAT.
And yes I do know people who have had problems in these counties. I also had an absolutely miserable experience using Charter due to their poor infrastructure in the valley. Internet on nights, weekends, holidays, etc. was unusable due to their high utilization of low bandwidth lines
In a household with 5 people, that is 25/10, which does fit into the FCC's definition.
WISPs are popping up left and right that can do 1000/1000 per access point, which can be shared with all customers within about a 500ft radius. That's definitely doable with the above definiton of broadband. Basically, it's one wifi-based access point that has a uplink, and each household has an externally mounted wifi antenna that then redistributes to a conventional home router.
On the other hand, I personally have a WISP in a dense urban area. I pay $45~/mo for guaranteed 100/100 - usually, my sustained speeds are closer to 200/200, or 300/300. It's an antenna on our building that is the backhaul for about 50 households.
WISPs are viable in rural areas - they bring broadband to those who can't get it.
WISPs are viable in urban areas - regions where installing new copper or fiber would be prohibitively expensive, they allow upstarts to challenge the duopoly.
Just about the only awkward middle ground where the economics get a little tough is in spread suburban areas.
maybe! I video conferenced on 1.5up for a week and I did have to turn down send quality, but other than that, it was fine.
I think the bigger issue is that if you can only get 1.5 in 2020, then that means that the physical layer between you and the internet is tenuous. Like, DSL far away from the DSLAM and thus packet loss and line noise.
For the heavy uploads I usually resorted to doing the upload from a VPS instead though, when possible (build the artifacts from that VPS, so that both the build and upload are much faster).
There are also a lot of crappy WISPs out there, so this is by no means definitive. Same as there's lots of crappy frontier copper wireline 5Mbps ADSL2+ still out there on degraded copper lines from 40 years ago.
$99 for 15/3 mbps, or $139 if you want broadband: https://ethericnetworks.com/residential-service-plans/
$50 for 2.5/2.5 mbps, or $679 if you want broadband: https://ridgewireless.net/ridge-wireless-plans/
That's exciting. Internet could be a real game changer for the 1800's
Are the satelites all in the same orbit? And if so shouldn't it be an orbit around the equator?
Intuitively for me it should require a view of the southern sky. But I know very little about satelite orbits to be confident.
https://satellitemap.space/indexA.html
(Try to ignore the closely bunched satellites; those haven't spread out yet.)
They're all in an inclined orbit, with the orbital planes regularly staggered about Earth's axis. So, the simple way to consider this is that the distance between these orbits is greater at the equator than it is near the poles.
An extreme to illustrate the point; if they were all polar orbits, all the orbits would intersect at the poles, providing coverage from all of the planes, whereas each location at the equator might be served by one or two orbital planes.
I drove by the ground station here in Michigan recently and it’s coming along but it’s definitely not looking close. In a month they basically installed conduit, electrical, and a fence. I don’t currently see any radio gear.
Near Manistique, MI. (45.9086063, -86.4838231)
q:What is Starlink Beta? a:Starlink Beta is an opportunity to be an early user of the SpaceX's satellite internet system.The purpose of Starlink Beta is to gather feedback that will help us make decisions on how best to implement the system for Starlink's official launch. By design, the beta experience will be imperfect. Our goal is to incorporate feedback from a variety of users to ensure we build the best satellite broadband internet system possible.
q:Who can participate in Starlink Beta? a:Starlink Beta will begin in the Northern United States and lower Canada, with those living in rural and/or remote communities in the Washington state area. Access to the Starlink Beta program will be driven by the user's location as well as the number of users in nearby areas. All beta testers must have a clear view of the northern sky to participate.
q:Why do I need a clear view of the northern sky to be a beta tester? a:The Starlink system is currently made up of nearly 600 satellites orbiting the Earth that can provide internet service in a very specific range between 44 and 52 degrees north latitude. Your Starlink dish requires a clear view of the Northern sky in order to communicate with the Starlink satellites. Without the clear view, the Starlink dish cannot make a good connection and your service will be extremely poor.
q:Can I document and share my Starlink Beta experience? a:No, unfortunately you cannot document or share your Starlink Beta experience publicly. Beta testers will be required to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement as a condition of their participation.
q:How will my service quality be during Starlink Beta? a:During Starlink Beta, service will be intermittent as teams work to optimize the network. When connected, your service quality will be high, but your connection will not be consistent. This means it may support streaming video with some buffering, but likely is not suitable for gaming or work purposes.
q:What is expected of me as a participant in Starlink Beta? a:Beta testers will provide feedback in the form of periodic short surveys over an 8 week period to help our teams improve every aspect of the service.
q:Is there a cost to participating Starlink Beta? a:There is no cost to be a beta tester, aside from a $1 charge to help test the billing system.
q:What will I receive as a Beta Tester? a:Your Starlink Kit will arrive via FedEx pre-assembled with a Starlink dish, router, power supply and mount depending on your dwelling type. Your Starlink Kit will require a signature for delivery, but you will be able to manage your delivery date and time through FedEx.
q:How does Starlink internet work? a:Starlink will deliver high-speed broadband internet across the globe with a large, low-Earth constellation of relatively small but advanced satellites. Satellite internet works by sending information through the vacuum of space, where it travels nearly 50% faster than in fiber-optic cable.
q:Most satellite internet services today come from single geostationary satellites that orbit the planet at about 35,000km, covering a fixed region of the Earth. Starlink, on the other hand, is a constellation of multiple satellites that orbit the planet much lower at about 550km, and cover the entire globe. a:Because the satellites are in a low orbit, the round-trip data time between the user and the satellite – also known as latency is much lower than with satellites in geostationary orbit. This enables Starlink to deliver services like online gaming that are usually not possible on other satellite broadband systems
q:If I sign up to be a Beta Tester and I change my mind, can I cancel? a:Yes, you can cancel at any time
q:Who can participate in Starlink Beta?
a:Starlink Beta will begin in the Northern United States and lower Canada, with those living in rural and/or remote communities in the Washington state area. Access to the Starlink Beta program will be driven by the user's location as well as the number of users in nearby areas. All beta testers must have a clear view of the northern sky to participate.