The part that is a bit hit-piecey is this quote from Viasat:
“even if SpaceX were to deploy a full, 4,408-satellite Starlink system, that system would fall short in satisfying SpaceX’s RDOF commitments.”
The full Starlink satellite system doesn't have 4,408 sats. That's just the Gen 1 constellation. They have committed to completing the Gen 2 constellation, with an additional 7,518 sats, which each provide many times more bandwidth than the Gen 1 sats, by 2027, well in time for the RDOF.
I'm seriously worried about the pollution they create for astronomers, but that's seriously absurd.
Do I need to repeat? They're beaming this from space, to your home.
Longer-term, I'm hoping for that favorite location to be a piece of land I actually own, in which case my goal is to setup a semi-permanent "base" with solar, Starlink, and a yurt or somesuch.
That's not to say Starlink or a competitor can't get there eventually. I already have pocketable/backpackable device that can shove data up and down a satellite link (Garmin InReach), it's just dog-slow, and that's likely down to the antenna and transmitter power if I were to guess. Someone with more RF smarts than I can probably cook up a foldable antenna, perhaps boost the power a bit, I dunno. But the PoC is there, it just needs iteration.
Garmin InReach uses an omnidirectional antenna on the Iridium network. With an omni antenna your S/N ratio is simply too low to send bits fast. If you made the device powerful enough to roast birds in flight it might work for faster uplink but then it would be dangerous to you too and the FCC would never let you use it anyway. And even this wouldn't improve your downlink speed.
The only way to improve the speed in both directions is to use a directional antenna, which points most of the uplink energy toward the satellite and concentrates the satellite's incoming energy to get the S/N ratio high in both directions. That's exactly what Starlink does.
This is made even more difficult because we're talking about LEO satellites and LEO satellites move. So the antenna has to track the satellite. Again this is what Starlink is doing.
(You can also use GEO satellites which don't move, but then latency becomes terrible. That's how the older satellite internet systems work.)
It's certainly possible to build a portable, directional, tracking LEO satellite antenna. That's exactly what the Starlink RV solution is. But it's never going to be as small as your Garmin unit.
They don't get kudos for failing to meet the standard they're required to meet as a condition of the government program they need to make their business work.
Hell yes I'd take them. Oh they'd steal my data? Well, so does everyone on this site and the telco I have now.
Consider this, Mr Geopolitical power. Do you want the US with this weapon, or sit on our ass and let China deploy one now that SpaceX has shown how powerful it is?
This is the single greatest Western soft power weapon since the iPhone. And you're begrudging it? Come on.
A few years back, AT&T took a half $billion from US taxpayers to build out fiber to rural neighborhoods. One comes to within 1/10 mi of my house. But they were not obliged to light any of it. They did not. That fiber sits dark, more than a decade on.
Just like all other ISPs. As well as tech companies.
What's your point? That Starlink is bad because it isn't a government-owned entity? Or are you opposed to the idea that a non-government entity can provide a strategic advantage/soft power to the US government?
Asking because neither of those two points seem to be able to withstand much scrutiny.
A hell of a lot of Tesla customers paid $thousands for self-driving, since, what, 2016? Tesla just laid off its whole self-driving department. What are the odds they will now issue refunds? Care to bet?
The situations are totally different. AT&T made money from LOCAL infrastructure that they had a natural and enforced monopoly on.
Starlink infrastructure is inherently global, their main goal is with minimal effort and cost to connect as my people as possible to distribute the global fixed cost. SpaceX has little intensive to involve itself as deeply in local politics. On a global scale some politics will go in their direction, others away, spending lots of money in each government is not really a very practical strategy.
The US government can force companies to do things sure, and if you have extreme security consideration that goes beyond having a VPN go threw Starlink then Starlink is not for you.
Starlink will not have a monopoly on anything, they have an essentially global outlook and they are trying to offer a uniform standard service from Stockholm to Santiago. So I do actually think its a fair assumption that costumer experience has a chance to be better.
> Tesla just laid off its whole self-driving department
You realize that is totally wrong right?
