Starlink Maritime(starlink.com) |
Starlink Maritime(starlink.com) |
Inmarsat is the only viable alternative for smaller boats that offers unlimited data plans, has higher latency due to being geostationary, much lower bandwidth, and charges about $8000 for a gigabyte…
I‘m not sure what Ku or Ka band GEO providers charge, but I doubt you can find anything competitive there either, and these require very large antennas.
350mbps is _insane_ for this
Your actual cost is irrelevant.
At $110/mo with 500k customers, they can afford to launch roughly 170 satellites per month. That is about break-even for their average launch cadence over the last 3 months.
Starlink Maritime allows you to connect from the most remote waters across the world
Not to mention, their launch calculations include re-use based upon a completely invented and also untested catching apparatus.
Talk about going all in...
They have almost 1000 laser satellites up now. I had no idea.
Are the new satellites too big for the current rockets?
"Falcon neither has the volume nor the mass [to] orbit capability required for Starlink 2.0," Musk said.
Why does it matter if they are covered or not?
I see this more for commercial operators, like the Ferry between Seattle and Victoria BC - they could sell high speed internet for $10/trip and make a profit if they can sell it to 500 passengers/month.
This isn't for ski-boats at the local lake.
Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction.
Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you when you waste my time.
https://www.rocketbuilder.com/start/configure went up in 2016
EDIT: used VPN.
Canada version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea.
US Version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea. $5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals.
Not all products are as much of a commodity as bandwidth.
If the buyer is an enterprise they expect a discount. The buyer may require the seller to use a supplier management tool like Arriba which has a monthly subscription fee. The buyer may purchase through a reseller, in which case the reseller expects a percentage of the transaction. The buyer may require custom contracts which can cost thousands of dollars in legal fees. The buyer may require extensive audits, pages of questionnaires and more which can take significant time and resources to complete. The buyer may hold back payment for up to 180 days.
So from my perspective, the problem is not the seller, the problem here is the enterprise buyer. If the buyer was willing to purchase from a website, with a credit card, and accept standard terms and pricing without modification, you would probably see much more transparent pricing and encounter fewer "contact sales" buttons.
I thought there were plans for polar orbiting Starlink satellites to cover polar bases.
Even so it should be a map of the full planet
That is not to say that, even when they can launch new birds, they will be able to make a profit on regular peon service. They probably will depend utterly on top-dollar accounts. Don't be surprised if your peon bandwidth gets disappointingly slow as they add more customers, and more who are more important than you.
Could there be some middle ground? Could you do something like "prices start at $X; additional fees may apply?" At least give us a ballpark number; something from which I can decide if it's worth my time to investigate further.
Honest Pricing/Licensing Plans
Personal | Business | Enterprise
$5/user/month | $8/user/month | $8/user/month
| | + $200/hour custom license business development rate
Features | Features++ | Features++Or been on HN too long :)
Starting in Q4/2022 they want to cover mid-latitudes around the globe. That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? (This is a bit surprising - on one hand, this step extends coverage towards higher and lower latitudes but on the other hand not as much as they already have inland-coverage (cf. Brazil). It also extends longitudinally around all of the globe?).
Coverage above mid-latitudes requires satellites in polar orbits to join the network. (Their non-polar orbits have an inclination of 53° which means that satellites go no further north or south than that (plus a bit whatever their range is)).
https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map....
This isn't the output of some fancy RF model figuring out exactly where you'll get coverage. Nor is it circles of a specific diameter around ground stations. Or even hexagonal cells where coverage will be allowed/denied in their backend config.
In places it seems to follow countries territorial waters (which would be expected due to regulatory issues), but in others it spills out into international waters.
Overall, the map has sufficient 'oddities' that I think there is a good chance it's a rough hand made 'guestimate' coverage map, and won't perfectly reflect where coverage will really be delivered.
Is it saying that in Q1/2023 the top of the earth (rest of Canada, etc) should be covered?
That's how I read it.
Or maybe they'll have stationary ships with "ground"-stations until the inter-satellite thing is working.
the one thing any satellite operator absolutely does not want is absurd ongoing monthly recurring costs to run their earth stations.
But its also related to groundstations, the satellites bounce the signal down to land. They're transitioning to satellites with the capability to network between themselves which will reduce the need for groundstations.
I don't know how much they really limit coverage due to borders. Like if you get one in colombia and just move it to venezuela, does it still work? They dont have permission in venezuela but they might just not region lock it until venezuela actually complains or something.
I know for a fact that other sat internet providers do work cross border in this exact situation.
for instance right now without fully operational satellite-to-satellite laser links, if you wanted to have live starlink services in afghanistan, you theoretically could, but you'd need to have a starlink earth station in somewhere like Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Or Peshawar, Pakistan. Or southeastern Uzbekistan. All politically problematic and very protective of their own domestic telecom companies.
Not the sort of place you can just drop a starlink earth station and buy a protected 100Gbps protected DWDM circuit to the nearest major city for an IX point, as starlink has done with their earth stations colocated with DWDM ILAs in the US pacific northwest.
Legally: no.
It also all costs an absolute fortune - iridium is about $1000/mo for 100Mb, and $10 for each additional Mb - and there are surcharges for use in polar regions.
Musk could probably bankroll all of starlink just by serving the scientific communities in Antarctica.
My South Pole colleagues would love to have a better network.
Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income.
In other terms, Iridium Go is still the best value around and truly global for the time being.
SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective, but the big question is will a LEO operator provide better coverage than a GEO operator?
Interestingly it does look like people are putting starlink on sailboats with ok results: https://www.reddit.com/r/SailboatCruising/comments/vovaxs/st...
Also having packed a few offshore miles at this point... I have never had much luck being productive doing "work" while actually on passage. The ocean has a funny way of sticking to its own agenda anyway, despite our best plans.
Most of your time cruising is hanging on the anchor anyway. Depending on where you are there is pretty decent cell coverage a lot of places, or hotel wifis you can get from your anchorage.
It looks like my sailboat remote life is still on hold for the time being.
wow! Why cant you just take your normal starlink with you on your boat? Don't people do that with RVs?
A BGAN terminal like an Inmarsat 9202 is ~$3k, which gets you capability of around 450 kbps. Something like an Iridium can bring that to 700 kbps for a ~$5k. Want multimegabit? No problem, KVH will be happy to help with something like a TracPhone for a mere $18000-50000! And then you pay a mere $5/megabyte, or you can get a monthly plan and save!
