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.
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.
Interesting to see Chile's new Fibre network taking shape. I guess it was a factor in the placement decision for these base stations though I imagine they were also located in Chile for the higher wealth and economic stability compared to Argentina.
They’re working on demonstrating flight use on a Air Force plane.
They’ve filed for FCC approval for mobile tests.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/8/22319761/spacex-starlink-f...
Elon’s tweeted about it
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1369051431903268865?s=21
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.
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?
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.
I am curious what the power consumption and bandwidth are for each of those units.
Basically a gravel lot fenced in with a bunch of radomes mounted to what look like prefab concrete pads.
Source: my employer is that someone.
Or do they only use this method in areas where it's not schnowing?
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.
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.
What kind of ground station density does Starlink need in its eventual state?
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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-may-fine-citizens-spa...
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)
I'm not saying it's an impossible problem to solve, but will require some real time and effort.
I am sure people who smuggle drugs will find a way.
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.
They will need ground stations all over the earth soon.
Or, maybe it's just better transparency/goverment data on teleports from the US.
Still a number of trains spreading out so global ground coverage is coming soon!
(Really cool project, btw. Thanks unidentified Googlers for creating it!)
What’s the reasoning for these locations? Low RF noise floor maybe? On some major transcon fiber route perhaps?
Long haul terrestrial fiber cables aren't like submarine fiber which has copper lines to carry high voltage power for submarine repeaters/amps. The power at each site is self contained, usually a fairly normal feed from local grid utility, backup generators (diesel or propane), and -48vdc rectifier + battery setups of normal Telco grade equipment.
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...
I imagine there are also some minor security benefits from being way out in the middle of nowhere.
I'm super glad for starlink in general as it allows me personally to just need power and water (and a clear view of the sky) and opens up a bunch of extremely cheap land options for viable places to build a house.
They're now going to move somewhere else but it basically delayed the 5G rollout in the northern half of the country for years.