I work in the space industry and follow SATCOM closely. This is a very competitive space. Companies like Viasat, Iridium and Inmarsat already work in this vertical.
SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective, but the big question is will a LEO operator provide better coverage than a GEO operator?
a) if you've ever personally lived for months or years at a time 100% dependent upon geostationary based services costing anywhere from $165/mo to $15,000 a month or more, for internet access and links to the outside world
b) if you've personally used a starlink terminal
the actual coverage isn't there yet for things like mid ocean, because starlink satellites in the present architecture need to be simultaneously in view of a CPE and a starlink run earth station.
what they've got right now is a viable competitor for the smaller geostationary based ku and ka band maritime vsat packages sold for coastal region use, which are limited to specific ku and ka band spot beams anyways. such as you might see used in the caribbean and Mediterranean oceans.
when they have more polar orbit satellites and the satellite-to-satellite laser links are working they will have full mid ocean coverage, and I have no doubt it will beat the pants off a $200,000+, 2.4 meter C-band stabilized-in-radome maritime VSAT system with a monthly service cost of $8,500+.
anyone that's ever done the link budget calculations and seen the RF channel sizes and very simple modulations (very poor bps/Hz ratio) needed to make IP data over 2.4m size c-band terminals will know what I'm talking about. this is directly proportional to dollars in the monthly recurring costs for ongoing transponder space use.
the performance and dollar per MB cost right now for coastal region use will absolutely beat anything inmarsat or iridium based by a ridiculous margin.
I fundamentally disagree with you that it's a very competitive market, it's a market that's highly dependent upon the business model of launching 3500-6000 kg things into geostationary orbit at immense cost and trying to recoup the construction+launch cost of them before they die in 13 to 16 years. And military/government contracts. Traditional two way geostationary based satellite comms stuff is a very conservative and moribund segment of the telecom industry.
you've got other things out there that are sort of viable like o3b (now owned/controlled by SES), but anyone that's ever priced an o3b terminal and ongoing service on something like a 36 month term will know that it's not a significant improvement in cost.
You are absolutely spot on. The market isn’t competitive, it’s artificial highway robbery to even be in business. The entry requirements and expenses are insanely high, preventing a lot of competition to begin with, and the few players are free to drive up their prices to disgusting altitudes while providing services of disgusting quality. I wouldn’t even be surprised if they have agreements going on between themselves. SpaceX’s going to have a field day and brutally rip some inflated executives out of their cozy decade-old comfort zone.
The problem is actually that most of those systems are on considerably less advanced tech than Starlink and as a result only have a fraction of the capacity.
Thus each piece of capacity costs more.. thus the very high costs of Iridium and Viasat.
Their profit margins aren't actually that good because their costs are so high compared to their capacity and the costs are so high that demand simply doesn't materialise - people just do without.
Starlink will change this game because of their drastically increased capacity (assuming they get sat-sat links working). Until another mega-constellation comes online I fully expect them to do to satellite Internet what they did to the launch market.
Iridium was the first network to successfully operate inter-satellite links more than 20 years ago. I wouldn't call it "considerably less advanced".
Iridium and Starlink operate in completely different bands (L vs Ka), with orders of magnitude more bandwidth available on Ka than on L. That (and the fleet size, which differs by 2-3 orders of magnitudes) is where the significantly lower bandwidth stems from.
Iridium was a marvel of engineering no-doubt but Starlink as a constellation is in a different league entirely.
They also followed different engineering principles, Iridium was engineered to perfection while Starlink is hacked until it works and paper over the kinks with sheer scale and many iterations.
Worth mentioning I have nothing but admiration for the original Iridium constellation, it was decades ahead of it's time, it's just so unfortunate they didn't see that broadband needs were going to dominate communications in time or maybe Motorola in it's original glory would still be around today.
big difference also is that iridium was designed from the outset to address handheld size customer terminals like an original iridum 9505 phone, starlink is something that needs a considerably larger fixed phased array. rf laws of physics being what they are I don't see a ku/ka-band starlink handheld phone or anything similar to the iridium L/S-band hockey puck sized antennas any time soon.
the business model was clearly not the best, as witnessed by its spectacular bankruptcy, and the acquisition by the 2nd corporate incarnation of iridium.