SD 1........ 0-20MB ............... $79.90/mo
SD 2........ 21-100MB ............. $275.00/mo
SD 3........ 101-250MB ............ $470.00/mo
SD 4........ 251-500MB ............ $775.00/mo
SD 5........ 501-1,000MB .......... $1,1150.00/mo
SD 6........ 1,001-5,000MB ........ $2,295.00/mo
SD 7........ 5,001-10,000MB ....... $3,000.00/mo
SD 8........ 10,000-Unlimited ..... $4,300.00/mo
But at any rate this looks extremely competitive once the full intersat mesh rolls out, and it's interesting to see hard numbers on that. While it'd have been cool if they could have launched something suitable for users right down to sailboats (officially vs unofficial use of residential ones), I doubt that'd be the right business decision until well after they have v2 flying on Starship for a while. What they're charging actually doesn't even seem to put much if any premium on the massive bandwidth advantage and flat out beating fiber optic in latency over enough distance. Plenty of businesses will be interested in this. And while sure no doubt it'll become standard on rich yachts, think more serious cargo shipping, oil/gas drilling platforms, etc. SpaceX themselves will be eager to dogfood this and have already been doing so for their drone ships, but they have plans for refurbing old platforms into Starship sea launch as well. The military will absolutely be very interested if they aren't deep into discussion already. I could see a major premium being charged there for priority in ports or other congested areas, maybe even special hardware.
Also having the mesh up also means a lot of other cool stuff, from coverage to remote islands or other areas for which no close ground station is feasible to special low latency intercontinental offerings on land (HFT and enterprises may be interested in).
I guess I don’t have a specific question. It’s just one of those engineering marvels that I never thought I’d see. No wires, but still frag people at <90ms ping.
[1]: https://blog.oxplot.com/powering-starlink-on-the-go-with-tes...
EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.
Fairly bleak place, and he had crap Internet service.
Looks like his [former] place is ... juuuuusssst ... out of band.
RIP Garmin, Iridium, etc...
As to why it is expensive? Well, they did their homework and found out is a lucrative market (one doesn't need a lot of hindsight for that, though).
But they could also quite easily support global coverage by bouncing data off other users dishes. The latency would be a bit higher and the service reliability a bit lower, but I would guess the result would still be far better than alternatives for maritime comms.
I'm actually really surprised they haven't done this already - it seems like something they could easily support, and it means they could deploy to anywhere in the world with mere hours notice, at least for a basic level of service.
Imagine the possibility of a demo sitting in the office of say the telecoms minister of venezuela... "So today, we have no infrastructure in your country. But we have something we'd like permission to deploy. Do you give us permission to transmit to your office to give it a demo? Yes. [Nods to engineer who types a few commands...]. Okay, it's enabled. Here it is working - this is the internet your citizens can get anywhere in the country tomorrow if you give us approval."
The fixed-location version of Starlink consumes around 60 to 100 W constantly which is problem if you want to e.g. use solar panels on a sail boat to supply the device.
I'm guessing a more affordable version more like the RV product will become available for cruising sailors in time. I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.
Seen number of comments about the costs, but honestly wondered why the “one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals” could not be replaced with a hand mounted cheaper DIY rig using the existing Starlink terminals. Guessing, though might be wrong, that Starlink already has this happen using the existing coastal coverage.
On the same note, guess most people don’t need 24/7 connections. Why not just charge 0.33 a min, which would still be a 3x over the $5000 month rate and enable Starlink to extend further into the market.
Any thoughts on why this would not make sense aside from whatever Starlink’s biases & business objectives are?
I suspect the market here is not individuals that want to browse YouTube and check their email.
Market 1: large multi person vessels like cruise ships. At any time someone wants to use the internet, and the ship can 'sublet' out a 2Mbit subset on an time basis.
Market 2: large transport vessels where the owners want a lot of data on what's going on for security reasons. $5k/month and you can have trusted security people keeping a watch over a few dozen cameras 24/7, so you know the crew is doing they job. A bit dystopian but I'd bet there's a market for it.
The Starlink IPO will provide hundreds of billions in funding for Starship and Mars
I will ask one of them for an idea of how far they get when they lose coverage and edit when I hear back. He is on the boat now.
1 - normal cell hand held phone use, you can often get (patchy) reception up to 15 (more sometimes) nautical miles off shore if lucky.
2 - setup a wifi hotspot on your phone and pull it up the mast. Range increases, i'm not sure how much to, but at 15nm the reception is good. Can work out further too, i've been on the far side of the channel islands in CA and had (poor) reception
3 - device with directional antenna up the mast - I always intended to do this but never did. I expect probably can get genuinely good coverage at 20nm out, maybe a bit more
(Inland lakes should work fine except perhaps for the very biggest ones like Lake Superior or the Caspian Sea. If lakes don't work with the RV plan, it's not for any technical reason.)
Intersat (laser links) comms is not available at the moment. Fairly sure they simply geofence non-maritime accounts. As you can see from the maritime map, it only covers water next to the shore which is a good indicator that they still use ground stations directly to provide service.
EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.
Iridium GO is cheap, but that's all you can really say positively about it. It is arguably not even offering "internet" in the normal sense, since loading a website would be incredibly expensive/bad and is therefore restricted to low data rate messaging and plain text weather updates.
Is $5K/month a niche product? Undeniably yes, and I hope to see more flex offerings later, but this isn't a good comparison.
Also data is not charged in minutes, it's theoretically unlimited. The voice plans are charged in minutes and I don't think worth it.
Just like the RO water-makers in the past, I believe this is the opening salvo in bringing data prices down on the high seas. A few providers have been the only players in this field (Inmarsat and Iridium) and it shows. Prices haven't budged in ages.
More like: commercial and military vessels
An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
Probably targeted more are commercial shipping vessels, cruise ships, and even militaries. I imagine that number would make the venture worth it.
350mbit can be sold ands split across 1000pax in on a cruise ship at $5/day so you’d have the fee covered on day 1.
Tankers, cruise ships, etc.
a) if you've ever personally lived for months or years at a time 100% dependent upon geostationary based services costing anywhere from $165/mo to $15,000 a month or more, for internet access and links to the outside world
b) if you've personally used a starlink terminal
the actual coverage isn't there yet for things like mid ocean, because starlink satellites in the present architecture need to be simultaneously in view of a CPE and a starlink run earth station.
what they've got right now is a viable competitor for the smaller geostationary based ku and ka band maritime vsat packages sold for coastal region use, which are limited to specific ku and ka band spot beams anyways. such as you might see used in the caribbean and Mediterranean oceans.
when they have more polar orbit satellites and the satellite-to-satellite laser links are working they will have full mid ocean coverage, and I have no doubt it will beat the pants off a $200,000+, 2.4 meter C-band stabilized-in-radome maritime VSAT system with a monthly service cost of $8,500+.
anyone that's ever done the link budget calculations and seen the RF channel sizes and very simple modulations (very poor bps/Hz ratio) needed to make IP data over 2.4m size c-band terminals will know what I'm talking about. this is directly proportional to dollars in the monthly recurring costs for ongoing transponder space use.
the performance and dollar per MB cost right now for coastal region use will absolutely beat anything inmarsat or iridium based by a ridiculous margin.
