Starlink Public Beta About to Happen?!?!

yeah we tried that once, welcome to the world DSL... and it still didn't do as advertised paid for.

Because the tech sucked and we didn't force the companies to hold up to their end of the bargain. In fact we just granted them monopolies and let them claim that they serviced entire areas if one house got service.

We have better tech now. The other half of the problem is politics and I won't talk about that.
 
Impressed by that ping.
I wonder what it's going to look like with a couple hundred thousand users on the network though.
 
I wonder what it's going to look like with a couple hundred thousand users on the network though.

With the total expected satellites to reach greater than 30,000, probably not too bad. By then Amazon, OneWeb and Samsung's offering could be available also.
 
With the total expected satellites to reach greater than 30,000, probably not too bad. By then Amazon, OneWeb and Samsung's offering could be available also.
So how long til we have enough satellites up there that it will block out the sun? Not to mention all the deactivated ones just floating around.
 
Not to mention all the deactivated ones just floating around.

Their orbit is low enough they automatically de-orbit after about 5 years, which is how they have also designed their tech refresh/upgrade model.

So if SpaceX went belly up, all of their trash would be gone within the following decade.
 
So how long til we have enough satellites up there that it will block out the sun? Not to mention all the deactivated ones just floating around.

It would take nearly 200 million Starlink satellites to block 1% of the Sun's light. Failed satellites will fall out of their orbit and burn up with five years. They're planning to have only 12,000 by 2027, so never.
 
So how long til we have enough satellites up there that it will block out the sun? Not to mention all the deactivated ones just floating around.
You're talking 18million mi² – not in your or my lifetimes, I expect.
 
They're designed to fall into the atmosphere and burn up when they're not longer usable. So no space junk left behind.

The engineers who built the satellites watching them launch into space:

1597944354415.png
 
putting my erek face on, I am EXCITED for this to come to a neighborhood near me. Currently using Ubifi cell based service getting 30/5 pretty consistently, ping between 50-125. This would be a huge upgrade to me, considering it's only going to get faster.
 
if you live out in the middle of no where those speeds are amazing and should only get better.. current geo orbit satellite internet is a fk'ing joke.
Agreed, as long as they can prevent people from other areas who do have internet from leeching off it just because they don't want to pay for what they have, then makes me want to move to rural area ... well maybe not around California because it's all on fire.
 
putting my erek face on, I am EXCITED for this to come to a neighborhood near me. Currently using Ubifi cell based service getting 30/5 pretty consistently, ping between 50-125. This would be a huge upgrade to me, considering it's only going to get faster.
The only option I have is Hughes net. I consistently get ~500kbps (kilobits... so about 50KB/s), sometimes it'll be higher when it's not busy, like 3mbps (300KB/s). My pings are measured in seconds (they average 1.2-2 seconds, but sometimes get as high as 4-6). This will be a godsend for us out here. Do you know how hard it is to do any real work online or get the kids school done online? We use our mobile hot spots which aren't much better (Verizon is the only service to my house). I can get around the same 500kpbs with my cell (it's 4g, lol, what 4g can't even hit 1mbps I don't know, but 3 bars of 4g gets me a half of a mb/s, sometimes if it's not crowded it'll spike up to a full mbps). Yeah, it's embarassing and the disconnect between rural and everyone else is ridiculous. All those hand outs the cable companies took and then didn't follow through with they should have to pay back, but our government is great at handing out money, but not so good at holding anyone accountable for promises or budgets.
 
Yeah prior to finding ubify (thankfully we have good ATT signal here) i was stuck with a local dsl monopoly company. best I could get was 4/1 and the actual speeds were MAYBE 1/512kbs on a GOOD day. If it rained, we lost internet, very crappy lines.

I'm super excited for Starlink. I'm hoping for ~100 a month or less.
 
Not bad all things considered, but a far FAR cry from the 10-20ms pings that Musk pre-ported when he was hyping it up.
To have pings like that you basically need to be in the server room of the server you're pinging. Elon needs to be taken with lots of salt. Usually still a tasty dish, but salty.

I wonder if he makes these promises and then throws buckets of money at his engineers to do what he promised?
 
