And with 2.3M customers, that's an average 1.7 Mbit/s per customer, or 550 GB per customer per month, which is kinda high. The average American internet user probably consumes less than 100 GB/month. (HN readers are probably outliers; I consume about 1 TB/month).
The way Starlink satellites are in orbit, the same satellites will remain "ahead" and "behind" you in the orbital plane. Those laser links (specifically!) will remain relatively persistent. This arrangement is similar to Iridium FYI.
FTA: "in some cases, the links can also be maintained for weeks at a time"
I think there is a lot of variance. The article also states about 266,141 “laser acquisitions” per day, which, if every laser link stayed up for the exact same amount of time, with 9000 lasers, means the average link remains established for a little less than an hour: 9000 (lasers) / 266141 (daily acquisitions) * 24 * 60 = 49 minutes
So some links may stay established for weeks, but some only for a few minutes?
But that’s me.
I don't think that breaks net neutrality either, which the FCC seems to be reimplementing
Edit: see https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
I'm kinda pissed their is no local ISP competition in my area....and iv tried reaching out to companies with little success...or they say were expanding to your area soon but will not say when.
10GB symmetric fiber isn't hard. Hell I'd use more bandwidth if I could but I'm stuck with no fiber atm
So it's hard to sustain the theoretical 100GPS connection for hours let alone days across 2 end points which are in constant motion.
I think I agree that each laser is grossly underused on average, but if you read the article, there's quotes about the uptime of these links. They're definitely not just "used in bursts [of] a few tens of seconds or minutes".
Don't forget that every communication protocol has fixed and variable overhead.
The first is a function of the packet structure. It can be calculated by simply dividing the payload capacity of a packet by the total number of bits transmitted for that same packet.
Variable overhead is more complex. It has to do with transactions, negotiations, retries, etc.
For example, while the theoretical overhead of TCP/IP is in the order of 5%, actual overhead could be as high as 20% under certain circumstances. In other words, 20% of the bits transmitted are not data payload but rather the cost of doing business.
So in addition to households add foreign bases and possibly drone command networks to possible sources of traffic going fast enough to warrant sat-to-sat connection.
I should probably see if my router can bandwidth limit their mac addresses...
Dead internet theory (alive and well!)
1tb feels reasonable to push that much video.
I'd be interested in what the sustained power/thermal budget of the satellites is.
Cross-plane optical links would have a trickier tracking problem.
While there's no explicit mention of same-plane vs cross-plane optical links, I assume that the first time people have a public cross-plane optical link, they will make a big deal out of it. :)
The article also mentions that SpaceX would need to do further study before using laser links between satellites and ground stations-- this kind of optical link would require both more angular tracking and probably atmospheric correction as well.
> For the future, SpaceX plans on expanding its laser system so that it can be ported and installed on third-party satellites. The company has also explored beaming the satellite lasers directly to terminals on the Earth’s surface to deliver data.
Is there rough pointing, followed by some rastering, until the sensor gets a hit? Maybe with some slight beam widening first? My assumption is that you would want exactly one laser, one sensor module, and probably a fixed lens on each? Is the sensor something like a 2x2 array, or pie with three pieces, to allow alignment? Or is it one big sensor that uses perturb and observe type approach to find the middle?
Also, is there anything special about the wavelengths selected? Are the lasers fit to one of the Fraunhofer lines? 760nm seems like a good choice?
Sounds very cool that cross-plane links are doable, even if they have predictable complications compared to in-plane.
I would have thought that someone would make a big deal (have a press release, e.g.) out of successfully establishing cross-plane links, but maybe it just doesn't seem that impressive to people who already have good enough precise predictive ephemerides or satellite states to make those links in the first place.
“ Cross-seam inter-satellite link hand-offs would have to happen very rapidly and cope with large Doppler shifts; therefore, Iridium supports inter-satellite links only between satellites orbiting in the same direction.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellat...
I'm assuming two things: That something like Manchester coding is being used so that some clock skew is tolerable, and that the laser carrier is not in fact being frequency or phase modulated. Last I checked FM and PM of optical frequencies was not yet practical outside of laboratories, but I'm happy to be corrected.
If they could only do in-plane links, they would have barely any acquisitions per day, because most links would stay up for long periods of time.
Additionally, their inter satellite links use regular Ka band radio.
And if they have zones where they don’t go to adjacent orbits, but instead go up or down within their orbit for the handover between orbits.
At first this sounded like an utopian dream but now it looks like common infrastructure that has a place in everyones life.
