Disclaimer: I am a very happy Starlink customer that has no other option for internet besides terrible LTE.

Starlink never originally advertised the ability to transfer service or even sell your hardware. It was very clear from the beginning you had to use it for the address you provided, and their communication was very clear to that effect.

You are definitely correct that logically you should be able to sell your kit, transfer service, or just move with it (Elon has said you’ll eventually be able to use it on an RV). But you took that logical end result and set your own expectations based on assumptions that were not aligned with reality.

You are not in the target market, of course you’re going to be frustrated.

>(Elon has said you’ll eventually be able to use it on an RV)

Mobile antennas will also require separate FCC approval.

That just seems crazy. Why?

The FCCs primary concern is devices not interfering with each other. Part of that is cutting up areas geographically and by spectrum, so you know that the 100MHz FM station in one area won't over lap with another's and both can transmit. My guess would be that mobile transmitters are required to fill out paperwork about how they won't interfere anywhere in the US. I could be wrong though.

"Requires separate approvals" does not always mean that approval is hard to get. It might require a version of the dish that doesn't do something v1 or v1 and v2 current do however.

Movement shifts spectrum so theoretically it may require bigger guard bands and slightly different paperwork. OTOH, I doubt SpaceX allocated spectrum is tied to a any particular location (as opposed to say - within country bounds), considering it's satellite communication.

Starlink itself cares about positioning to avoid overcrowding and also any satellite tasking/scheduling/whatever.

> even sell your hardware

If you can't sell it, is it really yours?

You can light it on fire or chunk it in the trash without consequence, so… kinda sorta?

Several ISPs charge you a 'connection fee' to get some weird locked down hardware, and if you close your account it becomes useless.

What's the point of satellite internet if you can't move the dish around? That would seem to be one of the USPs...

Due to the design of satellite based internet they are fundamentally limited on how many dishes they can support in a certain area while still achieving advertised bandwidth rates.

There is a very, very high probability that if they allowed people to move starlink transceivers/dishes around that a number of areas would end up with higher concentrations than wanted, and starlink would have a lot of angry customers.

I can just imagine what Burning Man would look like under a sea of Starlink dishes and still no one can get bandwidth.

I wonder if a minimal location change rate or policy would work? If if your coordinates don’t change often enough then you get rate limited gradually down to a HughesNet rate. Want mobility? Then it’s 1/10th the speed while you’re outside your home region. Stay in a region long enough and you get the worst rates or a change of region. Oh and charge differently for different regions.

It's a low orbit satellite, which limits the amount of coverage for each satellite. And currently (without the sat-2-sat laser link), there needs to be a ground station also in range. If his cousin's house isn't close enough to a ground station, it just doesn't work. That's why Starlink is allocating based on addresses.

This range is not 70 miles, it may be 300+ miles. My location in eastern Europe currently can connect to ground stations in Poland and Turkey (600 miles apart).

Right. But if you live near the edge of coverage, say 280 miles, and your friend lives another 70 miles out, he could be 350 miles from the nearest base station. I know this is an oversimplification of the issue. But maybe the friend would be connected to a different ground station, that happened to be full.

I'm not an expert on the Starlink network, but their coverage isn't uniform. Even across the 48 states. The constellation provides more effective bandwidth in some areas than others.

SpaceX has a government subsidy to provide high speed internet right across the street from my parents house. But they have no satellite coverage in that area according to their own map. I don't really understand the business plan of SpaceX with respect to starlink.

> But they have no satellite coverage in that area according to their own map.

There is nowhere in the lower 48 where starlink has no satellite coverage, I believe there are still areas where they have not built out ground stations though, and since most of the satellites don't have laser links to talk to other satellites (due to issues with their original lasers not fully burning up on re-entry - now fixed) they need to have a ground station under the same satellite as the customer.

They also have limited bandwidth to any one satellite, so they need to limit the density of their customers. Satellites move up and down lattitudes, but at any one time the density of satellites is higher at higher latitudes, so they should be able to serve more customers there.

You're just arguing nuance & semantics.

For an ISP that uses satellites, ground stations are equivalent to satellite coverage. It doesn't matter how many satellites they have, if there isn't a ground station to connect to you don't have coverage.

Inter-satellite links also don't do anything useful if you don't have enough ground stations. Even if you had a ground station with infinite bandwidth there is no way a single satellite can have the entire network linked through it. It's a really neat thing to have a single voice channel connect through a constellation from somewhere like the southern Indian ocean, but you can't really run 100+ mbps pipes like that.

This is completely different than something like a military communications satellite where both ends of the connection are communicating through the same satellite. The 48 states could be totally in the dark (no power, no comms) and a military communications satellite still functions fine.

I wasn't arguing, I was just adding nuance. Now I'm arguing though.