Starlink has plenty of room for increasing their antenna size on the satellite size to something that a handheld could use. I was surprised how small the phased array on the sat side is. Increase that to make it similar to the size of the satellite (not counting solar array) and with the larger v2 satellites, and they'd have much more gain (allowing the handheld antenna to be smaller). They essentially already use 5G bandwidth.
Isn‘t part of what allows much hire bandwidths for Starlink due to spatial frequency reuse, which requires mandatory beamforming on both sides of the connection?
There are many satellites overhead at any given time (the current LEOs and MEOs usually have just one), so terminals need to be able to limit their gain to a small angle not only for gain reasons. Steering in handheld applications seems very difficult.
Of course, they could dedicate parts of their spectrum to "one sided beamforming" and compete with Iridium that way (no idea if the L-band has any other advantages over Ka when used like that).
Actually in exactly the same way. The nice thing about phased arrays is they steer electronically, so you can aim them extremely fast and compensate for any movement. That's how 5G works and that's also how Starlink on moving vehicles works.
a flat panel phased array still has considerably more gain in the direction it's aimed, vs a randomly oriented omnidirectional (physical) antenna in a phone. i can guarantee you starlink doesn't work well when the array elements aren't aimed correctly in the general direction of where the satellites are.
the path loss and need for more gain at LEO satellite distance is considerably greater than talking about terrestrial cellphone networks in bands <2500 MHz.
5G phones already use a flat panel phased array, just with fewer elements (and less gain, but that can be compensated by using a lot more elements on the satellite side and by operating at much lower bandwidth). And yes, I understand the difference between lower frequencies and higher. 5G can also use lower frequencies but the main bandwidth advantage (over LTE/etc) is in the higher frequency, the mm-wave, roughly 25-50GHz, a frequency band that overlaps that used by the Starlink phased arrays.
5G and Wi-Fi don't use MIMO for terminal side spatial multiplexing though, as far as I know.
In MU-MIMO (available in newer versions of 802.11, for example), the base station transmits to and receives from multiple mobile devices that are located at different spatial angles. But in the mobile devices themselves, the gain from that steering is not high/fast enough to allow for multiple (relatively) fixed base stations in the same space.
In other words, a stationary/slowly moving antenna array on one side of the channel can target individual moving users due to angles changing slowly over time and the antenna array being quite sophisticated, but moving users with smaller antennas and angles varying over a much shorter period of time can't do the same.
Think about it: From a satellite's point of view, your angle varies much more slowly and predictably than the other way around, e.g. when taking a turn in a car or on a rocking boat (that's why high-gain antennas usually have to be gimbal-stabilized).
Starlink's orders of magnitude higher bandwidth, as far as I can tell, stems from requiring slowly and predictably changing angles on both sides, giving it m:n (relatively) independent spatial channels rather than just 1:n as is common for a one-sided omnidirectional approach. (That's also why Iridium and Globalstar wouldn't be able to scale significantly better in low-gain mobile-client applications by just launching more satellites.)
Sorry to interject between two people who clearly know what their talking about.
I've been reading books on satellite communications and have some idea of all the technical terms you guys mentioned as well as relationship between 5g and phase array etc.
Where do you get your knowledge from regarding these issues in such detail? Do you guys work in this area? Are there any reading materials you recommend in this field that are relevant and updated to keep track of these tech?
this is completely incorrect. viasat's technology is far more advanced than starlink. just because it's not LEO doesn't mean it's simple.
and starlink doesn't have dramatically increased capacity. they have a moderate increase over the busy areas geo incumbents have. most of their capacity is over water.
The end results of the link budgets required for geostationary to low cost consumer grade terminals means that now matter how good viasat's tech is, the end result is going to be mediocre. Have you actually lived on the far end of a consumer grade highly contended oversubscribed ku/ka band vsat terminal?
Viasat's modems and rf chain stuff are about as good as can be expected within the very constrained BOM budget, antenna gains and link budgets involved.
