SpaceX Internet Satellite Network: Starlink

[Cosmacelf]

No, not really.

Check out

and pay attention to latency for the long haul routes. It's not going to be better for sending data from San Fransisco to San Diego but it will be better for San Fransisco to any where in the world not in the pacific time zone.

There is no amount of money or new tech that can send data faster underground or underwater or through the air. What starlink will do is send data through space. The speed of light through vacuum is faster than the speed of light through gasses, liquids, and solids. Physics makes this unassailable by ground tech.

so in something like 20 out of 24 cases it'll be clearly better, 21 and 22 might be slightly better, 23 being about the same and 24 being worse. All in all it shrinks the world.

If you've ever played a first person shooter that has an east server and a west server in the US to keep the game playable. Imagine ping is so reasonable that you could play that same game on the US server, UK server, or Asia server and not care as much about the distance.

Now take that to streaming services, and data centers, and AWS, and google, and any global or international business you can possibly think of. If it's superior in 85-90% of the use cases every one will want to use it.

Kids, gamers, impatient people, business people, travelers, you name it. Hell, I live in a large enough city to have multiple internet options and I'm ready to switch sight unseen.

From 55 degrees north (southern Canada, central Europe) down to 55 degrees south (everything but Antarctica) it'll be competitive with any fiber based internet and will likely force fiber based internet to drop prices.

Anything worse that a fiber connection would be relegated to an even lower tier losing value / pricing power in the process. Cable modems, DSL, old school satellite internet. All that stuff gets devalued day 1 that a customer has access to Fiber and gets devalued again when they get access to Starlink.

Think about it, India, China, Australia, Philippines, South America, Central America, Africa, Middle East. It covers pretty much any place not called Scandinavia or Antarctica.

That's a huge market. Pretty much any bandwidth they put up there will sell out, guaranteed. If you don't live in Scandinavia or Antarctica you'll be seriously looking at this for your future internet.

It doesn't matter if you are in the largest city in your country or out in a field hundreds of kilometers from the next human.

It might matter if you can afford it, we don't now how pricing will play out for 3rd world countries. But for anyone that currently has anything like stable internet, this will compete from a technical standpoint if it's even half as good as I expect.

Yeah, that's what blew me away when I realized this. This is actually faster (and maybe more reliable?) than fiber for long haul. HOWEVER, the big question is always cost. What the cost per gigabit/mile of Starlink versus long haul fiber? Satellite solutions have ALWAYS cost significantly more than terrestrial options. But maybe with Elon's cheap rockets and impressive transport density, he can get the price down.

BTW, I know what you mean about ping times. I recently just moved our VPS server from an east coast location to a west coast location (all our users are on the west coast) to reduce the ping times from 80 ms down to 25 ms, and eliminate dropped packets. Makes a big difference.

 

[mongo]

Yeah, that's what blew me away when I realized this. This is actually faster (and maybe more reliable?) than fiber for long haul. HOWEVER, the big question is always cost. What the cost per gigabit/mile of Starlink versus long haul fiber? Satellite solutions have ALWAYS cost significantly more than terrestrial options. But maybe with Elon's cheap rockets and impressive transport density, he can get the price down.

Typically satellites are geostationary and limited in terms of total bandwidth (split amongst all users). Also, only one sat per expendable launch vehicle. Starlink is crazy parallel transmission on a reused launcher and provides coverage to developing regions for zero incremental cost assuming Starlink to Starlink communication.

 

[bxr140]

For developing regions, cell towers are faster/ cheaper infrastructure than land lines, and Starlink (once established) will be faster/ cheaper than building cell towers.

That's not necessarily true. It is of course absolutely true for rural areas with low user density, but it is absolutely not true for high population density areas, like cities. That goes for first world and third world. To analogize: While it might be cheaper, or at least faster to fly a bush plane 100 miles across the jungle or the Alaskan wilderness, for most other places in the world where people actually live its cheaper and faster to drive.

So, it all goes back to understanding where the limitations of a satellite network--even one as revolutionary as Starlink--draw the line against terrestrial solutions. As I noted earlier, the two major areas where a satellite network excels over terrestrial are 1) servicing rural/underserved markets, and 2) serving low latency markets. The major limitations are A) user density, because you can only put so many beams on the ground in the same area with a satellite network (and thus you can only serve a limited number of users within any coverage area) and B) implementation cost, because space hardware is, again, always going to be more expensive than equivalent terrestrial hardware.