I fundamentally disagree with you that it's a very competitive market, it's a market that's highly dependent upon the business model of launching 3500-6000 kg things into geostationary orbit at immense cost and trying to recoup the construction+launch cost of them before they die in 13 to 16 years. And military/government contracts. Traditional two way geostationary based satellite comms stuff is a very conservative and moribund segment of the telecom industry.
you've got other things out there that are sort of viable like o3b (now owned/controlled by SES), but anyone that's ever priced an o3b terminal and ongoing service on something like a 36 month term will know that it's not a significant improvement in cost.
i have - it was horrible. i was at least on land, and could drive with my laptop to a point where i could finally get cell service and tether my laptop whenever i needed internet service (need to download a new copy of Xcode? that's 15% of your monthly allotted bandwidth). it wasn't the speed or bandwidth so much as the latency: 900ms each way meant nothing could be close to "real time", which made things much more difficult.
I appreciate the LEO of starlink, but without essentially "free" launches, there's no way it could be financially viable.
IIRC Viasat has been especially active in trying everything they can to throw up regulatory hurdles and slow down Starlink deployment.
It was faster and cheaper to tether to my cell phone while working from their house.
Companies like Viasat, Iridium and the others will have a very, very hard time ever competing in the LEO space.
Depends on how you define marketing. I work for a very big and well known organization. We wanted to engage with them about an interesting initiative. I's almost impossible to reach out to anyone from SpaceX. Go and try to find an email address or a phone number.
Then, even when you obtain their sales email you will not get any response whatsoever.
Naively, cost+speed+coverage=value?
Then there's also the power requirements, which I haven't seen yet, but they'll probably be exceedingly difficult to meet for your average sailboat.
- Competition is expensive, e.g. BGAN at $284/GB of data transfer or more, while offering lower speeds (700 Kbps for a $6.5K Cobham Explorer 710, Vs. 350 Mbps for this).
- Competition likely won't be able to directly compete on offering for a while.
The next step will likely be commercial aircraft over the ocean. "Because they can [charge this]" is obviously the primary reason, but if you go look at what is available in this space right now, this isn't nuts, far from it.
Internet over the ocean is an incredibly hard/expensive problem. You cannot directly compare it to over-the-land offerings where the consumers are 1:1M.
Marine starlink needs to compensate for rolling, pitching, and forward motion.
I think Starlink doesn't want to use too heavy a hand with customers using their equipment not as intended (as is the case with most companies), but it does look like they're trying to increase their average billings.
I'd guess that they're trying to pick up a lot of commercial business. While it only covers coastal areas at the moment, it'll cover the North America/Europe/North Africa/Asia parts of the ocean in 6 months and substantially everywhere in 9 months. For a shipping company looking to replace their old-school satellite service, $10,000 for equipment and $5,000/mo is probably nothing. For every rich person with a yacht, that's basically nothing. It seems like a great way for Starlink to grab a lot of additional revenue in areas where there won't be a lot of congestion - and from people who are used to paying much more outrageous rates.
And they haven't said that they're going to be heavy handed with people grabbing a $600 Dishy and putting it on their boat by the coast. Maybe they will be, but we haven't seen that yet.
I'd also note that it's likely that the equipment is a lot better to withstand the motion and environment of being at sea. These are going to have to withstand a lot of salt-water air and spray while maintaining their motors in good working order. They'll probably also need to be rated for a longer lifespan given the amount of movement the motors will be doing compared to a stationary one (not just the travel of the vessel, but also the waves).
I'd guess that Starlink is assuming that small boat owners will just grab a regular Dishy and service and Starlink will ignore it as long as they're relatively near land. This will add 45x the revenue for those who can afford it - shipping companies, rich people with yachts, etc.
If the pricing is that low for commercial customers then it will sell out before you know it.
https://twitter.com/joeyscarantino/status/154516393155921510...
-- If I had to guess part of the reason would maybe be carrying capacity - a house that doesn't move is predictable - RVs & boats move so the per satellite bandwidth predictability of that class of object is lower - i think meaning the requirements for redundancy are higher - redundancy is expensive? - just a guess --
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/fcc-approves-spacex-starlink...
What a fucking joke. "coming soon" means nothing to me coming from a Musk company.
Compare to the iridum network: https://www.groundcontrol.com/us/knowledge/calculators-and-m...
Granted, iridium is much slower. But $5k a month for barely any coverage is an insult.
They should definitely go price some Inmarsat I-4 or I-5 based BGAN services or gyro stabilized maritime C/Ku/Ka band VSAT terminals before thinking this is expensive.
You can easily spend $130,000 on a fairly basic geostationary VSAT terminal for something like a small cruise ship or large yacht.
Also lots of amusing comments from people who've never been 100% dependent for months or years at a time on 1:1 SCPC or oversusbcribed, contended geostationary based access at latency anywhere from 492ms to 1250ms and $ per Mbps cost of $2000 per dedicated Mbps as a floor figure.
"[A]imed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd" really? :(. And Starlink is an amazing experience, it's been life changing for a few clients even just in rural New England. The only "high speed" improvement they'd gotten over 20 years was the offer of a 10 Mbps connection for $300/month. People dump on even regular Starlink pricing anyway. Having to live constantly on dial up or regular MEO/HEO satellite then moving to Starlink is eye opening already and gave me at least a tiny taste of what it might be like for people on ships or platforms way out there (I've done multiweek zero connected expeditions too but that's not doing "regular business" or work it's a different mental space). And at least in this case it's possible to drive an hour and then have a solid net connection somewhere, so like for big software downloads one could work around it a little. No such luck at sea.
Absolutely everyone can (and does) have an opinion on how to run the entire economy. At least you guys can say a bunch of stuff specific stuff and 99% of everyone will have to take you at your word and pretty much shuts up, lol.
I totally get it though, has to be frustrating. I was really shocked at the price but when its put into perspective _if_ it works it's clearly going to be a significant improvement.
nobody is debating that a under-provisioned service can be great during the honeymoon phase. but this won't last. they're strapped for cash and these enterprise plays are purely to keep afloat while the consumer business is burning cash
At the moment it's a competitor for specialist yacht 4G packages, and whilst they're also eyewateringly expensive to anyone benchmarking them against mobile phone contracts, Starlink certainly isn't undercutting them.
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0: https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
your post only has "what ifs", but none of that is working yet, and coastal coverage isn't going to win contracts with cruise ships and real customers.
I'm of course guessing that if you moved onto your boat you wouldn't spend the majority of the time far out at sea.
Downside to lower orbit means they won't last as long (a few years) before they are pulled down into earth's atmo. Which is fine since their rocket company will just send up some more cheaply.
Really fascinating stuff.
Starlink latency is still quite good and a completely different category of service than any geosync satellite ISP. But they've got a ways to go to improve it. A lot of gamers seem unhappy with it right now, FWIW.
i think the record low was 14.8 ms
(Although having run the calculations, that implies that conventional satellites should only be adding 200ms in the best case, which shouldn't be so bad?)