I've had their service for 4 years straight in the past. it's not as good as cable, but it's nowhere near as bad as you say if you're not playing real time games.
the constrained BOM is the very reason why the terminal cost is reasonable for this business. it's well known that SpaceX is selling the terminal at a huge loss to gather customers in the short term.
Even if viasat's consumer service was handing out high quality steel 1.8 meter elliptical offset ku band dishes with norsat PLL LNBs and 8W BUCs to consumers, the path loss and modulations required would mean that a given section of contended (let's say, 10MHz of a transponder) service to many terminals would still have significantly lower speeds and greater oversubscription to be economically viable compared to what end users see right now on starlink.
that's simply not true. they have transponders that should deliver 10Gbps to a single user IF they were willing to pay for both the service and terminal. SpaceX is limited in the exact same way, and their terminals + satellite costs are much higher for the number of them.
10Gbps to a single terminal using exactly what modulation and code rate, and channel size?
Or course you can achieve high speeds over geostationary if you throw entire transponders full of MHz at the problem. Which has a proportionally huge monthly recurring cost to control that transponder space. Or as a total percentage of the satellite's transponders dedicated to your network.
Yes satellite tx power from the twta is more powerful than it used to be. You still need a huge ass earth station to start doing 16apsk/32apsk reliably.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. starlink is also multiple smaller beams within a single beam for frequency reuse. a single beam does not get more bandwidth (in Gbps) than a viasat terminal.
> You still need a huge ass earth station to start doing 16apsk/32apsk reliably.
16apsk has been used for about a decade now on GEO satellites. I'm not sure why the gateway size matters when we're talking about user speeds.
If you don't understand why in a geostationary based link, the antenna size at either end matters a great deal for overall link budget, gain, Eb/No and what modulation you can use at a certain MCS and code rate before it gets too blurry in a QAM eyeball chart, there's no sense in talking about satellite communications with you.
I note you didn't answer my question because you have no idea of what modulations, channel size and such are required to actually push 10Gbps through a satellite link to a single terminal. I think you're going off Viasat's marketing material where they're claiming aggregate throughput of an entire satellite or something.
Show me the exact hardware configuration of modems you think are capable of 10Gbps by geostationary and how much transponder MHz it needs.
I literally just said that 16APSK has been used for a decade on Geo satellites. I don't know if you aren't aware what modulation means, but that is the modulation. it does not matter at all what size the gateway or the user antenna is. 16APSK (actually 32APSK is used as well) and the carrier size tells you all you need to know about the speeds, unless you've never done a link budget or worked in this industry.
I said if they wanted to they could sell a 10Gbps plan, because that's what the link budget allows. they don't, of course, because it's not profitable. SpaceX also could in theory, do that, but they also don't. your original claim is that SpaceX somehow has far greater bandwidth to an area than Geo is patently false.
> the path loss and modulations required would mean that a given section of contended (let's say, 10MHz of a transponder) service to many terminals would still have significantly lower speeds and greater oversubscription to be economically viable compared to what end users see right now on starlink.
if your definition of economically viable is getting VC money and government subsidies pumped in so that someone else other than the subscriber is paying for the service, then I agree with you. but that's not the metric most people use when they discuss being profitable
you can't really compare iridium to purely geostationary operators as a business model, however, something LEO based that support very small L/S-band modems and handheld size terminals, embedded modems is very different than a company that only owns C/Ku/Ka band geostationary satellites and makes most of its revenue from selling transponder kHz.
iridium is truly unique in that in the pre-starlink era it has been literally the only, true global pole-to-pole coverage LEO network. the trade off has been that the original network architecture of it was designed for very low data rates, so just highly compressed voice and low rate data only.
even the second generation iridium network which is now operational is still very limited in IP data rates.
you're still not going to get a starlink terminal to be as compact as a very small iridium modem and L/S-band portable antenna.
Viasat while it has a lot of consumer facing exposure (and contracts to do things like build teleports for the DoD) is not a major player in the market of actually owning geostationary satellites. Look at entities like Intelsat and SES.