The nuance between ground station coverage and satellite coverage is extremely important for understanding spacex's business plan, which is relevant to your comment since you were saying "I don't really understand the business plan of SpaceX with respect tostarlink", with the implication that it doesn't make any sense. The difference between ground station coverage vs satellite coverage is the difference between "we're still building out the infrastructure, but we have the hard bits in place" and "this business model never scales because we need to launch way more satellites just to have basic coverage over the continent". It shouldn't be surprising that they're not done scaling the ground infrastructure, but that's not an impediment to their long term business model, because it's not the expensive bit.

> Even if you had a ground station with infinite bandwidth there is no way a single satellite can have the entire network linked through it.

This is a straw man, no one ever suggested that the entire network would be linked from a single satellite.

Rather the primary purpose of inter-satellite links is that you can expand coverage to areas away from ground stations. You route the traffic to a nearby groundstation (or better, a groundstation close to it's destination) with bandwidth available.

> but you can't really run 100+ mbps pipes like that.

Yes you can, I don't have numbers for starlink's inter-satellite links, but in general that technology is at the ~10gbps / laser link range, each satellite has 4. Light travels through space faster than in fiber, so if routed intelligently this actually lowers ping too.

> This is completely different than something like a military communications satellite where both ends of the connection are communicating through the same satellite.

Ironically, this actually describes how the current system works (as long as you treat the endpoint as a groundstation, and not an IP address somewhere on the internet).

The future system is more robust, even if there is no "other end" to talk to locally, spacex will (with inter-satellite links) be able to route you to an "other end" anywhere around the globe.

> This is completely different than something like a military communications satellite where both ends of the connection are communicating through the same satellite.

Tell us you know nothing about military satcom without telling us you know nothing about military satcom.

Well given that I worked on military comms for over a year I'd say I'm pretty knowlegeable.

Let's see, this system predates even my birth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_Satellite_Communications...

It's still in use as recently as 2009, by pirates however. Newer systems include some form of conditional access to prevent anyone with the gear from using them.

I mean, OK, sure, but even Milstar Block I (mid-1990s tech) had a crosslink capability. And Milstar has already been folded into the the AEHF program, and the ESS program is already on track to replace AEHF.

It's a bit like saying "a bicycle is different from an automobile, because automobile frames are made from wood", and then pointing to a Morgan to prove the point.

A lot of it has to do with satellite orbits, and basically the constellation is just far from complete.

Due to the orbits, the northern US has the highest concentration of sats. Specifically I think if you use the Washington-Oregon border and extend that line across the entire US that's roughly where the highest concentration is. That said, I think they already have full coverage in the entire lower 48.

I don’t understand though. His cousin is 70 miles away, are the satellite coverages that small?

The satellites just relay signals from a customer ground station to a Starlink-owned ground station. That ground station has a wired Internet connection.

So coverage at your house is dependent on you and a Starlink ground station being in the ground track of some Starlink satellites. Because of their low altitude it's entirely possible for your house being in the ground track of satellites but the nearest Starlink ground station being outside.

At some point in the future Starlink satellites will have laser communications between each other. Then only one in that group needs to be able to see a Starlink ground station and the others can route customer signals to it.

It’s about the base station capacity, in theory. Though it seems super unlikely that an address that’s only 70 miles away would be on a different base station.

This will change dramatically once sat-to-sat laser comms are fully online as it will put more base stations “in range”.

I'm not so sure about that. At 200 Km altitude that the footprint of the satellite wouldn't be all that large depending on the phase array arrangement. It might not be able to swing that far sideways and still get enough signal strength. These antennas don't move physically, the use phase based signal steering (black magic to me).

Spacex business plan: Sucking tax payers money maybe ?

The point is that it's better than what anybody 5 miles outside of the city core can get. Local and state governments won't allow wireline competition, so this is the best we can do.

If you have no alternative, you get reasonable internet (100+ up/20+ down) with no data caps or throttling. It's a big step up from a hotspot/LTE connection (if you can even see the cell tower).

IMO they are just getting you used to the idea of what is normal. Then they gonna introduce $500/month “mobile” plan that many sailors will swallow like a bargain!

..they did this a few days ago. You nailed the price point, too.

Notably, this is only about twice the cost of a high speed "business" internet connection from the cable companies in a high density area. Regular Starlink is priced at about twice a high speed "consumer" internet connection, so the premium seems reasonable for the available-in-austure-areas part.

I do hope they end up coming out with a version for RVers that has the lower throughput but allows arbitrary roaming.. but I do understand putting roaming on a premium plan first, since it plays such havoc with per-cell capacity planning.

Is the cell capacity planning required since there are no laser interlinks or it's going to be forever like that?

That's within the feasible distance for a point to point wireless bridge. If geography permits - which is not that likely. Not cheap, but might be better than alternatives.