Less anecdotally, Starlink passed 400,000 customers as of a month and a half or so ago [0]. I wouldn't be surprised if it was pushing towards the half million mark now or fairly soon. They're limited now in terms of terrestrial cell density primarily, and that cannot be solved without more and more powerful sats which can actually shrink the physical cell size and improve beam count and bandwidth. Mobile/RV is therefore useful for them because it's lower priority with no guarantees, but that's ok for that usage model. The times where it will tend to be very important are in remote areas where cells are not full, and the times where cells are full there is also more likelihood of LTE, and RV can by definition move around if necessary. Maritime (or aircraft for that matter) obviously also fits those current limits, the oceans are near empty of Starlink right now and it's high revenue per user given the competition.
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0: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/25/spacexs-starlink-surpasses-4...
Sure, just like Tesla Autopilot is right around the corner, Starship will be flying this year, the Cybertruck has been released 2 years ago etc.
The additional load of the Starlink, relative to the chillers, water makers, and other onboard systems would be nothing.
Given that the estimated cost of building and launching the satellites is estimated at only 600 million dollars [1], it is estimated to take something around two or three years until it's been paid off, followed by two years of generating profit and the next five-year cycle starts (assuming that their estimate of five years life time per satellite holds [2]).
Personally, I think Starlink was the best bet SpaceX ever made. That thing will be a permanent cash cow.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2022/02/14/starlin...
[2] https://subspace.com/resources/spacex-is-giving-the-internet...
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-rise-a...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-14...
You have LEO stuff like Iridium that is targeted at pocket-sized terminals at very low bandwidth
You have GEO stuff like Sky Muster with large, fixed dishes, high latency and decent bandwidth
Then you have Starlink with large, fixed dishes, low latency and high bandwidth
Yes, they send them up with a certain amount of propellant to do that, once that runs out they fall down.
> What happens when they fall? Do they more or less burn up?
Yes. They're small enough to burn up completely, and low enough to do that quickly rather than creating a space junk problem.
Very Low Sulfer Fuel Oil (VLSFO) is running, depending on where the ship is loading up, 850 to 1150 USD a tonne.(July 7 2022)[1]
In round numbers, say, USD 1,000 a tonne, USD 10,000 an hour, USD 250,000 a day, and for a 20 day trip, USD 5,000,000.
[1] https://shipandbunker.com/prices
[2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/how-many-gallons-of-fuel-d...
Starlink is an active two-way system. Not only are they using high precision beam guidance on both ends, the receiver also has a GPS antenna and will report it's location back to the network.
Starlink is capable of turning off groundstations that are not where they're supposed to be. Not only capable, but for 'fixed location' groundstations (i.e normal service), they actually do block service if you move too far from where your assigned service area is.
"Tesla production up 87% year-on-year!"
"But what about Cybertruck, Roadster, and Semi? Fail."
Boat ~~ bust out another thousand
Edit: I took parent comment as a joke but ya never know
The dish cost has some good engineering explanations.
The 40-50x service cost increase, at least in territorial waters, is all about competition.
Most likely these laser links only go from each satellite to the one ahead and the one behind, in the same orbit. That is good enough. For example, there is an orbit that goes right over New York, London, and Hamburg.
Who wants low latency most is hedge funds. It would be surprising if Starlink did not make anyone who wants it pay through the nose to get traffic one millisecond faster than fiber, 100x that for 2ms, 100x that for 3ms, and on up for longer links. What they would really be buying is not so much getting their own packets N milliseconds ahead of the fiber crowd, which is OK, but rather for their slightly poorer competitors to get packets only N-1 milliseconds ahead, which is super-great.
In fintech, they like to say a microsecond is an eon, a millisecond an eternity. When they can get a millisecond jump on the competition, that can mean millions of dollars every day. So, they will pay it. Gladly.
https://www.inmarsat.com/en/solutions-services/maritime/serv...
Or Globalstar.
https://www.globalstar.com/en-us/blog/articles/satellite-sol...
there is zero globalstar mid ocean coverage.
there is a reason you will see lots of competing options for people integrating the iridium embedded modems into things designed to go on top of $40 million business jets and just about zero globalstar.
It was for his Spidertracks[1] flight tracking system. (Which, with the ADSB track, helped us hone in on the possible location. The wreck ended up being right in line with the last few pings.
[0] https://lompocrecord.com/news/local/experienced-solvang-bush...
I'd expect most of them to go with one of the Ka band these days; they have pretty small antennas available these days as far as I know.
If you buy the 'medium plan' for $119/month [1] you get 150 Minutes of 'Data, Standard Voice or combination of both' and can buy additional data for US$0.42/min. And the 'light plan' [2] at $57/month includes just 5 minutes.
Data seems to a "call via the Iridium GO! Access number" like old school dial-up.
It's only if you buy the 'heavy plan' for $149 [3] that you get the 'Unlimited Data'
Or am I misunderstanding things?
[1] https://www.satphone.co.uk/product/iridium-go-post-paid-serv... [2] https://www.satphone.co.uk/product/iridium-go-post-paid-serv... [3] https://www.satphone.co.uk/product/iridium-go-post-paid-serv...
I'd argue it is inherently very limited – 2.4 kbit/s is really not a lot, even sustained over a whole month ;)
There's no competition up there, GEO sats are too far north to see the Pole.
Or even better: just flat beam-forming antenna on the RV roof. Once thing there is enough on the roof is space.
For the record if oneweb or kuiper or telesat's proposed LEO networks existed as a viable, usable product right now and worked similarly I'd be equally enthused about them. (Yes, I know about Oneweb beta tests in Alaska)
Tesla Autopot also requires "just" a few software updates.
Swapping radios out for lasers isn't that much harder, there is some difficulty in tracking/alignment but it's space - things tend to stay where you put them, with whatever momentum you left them with.
Completely different ballgame to Autopilot which basically requires advancing the field of AI by another quantum leap before it's ready.
None of that is true for the self-driving car problem. That problem still contains a multitude of unknowns, including unknown unknowns.
Cybertruck is yet another kind of problem. I don't know what the issue with that is but I'd guess it's about manufacturing capacity.
Those communications are still an unsolved and hugely difficult engineering problem. It will be awesome if SpaceX has actually achieved this: getting the kind of precision required to communicate over direct laser links between specks of dust hundreds of km apart traveling at thousands of km per hour is no easy feat.
It also sounds like they're mass producing the Starlink sats for a fraction the price of "regular space".
you can fairly easily integrate iridium into something as small as a cessna 172...
at the minimum iridium will provide the ability to make phone calls to/from the PSTN while in the middle of an ocean on its smallest terminal. go up in terminal size a bit and you get something good for 500kbps of data.
for very large business jets that would be crossing the atlantic or pacific, that's a different market (overlaps somewhat with the same aviation VSAT terminals you would see on a 737-900 MAX)
Geostationary satellites are up at around 35,000 km. Starlink is about 500-600km - you can get a whole lot of hops between Starlink satellites and terminals before you're looking at the same distance.