I did the same as soon as Starlink launched. I saw it as an existential threat it is to all the Geo operators.
I was headhunted for a SRE position with Viasat last year due to my extensive Satcom background. I noped out as soon as I found out it was Viasat. Not because I dislike them personally, but because I don't want to be laid off next year.
Without going into too much detail I know someone who was headhunted for Telesat's proposed LEO network (too late, too low budget, too little technical clue) and ran away quickly once he had an idea of what he would be getting into.
I would argue that 25% or so net margin for a decade is a pretty significant sign considering how small their customer base must be and how much expenses they must have.
I see a lot of volatility for Iridium with quite a few years with big losses and zero profit.
Viasat simply has near zero profit margins, and quite a few years with losses.
Inmarsat looks like it has 20% or so profit margin for the last few years, but I could not quickly find more years of data.
Also, I would expect decent (10%+) profit margins for a business with few customers and extremely costly barriers to entry. Both of those factors add to volatility, and investors would require a commensurate return to make it worth investing in.
Iridium apparently had much more expenses for a few years around 2018, possibly mass upgrading their infrastructure, but before that a decade of near constant 20-30% net, recovering again now, unless I'm misreading this data.
They do make a good profit in the years they do, but my point is they also have quite a bit of volatility. I would not touch that business without the 10%+ profit margin opportunities.
Definitely agree, I probably wouldn't touch them at this point any more at all.
Was just replying to the notion that this couldn't be artificial highway robbery just because their net margin isn't great. I believe it definitely still can be, because apparently the only way these companies are even in business right now is exactly by highway robbery.
Iridium (and to some extent Inmarsat) are currently in an almost completely different market than Starlink is: They provide safety-of-life certified solutions for maritime, aviation and military customers.
I wouldn't be surprised if equipment and certification costs would dwarf the actual fee charged per month and user in these applications, and the market entry barrier in such highly regulated industries is usually enormous. (It took Iridium a long time to get SOLAS-certified, for example; before that, Inmarsat was the only solution besides HF radio.)
In the market of providing fast, non-safety-critical internet access to remote places however, my guess is that Starlink is going to shake up things significantly.
Large and serious budget offshore applications these days will of course have an Iridium terminal live and on the network, and also a geostationary based VSAT of some sort. Something such as Starlink is meant to take market share from the VSAT.
In some cases it might pay for itself in less than 1 month of service compared to the $/Mbps from the VSAT, using antenna hardware such as this and various vendors' choices of modems (and 3rd party VSAT ISPs that resell transponder kHz and operate teleports).
Go price what it would cost for 1:1 dedicated monthly recurring billing to have 5 Mbps down x 1 Mbps up DIA service assigned to a medium sized maritime VSAT terminal that roams around the Gulf of Texas... Or even in a 5:1 or worse contended network.
What you'll see is the Iridium of course remains live and on the network and is used for critical voice calls and message and such, while the data network on the ship/offshore oil rig/whatever has a new better DIA path via starlink.
the price looks like highway robbery from the POV of an end user purchaser of "internet by satellite" from a geostationary company, but they do also have extreme operating costs. a company like eutelsat or ses has extreme amounts of funds going out for purchasing satellites and launch services.
it is not like they have an extreme profit margin between their actual operating cost and the cost that a chunk of dedicated 1:1 transponder kHz/MHz (or a whole 36 MHz transponder) can be sold to the end user.
I cannot agree with that characterization. How can a business be a suboptimal or undesirable investment because it does not earn enough profit relative to risk, and simultaneously be committing highway robbery (i.e. charging too high a price for its products/services)?
If anything, it seems like the customers should feel lucky the investors are risking their money on this product/service, and it is being offered at all.
I think there's a misunderstanding. I noted that I wouldn't see these businesses as a good investment any more because of SpaceX and further developments.
I believe they can still commit highway robbery even without their net margins being dramatically high, since highway robbery is exactly what you stated - charging too high a price for its products/services.
Charging "too high a price" is only possible in a monopoly position. Would you argue that any satellite provider has one, at the moment?