The only option I have is Hughes net. I consistently get ~500kbps (kilobits... so about 50KB/s), sometimes it'll be higher when it's not busy, like 3mbps (300KB/s). My pings are measured in seconds (they average 1.2-2 seconds, but sometimes get as high as 4-6). This will be a godsend for us out here. Do you know how hard it is to do any real work online or get the kids school done online? We use our mobile hot spots which aren't much better (Verizon is the only service to my house). I can get around the same 500kpbs with my cell (it's 4g, lol, what 4g can't even hit 1mbps I don't know, but 3 bars of 4g gets me a half of a mb/s, sometimes if it's not crowded it'll spike up to a full mbps). Yeah, it's embarassing and the disconnect between rural and everyone else is ridiculous. All those hand outs the cable companies took and then didn't follow through with they should have to pay back, but our government is great at handing out money, but not so good at holding anyone accountable for promises or budgets.

I have a few customers on HughesNet and other satellite services that probably use the same network, I feel their and your pain. The problem with their network is the packet buffer in the satellite uplink is too damn large, and the satellites are too far away in space (according to HughesNet, they're 22,000 miles up.) The theoretical best latency you could get from their network is about ~240 ms, but due to the token buffer being so large on the uplink, getting below 500 ms is usually impossible.

On one customer, I faffed with their Hughesnet settings on their uplink and the best I was able to get was something like 550 ms latency to anywhere. The download and upload speeds were actually pretty good, but the two guys were gamers and I had to explain that their choice of going from cable internet to HN wasn't a very good choice. Last I heard, I think they went back to cable internet. It had far better latency, but the throughput was way less, which is why they went to HN.
 
I have a few customers on HughesNet and other satellite services that probably use the same network, I feel their and your pain. The problem with their network is the packet buffer in the satellite uplink is too damn large, and the satellites are too far away in space (according to HughesNet, they're 22,000 miles up.) The theoretical best latency you could get from their network is about ~240 ms, but due to the token buffer being so large on the uplink, getting below 500 ms is usually impossible.

On one customer, I faffed with their Hughesnet settings on their uplink and the best I was able to get was something like 550 ms latency to anywhere. The download and upload speeds were actually pretty good, but the two guys were gamers and I had to explain that their choice of going from cable internet to HN wasn't a very good choice. Last I heard, I think they went back to cable internet. It had far better latency, but the throughput was way less, which is why they went to HN.
It’s 240ms one way (customer to satellite to ground station), but a ping has to traverse that distance twice (once for the request, and back again for the response). So the best ping you can get is just under 500ms, not counting land distance travelled from the ground station to the server being pinged or packet processing time along the way.
 
I have a few customers on HughesNet and other satellite services that probably use the same network, I feel their and your pain. The problem with their network is the packet buffer in the satellite uplink is too damn large, and the satellites are too far away in space (according to HughesNet, they're 22,000 miles up.) The theoretical best latency you could get from their network is about ~240 ms, but due to the token buffer being so large on the uplink, getting below 500 ms is usually impossible.

On one customer, I faffed with their Hughesnet settings on their uplink and the best I was able to get was something like 550 ms latency to anywhere. The download and upload speeds were actually pretty good, but the two guys were gamers and I had to explain that their choice of going from cable internet to HN wasn't a very good choice. Last I heard, I think they went back to cable internet. It had far better latency, but the throughput was way less, which is why they went to HN.
Better throughput? That makes zero sense, the throughput is horrible. I would honestly buy DSL with a consistent 3mbps and be way better off. I can't imagine any cable companies offerings are slower than this. Sure, I can sometimes pull 20mbps until I hit the 10gb cap limit on day 1, then it's back to sub 1mbps for the rest of the month. I honestly was looking into a T1 line at 1mbps because of the low pings and consistent speed, but couldn't bring myself to invest $4k to have the lines run + $400 a month for 2 years. That was the best I could hope for here, so for now, I just deal with what I have available. My cell phone can sometimes get ~70ms pings so that's about it for gaming. Not ideal, and not really that consistent either, but I can't game one bit on satellite. Yeah, 500ms may be the theoretical, but.. then there's reality :).
 
I hope that folks in rural areas are able to afford this service and it is cheap enough. Of course Musk claims it will be "affordable" but who knows what that means.
 