So the question for #1, which @Cosmacelf has essentially posed already, is: what's the per-bit cost (and thus price) of Starlink service vs the various terrestrial offerings.

To investigate #2 we need to understand what the low latency market is going to look like, and then how the terrestrial alternatives compare. IMHO the addressable low latency market is really limited to gaming (which of course is blowing up) and trading. Certainly there will be other niche use cases, but I'm not sure there's any other significant use case in the foreseeable future that needs extreme low latency, especially compared to the mostly acceptably low latency offered by the global fiber network between major population centers. Then, I'd contest that if you Pareto the actual global low latency use cases you'll find that a significant percentage achieve minimum latency with terrestrial connections, not starlink. Much of the traffic within North America is going to be better served terrestrially, for instance.

I think air travel is really an appropriate analogy here. In many cases, travelers have an option for a direct flight or a connecting flight that takes hours longer but is less expensive. As it turns out, more people will choose the cheap option rather than the faster but more expensive one. The extreme case here would be the A380, which is now dead (as is the 747...pretty much anyway) because there simply aren't enough people that want to go way over there all at the same time as efficiently as possible. Interestingly, the A350 and 787 are quickly growing in popularity because fewer people want to go to even farther over there as efficiently as possible--so they're the Starlink of air travel, as to were. But...airlines aren't lining up to sent a bunch of dailies from NYC direct to Singapore because there simply aren't enough people that are willing to pay the premium over a layover on the west coast or Japan or wherever.

There is no amount of money or new so ztech that can send data faster underground or underwater or through the air. What starlink will do is send data through space. The speed of light through vacuum is faster than the speed of light through gasses, liquids, and solids. Physics makes this unassailable by ground tech.

Absolutely agree with the theory. In fact, an actual review of my posts will show nothing in disagreement with what you've said.

Reality, unfortunately, is a different beast. Satellites don't have unlimited capability, a significant portion of the user base doesn't want/need maximum performance, and the terrestrial service providers aren't going to rest on their laurels. To make one last analogy: Assuming global dominance of Starlink is akin to assuming Audi's dominance of the high performance EV industry because they're floating a concept car that has specs which beat a years-old P100D.

 

[dhanson865]

 

[BioSehnsucht]

For developing regions, cell towers are faster/ cheaper infrastructure than land lines, and Starlink (once established) will be faster/ cheaper than building cell towers.

In those areas, it's less likely that Starlink replaces cell towers and rather replaces the backhaul used by the towers (whether traditional satellite, or microwave point to point, or fiber... ). There'd of course be some direct users of Starlink but the cell phones can't directly use it and most users in those areas if they can afford any devices are likely to only have a phone.

 

[mongo]

In those areas, it's less likely that Starlink replaces cell towers and rather replaces the backhaul used by the towers (whether traditional satellite, or microwave point to point, or fiber... ). There'd of course be some direct users of Starlink but the cell phones can't directly use it and most users in those areas if they can afford any devices are likely to only have a phone.

Yah, solar + powerpack + Starlink = instant cell/ internet hub.

 

[mongo]

From
mobile.twitter.com/nextspaceflight/status/1128525327267975174

So 13,620 kg of satellites
He also reports that the satellites will be released at 440km and Krypton thruster their way up to 550km.

 

[ecarfan]

I love the phrase “powered by Krypton”.

There is a lot of information online about Hall Effect Thrusters using that gas, which is almost an order of magnitude less expensive than the Xenon that is typically used.
Krypton Hall effect thruster for spacecraft propulsion

 

[dhanson865]

btw, for those getting this from other websites the original source document they are reporting on is https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/starlink_press_kit.pdf

On the topic of Krypton, apparently Xenon hall effect would burn green, and Krypton hall effect burns blue. And as we all know blue is better.


See http://erps.spacegrant.org/uploads/...ownload_1988-2007/2011index/IEPC-2011-003.pdf for a comparison. Images with blue vs green on page 4.

you know it's good because it's blue

and apparently cheaper than Xenon.

 

[mongo]

On the topic of Krypton, apparently Xenon hall effect would burn green, and Krypton hall effect burns blue. And as we all know blue is better.

Those are their plasma emission spectrum, but they are not burning
Agree, blue is awesome.