For high-bandwidth large-terminal, you have Inmarsat GX, Viasat and various other Ka and Ku band based providers; for safety of life you have Inmarsat and Iridium (except at the poles, where it's Iridium and HF); for land-based tracking, you have Globalstar and Iridium; for handheld telephony, you have Iridium, Inmarsat and Globalstar.
Notably, Starlink also does not look like it will be competing in any of these fields.
> Iridium (except at the poles, where it's Iridium and HF)
a note that part of the DoD iridium market where Iridium was previously the only ultra-high-latitude/polar coverage part is served by the DoD's own molniya orbit satellites which provide full polar coverage. the orbits of these are designed to be at apogee and long dwell time directly above high latitudes.
the DoD is still a big part of iridium's revenue stream in general of course.
To be fair, a non vertically integrated geostationary-satellite-owning company like intelsat, ses, eutelsat or arabsat or similar has little to no control over how much Boeing charges for a fully equipped 702 series satellite bus, or the disposable rocket launch costs.
It’s incredible to behold. Can you imagine either being a satellite comms service provider or space vehicle provider trying to acquire or raise capital to acquire your compliment to vertically integrate and reap higher margins? You’ll get laughed out of the board room or the investment bank office. And instead, SpaceX knocks it out if the park with reusability such that they say to themselves (or rather, Musk tells the board) “well, we’re about to cannibalize the launch market and we’re running out of TAM, can we launch our own satellite constellation and consume another TAM with these F9s we’ve got laying around not being productive?”
geo companies don't care much about launch cost since it's infrequent, and SpaceX has not shown starlink has a path to be profitable. I know it's the cool thing to do to love SpaceX, but separate the launch from the satellites. the latter hasn't shown it's sustainable unless there's a large influx of government subsidies.
Let's say they have 12k satellites. With oversubscription at 10? and a third of time over land? but 20gbps capacity for 200mbps connections, you get 333 users per satellite. 12k gives you 4 million users, at $100/mo or $1.2k/y. I'm going to drop that to $80/mo because Starlink need to pay for backhaul, so let's say $1k/y because it's round. So $4 billion annually. Over 12 years of satellite lifetime that's 48 billion. Satellites cost $300k to make, so subtract another 4 billion for production (44 remaining). Sats are launched in batches of 50, requiring 240 launches. Internal costs are somewhere between 30 to 60 million, it's unclear because of reuse, let's say 50 million for 12 billion launch costs, leaving 3 billion a year.
And then there's some operational costs which they pay from that.
So Iunno, it doesn't seem as extremely profitable as my first calc, but it's still probably pretty profitable. And any improvement they make to the satellites over time just adds on top. (Also I don't think they actually have $50 million internal cost per launch.)
edit: Terminals "reportedly cost around $1000 to make" and are sold for $500, so nbd, subtract another 2 billion per customer-lifecycle.
This calculation illustrates the problems of subtracting a big number from another big number.
Here's some of my math:
* Each customer brings in $1.2k/year.
* Satellites have 20 gbps of bandwidth, and consumers today are reporting about 50 mbps links.
* Maximum capacity is then ~1000 customers/sat because a 50 mbps connection takes 100 mbps of capacity to run duplex, and you need to double that again because customer data needs to get to backhaul.
* Satellites will spend significant time over water, and even more time over people who aren't paying - remember, metro areas all have cheaper cable internet. I would give these ~10% capacity at most.
* Satellites have 5 year life, but some fraction of them fail early - let's say that averages to 4 year replacement, and that estimate is at the high end of Musk's original estimate.
* One satellite is capable of $1.2M annual revenue, assuming 100% utilization, or $5M revenue over its life.
* Satellites cost $250k to manufacture, and $1M to launch ($50M per launch of 50 sats, making the math simple). Let's raise the unit cost to $1.5 million assuming a very good yield on satellites making it to orbit.
* The profitability of a single satellite is heavily dependent on utilization: At 10% utilization, each satellite makes $500k of revenue over its life. Satellites have to run at 30% utilization to break even.
