Commercial and military vessels have contracts with Iridium/Inmarsat etc for mission critical stuff.
An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
I used to be a naval officer in the Dutch navy, this is the type of capability that we would love to have. It was always a mess to divide satcom bandwidth between operational and recreational purposes, so if we could put all non-essential traffic on Starlink (for only 5k/month/ship too!) that would be a huge win and free up massive operational bandwidth on the more serious satcoms.
Would there be any concern that you are essentially advertising your location at all times to some third party corp? Or is that only a concern during certain times and you can just turn off the commercial system at that point?
By the time NATO partners can no longer trust each other with the position of their naval vessels you have serious problem already. The official satcoms are all NATO-shared satellites anyway, so you could probably derive their positions from that.
With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" operations that block any non-essential comms. I no longer work for the navy but I can imagine that would involve physically cutting power to the starlink dish.
>With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" operations that block any non-essential comms.
As a practical matter as well, both in theory and based on usage in Ukraine, Starlink appears to be a somewhat challenging target too. A phased array doing 10-12 GHz is a fairly tight beam and it's tracking very fast across the sky, jumping around between LEO@550km (and in the future VLEO@~350km) sats. In a naval setting it's not clear that'd be much of a limiting factor: something capable of seeing that would probably need to be at such an altitude and angle to ships on the ocean that it could also just plain see any surface naval vessel directly optically or via radar. The stealth ship proposals Skunkworks suggested back around the F-117 never went anywhere since the US Navy is dumb^Wtraditional.
But as you say either way they can always just turn it off as needed. It'd be very helpful the much higher percentage of time that things are boring.
Another commenter here mentioned that Starlink user terminals include a GPS receiver, and report their coordinates back to Starlink. That'd create an alternate vector for locating maritime users – exfiltrate that position information from their servers.
I had a hard time finding confirmation of this online (lots of hits about Starlink potentially being used _as_ a GNSS), but one of the photos of this teardown of a terminal highlights the GPS receiver: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teard...
All the existing commercial maritime comms providers will happily sell separate bandwidth for crew use, or let them meter/throttle it, so I assume the challenges the Dutch navy has with their existing setup are related to specific security and/or procurement restrictions preventing them from just installing the same solutions commercial vessels use. Probably less about broadcasting location and more about what is and isn't allowed on their vessels
All surface maritime vessels, military or not, need to advertise their location to anyone who can listen for the purpose of collision avoidance. If they didn't that would probably violate a treaty.
Military vessels are exempt from that particular treaty. That would not be a significant worry. But yes, when you go into serious operations, the ship typically enters "black hole" operations where all non-essential communications are blocked. In the ships we were at they just pulled the network cable for the non-operational comms, very effective at preventing anyone from emailing back home.
Neither iridium nor Inmarsat provides capabilities of starlink: low latency, high bandwidth, asat-resistant, jamming-resistant infrastructure, all this proven in a real world conflict. They are ‘only’ missing coverage. Military will pay top dollar for this, Musk is in the name-his-price territory here. It’s become mission critical overnight. If they manage to cover the full globe, you’ll see the DoD quietly spending billions to have access and more billions to deny any other military the option.
These vessels still have people on board who want to watch YouTube.
This will be amazing for retaining crew while sitting at anchor outside of Panama for day 27 of who knows how long.
You can prepare for a 7 day cruise between ports when you're going to be pretty busy anyway. The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe.
> The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe.
I sat through a Vodafone presentation at a maritime comms conference a couple of years ago and he quoted just how high a percentage of the world's commercial shipping traffic was within range of his LTE networks. The ability to provide high speed internet within sight of [most] land has been around for a while, at lower costs than Starlink. If providers haven't added it to their crew internet provision, it's not because they've been waiting for Elon.
An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.