I hope that folks in rural areas are able to afford this service and it is cheap enough. Of course Musk claims it will be "affordable" but who knows what that means.
He did hint that it would be similarly priced as what we are paying now for crappy satellite internet. I pay over $70 a month for my crap internet. If he releases it at anything under $200 I'd jump on it. If it can maintain <25ms and >50mb/s I'd probably pay up to $300 a month for it. The issue isn't if those of us out here with nothing can pay (a reasonable price) for internet, it's that we have no opportunity. If this many people are willing to dump >$70 a month on <1mbps.... you can imagine most would be elated to *only* pay $100 for 50mb/s with pings that allow us to actually game or hold a phone conversation with a teacher without long delays.
 
He did hint that it would be similarly priced as what we are paying now for crappy satellite internet. I pay over $70 a month for my crap internet. If he releases it at anything under $200 I'd jump on it. If it can maintain <25ms and >50mb/s I'd probably pay up to $300 a month for it. The issue isn't if those of us out here with nothing can pay (a reasonable price) for internet, it's that we have no opportunity. If this many people are willing to dump >$70 a month on <1mbps.... you can imagine most would be elated to *only* pay $100 for 50mb/s with pings that allow us to actually game or hold a phone conversation with a teacher without long delays.

Seems like I saw the number $80 thrown out in an article as a price point that Musk hoped to hit, which would agree with your first statement. I'm pretty sure that he intends to make it affordable, and most people would not consider $200-$300/mo a reasonable price for internet (although I understand that you personally would pay that compared to what you have now). Guess we will just have to see.
 
Seems like I saw the number $80 thrown out in an article as a price point that Musk hoped to hit, which would agree with your first statement. I'm pretty sure that he intends to make it affordable, and most people would not consider $200-$300/mo a reasonable price for internet (although I understand that you personally would pay that compared to what you have now). Guess we will just have to see.
Yeah, I'm thinking he was pointing towards <$100, just saying I'd be willing to pay more. Amazing how impossible it is to get internet in some places. I was calling around asking what I could get to my house with $4k+ up front and $1k per month.... They just laughed and said they can't do anything. I'm honestly not even that far out there, it's 20 minutes to target and 25 minutes to Walmart. The only one willing was a 1mb/s T1 line... It was $2k up front and $400 a month for 2 years, for 1mbps, although it was much better pings and guaranteed speed, it was actually tempting, lol. Was pricing out long range wifi and seeing how much it'd cost to get installed on a tower nearby, but with starlink I don't think the investment would be worth it now (I was looking at a multi user system to distribute costs). Lose lose at this point. Just hoping when starlink gets down here (South Carolina) eventually I can get in the beta, lol.
 
The speeds aren't too bad, good enough for video streaming and Steam downloads (not super fast, but still better than rural internet)

Per tests conducted using Ookla's speedtest.net tool:
Downoad from 11Mbps to 60Mbps
Upload from 5Mbps to 18Mbps
Latencies for Starlink don't hit Musk's target of below 20ms, they are below the FCC's 100ms threshold.

Exactly, they were talking about 500mbps in the original release... however that's for the entire satellite / region. So it's divided by how many people are using it.. Ultimately this is going to lead to 10mbps once they get 100 customers on there (I'm using the assumption that not everyone will be on at once, 50% average usage per person)

Uploads will be bad as well.

Until they get a satellite that can do 5-10Gbps, this is not exactly revolutionary.

And does a satellite really pay for itself with only 100 people using it? Doubtful.

Even if 100 x $50 /month = $5000 / month x 12 months = $60000 / year.
How much does a satellite in space cost??

13.5 million at the cheapest? That means it's going to take 225 years to pay for itself.

Let's assume that Starlink can do it for much less... let's say 5 million dollars. (More than half the price).
Let's assume that Starlink also decided to put 200 customers on a single 500mbps satellite (ridiculous but let's go with that assumption)
Let's assume that because people are far up north, they are willing to pay $70/month for 2mbps internet.

70 x 200 x 12 = $168000 / year. 5 million dollar satellite.
That's still 29.7 YEARS before they break even on just the cost of the satellite (launch included) alone.

That obviously doesn't include maintenance, customer service and all the overhead that could easily double that number. So in the best possible case, if demands for internet stayed the same (and obviously it won't), it would maybe break even in 60 years when you consider the overhead.

However, will people be satisfied with 10 mbps speeds in the future? Hell no! That's slow TODAY. Imagine in 10 years, 10 mbps speeds will be laughable. Those speeds will be outdated in 20 years, akin to using dial up to browse the web today. What happens then? What do you do with the satellite? Do we have a plan to go upgrade it while in orbit? Does it come crashing down? Or just deactivate itself?