* Customers receive a ~$1k subsidy to access the network in terms of the discount on the dish. This means we have 1 year per customer to break even on the customer. Assuming 3 year customer/dish lifetime (and assuming we will subsidize dish replacements when they break), we have only ~$2k margin per customer over 3 years, or $700 per year amortized.
* Now, the per-satellite gross margin drops to around $3-3.5M. This means that you now need up to 50% utilization to break even on a satellite.
What this all means is that starlink, if it is ever profitable, will be profitable based on niche use cases where they can charge extremely high subscription prices. Use cases like airplanes, yachts, offshore oil platforms, and military deployments. Customers who aren't paying a lot per subscription are dead weight.
By making slightly different assumptions, we have dramatically different conclusions.
It's a round number, and assumes about 10% loss. But also, they can't make or launch the sats for $1.25 million each yet, so it might not be a bad number.
Also, by my math, 5:1 oversubscribed is about breakeven, and it appears to be what Starlink does (reports of 10-50 mbps by users).
Just to note, 5:1 oversubscription wouldn't give you 10-50mbps unless everyone was using the connection at full rate at once. That's why (quick google) DSL services often oversubscribe by up to a 100:1.
I can't edit anymore, so correction: Current sats only have 6y lifespan, which drops us to 1.3 billion yearly, but I think that's partially cause they're still iterating on them. It seems clear that satellite lifespan is the main factor for profit.
Very bad source. I go into why in more detail in this comment, but to keep it short: his numbers are lies and he knows it too - some of his screenshots are photoshopped to preserve his narrative. He has an agenda - an anti-Elon Musk agenda - and has no intellectual integrity.
Read around and that thread a bit and you'll see that people confirmed my claims and that those who doubted it and checked his numbers themselves observed a three order of magnitude difference* in his cost estimation versus their estimate.
This isn't a source to get informed by, but one that makes you delusional.
He claims the terminal costs at least 3× the retail price and will never make a profit because of it
He also claims that its product offering brings nothing new to the table compared to hughesnet and viasat which is wrong imo as offering 1/10th latency of these products is a gamechanger.
Sorry, I'd do better but I'm on mobile, I think it's worth a watch at 1.5×
- After lying about SpaceX launch costs, he later posts screenshots of articles. One of those articles had the true launch costs. The image was photoshopped to remove this launch cost.
- When posting pricing information for competitor services, he uses their lowest cost tiers for their highest cost service provision. He also falsely implies that SpaceX and other satellite providers are providing comparable services despite the latency difference. This is all part of his effort to mislead with regard to demand.
- When quoting speed test results, he uses outdated alpha information. He argues that speedtests would not improve, but at the time he posted the video the speed tests results did improve. He knew this. You can tell because he claims there is a government conspiracy to favor SpaceX for funding for rural internet. This reveals he knows that they qualified for this. Which reveals that he knows his speed test numbers are out of date.
- He lies about the number of launches SpaceX will have to do, double counting replacement launches. I might think these sort of things were an honest mistake, but the pattern of behavior is clear. Given any information, he distorts it and attempts to paint a bad narrative, going as far as photoshopping or proposing government conspiracies. It is obvious he did a great deal of research - so it is absurd to give him the benefit of the doubt with regard to ignorance.
TL;DR - Watching that video will make you uninformed and delusional, not informed. It is not worth watching. The person who made it is not trustworthy. You are linking, not to a skeptic, but to an Elon Musk conspiracy theorist.
When I brought this video up, I just wanted to provide a voice from the other side of the debate. I did not really verify its contents and wanted to hear what other people had to say about it.
I'm familiar with the mobile satellite sector and I can say for a fact that he is right about the cost of the terminal being couple times higher than $500, though getting at the exact number would require a considerable amount of digging.
I got things to say about the attitude in this micro-thread though: I'm sure y'all heard the saying "If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed". I like that quote, but I always felt like some elaboration should follow.
By all means, do watch/read/consume anything and everything, and first use introspection, ie. ask yourself "Am I qualified/informed/sane enough to reach a conclusion about this matter?", and if your answer is yes then use your critical thinking neurons to reach YOUR conclusion. Then still try to verify it with your peers, or if you can find any, experts in that particular field. Personal attacks (along with other logical fallacies) have no place in a civilised discussion.