There's talk that they might be able to use either existing terminals, or a special set of terminals to do this, without the need to deploy them in fixed locations.
They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too.
There's enough of those around to provide a massive network of potential relays.
But they are deploying inter-satellite laser links on newer launches, so those will come on and provide more coverage too.
one thing iridium has actually done really well is provide the developer documentation to make this fairly straightforward, there's a set of 600 page PDF files with every detail you could possibly need to make a very tiny embedded linux system talk to an iridum modem over a UART.
They're another example of exorbitant fees for tiny bits of data. (Though, being able to text pretty much anywhere on the globe on a tiny device is really nice - even with a 20minute RTT.)
If you look at the per cpe traffic charts for each of the 32 customers on your typical 32:1 oversubscribed GPON connection, each individual one doesn't move that much traffic at all, relative to a chart that's scaled to 1Gbps on the Y axis.
With very basic CWDM you can push a ridiculous amount of data through just one strand of good sm fiber.
Docsis3/3.1 cable internet is worse because it's reliant on asymmetric use of downstream rf channels and much more limited bandwidth in the coax (though, they do still achieve 2048 and 4096qam!)
If you have a very small piece of rf spectrum like some tiny fraction of one 36MHz satellite transponder and you then oversubscribe it 32:1 or worse and also have to use fairly rudimentary loose modulations (very poor bps/Hz compared to terrestrial wired line modulations) at geostationary link budget distance, yeah, it's gonna suck.
It's more like, imagine you had fifteen people with laptops all connected to a single 802.11n AP from 12 years ago and you're all trying to torrent the latest 5GB debian install iso at the same time.
This statement is meaningless as written. You can emit as much or as little with a laser as you like. You could say "a lot of power is required for a reliable inter-satellite optical link", to which I would say "citation needed".
Iridium has been doing inter-satellite links since the late 90s and moving from RF to optical doesn't change the game that much.
With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" operations that block any non-essential comms. I no longer work for the navy but I can imagine that would involve physically cutting power to the starlink dish.
This will be amazing for retaining crew while sitting at anchor outside of Panama for day 27 of who knows how long.
You can prepare for a 7 day cruise between ports when you're going to be pretty busy anyway. The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe.
I sat through a Vodafone presentation at a maritime comms conference a couple of years ago and he quoted just how high a percentage of the world's commercial shipping traffic was within range of his LTE networks. The ability to provide high speed internet within sight of [most] land has been around for a while, at lower costs than Starlink. If providers haven't added it to their crew internet provision, it's not because they've been waiting for Elon.
But over a few years, if Starlink delivers on it's ambition, I'd expect a steady stream of converts.
Well that's the least important analysis compared to looking at what should be available in a year.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SailboatCruising/comments/vovaxs/st...
Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?
The thing that makes Starlink so appealing to airliners is that they can now do real-time telemetry of virtually every sensor on the plane without going bankrupt from the satellite data cost - not just for disaster recovery, but also for regular maintenance. Think of some random but unimportant component failing and the airline can dispatch a spare part and a repair crew to wait for the plane and do the maintenance right when it lands.
They may not track/keep that information, but there's no reason they couldn't.
So not quite an order of magnitude, but 5 times difference in launch costs should already be achievable.
And Starship will bring another 5-10 times cost reduction when measured per kg, even when you assume pessimistic mass margins and costs / launch rates.
starship won't be around anyone soon, and they need the money now.
Who are they buying launches from? How much are they paying for those launches?
As a practical matter as well, both in theory and based on usage in Ukraine, Starlink appears to be a somewhat challenging target too. A phased array doing 10-12 GHz is a fairly tight beam and it's tracking very fast across the sky, jumping around between LEO@550km (and in the future VLEO@~350km) sats. In a naval setting it's not clear that'd be much of a limiting factor: something capable of seeing that would probably need to be at such an altitude and angle to ships on the ocean that it could also just plain see any surface naval vessel directly optically or via radar. The stealth ship proposals Skunkworks suggested back around the F-117 never went anywhere since the US Navy is dumb^Wtraditional.
But as you say either way they can always just turn it off as needed. It'd be very helpful the much higher percentage of time that things are boring.
I had a hard time finding confirmation of this online (lots of hits about Starlink potentially being used _as_ a GNSS), but one of the photos of this teardown of a terminal highlights the GPS receiver: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teard...
I can tell you what the latency is on fiber from the Redmond or North bend Earth stations to downtown seattle, and it's minuscule. Same as if a person was a customer on a docsis3 or GPON network in Redmond.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1415480145830465539?t=O9...
The low orbits that give Starlink its low latency compared to geostationary satellite internet services also mean that each satellite can only see a small part of the earth at any given time. This is why they need so many satellites to provide reliable coverage.
Right now each satellite has to communicate directly to a uplink station, so it's only possible to provide coverage to areas where a satellite can simultaneously see the user and the uplink.
This is where SpaceX's planned inter-satellite link capability comes in to play, they claim they will be able to use lasers in a free-space optical network (think fiber without the fiber) to relay data directly from satellite to satellite, allowing service more than a single hop from a uplink station. This will also hypothetically allow for direct user to user connections over the satellite network that do not traverse the terrestrial internet, which would be huge for both military and business applications. Lots of words have been written about intercontinental high frequency trading for example.
Supposedly every satellite launched in 2022 has the capability but as far as I'm aware it hasn't been openly demonstrated to work yet. Making it work reliably within a single orbital ring is a hard problem and the claimed ability to cross-connect between adjacent rings is an absurdly hard problem. Neither are impossible, but I'll believe it when I see it.
This whole "yea inter-sat free space fiber links are totally going to happen" charade smacks of the same hype baiting as "full self driving by end of year" nonsense that Elon has been spouting since 2018.
The Starlink "team" did an AMA on reddit[0] last year and it was comical how empty the answers were. People asked about the space lasers and the answers were all "yea it's a really hard problem, BTW we're hiring!" which honestly felt like an admission from HR that they're looking for engineers willing/able to cash the checks marketing already wrote.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jzozv3/every_answ...
They did a test in late 2020[0], and all launches since June 2021 have been Starlink v1.5 with lasers[1].
0: https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-laser-test/
I'd even be satisfied by specific claims of test results that could be validated once the capability is officially activated.
Additionally there's the issue that their operating licenses don't allow inter-satellite communications.
This is of course a much easier problem to solve than putting a dynamic mesh network in space.
6900km from the center of Earth. Figure you don't want the link to point within 150km (6500km) of Earth, to not pass through much atmosphere and to not see too much atmospheric glow (even with narrow filters, this matters).