There must be an alterior motive that is part of a bigger masterplan for the Starlink project. Starlink is a huge money loss with no chances of being profitable in the future. So why does it exist?

Potential idea one:

- Maybe it's in order to provide some sort of connectivity to cars around the world. Is Tesla being gouged for over the air updates? The only way to have car connectivity 'everywhere' would be with satellites like that. Perhaps for self driving / inter-car connectivity. Maybe they could use the satellites to track cars in the cities (like Google maps but only for Tesla cars)... but we already have GPS for that?

- Ultimately, if I had to place a bet, I'd say it's for the Mars masterplan. In order to get to Mars, you're going to need a communication system and that's going to be via satellite. I think this is just a practice project that will eventually integrate with SpaceX in some sort of way.

Starlink seems like a bad idea when you look at it from an internet provider point of view. However if you approach it as a stepping stone towards interplanetary exploration, it makes a lot more sense. That's my opinion on things!
 
You left out number 3, government contract. This is has nothing to do with whatever good idea fairies you’re talking about.

This is a huge step for communications on the tactical edge.
 
Until they get a satellite that can do 5-10Gbps, this is not exactly revolutionary.

I suspect the answer is closer to this, or at least that's what i'm hoping for.

Considering 3 companies (Starlink/OneWeb/Amazon) are all working on a build out there must be huge potential. And without general public being a large part of that I can't see how it makes sense.
 
Exactly, they were talking about 500mbps in the original release... however that's for the entire satellite / region. So it's divided by how many people are using it.. Ultimately this is going to lead to 10mbps once they get 100 customers on there (I'm using the assumption that not everyone will be on at once, 50% average usage per person)

500mbps seems terribly low. At any speed, like you said, when they choose to oversaturate/oversell the service in a particular region, speeds can suffer greatly there. Has Starlink publicly released any actual specs on the bandwidth capabilities per satellite? I don't know why they would want to disclose these limits to the world (I'd imagine stock prices would drop if the public knows that Starlink could only serve a paltry 500mbps to a region with this "cutting edge" service).
 
500mbps seems terribly low. At any speed, like you said, when they choose to oversaturate/oversell the service in a particular region, speeds can suffer greatly there. Has Starlink publicly released any actual specs on the bandwidth capabilities per satellite? I don't know why they would want to disclose these limits to the world (I'd imagine stock prices would drop if the public knows that Starlink could only serve a paltry 500mbps to a region with this "cutting edge" service).
It has to be more then 500mb total. There would be no profits in that unless they are charging a ridiculous amount for the service.
 
You left out number 3, government contract. This is has nothing to do with whatever good idea fairies you’re talking about.
Yup, Musk doesn't do anything "for the betterment of humanity" unless he can find a way for someone else to pay for it, whether it's the US Gov't or private investors.
 
It has to be more then 500mb total. There would be no profits in that unless they are charging a ridiculous amount for the service.
It is more than 500mbps... This is just some random number that he came up with to make some made up argument for no reason.

"Bandwidth per satellite is believed to be 20-80 gbps".
"during the Starlink v0.9 launch, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk indicated that the 60 satellites represented a bandwidth of more than 1 terabit per second (Tbps), translating to ~17 Gbps per satellite."

That's a big range I know, but nowhere near the 500mbps he was saying, lol. He wouldn't waste his time/money to put 100 users online. From the info we have so far, they will have a near 20gbps per satellite (minimum). More than enough for 100 users to not be throttling.
 
500mbps seems terribly low. At any speed, like you said, when they choose to oversaturate/oversell the service in a particular region, speeds can suffer greatly there. Has Starlink publicly released any actual specs on the bandwidth capabilities per satellite? I don't know why they would want to disclose these limits to the world (I'd imagine stock prices would drop if the public knows that Starlink could only serve a paltry 500mbps to a region with this "cutting edge" service).
He did publicly state that 60 satellites had over 1tb/s total, so... At least 17gb/s per satellite. Don't believe some random guy on the internet claiming 500mb/s, that would make zero sense.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.te...ellite-upgrade-more-bandwidth-more-beams/amp/

If I could get >5mbps during slow periods, I'd be ecstatic. Anything else is just icing on the cake. I think a lot of people who have access to good internet fail to see how under server did areas are. They talk about nobody being happy with 10mbps... I'd be grateful for 10mbps. That's about 10x faster what I can get now.
 
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