Basing on the above, if the Starlink opposers are as desperate as you say about distorting the facts to advance their narrative, it only increases my confidence in the project. You see, I did not end up being delusional, just reached a logical conclusion to the extent of my abilities.
So all in all, thanks for taking the time to write this up.
You're wasting your time arguing with a TSLAQ idiot. They will just ignore all your facts and keep spreading lies. I bet they also use Jenny McCarthy as the source for their vaccine information.
Yeah. Having lived for years with geosyncronous internet: it's not what people think of normally as internet, it's more of a consumerized interesting radio thing. It's not reliable, it's not fast, the latency is insane, the data caps are low. Unless you're working for yourself and doing most of your work on local machines you're not using it for anything interesting.
at the consumer level under $200/mo, assuming what we're talking about a consumer viasat/hughesnet/wildblue type low cost terminal and service, what you're getting is 32:1 or 64:1 or worse oversubscribed
The bandwidth possible in the terahertz size "channels" in singlemode fiber is incredibly larger than the channel size and modulations needed for rf to/from geostationary.
If you look at the per cpe traffic charts for each of the 32 customers on your typical 32:1 oversubscribed GPON connection, each individual one doesn't move that much traffic at all, relative to a chart that's scaled to 1Gbps on the Y axis.
With very basic CWDM you can push a ridiculous amount of data through just one strand of good sm fiber.
Docsis3/3.1 cable internet is worse because it's reliant on asymmetric use of downstream rf channels and much more limited bandwidth in the coax (though, they do still achieve 2048 and 4096qam!)
If you have a very small piece of rf spectrum like some tiny fraction of one 36MHz satellite transponder and you then oversubscribe it 32:1 or worse and also have to use fairly rudimentary loose modulations (very poor bps/Hz compared to terrestrial wired line modulations) at geostationary link budget distance, yeah, it's gonna suck.
It's more like, imagine you had fifteen people with laptops all connected to a single 802.11n AP from 12 years ago and you're all trying to torrent the latest 5GB debian install iso at the same time.
which is exactly what starlink will be when it has enough customers. it's already having a slow decline in speeds as the network fills, and it's not even close to capacity in most areas.
If you think that the network engineers running starlink in Redmond are going to walk blindly into the mistakes made in excessively oversubscribed networks by every pre existing geostationary vsat consumer grade service, you must have a very low opinion of their intellect, experience and ability to research the market.
I'm not sure why this has to do with network engineers in Redmond. SpaceX doesn't control the rest of the internet, and they don't have enough POPs (and won't) to hit the latency elon promised. there's a reason why fiber internet is 30ms ping and not 15-20ms.
The latency promised is obviously for the satellite segment, any DIA end user with a clue knows that terrestrial fiber latency to and from various places will vary based on where you are and how your local ISP is linked to nearby ix points and peers.
I can tell you what the latency is on fiber from the Redmond or North bend Earth stations to downtown seattle, and it's minuscule. Same as if a person was a customer on a docsis3 or GPON network in Redmond.
Ahhhh, so when Elon musk himself says pings will be < 20ms, he's talking about just the satellite segment, right? because obviously everyone pings just the satellite segment.
It does matter. When you make claims that a small group of people say is not possible and are quickly shouted down, only later to be completely ignored, it matters. It's the same reason FSD coming "next year" for 5 years matters, or having 20k satellites in service by 2021 matters. You say these things, people believe you and prop you up like a god, but when you fall well short it's "not a big deal".
If you recall there was non-stop chatter about how HFT would be using Starlink because the latency was so low, or that it would replace fiber because the latency would be lower. It was all fake. The latency will be 30-40ms nominally for most users. That's great (it's just okay for LEO) for satellite, but let's not pretend it's anywhere near what the goal was.