> Starlink will not have a monopoly on anything
Numerous people have posted right here, contradicting you. Maybe read them?
They are wrong. Its simply factually wrong. Starlink will coexist with many global LEO constellations, many are already in planning.
I had to check since I hadn't heard of this. All the sources I checked were about 200 low-level employees who were mostly doing manual annotation of images to help improve the algorithm. Not developers themselves. Definitely nothing about laying off "the whole self-driving department".
From https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/28/tesla-layoffs-autopilot-wo... :
"Most of the workers were in moderately low-skilled, low-wage jobs, such as Autopilot data labeling, which involves determining if Tesla’s algorithm identified an object well or poorly, according to one source."
They are closing the entire San Mateo unit. If I were among the "self-driving" staff remaining, I would be updating my résumé.
Curiously, all those dumped were "terminated for underperforming", which will make finding work elsewhere hard, unless other companies see it as a cynical ploy to dodge regulations on normal layoffs.
Do you have a source for the underperforming thing? That'd be next level incompetence for them to lay off 200 people for that reason all at once. (not saying it's impossible obviously!)
Agree, abusing labor law like that would be pretty scummy. Is it "incompetent" if it costs less? Depends on who is getting in trouble.
Refunds for what? Every feature I bought the car with is still there. Even got the FSD beta access last month after being on the waitlist for a while. Updates still keep getting pushed, fixes and adjustments still get deployed on a regular basis. The self-driving program isn't ending, the development is still ongoing and alive, so I am not sure why I should be expecting a refund for that.
Also, get your news right. The people they recently laid off were mostly working on labeling data, they were not actual self-driving engineers. Labeling data is a pretty common and manual type of a task. I am actually surprised they've been doing it in-house for so long, as opposed to contracting it out. Not trying to justify that layoff, but claiming that it indicates the end of their self-driving program is ridiculous at best (and disingenuous at worst).
> anyone expecting Starlink will treat you better than AT&T does, and to act on behalf of the US, is very unfamiliar with both history and Elon Musk
You can make that statement about literally any company, and it is always a fool's errand to guess instead of evaluating that specific thing in question. You can say the same about Google, but I've been a happy Google Fiber/Webpass customer for the past few years. I can say nothing but good things about it, after many years of terrible experience with Comcast/Xfinity, and a few much better (but still worse than Google Fiber/Webpass) years with WaveG (WA area fiber provider).
In this specific case with Starlink, you don't need to guess either. If you live in an area where they provide service, you can sign up and compare it to any currently existing internet solutions for areas with no high-speed internet (rural and far-from-major-cities areas), which is the primary use case that Starlink was designed for.
Back to the original point about "private tech company as a soft power for the US government is a ridiculous idea." In the present day, we got Ukrainian Vice PM tweeting[0] his expression of gratitude towards the US government and Starlink for providing connectivity during their current crisis. What is this if not a proof of that soft power US can exhibit through private tech companies?
0. https://twitter.com/FedorovMykhailo/status/15327439910658170...
A mass layoff sends a message. Everyone left, there, certainly got it, and are updating their CVs. (I wonder what they will say they have been up to.)
You do get self-crashing, anyway: You can watch those frame by frame on YT.
And, yes, the same is true of any big corporation. But many people have announced in public that they do expect different, and need the correction. Comcast, the "Most Hated Corporation in America", is a curious choice to have substituted in for AT&T.
Anyone who imagines that Starlink did not get back way more than full value for that Ukr gesture knows nothing of PR.
That is power.
What does that even mean? You can't see them unless you have highly speziallised equipment.
And in terms of physical spots, space is absurdly huge, space is not really a limited resource.
Tracking and control technology is constantly improving. Just like as with airplane safety humanity will improve with increase use.
I own 2 starlinks at different locations and I can tell you 1 of those locations is consistently MUCH under that.
That being said, I am pleased with starlink at one location as it absolutely blows away the next best available option.
That is putting aside ground stations located in areas which themselves have poor transit which is the main problem with regional variability of performance I would imagine, though could also be congestion if they are oversubscribing in those regions. i.e too much density of terminals.