If my handy online calculators are working correctly, 70km distant would require a 300+ ft tall tower on each side for that P2P bridge. Just to deal with the curvature of the earth and not counting for anything else that might be in the way.

It would likely have to be more than one hop, yes...

What happens if you just take it there and plug it in?

The dish won't work since it knows where it is via GPS and where it is supposed to be. There is a little bit of tolerance in where the dish can be moved, but certainly not 70 miles of leeway.

Ha, reminds me of the tiny 3G picostations you could get from your mobile operator for a while when 3G was in its infancy - if you said you had really poor signal at your home, they would send you a small 3G station you could use in your home and which used your own internet for data and calls....but the hardware had a GPS built in to make sure it was never moved from the address it was assigned to(otherwise you could take it say, abroad, and make calls with your own numbers without paying for roaming - not that in that specific scenario paying for roaming would have made any sense anyway).

The geo tieing makes more sense as a product of spectrum regulation. If you move the Pico station they might not even own the resulting local spectrum.

> hardware had a GPS built in to make sure it was never moved from the address it was assigned to

There are also 911 implications.

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nena.org/resource/collection/1F053...

If you move it, and call 911 - how does the carrier determine the address where the call originated?

ATT's product along this line was a complete failure for me. I didn't have a street address at the fixed (albeit remote) location, and there were no street addresses I could pretend to have within its tolerable radius. They had no way of enabling the device without it being near a street address.

The technology would have worked just fine, they just couldn't fill in their E911 entry with anything that would work.

If you were to take it abroad your provider would also not have a license to use the frequencies it needs.

So, some cars have a decent antenna/hardware for 4G/5G to WiFi bridge; would it make sense to have a picostation inside the car as a repeater?

I only ever heard the term Femtocell for this. Also, wouldn't an IP check suffice? Are you sure it had GPS?

Yep - https://www.engadget.com/2007-03-28-hands-on-with-the-samsun...

IP would be absolutely trivial to spoof so that's not a proof of anything really.

My static IP geolocates to a town 50 miles away. So unless it's some list that has good accuracy i wouldn't think so.

The one I had years ago did have GPS, I was told the reason was for accurate 911 locating. It was a hassle because we were trying to use it in an office and the GPS antenna needed to be near a window.

>Are you sure it had GPS?

AFAIK even regular cell sites have GPS for timing purposes.

The GPS was also required for time sync for interconnectivity with the cellular network, to my understanding.

> There is a little bit of tolerance in where the dish can be moved,

There is so little tolerance that people are finding the dish only works say, in their driveway because the dish's required location is based off mapping data that puts a certain address at certain coordinates, regardless of where the house is (which might be set back considerably from the road.)

He’s got a video where he tried this and was unable to get it working.

Yeah, that was my first thought. After reports of success from people mounting it to the roof of their RVs I thought you could move it anywhere you wanted.

You can physically move it wherever you want, but you have to hope that there is an opening available in the "cell" at the new location, otherwise, you've got a paperweight.

Each Dishy is assigned to a specific ground station, so you can freely move it around as long as it's 'close enough' to that ground station. (I don't know the distance by memory..) There's a way to ask Starlink to switch your ground station, which is what people with the RVs are doing.

You should have done more research before signing up imo.

I have synchronous gigabit wireless internet from Sail Internet. It has pretty much all the same issues you mentioned about Starlink except the last one, but I'm not making a video to complain about it.

Engineering involves trade-offs, and it's just a reality.

Curiousity and frustration would have me moving it anyway. Have you tried?

Jeff had an episode where he took it out to his cousin's farm, and it didn't work there.

> My biggest gripe is the fact I can't transfer it to my cousin

This seems like a gripe very particular to you and not generally relevant.

What happens if you just take your dish over to your cousin's house and try using it?

what happens if you have to move to another area they serve? Do you still have to wait for them to reactivate it, or you have to throw it out and buy a new one? Can't you just say you now live with your cousin?

What happens if you move places?

Early adopters have early adopter problems. Are you genuinely surprised Starlink doesn't support something they didn't claim to support and that most users don't even need? Complaining about "beta" labels, which everyone knows are meaningless?

FYI: I unsubscribed because of this video (previous to it showing up on HN). It's obviously disingenuous clickbait. Look at the title alone. And it even goes into a pointless discussion about Elon Musk that has nothing to do with Starlink itself. Lots of good technical YouTubers avoid this crap. I was surprised you felt the need to engage in it. I'm not mad, just disappointed :-)

I don't interpret it as complaining or disingenuous. It feels like he's sharing his experience and says a lot of positive things about it. But it just turns out it can't do what he intentionally bought it for.

I was genuinely informed by the experience.

But your gripe seems to be centered around something they never claimed as a selling point initially.

Just because they do not have the coverage of other satellite systems does not mean it is still a beta.