A big deal is also that LEO Internet should have reasonable latency. From my experience in the early-mid 2000s, high quality 512kbps with reasonable latency works for everything except high quality video streaming. (Experience: ASDL from a highly-rated UK ISP.)
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A big deal is also that LEO Internet should have reasonable latency. From my experience in the early-mid 2000s, high quality 512kbps with reasonable latency works for everything except high quality video streaming. (Experience: ASDL from a highly-rated UK ISP.)
I don't think the number of users limitation quite works the way you are thinking. The satellite can only talk to one user at a time per large region. It doesn’t matter whether it is sending 100 packets to 100 users or 10,000 packets to one user, it’ll take the same bandwidth.
You are right that a WISP could charge far less per connection than Starlink by giving a lower bandwidth connection, but then so could Starlink.
Unlike most other forms of communications, satellite internet has the unique disadvantage that it is aggregate bandwidth constrained. You have a limited bandwidth broadcast pipe that serves lots of customers. So giving essentially a discount to a large customer isn’t going to help with the economics.
I could be totally wrong, of course. Does any other satellite Internet service sell to WiSPs?
Going hub-spoke makes it easier, but then sticks you with all the current issues: line of sight for RF, cable for hardwired.
The sats can converse with several ground stations in the same spot virtual simulationsly (just like cell towers and phones).
The phased array antennas also mean the a ground station can jump between any visible satellites on a packet by packet basis. The sats can do the same for the ground stations.
With packets with internal addressing, sat to ground comm bandwidth is not impacted by a hub-spoke or individual stations. The issue is in the uplink side (which also include ACKs for the downlink packets), but there are ways to handle that.
There are fewer statements in this world of which I am more certain.
What I was really trying to comment on was how the RF portion of the end to end data link is really the limiting element. Because the arrays on the satellites are essentially targeting each ground terminal individually, Starlink would prefer to have fewer terminals for equivalent bandwith/data/users/whatever metric so that each satellite has fewer targets.
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I think the latency aspect is being a bit over hyped as an advantage for Starlink. For most people its going to be completely in the noise, because most people don't care or even know that their data might be showing up a couple-ten ms later with some other service.
Streaming video is by far the largest piece of the global pie and pretty much the only things that matter there are a) quality/resolution and b) no buffering.
Are they? I doubt the phased array antennas are that precise. I suspect (but don’t know for sure) that the satellite is essentially broadcasting RF over a fairly wide area. Like in the order of 10s of square miles.
It's not a big deal if you're choosing between LEO and ADSL, but if you're choosing between LEO and geostationary the difference can be half a second or more.
For people currently dealing with satellite Internet, the LEO satellite Internet systems are going to be a huge improvement, even if they don't have high bandwidth.
For sure the coverage is a large area, but the point of the phased array is to direct the energy where it needs to go within its view shed. The more terminals, the more places that energy needs to go.
If your spot is 40km across, there is no difference between multiple small sites and centralized stations 40km apart. For reference: DSL max distance is 5.5km without a repeater.
As Mongo said, it doesn’t matter where in the phased array transmission area the signal is going. All terminals in that area receive the same signal, so if it is going to one antenna in that area or multiple, it doesn’t matter.
Yes, this is key. Current satellite Internet is awful because of the very noticeable latency, bandwidth caps, and error rates. Latency means gaming is not possible. Even surfing the web, it becomes annoying since your average web page these days downloads about 30 files. Latencies pile up. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of bandwidth caps/pricing Starlink comes up with.
What service do you have now and what are its characteristics like Mbps up/down and latency?
adiggs
Well-Known Member
The two areas I know where latency is critical are online gaming and VPN / work from home / interactive video. I put those latter three all in the same bucket as that's how my own work from home internet connection works today, for me to interact with the company I work for.
Namely - I connect to my company via VPN (problem #1 for high latency connections), and then I can work as if I were sitting in the office. That involves interacting with servers, databases; and then other routine activities such as attending meetings via audio and sometimes video (using the VPN connection).
The VPN connection itself is 'chatty', and the big round trip latency will mean everything performed via the VPN connection will be somewhere between slow and unusable. Everything involving real time interaction (the audio or video interactions) will be somewhere between unusable or will self-terminate due to how bad it'll get (performance below connection standards).
Here's an article that talks a little about this dynamic:
Are VPN and Satellite Internet Networking Compatible?
I learned from the article that satellite internet tends to be good on download, and slow on upload. VPN though needs both good down AND upload speeds, in addition to low latency.
The bigger use case here is the remote worker use case. A satellite internet provider that solves the VPN problem will get a whole host of rural users that are living rural, but they'd be living in town for high quality internet otherwise. I'm one of them (I'm a wanna-be rural folk, with one of the big impediments to getting there being the crappy internet service available at most of the houses we've looked at, and the corresponding inability to work from home - even 1 day a week).
Interesting. My experience is only with larger BFNs that have many elements that do not individually project on the entire coverage area.
Yes of course! Latency will drastically improve versus something like GEO internet service.
The big picture point still remains: The majority of users aren't going to find significant value in decreased latency--they're far more concerned with 1) price and 2) how big their pipe is. If you give 10 people a $59/mo GEO high latency option that has otherwise equivalent service to a $69/mo Starlink option, 9 of those people are going to choose the GEO option.
Having used satellite internet before in the past (HughesNet/DirectPC), I doubt anyone who already has experience with geo latency will choose to stay with it, if they understand that Starlink will have almost none by comparison, and understand what that means for their usage experience.
That said, sure, there's plenty who won't understand why it's better and thus won't switch unless it is cheaper or has bigger bandwidth numbers. But anyone who knows the difference will choose Starlink.
The few times I was at a location with satellite internet, I got so frustrated with the latency I switched to dialup, which was a fraction of the speed but the reduced latency made everything more usable!
doghousePVD
My grandfather’s car
It depends whether the user also has decent phone service. Where I am, the only communications is via the Internet link, and even basic voice links are PITA. More and more comm is via two-way video, and it does not work with high latency. GEO satellite works OK for download only, such as Netflix - nobody cares if the movie is a few seconds "late".
Certainly we're waxing philosophic at this point, but the history of consumer products (and in fact the entire history of salable products) has proven time and time again that--as long as a product meets a base level of performance--bench racing numbers are irrelevant.
All internet needs to do for the vast majority of people is stream videos. Anything else is gravy as long as it doesn't cost any more. If Starlink can beat the others on price, they will win the internet. If they cannot beat the others on price, their addressable market will always be capped at those who are underserved, and it can't be overstated that the majority of that underserved market is going to be people who can't stream Netflix through their currently available solutions. Those who need low latency are a very legitimate part of that underserved market and I am by no means dismissing their needs, but they are a very small piece of that underserved consumer base, and they're certainly nothing to build a business model around.
There are a couple of reasons ISLs are part of some internet satellite concepts and latency is at the bottom of that list...and perhaps it only makes that list because its a convenient byproduct.
Easily done, as long as they have at least 3 neighbours in line-of-sight. Ubiquiti wireless gear is cheap, easy to set up and can link up neighbours several miles away.
