Musk says Starlink will work on boats

[Scorpius]

Originally Posted by GordMay

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

Yup, but for some reason I always seem to be in the 10% and the 95%

[sv_pelagia]

Originally Posted by Scorpius

Over 95% of Canada does not have cell service.

Perhaps cell coverage maps (which are always overly optimistic) for coastal British Columbia are of interest:

Rogers/Fido:


Telus/Koodo:


Telus/Koodo is definitely best (I believe Bell & Telus share coverage).

Large (major!) gaps on Central and Northern BC coasts, Haida Gwaii, and West Coast Vancouver Island.

[bcboomer]

Damned near every anchorage we have been in has no cell service!
A Starlink techie told me, last summer, that we may have service in the Salish Sea by this summer. I hope that happens.

[sv_pelagia]

Originally Posted by bcboomer

Damned near every anchorage we have been in has no cell service!

A Starlink techie told me, last summer, that we may have service in the Salish Sea by this summer. I hope that happens.

Get a cell amplifier... works for us when service (w/o amp) is sketchy (which is most of the mainland coast north of the rapids).

[Corvidae]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

Starlinks ability to access terrestrial customers remains completely under the control of client governments who can allow or restrict access

I'm waiting to see how long it's going to take Starlink to be available in India. They've been VERY restrictive of satellite communication since there was a terrorist attack that used sat phones to coordinate, not only helping in the attack, but making it near impossible to stop or track their communications. So I get their restrictiveness. At the same time though, communications are going to spread on other channels, causing just as much of a problem.

At some point it will get sorted out, but I'm expecting it to be a fairly messy process.

[goboatingnow]

Well we shall see soon enough in the next year or two what transpires.

[Statistical]

One complicating factor is that the upper 500 MHz of Starlinks downlink frequency range is not authorized for ESIM (Earth Station in Motion).

SpaceX has requested a waiver from the FCC but that moves it from a mere technical certification of equipment to a rule change with all the public input and lobbying that comes with it. They also need the intersat links working across the network to allow coverage beyond coastal waters.

At best you are looking at a couple years. I think it will be a decent deal but I would expect the hardware and plans to be more expensive that what is available to residential users. The competition is just a lot weaker. Starlink only needs to be cheapER than existing options and for marine users that isn't that cheap.

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by redneckrob

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.

The service was internet capable on Ryanair it was not primarily aimed at voice calls. It’s wasn’t that fast and was expensive mainly aimed at texting users. It didn’t last long as an offering.

We shall see what happens I hope the optimism is justified. I’m expect to waiting another 20 years before I see a proper autonomous Tesla. Actually objectively I think Mercedes will be there first.

I think mobile pricing will be 10x land pricing

[redneckrob]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

The service was internet capable on Ryanair it was not primarily aimed at voice calls. It’s wasn’t that fast and was expensive mainly aimed at texting users. It didn’t last long as an offering.

We shall see what happens I hope the optimism is justified. I’m expect to waiting another 20 years before I see a proper autonomous Tesla. Actually objectively I think Mercedes will be there first.

I think mobile pricing will be 10x land pricing

Self driving capability of Teslas has a out as much to do with this conversation as the price of a random Ryanair 4 hour flight in Europe did

Just as an aside, the vast majority of North American flights now have internet service and for the third time, objectively it's earning a decent amount of money despite it sucking. I would highly recommend you take a flight over here and spend a couple weeks in an RV in rural Canada or the U.S.. You may be as surprised at how little that big chunk of the world is like your experience flying Ryanair and sailing around Europe as I am every year when I travel to Europe and experience the opposite. It would certainly change your outlook this particular subject, which seems to be based entirely on some rather wild extrapolations of personal experience.

On mobile Starlink, if it's a single order of magnitude higher than it currently is then it's still less than half the price of Inmarsat and two orders of magnitude faster. I am guessing it's only going to be a couple hundred dollars a month, and being a business owner with a lot of experience on how much price impacts demand and some faith that Elon does as well that only makes sense as the most profitable route. But we'll see, hopefully we can revisit this thread within the next year or so with an answer.

[Jon Hacking]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

... I think mobile pricing will be 10x land pricing

Musk's not known for gouging customers. Dishy still costs SpaceX almost twice as much to build as what they sell it for. And they can't build them fast enough for current demand. If he wanted to charge more, he could do that now, & the volumes probably wouldn't go down significantly.

And it certainly wouldn't cost much more to provide mobile coverage. Put some IC accelerometers in Dishy & the SW to use them. No more than a few bucks at the production level (which doesn't seem to mean much to Musk).

