Musk says Starlink will work on boats

[redneckrob]

Originally Posted by Jon Hacking

Boating, you've been surprisingly negative about StarLink for a while, especially given your tagline.

Pretty much all bigger ships have, & presumably use, sat-com domes, which, as you correctly point out, are considerably more expensive than StarLink, both to buy & to operate. I'd think that those shipping companies would save a BUNDLE on StarLink when compared to their current geostationary setups, & smaller shipping lines would want in as well, since the prices are so much lower than those other options. That's not a huge market, but it's pretty sizeable.

There are a TON of RVs out there, & they'd all like a mobile solution that works anywhere. They've got a lot more vibration than we do.

Commercial planes will need a different antenna entirely, probably a skin-mounted phased array. They're probably a comparably sized market to ships, & StarLink has promised them a solution, despite having to design & build an entirely new antenna for them.

I won't try to 2nd guess Musk, but there's a sizable market for mobile connectivity (as you should know). I'm keeping the faith.

The commercial airline market is huge in revenue terms, and certainly worth Starlink's while to invest in. The rest of us mobile users will get to go along for the ride. It's also important to note for any Elon Musk company that the coolness factor of something is of equal or sometimes more importance than its contribution to the bottom line. I am guessing there's no way Elon will be able to resist that when it comes to developing mobile capability for Starlink.

[Jon Hacking]

Originally Posted by redneckrob

The commercial airline market is huge in revenue terms, and certainly worth Starlink's while to invest in. The rest of us mobile users will get to go along for the ride.

It's also important to note for any Elon Musk company that the coolness factor of something is of equal or sometimes more importance than its contribution to the bottom line. I am guessing there's no way Elon will be able to resist that when it comes to developing mobile capability for Starlink.

I agree on both points, Rob. Hope so, anyway.

And speaking of cool, how long will it be before Teslas start sporting a Dishy embedded unobtrusively in their roofs? The motors on the mounts aren't really needed, especially after the constellation gets filled in a bit more.

Lessee, some back of the envelope calculations (& yes, I'm making some gross simplifications & assumptions - the birds aren't evenly spaced, & they don't have to cover the poles as thickly)...

• Earth has a radius of 6,400Km & the birds are up 550Km so the surface area of that orbital sphere is 600M-sqKm.
  
  
• With the current 1,500 birds up, that means that each one has to cover 400,000 sqKm.
  
  
• If the final constellation goes to 30,000 birds, each one will have to cover only 20,000 sqKm.
  
  
• If Dishy can see +/-45 deg, then that's an area of 785,400 sqKm of that orbital sphere, or 0.13%.
  
  
• So with the current constellation, Dishy should be able to see about 2 birds at any time, on average.
  
  
• With 30,000 birds up, Dishy should be able to see almost 40 birds at any time, on average.

[Corvidae]

The problem Musk is going to run into with the cruising vessel market is that the Starlink needs nearby ground stations. Each satellite is an independent relay to a nearby ground station, with limited communication with the other satellites. So the open ocean becomes a problem. Still far better coverage than you could get with a cell signal, but there will be dead zones for a bit. That's the point of the medium orbit satellites in the system. They cross the gap when there's no downlink.

You can see the effect here https://satellitemap.space/?constellation=starlink

They include the down links on the map, so you can see why there's no service in Puerto Rico for instance.

I'm still curious if Dishy will need a gimbal system for boats. Due to the fast tracking needed, the dish might already be able to point fast enough on it's own. Even if the base system is too slow, it would be trivial to upgrade.

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by redneckrob

The commercial airline market is huge in revenue terms, and certainly worth Starlink's while to invest in. The rest of us mobile users will get to go along for the ride. It's also important to note for any Elon Musk company that the coolness factor of something is of equal or sometimes more importance than its contribution to the bottom line. I am guessing there's no way Elon will be able to resist that when it comes to developing mobile capability for Starlink.

I’m paying 15 euros to fly Dublin to Athens ( 4 hour flight ) I don’t think there’s much opportunity to charge me significant amounts of money to send WhatsApp’s chats.

