Until last year, the FCC prohibited taking orders for, or even advertising to the public, not yet certified devices.
FCC Relaxes Rules on Marketing and Importing Devices | Cooley | Global Law Firm
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FCC Relaxes Rules on Marketing and Importing Devices | Cooley | Global Law Firm
Yeah, disagreed with that stance too, so glad they abandoned it.
Sure, but the intent of the action isn't the contentious element of this situation. This would be a total non-issue had SpaceX simply received permission from the proper authority to act within the Pakistani sovereignty.
Again, imagine the national outrage if NIO started taking paid reservations in the US today.
Would Starlink work (to replace a subsea cable) in Tonga - I am assuming they would need the laser connected sats for connectivity from Tonga to anywhere else?There's only 100k people in Tonga.I also don't know if Starlink is authorized to operate in Tonga yet so, while likely a hurdle that can be cleared through emergency measures, its not quite as easy as just shipping terminals out there and plugging them into a power source.
As for the ash, yeah--and as with most satellite communications, a lower throughput can often push through thick atmospheric occlusions.
One number I've been watching closely is their attrition rate...which has been rising since deployment started and is around 9% or so. That kind of failure rate is unthinkably unacceptable for practically every product ever offered and every infrastructure ever constructed in the history of history (to say nothing of the legacy space folks going head-explody over that rate) when you consider that the oldest 1.0 sats haven't even reached half their design life...though its unclear to me yet whether that's actually a bad number in this context.
Excellent point! There aren't nearly enough ISL sats to provide anywhere near useful service beyond the current requirement of groundstation covisibility.
There's certainly no starlink ground station in Tonga right now [that would necessarily need to be connected to The Internets], and near as I know (happy to be checked on this) there's none in Fiji or Samoa/American Samoa...both of which are maybe close enough for covisibility...(?).
Edit: Its also worth noting that a number of GEOs provide satellite service to Tonga (and also O3b/SES and Iridium, assuming they're authorized to do so), so its not like there's nothing there, especially for emergency use.
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Sure. If NIO was following the appropriate steps to set up shop in the US and received appropriate permission to start taking Americans' money (which they haven't, to be clear, hence the suggestions of national outrage), its all good.
The issue is: that's not what's happening with Starlink in Pakistan. There have certainly been discussions between Starlink sales people and Pakistani ministers, but as is self-evident by the subject article, SpaceX hasn't been given permission to move forward with actually taking money from Pakistanis.
Just because we might not like (or as is probable with SpaceX in this situation, simply not realize) the rules/procedures/processes of another country doesn't mean we can subvert them.
CaptUAL
Member
?? So presumably that is no and yes. No Starlink does not (currently) work in Tonga because yes it does need the laser connected satellites.
Fair thought...though in practice, not as much as you'd think. There's a few pieces to the puzzle.
1. In some countries (especially third world), local grounstations will be required by the authorities, and all traffic within that country must go through the local ground stations. So...taking out ground stations basically takes out starlink.
Obviously starlink has (or at least, once the ISL network is fully armed and operational, will have) the technical capability of operating within that country even without local ground stations, but, regardless of #1:
2. Fundamentally, Starlink needs permission to operate in a foreign country. In the event of a war, that permission could be revoked, properly or not, by the 'ruling entity' (a purposely abstracted title). Because Starlink is effectively America, if Starlink were to continue operating in defiance of the 'ruling entity' that explicitly means America has self-identified as an enemy of that 'ruling entity'.
While maybe no biggie if its the Taliban or whatever, it is not SpaceX's place to make decisions on who the US identifies as state enemies.
3. In the event ground stations from neighboring countries can provide co-visibility to users within the war torn state (instead of using ISLs), that still results in the 'enemy of our state' scenario. Again probably no big deal if its like Israel vs Palestine since they already hate each other, but it could lead to some uncomfortable situations for some country pairs.
4. Not really part of the discussion but worth noting anyway, In the event the US is involved in the conflict, our warfighters will use existing (and future) satellites/constellations for their communications, where the military controls the end to end infrastructure. NFW will secure/important/tactical military comms (like what would be necessary in a theater) ever go through commercial infrastructure (like starlink) along side your steaming reruns of Mad Men. Low level stuff? Sure. That private wanting to video chat with their toddler from some 'Stan? Fire up the starlink terminal and let everyone have more time.
Elons response: “This is a hard thing for us to do right now, as we don’t have enough satellites with laser links and there are already geo sats that serve the Tonga region. That is why I’m asking for clear confirmation.”
Ships with two (or more) ground stations could bounce between satellites. Two-ish hops to Fiji, I think.
willow_hiller
Well-Known Member
I wasn't expecting a premium service, but market segmentation is nice: https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-premium-all-weather-dish/?s=09
From SpaceX. Most of the Starlink sats from the 4-7 launch are not going to work because of a geomagnetic storm.
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