Those stations in Chile are going to revolutionise comms down there.

I trekked to El Chalten in 2019 and the entire town was connected with a ~150mb microwave link. With thousands of tourists in town it had slowed to a crawl. Starlink won’t do much in cities but for regional areas it will open massive opportunities particularly in tourism with today’s instagramming travellers.

If this is going to work from my boat at some point, I'm never setting foot on land ever, again.

Does anyone have an image of what one of these ground stations looks like? Do they piggyback on some existing antenna shack? Or did they build their own from scratch?

I also wonder whether they considered partnering with AWS Ground Station? https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/

Or maybe the Starlink constellation's requirements are not amenable to that?

On a tangent, I wonder what effects Starlink will have in countries where the government wants to control or filter/restrict people's internet access?

Wow.

For a service that should have global reach, these are mostly in the US! I'm a lot more excited about LEO broadband compared to 5G. Sounds like a career change worth pursuing, even if you are halfway around the world.

Check out the starlink satellite orbits here: https://space-search.io/?search=starlink

Still a number of trains spreading out so global ground coverage is coming soon!

The 'legend' is not really a legend, (right?). It lists out base stations, but I still have no idea what the icons mean.

(Really cool project, btw. Thanks unidentified Googlers for creating it!)

Put down a deposit for service up in Alaska near Kenai. They're estimating early 2022 at the moment. Might be stuck on one of the GEO sat providers until then.

These are some very strange locations. Many of them are way out on country roads, some in places where I’m imagining they had to spent some money to get power service. Check out Panaca, NV, near the Utah border. I’ve been right through here and it’s super desolate. I’ve also been near the one in Evanston, WY and the one outside of Hutchinson, KS. There ain’t nothin’ out there!

What’s the reasoning for these locations? Low RF noise floor maybe? On some major transcon fiber route perhaps?

It's a pity that those of us offering to host ground stations in areas where the nearest ground station is hundreds of kilometers away are ignored. I've tried to reach folks at Starlink with zero success thus far. That said, I wonder what the bottleneck is for setting up new ground stations.

Very nice! What do the orange circles mean?

There are photos here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/m8maa9/wise_nc_st...

Across all the photos I've seen it looks pretty consistent, they build a fence and mount the antennas on small pads. It doesn't look like Starlink is building their own shelters (the ones in those photos are the carrier's). The carriers will readily offer rack space in their shelters for the right price but this does tend to suggest that the antennas are pretty self-contained and don't require a lot of external support equipment.

These were posted by a user on Reddit

https://m.imgur.com/a/DkfdjbU

Basically a gravel lot fenced in with a bunch of radomes mounted to what look like prefab concrete pads.

SpaceX's original plan was to build environmentally controlled pods/huts to hold equipment to aggregate ground transceivers. However they found it more economical to build un-airconditioned pods/huts and use someone's extended-temperature equipment instead.

Source: my employer is that someone.

> also wonder whether they considered partnering with AWS Ground Station? https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/

Absolutely not since kuiper will be a direct competitor, and starlink's earth station design is their own proprietary equipment.

The majority of them are colocated with long haul DWDM regen huts, where they buy transport to the nearest major city. In the western US states they're adjacent to either Zayo or lumen (CenturyLink) sites.

Amazon is also planning an LEO internet constellation; being dependent upon a direct competitor for core infrastructure probably isn't a good idea, especially when that specific competitor (Amazon) has been busted before abusing its position as vendor to appropriate their customers' private information and enter their markets directly as participant.

If you are going to compete with Amazon, don't use AWS to do it.

I also doubt AWS ground station locations are numerous enough to provide the kind of service that Starlink needs.

Currently AWS Ground consists of a very small set of sites and antennas, not enough for any constellation. It's also very limited in terms if services.

I wondered this too, but came to the realization that it will be like any other ISP, and comply with any/all local laws it has to comply with to get the revenue that it is ultimately a company's job to get.

Most companies don't engage in activism/disobedience at the expense of revenue. Apple censors the App Store and backdoors iCloud for the CCP (via state-operated servers) to operate in mainland China, for example.

The ground stations will have to be fairly close to the customers for a while, and the customer antennas aren't particularly covert.

It will probably have all manner of government-mandated filtering like any other established commercial ISP. After all, it's nothing without its ground stations right now.

EDIT: It was HN that changed my view on this, in some of the comments in the HN thread on my Starlink blog post. I started out hopeful and idealistic about Starlink being an anti-censorship technology.

Realistically Starlink will register as an ISP in the country and follow government rules for censorship like all the rest.

For other sat phones and sat internet, if a country makes it illegal, the sat carriers don't provide service when you're in that country.

"Russia may fine citizens for using SpaceX's Starlink internet. Here's how the internet service poses a threat to authoritarian regimes."

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-may-fine-citizens-spa...

There are already a handful of countries that restrict the import of things like sat phones, CB radios, etc.

The Starlink dish will just be on that same list of prohibited goods, and Customs will stop them coming into the country.

(I was warned NOT to take a sat phone on my trek all the way around Africa - governments of countries like Rep. Congo, Sudan, Nigeria and a few others don't like civilians (especially foreigners) having that tech)

A starlink terminal needs to transmit in known bands and have clear unobstructed view of the sky, and looks quite distinctive. Authoritarian states like Iran are totally capable of training cops to use portable spectrum analyzers, which are not nearly as big or costly as they used to be.

I'm not saying it's an impossible problem to solve, but will require some real time and effort.

I know Cuba strictly controls which antennas can be imported into the country. I think it would be pretty hard to sneak a Starlink device in undetected, even if Starlink supported it.

Very little without the US government giving them the nod to provide these services (which is very unlikely). You could just about start World War 3.

I am sure it is going to be prohibited to use it over there. I feel like I already read somewhere that government in Russia is concern about it.

The majority of sites in the United States, actually all of them I've checked, are pre-existing fiber shelters, mostly CenturyLink's in the west. They exist at various points on the fiber line for add-drop and power injection. It's not especially unusual to negotiate with carriers to install equipment at these sites as part of your transit agreement. I don't immediately see any aerial photos where SpaceX's equipment seems to have been installed but I would imagine they're adding the antenna and maybe another prefab shelter. But basically everything you're seeing at those sites on Google Maps right now isn't Starlink, it's existing carrier equipment.

There's an ancient map here that shows a dogleg in the NV cable that may run by Panaca.

https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cyberge...

There is also an article that shows a few(?) cables in that area

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-detailed-pub...

DWDM regen huts on major inter city fiber paths are usually out in some real randomly weird locations. Like the one in Prosser, WA. They're sited wherever they can get cheap land with electricity and a road passable by a normal pickup truck or telecom work van, approximately every 80 km of fiber, plus or minus a bit.

I bet the noise floor thing. Inmarsat (and the intelligence monitor station beside it) have been trying to block the 3.5Ghz spectrum in most of the Netherlands (up to 100km away or so).

They're now going to move somewhere else but it basically delayed the 5G rollout in the northern half of the country for years.