Given that all future birds will have laser interconnects, the incremental system costs to provide mobile coverage will be pretty close to zero. Some tweaks to the bird's SW to reestablish contact once the mobile user leaves their cell, but cell-towers have been doing that forever. This, & the accelerometers, will be needed for planes anyway.

Here in the Philippines, I get unlimited LTE data for $10/month, so StarLink is not at all price competitive except where there's no service. And this is true for much of the world, as you pointed out. Yes, governments can get obstructive about licensing, but it actually saves them from having to provide service to those remote (& therefore, probably unprofitable) communities.

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

But what happens if/when StarLink gets on those recommended carry lists?

You're absolutely right that the next few years will be interesting, to watch how this all unfolds.

[Jon Hacking]

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.
...
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.

This problem is well known to StarLink. The original v1.0 birds couldn't talk to each other, so you're right, the bird you talk to has to be able to see a ground station, & there aren't that many of them. Since the birds are in relatively low orbits, they can't see very far, so you have to be within a few hundred nm of a ground station.

But late last year, StarLink started launching v1.5 birds, which have laser interconnects. This means that your data can skip from bird to bird, & only come down to Earth when it gets close to its destination. And since lasers in space are actually faster than lasers in glass fiber, overall internet performance should be improved. Musk is hoping to beat the speed of the undersea cables from NY to London.

Dishy is a "phased array" of over 1,000 radiating elements. It's not a parabolic dish at all. A phased array can redirect its beam in single digits of ms (or possibly even faster). This is MUCH faster than any mechanical redirection, & certainly fast enough to compensate for the motion of the platform (boat) it's mounted to. However, it currently needs better instrumentation to measure that movement, so it can redirect its beam to counteract it.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Corvidae

I'm waiting to see how long it's going to take Starlink to be available in India...

Starlink hits a wall in India
India has told Starlink, which is yet to get a licence, to refund clients and refrain from fresh orders.
Starlink is planning to apply for a commercial licence in India by the end of January.
More about ➥ https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/20...-wall-in-india

[promanus]

I and my wife are planning to semi-retire in 2 years on a catamaran. She still wants to work and can work remotely. For us having Starlink would be priceless since most of her time is spent on video conferencing which means low latency and decent, constant bandwidth.

We would love to spend our time cruising Caribbean, Bahamas and the east coast of US. LTE is available in many places in US and our recent trip to Bahamas showed that it is available in many places there too. However, approximately half of our week trip was spent in anchorages without any or very poor LTE coverage.

So Starlink would be a great help and we would be prepared to pay quite a lot for it.
Two more points:
- middle of the ocean communication is not crucial for us since I don't see her working on passages (low bandwidth communication for weather would be great though but we have solutions for it now).
- I don't think we are alone in our desire to semi-retire on the boat with a need for decent communications

[Rubicon King]

Gord, Musk is smart, but check out AST Space Mobile, they have cracked the code and will beat musk to affordable 5G coverage globally. They are the REAL DEAL

Originally Posted by GordMay

Cat on a hot satellite dish: Elon Musk’s Starlink antenna hits surprise problem
Starlink’s satellite internet performance has fallen victim to felines attracted to the warmth its dish gives off on cold days.
Starlink, Elon Musk’s internet company, has more than 1,600 outdoor satellites orbiting through space. However, some of the earthbound Starlink satellite dishes are having an internet speed problem. The satellite dishes have a self-heating feature, which works great at melting snow—but may be why cats are huddling on them to warm up, the Guardian reports.
More ➥ https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...cats-elon-musk

[redneckrob]

Originally Posted by Rubicon King

Gord, Musk is smart, but check out AST Space Mobile, they have cracked the code and will beat musk to affordable 5G coverage globally. They are the REAL DEAL

AST Mobile has launched I believe one proof of concept satellite, while SpaceX has launched 1,800 and has an actual service in place. Additionally, AST Mobile doesn't ever plan to have service where the LEO satellite doesn't have view of a telco ground station so to the extent it matters to you they have no plans for worldwide coverage. And their model depends on individual agreements with telcos in each country so again mileage will vary depending on if they've managed to strike a deal with a telco in the country you're in. I don't think they've cracked either the technical code for handling a large number of 5G customers per satellite or the business code for setting up agreements with the 25,000+ telcos in the world.

They're a startup playing the "fake it till you make it" game pretty hard, I know because I've done the same thing. I wish them the best of luck, but they're a looooong way from anything viable. If they actually manage to put up a service they'll certainly beat Starlink to 5G coverage, given that 5G coverage isn't what Starlink is trying to achieve. But Starlink has already beat them to providing internet coverage via LEO satellite by quite a long ways.

Good luck with your ASTS holdings by the way, although trying to pump the stock here probably isn't going to help you much.