Effectively you have an isosceles triangle with 6900km on the common side and an altitude of 6500km (tangent to "top of atmosphere" at 150km.
sqrt((6900^2 - 6500^2)) * 2 =~ 4600km
One interesting side-effect of the laser links is that they can open up connections between stock exchanges and trading houses that are faster than direct fiberoptic lines. Milliseconds count in high frequency trading.
So I think it's plausible for intercontinental links.
The precision required for aiming is directly related to the wavelength. Iridium NEXT satellites use Ka band with a wavelength around ten millimeters where anything light related has a wavelength measured in hundreds of nanometers.
The forward/backward links are a lot easier than the inter-plane links, but it's still not trivial because you're trying to hit an object the size of a small car with a laser from over 1000 miles away. Not impossible by any means, but there's not a lot of margin for error when they're looking to be able to transfer around 100 gigabits per second over this link. Other FSO systems work at significantly lower bandwidth and/or shorter range. That's not even getting in to the inter-plane links, where the target is constantly moving even in a relative sense.
If you recall there was non-stop chatter about how HFT would be using Starlink because the latency was so low, or that it would replace fiber because the latency would be lower. It was all fake. The latency will be 30-40ms nominally for most users. That's great (it's just okay for LEO) for satellite, but let's not pretend it's anywhere near what the goal was.
Thus each piece of capacity costs more.. thus the very high costs of Iridium and Viasat.
Their profit margins aren't actually that good because their costs are so high compared to their capacity and the costs are so high that demand simply doesn't materialise - people just do without.
Starlink will change this game because of their drastically increased capacity (assuming they get sat-sat links working). Until another mega-constellation comes online I fully expect them to do to satellite Internet what they did to the launch market.
Iridium and Starlink operate in completely different bands (L vs Ka), with orders of magnitude more bandwidth available on Ka than on L. That (and the fleet size, which differs by 2-3 orders of magnitudes) is where the significantly lower bandwidth stems from.
They also followed different engineering principles, Iridium was engineered to perfection while Starlink is hacked until it works and paper over the kinks with sheer scale and many iterations.
Worth mentioning I have nothing but admiration for the original Iridium constellation, it was decades ahead of it's time, it's just so unfortunate they didn't see that broadband needs were going to dominate communications in time or maybe Motorola in it's original glory would still be around today.
and starlink doesn't have dramatically increased capacity. they have a moderate increase over the busy areas geo incumbents have. most of their capacity is over water.
Viasat's modems and rf chain stuff are about as good as can be expected within the very constrained BOM budget, antenna gains and link budgets involved.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IRDM/iridium-commu...
Neither do Viasat’s:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VSAT/viasat/profit...
For some reason, Inmarsat has very nice profit margins though:
https://craft.co/inmarsat/metrics
Interesting that Viasat was able to purchase Inmarsat given the figures.
Not if they have to replace 100's of satelites due to their 4 years life spawn.
There are videos showing calculations and how crazy starlink is from business perspective. Money doesn't add up in long term.
iridium is truly unique in that in the pre-starlink era it has been literally the only, true global pole-to-pole coverage LEO network. the trade off has been that the original network architecture of it was designed for very low data rates, so just highly compressed voice and low rate data only.
even the second generation iridium network which is now operational is still very limited in IP data rates.
you're still not going to get a starlink terminal to be as compact as a very small iridium modem and L/S-band portable antenna.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTEQ/intelsat-sa/...
SES SA is doing well, but only a couple years of data:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SGBAF/ses-sa/profi...
But yes, I did in fact assume it to be higher.
Viasat simply has near zero profit margins, and quite a few years with losses.
Inmarsat looks like it has 20% or so profit margin for the last few years, but I could not quickly find more years of data.
Also, I would expect decent (10%+) profit margins for a business with few customers and extremely costly barriers to entry. Both of those factors add to volatility, and investors would require a commensurate return to make it worth investing in.
the constrained BOM is the very reason why the terminal cost is reasonable for this business. it's well known that SpaceX is selling the terminal at a huge loss to gather customers in the short term.
the business model was clearly not the best, as witnessed by its spectacular bankruptcy, and the acquisition by the 2nd corporate incarnation of iridium.
It'd only work well outside, though.
There are many satellites overhead at any given time (the current LEOs and MEOs usually have just one), so terminals need to be able to limit their gain to a small angle not only for gain reasons. Steering in handheld applications seems very difficult.
Of course, they could dedicate parts of their spectrum to "one sided beamforming" and compete with Iridium that way (no idea if the L-band has any other advantages over Ka when used like that).
They do make a good profit in the years they do, but my point is they also have quite a bit of volatility. I would not touch that business without the 10%+ profit margin opportunities.
Was just replying to the notion that this couldn't be artificial highway robbery just because their net margin isn't great. I believe it definitely still can be, because apparently the only way these companies are even in business right now is exactly by highway robbery.
Also seems likely that if they can find a way to make small sats with the ability to accurately point a laser at another sat, that would have pretty obvious implications to the defense dept. SpaceX is a military contractor after all.
Here's the design 101 from base principles:
In practice, you need a big-ish telescope on both ends to control beamspread and to collect light from a big aperture. Aperture is a given based on link budget (and you can trade off power to make the aperture smaller, but halving the aperture diameter on both sides means you'll need 16x the power); if you target F/2 then it'll be twice as long as the aperture. Maybe think about a 6cm aperture and 12cm long telescope for a starting point. This will get you a 6 arcsecond wide beam @ 1000nm.
Then, you need to slew this at pretty fast rates-- perhaps 15 degrees per second for acquisition, and control the pointing within 3 arcseconds while tracking at peak rates of a few degrees per second. Yeek! This pretty quickly takes you towards some kind of direct drive fork mount that is very gimbally-looking.
One bit of fun is that you need to have a lot of bandwidth on your reaction control system on the spacecraft, too-- because when you snap one of these telescopes around, the whole craft is going to want to counterrotate, so the reaction control wheels (and/or other telescopes for links in other directions) will need to react. Feedforward is advised.
?
> if it wasn't there would be existing examples.
Let's see. NASA downlinked from the moon to the ground, through the atmosphere at OC-12 rates back in 2013-- so about 100x the distance, with the added penalty of traversing the atmosphere. NFIRE did 5.6 gigabit/sec LEO to ground (again through the atmosphere) in 2011-- shorter distances but higher angular rates which is the "hard part". And EDRS does 1.8gbit/sec over longer distances in geostationary orbit. Both flown and proven.
I was headhunted for a SRE position with Viasat last year due to my extensive Satcom background. I noped out as soon as I found out it was Viasat. Not because I dislike them personally, but because I don't want to be laid off next year.
You can't get the same degree of directivity. As wavelength decreases, you get more directivity for a given aperture. Light has 1/5000th the wavelength of plausible radio links, so both the sender and the receiver can have much higher gains. You also can have much more bandwidth, and thus you obtain many orders of magnitude higher data rates per unit of power used.
