Starlink and the future of communication at sea

[mabowers]

Originally Posted by Discovery 15797

Getting up-to-date weather is already possible via Iridium, and marine radio fax, etc.

I suspect those of you waiting for Starlink for ocean passages will wait a long long time. Starlink uses geostationary satellites to form its net. The plan for worldwide coverage means "populated areas of the world."

But, who knows.

Not even close to geostationary, the entire constellation is low earth orbit. As for coverage, there is an interesting website that calculates that, https://sebsebmc.github.io/starlink-coverage/index.html

[CarlF]

Not only are the satellites not geo-stationary but the phased array antenna can track the moving satellites for 100 degree of arc without moving the antenna. This should make performance on a rolling boat reliable.

For those with too much time on their hands, here's a guy who did a teardown of his brand new Starlink antenna (nicknamed DISHY) to see what was inside. The good news is that the thing appears to be well waterproofed. I've already picked out where I'm going to mount mine

https://hackaday.com/2020/11/25/lite...rlink-antenna/

[Discovery 15797]

Yes, I stand corrected. Thank you all for info.

[Lance Monotone]

Whomever said Starlink is a long way off, it's in beta now and I would expect it to be available to the average consumer within a year or two (my bet is late this year). As to rural vs urban users, unless SpaceX imposes some sort of geolocation blocking or simply refuses to sell service to billions of city dwellers (not the best business model), it won't matter where you are on the planet. The satellites are everywhere in the sky, they don't discriminate.

[Discovery 15797]

Originally Posted by Lance Monotone

Whomever said Starlink is a long way off, it's in beta now and I would expect it to be available to the average consumer within a year or two (my bet is late this year).

I suggest that it will be a few years off; esp. before it's better than Iridium and provides solid offshore use.

Right now it is in limited beta (they call "better than nothing") mostly in the PNW & parts of Canada (which is why I mistakenly assumed the sats were geostationary).

Also, they will have to bring the prices way down to be available to the average consumer; esp to customers outside North America and the EU.

I don't mind paying a few hundred a year for PredictWind...getting reliable weather is important to me.

There is not much else on the Internet that is worth $1200 a year.

[chubby]

any yall been approved after signing up for beta testing(via their website)?

[CarlF]

Starlink opened up beta for all of Canada and the UK a few days ago. Promised Florida and Europe in March. This is moving very fast (as Musk tends to do).

Mid-ocean service is still a couple of years away but within 50 miles of a coast it could be this year. How often are you more than 50 miles from land?

And the $100/month price will get many takers - priced the same as cable internet in a house. It could completely change cruising communications - TV, email, telephone, Facebook, this forum - all as fast and as available on the boat as ashore - or at least that's the promise. For people with Starlink it will mean an end to marina wifi, data SIMS, cell phone and wifi boosters, DirectTV, Pactor modems, etc.

Of course, it may not work. But after betting against Tesla vs the major auto makers - I won't bet against Musk again.

[Narfi]

Originally Posted by Lance Monotone

The satellites are everywhere in the sky, they don't discriminate.

I could be wrong, but as I understand it the current batch of satellites still require an earth base as they do not communicate amongst themselves(yet).

So they do discriminate in that they can only service areas they can link to. (it doesn't do any good for you to communicate with a satellite that has no connection to the internet itself.)

I signed up for beta months ago, but looking at the map posted earlier I am just barely too far north for service yet even though I am south of Anchorage.

[dannc]

Originally Posted by CarlF

S
And the $100/month price will get many takers - priced the same as cable internet in a house. It could completely change cruising communications - TV, email, telephone, Facebook, this forum - all as fast and as available on the boat as ashore - or at least that's the promise. For people with Starlink it will mean an end to marina wifi, data SIMS, cell phone and wifi boosters, DirectTV, Pactor modems, etc.

Of course, it may not work. But after betting against Tesla vs the major auto makers - I won't bet against Musk again.

Yep.

For those of us living in the country who have VERY limited internet access, Starlink will be a sea change. Our DSL is 1.5 mbps. That is as fast as the company will provide. They are taking tax money to upgrade the network but they won't upgrade our network and I hear the same story from many people using this company across the US.

Starlink will simply be a sea change and it is not just rural people in the US but in other countries as well.

Tesla gets all of the press attention. What Musk has done with StarLink is far more impressive and does not get the attention it deserves. What has been accomplished so far is amazing.

Later,
Dan

[Lepke]

I've had Starlink at my dock for about a month. It's touchy about being near a building or roof overhang. It needs to be 10-15' away from anything overhead. I don't know how that will work out with rigging and masts. There is an app to check sky access.