This must have been the same feeling when the first landlines were installed. The very first lines were a sensation and then after only a few years it becomes normal quickly.
My deepest hope currently is that the riches of the universe now on the horizon of being relatively easily accessible, in a systematic and efficient way, will lead to the military industrial complex profit seeking to redirect their efforts to mining the riches of the our solar system and beyond, rather than likely mostly inadvertently driving for hell on Earth.
You can’t deny (I don’t think) that the things he’s done are amazing. He’s in the zone where he’s smelt too many of his farts though, and believes he can do no wrong, which is historically a very bad place to be. I hope, for all of the awesome things he’s said he’d like to do, that they don’t come agutsa due to that
- About 4,000 customers worth of maxed out Gigabit internet
- ~243,000 simultaneous Netflix 4K streams
- 1.6% the capacity of the latest BlueMed undersea fiber cable
Edit: It's international traffic. YouTube, Facebook video has local cache server by ISP.
https://info.cobaltiron.com/blog/petabyte-how-much-informati...
ftp.ebi.ac.uk for example.
How do I think of 42 petabytes in terms of an ISP? Is that a lot? How does it compare to other satellite providers? How does it compare to 4G capacities? Is this a small country worth of traffic or just any ol' data center? I have no intuition about traffic at this scale.
Most people's experience with 4K video is through a streaming service, and 10 minutes of 4K video on a streaming service is more like 1-1.5 GB.
Or a UHD Disc perhaps where 10 minutes is 3.5-7 GB.
Which also makes me wonder how many of the shooting stars I've seen recently are just old starlinks burning up.
Probably close to none. The lifetime of the satellites is about 5 years give or take. According to this page [1], a total of 355 satellites have deorbited over the past roughly 5 years. That's an average of about 71 per year or about one every 5 days.
Since planned disposals are done over uninhabited areas (e.g. the pacific ocean), the likelihood of spotting one is very low.
Hope that helps answer your question, even it wasn't necessarily meant seriously :)
[1] https://starlinkinsider.com/starlink-launch-statistics/Wow ... is it economical to replace the entire constellation every 5 years? How does the business side work? Or is it just a great money-burning party?
I see them 1/3 of the time in outside for 30 minutes or more I’d say. Thought they were much rarer. Only seems a Starlinkn train once.
2. The sky needs to be dark enough to see it (so twilight or night)
3. The satellite needs to be illuminated by the sun.
4. The satellite needs to reflect enough light that you can see it.
Basically this happens just before sunrise, and just after sunset. So the ground and sky are dark (allowing you to see through the atmosphere), and the satellite - being at high altitude - is still illuminated.
As they pass overhead, you can often see them suddenly vanish as they pass into the Earth's shadow.
The International Space Station is a good one to find, as it's quite bright (very large).
There are various websites and apps; some phone apps use the GPS and magnetometer to show you what direction and time to look, and a search tool to look for visible objects at your location. It used to be really good with the old Iridium satellites, which gave a bright flash due to their large flat antennas.
Planes are similar, but tend to have flashing or colored lights and obviously aren't as far away.
I'm in a big city, but close to the ocean so I have a bit less light pollution. The city is also heavy military, so that could be part of the frequency.
Update: if you're near any of the spacex launches, you can watch the rocket too. I'm house sitting in Irvine, CA and saw the Monday launch go right near the house. Amazing to watch the plume from the rocket!
You probably just thought it was a star or a plane. They move but relatively slowly (even a fast LEO sat will cover the sky in about 5 minutes). They look just like a star apart from moving slowly. Depending on angles they can look pretty dim, especially the latest SpaceX sats. But the ISS is usually really bright because it's so huge and technically it's also a satellite.
You can tell them apart from a plane because they don't flash.
Edit: But yes there are several conditions that need to be met to see them like the other posters have mentioned. But every clear night near dusk or dawn you will see sats for sure. There are just so damn many in LEO now.
In general, you can see a satellite when it is overhead and illuminated by the sun. In the evening, it will appear in the west, moving towards the east ( almost all satellites go this way, not just ISS ). As it goes farther east, heading towards darkness, it will fade away. The ISS is bright enough to see a reddish tinge as it passes through sunset light.
Shooting stars go much faster than satellites.
You should try to find one once, with the help of an app. It's not that difficult.
> Brashears also said Starlink’s laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long “it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth,” he said, before the connection broke.
How do these tiny satellites achieve this kind of accuracy and link quality when they're shooting around Earth with 17.000 miles an hour?