Starlink will make those who would benefit (hedge funds, mainly) pay through the nose to get it. And, pay even more to keep somebody else from getting it. Probably they will charge a huge premium for 1ms faster than fiber, and 100x more for each ms better than that.
You may be certain they will not use that extra income to provide you better value.
Sending early is of course always OK. Those paying for that millisecond need it reliably every time, so not much of your traffic would need to be stalled. Maybe 10%. And maybe only while markets are open.
Let's say you're in SF, served by a satellite that is currently over SF.
You're talking to a server in NY.
Your data has to go up to a satellite and come down from satellite to a base station.
Currently this uses 2x bandwidth for this one satellite.
But let's say SF satellite is maxed out but there currently is a satellite over Nevada desert with a spare capacity.
With inter-satellite links and proper routing, your data could go up in SF and come down in Nevada dessert, making more bandwidth available in SF.
The satellites have a full coverage of US area but there are large parts of land where there's very little use of available bandwidth.
If SpaceX builds enough base station scattered around US, they could almost 2x the bandwidth available in areas with high density of customers.
They might even be equipped to broadcast identical real-time content (e.g. world cup) once for all terminals following. (Anyway I would make that work, in their place.)
It’s not an arbitrary threshold.
By 2028? So where exactly is the sky falling?
But mostly, I agree — the article seems a little over-worried.
It’s a bit nitpicky but that B needs to be a lowercase one.
Lots of people would like you to think otherwise. Now you know better.
An active multi-peer beamformer uses a single transciever complex using mathematical signal processing to transcieve multiple data channels to peers in parallel.
Some types of phased array antenna offer multiple focus points at the same time, but the electrical signals must pass through a transceiver complex for the different components to be combined and separated mathematically. In simplified terms, matrix multiplication is used to transform between parallel data channels and parellel antenna components; then the antenna geometry focuses them approximately into parallel beams.
It's not a transceiver per peer, but it behaves a bit like one for the set of focused peers at each time slot. Spatial separation by this method increases aggregate bandwidth, and therefore increases individual peer bandwidth when there is congestion.
Point is just that practical limits make things rather worse than what a subscriber might naïvely hope for.
I'm not super rural, but we have literally no other internet options, are on septic/well water, and are about 10 minutes from the nearest store by car.
Who cares? If they signed up for
>100/20 Mbps speed obligations attached to its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) projects
they have to deliver. The article has a valid point.
Assuming they avoided bidding on areas their network is currently contested they might already meet their obligations.
This article seems like it's written by a PR/lobbying firm for BigTelCo / Satellite providers.
They have until 2028 to meet the 100/20 numbers in specific areas. Ookla's testing was not specific to those areas, and was not done in 2028.
But let's not let facts get in the way of irrational anger
> dont want to pay for billionaires entertainment
It's not "entertainment". It's actually delivering value to underserved customers, there's no need to inject politics or personal vendettas into this.
I hope they improve it, but Musk has a strong history of over promising and under delivering. Time will tell, I do not think this was a alarmist of fluff piece. Merely a reminder of their promises and current results.
> It's not "entertainment". It's actually delivering value to underserved customers, there's no need to inject politics or personal vendettas into this.
This is arguable. Musk depends on tax payer funding to keep SpaceX afloat to get to Mars. Nothing about politics or vendettas, but this is a billionaires joy ride. The US government also has a history of spending money to help the under served which has historically never panned out either.
>All of this data begs the question: What happens if Starlink can’t meet the 100/20 Mbps speed obligations attached to its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) projects?
Am I the only one who raise my eyebrows? What's the median for wireless internet delivery? What does that has to do with RDOF's completion requirement (by 2028)? How is StarLink doing at this point comparing to the other RDOF winners in terms of deployment?
From the actual Ookla article-
>while Starlink download speeds were slower than fixed broadband for all providers combined in the U.S. (144.22 Mbps) and Canada (106.86 Mbps).
Oh 144.22 Mbps is the industry median of _wired_ broadband. Well no shi* wireless is slower. Starlink can always deploy more satellites to service the demand. Is this a hit piece on Starlink?