 

[Grendal]

SpaceX reveals new Starlink satellite details 24 hours from launch

 

[dhanson865]

Those are their plasma emission spectrum, but they are not burning
Agree, blue is awesome.

In layman's terms fire is plasma and plasma is fire.

Q: Is fire a plasma? What is plasma?

But there are plasmas that are cool so not all plasma would count as fire even to a layman.

So the question is how hot is the plasma generated by the hall effect thruster using Krypton?

 

[mongo]

In layman's terms fire is plasma and plasma is fire.

Q: Is fire a plasma? What is plasma?

But there are plasmas that are cool so not all plasma would count as fire even to a layman.

So the question is how hot is the plasma generated by the hall effect thruster using Krypton?

Yah, but doesn't burning imply oxidation?

 

[ecarfan]

Fire IS oxidation. Plasmas are not “on fire”.

 

[dhanson865]

Fire IS oxidation. Plasmas are not “on fire”.

Yah, but doesn't burning imply oxidation?

For example, our Sun (or any star) is a miasma of incandescent plasma. One way to see this is to notice that the solar flares that leap from its surface are directed along the Sun’s (generally twisted up and spotty) magnetic fields.

Layman, and even most scientists describe the sun as a ball of fire, burning hot, eventually burning out. You can't have

Will the Sun Ever Burn Out? talking about the sun burning hydrogen without the fact that people think of it as burning and you can't deny that the sun is a case of plasma that most people think of as I linked before to Q: Is fire a plasma? What is plasma?

Yep, it's not oxidation. But it sure as heck is hot. And most people think anything hot enough to melt most any object you can imagine as being on fire, even if there is no oxygen involved.

So again I ask, how hot is the exhaust from a Krypton hall effect thruster. Is it fire hot, hotter than fire, cooler than fire?

 

[mongo]

Layman, and even most scientists describe the sun as a ball of fire, burning hot, eventually burning out. You can't have

Will the Sun Ever Burn Out? talking about the sun burning hydrogen without the fact that people think of it as burning and you can't deny that the sun is a case of plasma that most people think of as I linked before to Q: Is fire a plasma? What is plasma?

Yep, it's not oxidation. But it sure as heck is hot. And most people think anything hot enough to melt most any object you can imagine as being on fire, even if there is no oxygen involved.

So again I ask, how hot is the exhaust from a Krypton hall effect thruster. Is it fire hot, hotter than fire, cooler than fire?

Solar fusion is different since the Hydrogen is actually consumed and transformed.

If fire is defined as oxidation, then iron rusting is fire, and it happens at lower that body temp, so based on that criteria, my plasma is burning, yet my blood is not boiling.

Thruster exhaust may be ~ 1000K, but I'm not reading the whole paper. www.mwalker.gatech.edu/papers/JPP_V26_No5_SeptOct2010_pp1036_1044.pdf

They Might Be Giants were willing to change their tune (literally).

Is it 10:30 yet? I want to see how there dispenser works.

 

[dhanson865]

on another note on grammar, vocabulary, and vernacular

We generally say rocket engines burn and thrusters burn because the most common type of rocket engines we see do use an oxidizer and do truly burn fuel.

I've played enough hours of KSP and had enough discussions on line to be used to saying "burn" when talking about thrust even if the engine doesn't work on that chemical reaction. I'd say the majority of non physicists would make the same lazy mistake.

Please don't burn me at the stake for saying "burn" when it's really "thrust". (apply as needed)

 

[mongo]

on another note on grammar, vocabulary, and vernacular

We generally say rocket engines burn and thrusters burn because the most common type of rocket engines we see do use an oxidizer and do truly burn fuel.

I've played enough hours of KSP and had enough discussions on line to be used to saying "burn" when talking about thrust even if the engine doesn't work on that chemical reaction.

Please don't burn me at the stake for saying "burn" when it's really "thrust". (apply as needed)

I feel ya.
Even consume seems wrong, what about eject?

 

[doghousePVD]

For developing regions, cell towers are faster/ cheaper infrastructure than land lines, and Starlink (once established) will be faster/ cheaper than building cell towers.

Starlink will likely be the backhaul for rural and developing countries cell towers. Starlink is never going to service hand sets directly.

 

[sailorjohn]

My son is now out in the Atlantic and will recover the fairings (nose cone) tonight. Hoping that everything goes well.