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by Corvidae

The problem Musk is going to run into with the cruising vessel market is that the Starlink needs nearby ground stations. Each satellite is an independent relay to a nearby ground station, with limited communication with the other satellites. So the open ocean becomes a problem. Still far better coverage than you could get with a cell signal, but there will be dead zones for a bit. That's the point of the medium orbit satellites in the system. They cross the gap when there's no downlink.

You can see the effect here https://satellitemap.space/?constellation=starlink

They include the down links on the map, so you can see why there's no service in Puerto Rico for instance.

I'm still curious if Dishy will need a gimbal system for boats. Due to the fast tracking needed, the dish might already be able to point fast enough on it's own. Even if the base system is too slow, it would be trivial to upgrade.

Phased array is much faster then anything mechanical

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by Jon Hacking

Boating, you've been surprisingly negative about StarLink for a while, especially given your tagline.



Pretty much all bigger ships have, & presumably use, sat-com domes, which, as you correctly point out, are considerably more expensive than StarLink, both to buy & to operate. I'd think that those shipping companies would save a BUNDLE on StarLink when compared to their current geostationary setups, & smaller shipping lines would want in as well, since the prices are so much lower than those other options. That's not a huge market, but it's pretty sizeable.



There are a TON of RVs out there, & they'd all like a mobile solution that works anywhere. They've got a lot more vibration than we do.



Commercial planes will need a different antenna entirely, probably a skin-mounted phased array. They're probably a comparably sized market to ships, & StarLink has promised them a solution, despite having to design & build an entirely new antenna for them.



I won't try to 2nd guess Musk, but there's a sizable market for mobile connectivity (as you should know). I'm keeping the faith.

I love starlink from it’s technical aspects. But the success of global comms has been very spotty. Starlinks ability to access terrestrial customers remains completely under the control of client governments who can allow or restrict access ( especially if he challenges domestic terrestrial suppliers )

There are commercial providers like INMARSAT which have many customers through GMDSS mandatory or recommended carry rules. These will not displace easily.

Again RVs largely have access to 4G/5G cell service , which will several times cheaper then starlink

I sail the Ionian , within 20 miles of the coast I get excellent internet coverage , to me starlink offers nothing

Hence the number of mobile customers where starlink has a significant advantage is. quite small.

[Scorpius]

Originally Posted by Corvidae

The problem Musk is going to run into with the cruising vessel market is that the Starlink needs nearby ground stations. Each satellite is an independent relay to a nearby ground station,

I thought the new generation of satellites used satellite-to-satellite laser links to get away from that restriction. If one satellite couldn't see a ground station it would relay to one that could - thus eliminating dead spots.

Perhaps I'm wrong.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Scorpius

I thought the new generation of satellites used satellite-to-satellite laser links to get away from that restriction. If one satellite couldn't see a ground station it would relay to one that could - thus eliminating dead spots.
Perhaps I'm wrong.

The new inter-satellite SpaceX lasers will enable the network to operate with fewer ground stations.

They’ll route data around the constellation (between satellites), rather than between Earth and space. Fewer “hops” between the ground and orbit reduces the time it takes for a signal to travel between destinations. The goal is to provide Starlink patrons with improved latency. That improvement should translate to faster internet speeds.
➥ https://www.satellitetoday.com/broad...musk-confirms/

[redneckrob]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

I’m paying 15 euros to fly Dublin to Athens ( 4 hour flight ) I don’t think there’s much opportunity to charge me significant amounts of money to send WhatsApp’s chats.

I'm not sure what the cost of your ticket has to do with anything, if anything I suppose at least for me getting such a great deal gives more latitude to pay a couple bucks for internet access during 4 hours of being stuck in a 2x3' space. Regardless, the global market for the current crappy satellite internet service is already $2B a year on commercial flights alone, which is sufficient to at least cover the engineering and regulatory cost of making Starlink mobile.