> a) if you've ever personally lived for months or years at a time 100% dependent upon geostationary based services costing anywhere from $165/mo to $15,000 a month or more, for internet access and links to the outside world
i have - it was horrible. i was at least on land, and could drive with my laptop to a point where i could finally get cell service and tether my laptop whenever i needed internet service (need to download a new copy of Xcode? that's 15% of your monthly allotted bandwidth). it wasn't the speed or bandwidth so much as the latency: 900ms each way meant nothing could be close to "real time", which made things much more difficult.
I appreciate the LEO of starlink, but without essentially "free" launches, there's no way it could be financially viable.
Given how hard the 'old guard' have been fighting Starlink, I think it's relatively clear that it's going to shake things up significantly for traditional GEO operators.
IIRC Viasat has been especially active in trying everything they can to throw up regulatory hurdles and slow down Starlink deployment.
You could be 2 cups and a long string and beat most of those providers. I've been trapped in their horrible world for over a decade and can't wait for "any" other option. I don't even care how much it costs anymore.
I’ve done work video calls using my friend’s starlink wifi on a remote mountain, and it’s unlimited bandwidth so this didn’t cost anything beyond the flat $110 monthly fee. Are geosynchronous services even capable of doing the bandwidth and latency needed for a two-way video call? And if so, how much would it cost?
My parents are on Sky Muster in Australia and it works fine for them, we call them a couple times a month and the latency isn't amazing but I've had worse calls with people on DSL.
My subjective opinion was that the starlink was better than DSL and even better than some cable internet services I’ve subscribed to in recent years. The downside of the starlink was that it would sometimes drop out for 8 seconds, but I’ve had cable and DSL that would fail for half an hour. Apparently the dropouts have become much less common in the last year.
Yes, they can do it - my parents have Hughes satellite internet. I've been able to do multi-person video calls from their house. It's pretty low bandwidth though 40Mbps or so claimed I think and something like 50Gb/Month data cap.
It was faster and cheaper to tether to my cell phone while working from their house.
Any reason to believe that SpaceX isn't capable of getting global coverage using intra-satellite links? Assuming this, and they've already proven they can do it, SpaceX will be strictly better than any other solution out there.
How so? Starlink seems extremely competitive in bandwidth and terminal size with Ka and Ku band GEOs, while blowing them out of the water when it comes to latency.
bandwidth per dollar is what matters, and Leo is not as good as geo in that regard. if you threw the same amount of money SpaceX is putting into starlink into a viasat-3 you'd have more bandwidth and better coverage.
In my opinion, between SpaceX and Amazon, the majority of heavy lift launch is already booked for years to come. OneWeb has to bet on Relativity Space that has never even launched anything to launch their constellation.
Companies like Viasat, Iridium and the others will have a very, very hard time ever competing in the LEO space.
> SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective
Depends on how you define marketing. I work for a very big and well known organization. We wanted to engage with them about an interesting initiative.
I's almost impossible to reach out to anyone from SpaceX. Go and try to find an email address or a phone number.
Then, even when you obtain their sales email you will not get any response whatsoever.
Depending on how this is priced this is still an extremely viable option for a good chunk of the maritime industry, even if coverage is limited to ports and national waters.
I don't think I said there wasn't a difference. There are always differences.
But I do stand by my point that you can't put much stock in Musk's claims. Which, now that people are becoming more aware of it, makes him less and less likely to deliver anything major again.
As an example, take a look at his failed purchase of Twitter. He wasted a ton of his time and caused a lot of damage to Twitter, its employees, and his own reputation. You can bet that any future business partners, even the ones willing to ignore his behavior on Twitter, are going to take it as a cautionary tale.
In the latter case, there is precedent. Elon promised to revolutionize space travel, he's done so. He promised to revolutionize electric cars, he's done so. He promised to revolutionize intercity traffic, that didn't pan out. Clearly you can see the difference between him and someone that's never delivered on what they promised.
as you might know, it's also about bandwidth and latency. LEO satellites can be an enabler for a lot of remote operation, IF (and this is a big IF) latency remain small also with intersatellite links, and connection reliability is comparable to GEO
SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective, but the big question is will a LEO operator provide better coverage than a GEO operator?