In my experience, the service is about 90% reliable. It will work fine for hours and then suddenly stall and may take several seconds to several minutes to recover a connection. But it's better than wireless I had before. Faster, too. 15-18mbps. I can stream a movie and download a large file at the same time.
Setup is easy. The equipment comes with all connections made, so you know where plugs go. You can unplug to install. You set the dish, remake any connections and plug in the power supply. The dish turns and angles to find the satellites. Within a couple minutes you're online. You can connect with or without a cable. On the first login, you set a modem password. The $99/month is cheaper than the unlimited wireless I was using. And the wireless wasn't 100% reliable. I also has satellite internet in the past. That wasn't especially reliable either, metered, and had trouble if the boat was bouncing around.

[bcboomer]

Just got my Starlink.

It is just sitting in the cockpit and even partially hidden by the solar panels I'm getting 50-100 Mbps.
The boat movement when it is blowing doesn't affect it at all.

I see a news item today saying that next year the satellites will have laser connections to give coverage without ground stations.

Beats the hell out of the marina wifi that, even with an Island Time antenna is .2 to 3 Mbps and goes to 0 randomly.

Next step is a bracket to put it on the radar arch.

[Lance Monotone]

Originally Posted by Narfi

I could be wrong, but as I understand it the current batch of satellites still require an earth base as they do not communicate amongst themselves(yet).

So they do discriminate in that they can only service areas they can link to. (it doesn't do any good for you to communicate with a satellite that has no connection to the internet itself.)

I signed up for beta months ago, but looking at the map posted earlier I am just barely too far north for service yet even though I am south of Anchorage.

Regarding interlink capability:

From spaceflightinsider.com - 10/18/2020:

During the live broadcast of September’s Starlink 11, SpaceX Senior Program Reliability Engineer Kate Tice confirmed that there had been tests conducted using two satellites which featured ‘space lasers’. “Recently as the Starlink team completed a test of two satellites …that are equipped with our inter-satellite links which we call called space lasers,” she said, “With these space lasers, the Starlink satellites were able to transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data.”

Continued testing and optimization of the inter-satellite communications through the “Space-Laser” feature will be an important component and benchmark to follow as SpaceX’s Starlink network data improves overall transfer rates, allowing latency rates to decrease and out-perform competing communications options. The company plans to mass-enable these inter-satellite links: “Once these space lasers are fully deployed, Starlink will be one of the fastest options to transmit data all over the world,” Tice stated.

https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/m...constellation/

Space lasers! I love Elon's sense of humor. I'm a bit of a fanboy, I'll admit.

[CaptTom]

Exciting to hear the good reviews! I signed up for the beta but never got called.

Without doing the math, I wonder what the "space laser" feature will do to latency. Obviously mid-ocean any signal at all would be great. But how much latency will one "hop" add? What about multiple hops between satellites before reaching one in range of a ground station?

Obviously this issue goes away with more ground stations. Just as when cellular coverage wasn't very good until there were cell towers every few miles.

Exciting stuff! For $100/mo I'd be a customer today. I would SO love to tell the local monopoly cable company where they can get off.

[Dsanduril]

With the current constellation the typical hop between satellites is about 400 miles/600 km. It's not at all homogenous, but that's pretty typical. At that distance each hop takes about 2ms for transmission. Conversion at both ends, in earthbound fiber optic systems, can add about 10% to that. I'd assume Elon and crew are using gear that can make that kind of turnaround but it is an unknown.

That leaves a broad estimate of 1-3ms/hop and a few spots in the world where you might need 8-10 hops to get in view of a potential ground station.

[Jon Hacking]

Light doesn't actually go very far in a fiber before it has to be received, amplified, & retransmitted, all of which ads to the latency. Also, light in free space is a few percent faster than light in a fiber. So it wouldn't surprise me if StarLink can beat most transoceanic cables, even if the signal has to zig-zag a bit between birds.

Not that I really care. A few more msec of latency is still way better than what we're currently using.

The bigger issue for me is the power required for the user terminal, which I understand is about 100W. That's a bit much for a boat at sea to leave on for very long, even with a big solar array.

As I understand it, the first 700-ish birds did not have the inter-satellite laser capability, so it's only the birds that have been launched since about October have that capability. Still, that's several hundred birds, since they're producing & launching almost 120/month. Iridium can get a sat/sat mesh going with only 66 sats, & StarLink's way past that, but presumably some of those original 700, which I understand are now being de-orbited, are in critical positions needed to complete the mesh.

I'm actually surprised that StarLink is investing in so many ground stations. If the birds will have sat/sat comms, why bother with ground stations? OK, maybe they're only temporary, while they test the system?