Of course the idea is that there are all kinds of customers and mobile applications that respond to the supply and demand curve as the price falls and reliability increases, the point being to increase quantity not price. The super budget flyer is on that target curve somewhere, but probably very far down on the target audience list. However even if you get a couple bucks out of half of the 150 of them on a flight multiplied by the 115,000 flights per day worldwide it turns into decent marginal revenue with almost no marginal cost. Or to put it another way, there are 4.5B passengers every year, you don't have to get much from many of them to make it pay off, especially compared to the number of boaters both pleasure and commercial who routinely go out of cell range. So we're lucky to have that adjacent market to absorb the fixed costs and we hopefully will get to ride along.

[goboatingnow]

Ryanair did offer on board phone communications it was not a success too expensive most people didn’t bother

[Franziska]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

Ryanair did offer on board phone communications it was not a success too expensive most people didn’t bother

And that's the very reason why Starbucks will succeed, the other providers did not get into the mass market and are far to expensive.

Starlink has the economies of scale to its advantage...

[redneckrob]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

Ryanair did offer on board phone communications it was not a success too expensive most people didn’t bother

So for the vast majority of folks the phone is a little used app on their phone. The use case for Starlink on aircraft is most certainly not to make voice phone calls via air phones from the 90's at $10/minute! It's to have good, high speed internet service for a couple bucks per flight. I'm not sure how much more clearly I can put this, the entire point is that this isn't your grandpa's $10/minute with poor service product!

As I said, that's already a $2B market even at high prices and horrible service, so while you may not be partaking on your Ryan Air flight, that doesn't mean it isn't objectively a popular service. And as I also said, Ryan Air customers on an extreme budget are probably the last people in the target audience. There are plenty in the 4.5 billion passenger pool for whom there is at least a couple bucks worth of value to having reliable high speed internet service at a time you can't do much of anything else, often for several straight hours.

[redneckrob]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

I love starlink from it’s technical aspects. But the success of global comms has been very spotty. Starlinks ability to access terrestrial customers remains completely under the control of client governments who can allow or restrict access ( especially if he challenges domestic terrestrial suppliers )

There are commercial providers like INMARSAT which have many customers through GMDSS mandatory or recommended carry rules. These will not displace easily.

Again RVs largely have access to 4G/5G cell service , which will several times cheaper then starlink

I sail the Ionian , within 20 miles of the coast I get excellent internet coverage , to me starlink offers nothing

Hence the number of mobile customers where starlink has a significant advantage is. quite small.

Aside from the 4.5 billion customers I already pointed out, which I'm not sure anyone would call a "quite small" number, I don't understand your point about INMARSAT? INMARSAT BGAN is $2,800 a month for 10 GB of service, before the price of the equipment, to get you 800kbps max speed. Starlink can make money at $99/month for unlimited service at 80+ mbps, literally two orders of magnitude faster at more than an order of magnitude cheaper! We're talking about boats on the high seas here, there's no client government issues there and no-one in their right mind would opt for INMARSAT over Starlink even if Starlink decide to double or triple their mobile service pricing. If you're on a boat that's in a country that doesn't allow Starlink, you just use your cell data, as you indicated.

I would also caution that the idea that cell service is ubiquitous over land is a fallacy in the U.S. at least. I have spent a lot of time in a lot of area where cell data is unusable or completely absent, much of the rural U.S. in fact. If your RVer sticks to the interstates and decent sized cities, sure. But that's the opposite of what many RVers are looking for.

[Scorpius]

Originally Posted by redneckrob

I would also caution that the idea that cell service is ubiquitous over land is a fallacy in the U.S. at least. I have spent a lot of time in a lot of area where cell data is unusable or completely absent, much of the rural U.S. in fact. If your RVer sticks to the interstates and decent sized cities, sure. But that's the opposite of what many RVers are looking for.

Over 95% of Canada does not have cell service.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Scorpius

Over 95% of Canada does not have cell service.

And, over ninety percent of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border, leaving ± 95% uninhabited.