The main advantage I can see (over resedential + portability) is you can pause the service so basically if you wanted it for 1 month a year it's only going to cost you that $200 (Plus the significantly larger amaortized $1000 if you use it that way)

It's normal service, normal hardware. It just won't boot you from the network if you travel too far away from your home cell.

Out of curiosity, what is the justification for being booted if you're too far from your home? Is it just to try to keep bandwidth demand in areas predictable?

I believe that is the case. They have been limiting regional sales to what they believe they can support within that cell.

Will that be less of an issue when a larger portion of their satellite fleet have laser interconnects? I think I read somewhere that the required ground stations are a limitation of the initial launches without laser connections...

Yes.

Plus they'll launch more satellites, build more ground stations, improve the software and potentially also improve the antennas so that they can get more real bandwidth from the same available spectrum.

Even if ground stations are a bottleneck now, ultimately each cell is served by one satellite and each satellite has finite capacity.

Partly that , partly also to make sure there is no abuse to bypass waitlists in a cell.

There is a limit per cell how many customers can be serviced. Satellites can only handle so many connections .

However humans tend to concentrate in few areas and those areas will have higher demand.

If they allow us to buy in a light demand area and use in roaming in a heavy demand area constantly with same network quality, it would become a problem, people would do that to bypass waitlists

To solve that they are allowing roaming but giving traffic/QoS preference to local users over roaming users

Any idea what sort of degradation occurs when a cell is ridiculously (like 10x) over capacity? I wonder if it will lose carrrier entirely, or just FIFO / round robing the oversaturated connections.

I just bought one to bypass the waitlist. The magic number for them to beat is worst case 5mbit down, 3 up and 66ms, <1TB cap.

Our current internet is as expensive as these starlink plans. The waitlist here is 2+ years, and this area is full of rural nerds. I'd guess they just got 1000 "RV" orders from my county.

There maybe hard limits depending on solar panels power available and the radio setup on the satellites.

My guess the tolerance is lot lesser than 10:1 . SpaceX likely did some load tests before opening up roaming, so must be confident to some extent.

They are also adding satellites every week so capacity is likely also improving.

The dish manufacturing constraints and base stations could be other limiting factors for duration of waitlists

Okay, but that's not a very useful answer when there are a number of technical reasons why the restriction might exist.

I'm not convinced that the statistical number of people that would regularly move outside their "primary service area", or original owner resale, etc, would drive real issues for them.

Are there reports, for example, that the mass movement of these things into Ukraine is causing significant issues?

Ukraine is somewhat of an exception in that being able to provide any service at all is sufficient. But I do recall that last year, there was an incident of someone driving around with an antenna strapped to their car.

That doesn't stop it being possibly correct? I think it's as valid an answer as any guess that happens to be about technical detail/implementation.

It's just a lazy answer to an earnest question. Anyone reading HN can imagine a "just because they can" argument. I'm asking and hoping someone can help me better understand the technical issues projects like Starlink have.

Alternatively, I'd proffer that it's possibly the correct answer to an earnest question, and a helpful nugget that could easily get lost here in plenty of imagined technical problems, suggested by predominantly technical people used to thinking mainly about that and assuming it's the reason.

I think they announced the 25$ extra few weeks back?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-becomes-movable-with-new...

So this seems like basically just that, branded as "for RVs"

With the very beneficial addition of being able to pause billing for the service. Which is not possible with the regular roaming enabled extra $25 per month terminal.

They also say that in waitlisted areas they will prioritize residential customer traffic over yours.