E.g. a 6cm telescope has 82dB of gain on each side for 1000nm light.
A 1 meter aperture (about what a 3.2x1.6x0.2m Starlink satellite can likely present to another satellite) has 53dB of gain on each side.
So for equivalent power, you have 6 orders of magnitude more signal strength, and you can occupy 10x the bandwidth, too, even if you have a very large phased array.
> The only reason you'd go for lasers here is thin civilian cover for developing a weapons platform.
This kind of system has very little in common with how I would build an anti-satellite laser system.
Or course you can achieve high speeds over geostationary if you throw entire transponders full of MHz at the problem. Which has a proportionally huge monthly recurring cost to control that transponder space. Or as a total percentage of the satellite's transponders dedicated to your network.
Yes satellite tx power from the twta is more powerful than it used to be. You still need a huge ass earth station to start doing 16apsk/32apsk reliably.
> You still need a huge ass earth station to start doing 16apsk/32apsk reliably.
16apsk has been used for about a decade now on GEO satellites. I'm not sure why the gateway size matters when we're talking about user speeds.
I note you didn't answer my question because you have no idea of what modulations, channel size and such are required to actually push 10Gbps through a satellite link to a single terminal. I think you're going off Viasat's marketing material where they're claiming aggregate throughput of an entire satellite or something.
Show me the exact hardware configuration of modems you think are capable of 10Gbps by geostationary and how much transponder MHz it needs.
I'm comparing to LEO to ground, which has a higher rate of angular movement (e.g. harder to point at) than LEO-to-LEO in the same shell, among other things.
I've built systems that point to sub-arcsecond precision at satellites in LEO. It's not quite an off-the-shelf controls problem (e.g. good luck getting a COTS motion controller to hit-a-fast-moving-target-at-a-chosen-time, rather than follow a track and not care about time) but it's not super hard, either.
Given that there's systems that have successfully flown doing links from GEO to LEO (e.g. high angular rates again), using several year old conservative technology, it's not so bad.
There's a million little details, of course. Just conduction cooling for fast optical transceivers is going to be annoying in space, for instance.
I said if they wanted to they could sell a 10Gbps plan, because that's what the link budget allows. they don't, of course, because it's not profitable. SpaceX also could in theory, do that, but they also don't. your original claim is that SpaceX somehow has far greater bandwidth to an area than Geo is patently false.
> the path loss and modulations required would mean that a given section of contended (let's say, 10MHz of a transponder) service to many terminals would still have significantly lower speeds and greater oversubscription to be economically viable compared to what end users see right now on starlink.
if your definition of economically viable is getting VC money and government subsidies pumped in so that someone else other than the subscriber is paying for the service, then I agree with you. but that's not the metric most people use when they discuss being profitable
I wouldn't be surprised if equipment and certification costs would dwarf the actual fee charged per month and user in these applications, and the market entry barrier in such highly regulated industries is usually enormous. (It took Iridium a long time to get SOLAS-certified, for example; before that, Inmarsat was the only solution besides HF radio.)
In the market of providing fast, non-safety-critical internet access to remote places however, my guess is that Starlink is going to shake up things significantly.
In some cases it might pay for itself in less than 1 month of service compared to the $/Mbps from the VSAT, using antenna hardware such as this and various vendors' choices of modems (and 3rd party VSAT ISPs that resell transponder kHz and operate teleports).
https://orbit-cs.com/maritime-satcom
Go price what it would cost for 1:1 dedicated monthly recurring billing to have 5 Mbps down x 1 Mbps up DIA service assigned to a medium sized maritime VSAT terminal that roams around the Gulf of Texas... Or even in a 5:1 or worse contended network.
What you'll see is the Iridium of course remains live and on the network and is used for critical voice calls and message and such, while the data network on the ship/offshore oil rig/whatever has a new better DIA path via starlink.
it is not like they have an extreme profit margin between their actual operating cost and the cost that a chunk of dedicated 1:1 transponder kHz/MHz (or a whole 36 MHz transponder) can be sold to the end user.
If anything, it seems like the customers should feel lucky the investors are risking their money on this product/service, and it is being offered at all.
I believe they can still commit highway robbery even without their net margins being dramatically high, since highway robbery is exactly what you stated - charging too high a price for its products/services.
For high-bandwidth large-terminal, you have Inmarsat GX, Viasat and various other Ka and Ku band based providers; for safety of life you have Inmarsat and Iridium (except at the poles, where it's Iridium and HF); for land-based tracking, you have Globalstar and Iridium; for handheld telephony, you have Iridium, Inmarsat and Globalstar.
Notably, Starlink also does not look like it will be competing in any of these fields.
I don't understand what this means. If you mean Facebook-- Facebook didn't drop billions of dollars in to free space optical comms.
> GEO to LEO is not LEO to LEO
Yes, GEO-to-LEO is worse in every way (assuming the LEO satellites are in the same inclination and have the approximate same orbital period):
* Longer link distances. (More path loss, worse link budgets)
* Higher peak angular rates for pointing.
LEO-to-Earth is mostly worse:
* Shorter link path, but atmospheric dispersion (More path loss, worse link budgets, plus things like multipath).
* Higher peak angular rates for pointing.
* Less demanding pointing precision due to shorter path, though.
The hard part isn't the optical comms in space. The hard part is fitting multiple precision-pointed transceivers into a tiny volume and mass budget.
edit: MASSIVE miscalculation fixed!
Let's say they have 12k satellites. With oversubscription at 10? and a third of time over land? but 20gbps capacity for 200mbps connections, you get 333 users per satellite. 12k gives you 4 million users, at $100/mo or $1.2k/y. I'm going to drop that to $80/mo because Starlink need to pay for backhaul, so let's say $1k/y because it's round. So $4 billion annually. Over 12 years of satellite lifetime that's 48 billion. Satellites cost $300k to make, so subtract another 4 billion for production (44 remaining). Sats are launched in batches of 50, requiring 240 launches. Internal costs are somewhere between 30 to 60 million, it's unclear because of reuse, let's say 50 million for 12 billion launch costs, leaving 3 billion a year.
And then there's some operational costs which they pay from that.
So Iunno, it doesn't seem as extremely profitable as my first calc, but it's still probably pretty profitable. And any improvement they make to the satellites over time just adds on top. (Also I don't think they actually have $50 million internal cost per launch.)
edit: Terminals "reportedly cost around $1000 to make" and are sold for $500, so nbd, subtract another 2 billion per customer-lifecycle.
Here's some of my math:
* Each customer brings in $1.2k/year.
* Satellites have 20 gbps of bandwidth, and consumers today are reporting about 50 mbps links.
* Maximum capacity is then ~1000 customers/sat because a 50 mbps connection takes 100 mbps of capacity to run duplex, and you need to double that again because customer data needs to get to backhaul.
* Satellites will spend significant time over water, and even more time over people who aren't paying - remember, metro areas all have cheaper cable internet. I would give these ~10% capacity at most.