(Meanwhile, me on Earth, has link quality issues due to a speck of dust on a fiber connector)
Maybe the future of usb in 10 years :)
It's incredible really. I remember when I was a kid living with my mom on an island, we got broadband relatively late (compared to the rest of the country), as the island required antennas for getting mainland and the island linked, instead of cables. I think it was set up that way because of costs or something, remember it being expensive...
Regardless, the antennas were setup and we finally got broadband, but every time it got a bit windy and/or rainy, the links started to have huge issues, especially if the lake got lots of waves, then the connection simply disappeared.
And now it seems almost like magic to me how the same setup is literally done but way above our heads, in a really hostile environment like space.
Even the original ones weren't that small weighing 570lb.
Re. Link quality: laser, line of sight, most of the trip is in vacuum and the rest in very sparse atmosphere. So interferences are likely quite low.
American vehicle manufacturing was a strategic advantage during WWII because they swiftly pivoted to selling tanks to the government instead of cars to civilians.
Also, if it is that strategically important, the government can just buy SpaceX.
Sounds great, what could possibly go wrong?
I can't figure out what this sentence means.
SpaceX for sure.
Hard to argue that Tesla is "bleeding edge" anymore; they maintain some advantages, but have fallen behind in other domains.
FSD12 is end-to-end neural nets and the videos are pretty impressive. Who else is doing that ?
Won’t beat HF radio though.
My guess is the real latency depends mostly on the latency of relay nodes (either satellites or routers on earth), not the medium through which signals travel.
I see folks in the Pentagon doing a collective /phew that this project is online in the next decade, multiple times.
On top of that, you may have queuing in each satellite.
Finally, the satellite laser links aren’t pointing exactly in the direction you want to your packets to travel. They’re at some diagonal, and the packets need to tack back and forth, which wastes distance. Think the streets of Manhattan.
There was company recently wanting to do high-frequency trading on HF because of the quickest path.
I know space is really big and so the odds of a rocket hitting a satellite on its way up are incredibly low, but now we're talking about lots of lines between each satellite rather than just the satellites themselves. Are the odds still tiny?
Not that it would be a big deal if it happened, just curiosity.
https://satellitemap.space is pretty amazing but a Starlink satellite looks massive on there, really at the scales we are talking they wouldn't even be a pixel. Do we know how many of the satellites are actually interlinked by lasers?
I think you could take the time a rocket would be in the way and compare it to the time it would take any given satellite link pair to make an orbit to form an estimate of the chance of a single interference. Then multiply by rockets and satellite pairs to form an overall estimate.
Which is actually a lot more then I estimated when I started this math, kinda puts into perspective more then 1 of the scales at play here.
Tl;dr Rockets are fast, data is apparently faster.
[0] Apparently on its longest distance link Starlink intersected 30km altitude
[1] Ref: my ass
Aside, but it's not left to chance. They only launch when there's a gap in the space traffic.
PCMag serves me English, with "en-GB,en", though I don't know if they would support Danish anyway.
I can hear the SI crying.
https://www.sda.mil/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/SDA_OCT_Stand...
Only complaint is that their DHCP server is buggy so if you don't use their blessed router, you can expect outages when you get transitioned to a new base station and starlink expects your IP to have changed, but it doesn't, or sometimes when your IP lease expires. Took me months to figure out that was the issue. I run almalinux on my router so I just have a script that checks a heartbeat and if it gets interrupted it will nmcli down the wan interface and back up, which usually gets a new IP. Though sometimes it will give the special IP to my router that is supposed to go to the blessed router.
Overall I do recommend, but have a backup ISP if always up is important.
I use it when I'm venturing around my rural area, which has spotty (or zero) LTE and broadband. It's awesome for that, literal game-changer.
But it does suffer from downtime, sometimes poor reception, bit of lag, etc. It's the difference between 99% uptime and 99.999999%; you'll notice if you're using it all day, every day. It's also more expensive than my home broadband for lower speeds. I don't think you could replace your ISP, unless your ISP is pretty bad.
They’ve also nearly halved the price since I signed up.
1. Full-circumference world round-trip latency sat to sat (yes it has to go to ground to “count” but I just want to know what the number is)
2. Deployed LEO servers running with laser communication to the Starlink satellites. Preferably gaming or CDN since either is a great way to verifiably test the limits.
Might be an issue for Antarctica and major seas.
I dont think theres anything having to do with seams or fabric in this conversation
You can try it out for 30 days and form your own opinion.
EDIT: there's some confusion information out there. With a more conservative estimate of 150.7 exabytes per month, Starlink gets 1 part of 119, which is more impressive.
