Starlink Ground Station Map (opens in new tab)

El Chalten is in Argentina and its a completely different story over there.

Chile has fiber all the way to the very south and is in the process of further expanding this network to all relevant cities in the south until the end of next year.

https://foa.subtel.gob.cl/mapa-de-proyecto-foa/

Unfortunately (at present) Starlink does not provide for mobile platform access. They say you have to stay within your access cell and people have reported inability to connect if the antenna is taken somewhere distant from the registered home position. Maybe that will change in the future though?

OneWeb is coming to boats this year, even before it has global coverage. One thing to note with OneWeb is there are two terminals that must be placed more than 10' apart. e.g. ideal to put one on each hull of a cat, might be a bit tricky finding somewhere to put them on a 35' mono-hull.

So far it looks like OneWeb is going to be a better option for marine use because you can actually find information about it within the industry already. With Starlink all we have to go on is speculation and the occasional tweet.

Until you need to shop for groceries and boat repair supplies, of course.

I believe musky said mobile would be active by end of year?

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 map legend points out that most of the data is from FCC filings, so other countries might not have complete data. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still more stations in the US than elsewhere, but this map probably isn’t the best evidence for that.

There is no direct connectivity between the satellites at this point, so starlink can't be expected to have global reach yet - you go up, and you come down within a certain distance of where you are.

They will need ground stations all over the earth soon.

They're starting in the US but expanding to other countries now too. it won't be long before you will see these all over the world. It's already possible to pre-order starlink here in Spain for service around the end of this year.

Likely it's easier for a US based company to get licensed and find sites to lease in the US. Also, better to get experience with equirment before going global.

Or, maybe it's just better transparency/goverment data on teleports from the US.

the legend is in the atlantic ocean near the bermudes (click on the three round dots, + and two eyes)

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.

They are roughly the area in which you can be connected to a satellite that is directly connecting to the ground station in the middle of it.