* Satellites have 5 year life, but some fraction of them fail early - let's say that averages to 4 year replacement, and that estimate is at the high end of Musk's original estimate.
* One satellite is capable of $1.2M annual revenue, assuming 100% utilization, or $5M revenue over its life.
* Satellites cost $250k to manufacture, and $1M to launch ($50M per launch of 50 sats, making the math simple). Let's raise the unit cost to $1.5 million assuming a very good yield on satellites making it to orbit.
* The profitability of a single satellite is heavily dependent on utilization: At 10% utilization, each satellite makes $500k of revenue over its life. Satellites have to run at 30% utilization to break even.
* Customers receive a ~$1k subsidy to access the network in terms of the discount on the dish. This means we have 1 year per customer to break even on the customer. Assuming 3 year customer/dish lifetime (and assuming we will subsidize dish replacements when they break), we have only ~$2k margin per customer over 3 years, or $700 per year amortized.
* Now, the per-satellite gross margin drops to around $3-3.5M. This means that you now need up to 50% utilization to break even on a satellite.
What this all means is that starlink, if it is ever profitable, will be profitable based on niche use cases where they can charge extremely high subscription prices. Use cases like airplanes, yachts, offshore oil platforms, and military deployments. Customers who aren't paying a lot per subscription are dead weight.
By making slightly different assumptions, we have dramatically different conclusions.
The biggest factor driving disagreement seems to be satellite lifetime. You also didn't account for oversubscription.
edit: Though-
> Let's raise the unit cost to $1.5 million assuming a very good yield on satellites making it to orbit.
How do you get that?! Starlink don't lose 30% of sats, lol.
edit: I've put up a Guesstimate Model: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/20609
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMzGhc1cg&feature=youtu.be
Looks to me that you forgot about the consumer-side terminal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31486083&p=2#31487813
Read around and that thread a bit and you'll see that people confirmed my claims and that those who doubted it and checked his numbers themselves observed a three order of magnitude difference* in his cost estimation versus their estimate.
This isn't a source to get informed by, but one that makes you delusional.
Can you tl;dw? I'm not watching 40 minutes of a video that has DEBUNKED in the title.
Calculation fixed!
a note that part of the DoD iridium market where Iridium was previously the only ultra-high-latitude/polar coverage part is served by the DoD's own molniya orbit satellites which provide full polar coverage. the orbits of these are designed to be at apogee and long dwell time directly above high latitudes.
the DoD is still a big part of iridium's revenue stream in general of course.
Also, by my math, 5:1 oversubscribed is about breakeven, and it appears to be what Starlink does (reports of 10-50 mbps by users).
the path loss and need for more gain at LEO satellite distance is considerably greater than talking about terrestrial cellphone networks in bands <2500 MHz.
In MU-MIMO (available in newer versions of 802.11, for example), the base station transmits to and receives from multiple mobile devices that are located at different spatial angles. But in the mobile devices themselves, the gain from that steering is not high/fast enough to allow for multiple (relatively) fixed base stations in the same space.
In other words, a stationary/slowly moving antenna array on one side of the channel can target individual moving users due to angles changing slowly over time and the antenna array being quite sophisticated, but moving users with smaller antennas and angles varying over a much shorter period of time can't do the same.
Think about it: From a satellite's point of view, your angle varies much more slowly and predictably than the other way around, e.g. when taking a turn in a car or on a rocking boat (that's why high-gain antennas usually have to be gimbal-stabilized).
Starlink's orders of magnitude higher bandwidth, as far as I can tell, stems from requiring slowly and predictably changing angles on both sides, giving it m:n (relatively) independent spatial channels rather than just 1:n as is common for a one-sided omnidirectional approach. (That's also why Iridium and Globalstar wouldn't be able to scale significantly better in low-gain mobile-client applications by just launching more satellites.)
And those require line of sight or be very close to them to achieve high speeds. That's why there is little incentive to provide them.
I've been reading books on satellite communications and have some idea of all the technical terms you guys mentioned as well as relationship between 5g and phase array etc.
Where do you get your knowledge from regarding these issues in such detail? Do you guys work in this area? Are there any reading materials you recommend in this field that are relevant and updated to keep track of these tech?
He also claims that its product offering brings nothing new to the table compared to hughesnet and viasat which is wrong imo as offering 1/10th latency of these products is a gamechanger.
Sorry, I'd do better but I'm on mobile, I think it's worth a watch at 1.5×
Some examples:
- After lying about SpaceX launch costs, he later posts screenshots of articles. One of those articles had the true launch costs. The image was photoshopped to remove this launch cost.
- When posting pricing information for competitor services, he uses their lowest cost tiers for their highest cost service provision. He also falsely implies that SpaceX and other satellite providers are providing comparable services despite the latency difference. This is all part of his effort to mislead with regard to demand.
- When quoting speed test results, he uses outdated alpha information. He argues that speedtests would not improve, but at the time he posted the video the speed tests results did improve. He knew this. You can tell because he claims there is a government conspiracy to favor SpaceX for funding for rural internet. This reveals he knows that they qualified for this. Which reveals that he knows his speed test numbers are out of date.
- He lies about the number of launches SpaceX will have to do, double counting replacement launches. I might think these sort of things were an honest mistake, but the pattern of behavior is clear. Given any information, he distorts it and attempts to paint a bad narrative, going as far as photoshopping or proposing government conspiracies. It is obvious he did a great deal of research - so it is absurd to give him the benefit of the doubt with regard to ignorance.
TL;DR - Watching that video will make you uninformed and delusional, not informed. It is not worth watching. The person who made it is not trustworthy. You are linking, not to a skeptic, but to an Elon Musk conspiracy theorist.
I'm familiar with the mobile satellite sector and I can say for a fact that he is right about the cost of the terminal being couple times higher than $500, though getting at the exact number would require a considerable amount of digging.
I got things to say about the attitude in this micro-thread though: I'm sure y'all heard the saying "If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed". I like that quote, but I always felt like some elaboration should follow.
By all means, do watch/read/consume anything and everything, and first use introspection, ie. ask yourself "Am I qualified/informed/sane enough to reach a conclusion about this matter?", and if your answer is yes then use your critical thinking neurons to reach YOUR conclusion. Then still try to verify it with your peers, or if you can find any, experts in that particular field. Personal attacks (along with other logical fallacies) have no place in a civilised discussion.
Basing on the above, if the Starlink opposers are as desperate as you say about distorting the facts to advance their narrative, it only increases my confidence in the project. You see, I did not end up being delusional, just reached a logical conclusion to the extent of my abilities.
So all in all, thanks for taking the time to write this up.
And yes, um, read comments on /r/starlink of people switching from Viasat. It's pretty unequivocal.
(I'd say "read comments on /r/viasat of people switching from Starlink too", but, well, all you can find on that sub is people switching to Starlink.)