Starlink say 20ms average ping and of course they claim to be increasing their bandwidth. I have seen stuff claiming it can’t do cell service because of the band etc. I don’t buy that. They said they won’t do inner city but I think they just got a license for it. I think they didn’t want to scare the telcos prematurely.
I agree on all that but I think the real insight with Tesla is it has transformed the cancer cell known as the corportion into a regular cell of society or societal building block. It looks like a corporation but I don’t think it is. But I still wish Tesla and its investors would sue to keep Blackrock and its proxy in the managed side of Vaguard from buying shares because they are in my opinion only to trying to sabotage Tesla to protect the money and power behind fossil fuels- their intent in my opinion is obviously criminal and should be addressed.
Of course it won’t. The frequencies for cell phones are reserved for the cell phone companies. Business limitations/decisions always trump technical possibilities. In Australia and I think USA too the frequencies used are are reserved by government departments (FCC in the US) and the cell phone companies pay a hefty price for the rights to use them.
The satellites are being used for Internet comms (TCP/IP). You can do voip calls of course.
The 20mS would be for a specific place since the speed of light governs how long signals take to traverse a certain distance and then there is the additional routing/repeating delays too. There is no way on earth that a packet will get from Australia to the US in 20mS using light or radio waves.
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While reading some of the FAQ’s this one is of extreme importance to the Safe Network
Can I port forward with the Starlink router?
The Starlink router does not have the capability to forward ports.
Also it will use CGNAT with 2^22 available IPv4 addresses (4 million). When needed it will be upgraded to IPv6 with no CGNAT
As to speed
Customers can expect to see download speeds between 100 Mb/s and 200 Mb/s and latency as low as 20 ms in most locations.
As we launch more satellites, install more ground stations, and improve our network software, speed, latency and uptime will continue to improve.
Note that its a minimum of 20mS and represents 6000Km for light to travel. But this includes routing and repeater (satellites) delays, meaning a much smaller distance of signal travel. There is approx 1000Km for the signal to go into space and back again
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Any idea about why they would be blocking port forwarding?
The blocks of spectrum for licenses aren’t forever. They really cannot pay for monopoly enclosure. They do not pay remotely close to enough. There are ways around their temporary blocks like white space.
I think we should be giving the “corporate death penalty” to some of these firms including AT&T (going further than the last break up)- their lobbying against our basic rights should go a lot further in terms of consequences than then the corporate death penalty. I think of these companies as making bribery and corruption pay companies and in general the public rightly hates and them and what they stand for and it would be close to unanimous opposition if the public knew more about them- it is a lot worse than a total idiot complete bottom line focus. These are companies that seek to rent seek the time and energy out of people’s lives and work with other such rent seekers as a kind of oppressive quilt. You can imagine working with planners behind the scenes talking about how much disposable income (they mean all income) and hence time and energy they should be allowed through planning to encroach on in the average person’s life and how much at the same time they should be able to suppress wages in a bid for slow cook the frog for complete oppression. It is the picture of non sustainable instability.
I doubt it is a policy issue, but simply a technical one. Its a CGNAT.
Starlink is trying to get into the ISP market with their satellites. To try and get into cell phone market at the same time is extremely difficult. It requires spending a lot more money before they have any serious market. They have 2000 satellites out of 30,000 up there, the cost is extremely high.
Also for a household you have one internet and 1 to 5 mobile phones. Cell phone coverage is extremely expensive compare to internet supply.
Additionally you need special phones to use satellites. Thus you need the public to buy new expensive phones to use their satellites when the populated areas are swamped with cheaper cell service.
You see digital cell phones have to be within 11 Km (IIRC) of a cell tower or else will not work properly. Now with the Satellites 500Km away its impossible to use standard cell phones.
As far as cell phones are concerned they are forever, for the life of the usefulness of the spectrum.
Satellite phones use a different band anyhow. The technical limitations dictate the market for satellites phones and for the time being it is well served and not worth the costs involved to add additional transmitters/receivers in the starlink satellites. Also doing so reduces the internet effectiveness.
The area later on is to target and develop for is mobile internet via satellites, but that will still require special devices and will be a lot slower than using a dish since the freq band used will not allow such speeds since a mobile device needs to have a much smaller receiver (something like a big 4G dongle)
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maybe mobiles can just connect through the starlink routers wifi and do voice over wifi
or maybe ISPs with cell towers can replace the ground optical links with starlinks when the speed will be fast enough
Yep, that is what i mention to Warren earlier. VOIP or whatever they call it now.
I honestly doubt it, the delays/lag would not be good. Also it would swamp the sat links since the sats can only handle a certain amount of bandwidth.
I doubt that starlink in the next while will ever see the majority of people use it, and I reckon that starlink themselves do not expect the majority of people/businesses to use it. @peca said before optic fibre has the ability to carry a lot more traffic than the satellites can, especially for city wide cell tower connections and intercity connections.
They don’t, never have. According to Elon, it has always been primarily designed for rural areas and sparsely populated suburbs. Coverage would be restricted in urban areas. Not sure how that would work, though, in cities. First come, first serve maybe.
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That is what you see when accessing their site for ordering. Currently my area is instant acceptance for ordering and delivery. Obviously there was not enough pre-orders for my area to fulfil the allocated number of customers for my area. We simply do not have the density of satellites over Australia to provide service to a large number of people.
Also on the other side city/urban areas have NBN service available which gives 25/50/100Mbps services to everyone and I expect that there is not the demand for starlink. Many people are using the 50Mbps service as its a sweet point between cost and speed so why would many of those consider the more expensive starlink service.
Rural and out of city areas is a different story.
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OK, it arrived today and I thought with the pre-delivery checks using their App I would need to have the dish on the roof because of the tall trees in the area. Some trees around are 50-90 meters high but across and little down the creek.
But I put the dish on the back deck railing and getting almost consistent connection. Last 2 hours has seen 29 seconds of connection loss and that was within the first 10 minutes and could have been anything. No loss for the last 1 hour 50 minutes.
I pinged a USA site on my NBN connection and it is 230mS varying by less than 2 or 3 mS
The starlink from my phone connection showed 180 mS average. 170-190mS range and the phone to the wifi router is 6 to 10 mS and I should reduce the ping time by at least 6 mS to account for the extra delay in wifi. PC to NBN router is 1 to 2 mS
I would confidently say this is a good reduction in ping times approx 175mS compared with 230mS which is a 55mS reduction. (yes averaged) OR a 24% reduction.
Obvious this varies as the satellites move across/around the earth. and is expected to reduce once version 2 satellites are significantly deployed in the next couple of/few years
Just an update. Oh I have seen 300Mbps but consistent 140Mbps
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The life of the spectrum- eeek that has to change. It would be like granting a private company a permanent monopoly on highways and then these companies resist being dumb piped and think have to be paid to keep from spamming or censoring or spying and selling your communications and insist they have a right to do all this. Like to see the idiot ‘modernize’ language used to strip all that away permanently from them.
They are so wedded to this paid lie bs. When Musk went after the Montana Skeptic the paid lie crowd went berserk. Have to wonder if the Trump undermining of the ISP common carrier rules with Ajit Pai really added to some of the problems we’ve seen lately with a ramped up paid lie industry. Its like Missy Cummings at NHSTE under Biden and the total shills Trump put in at the EPA. We need to be able to go after these graft entitled beligerant clowns with contempt of public.
Spectrum licences is a common sense way to regulate the usage of a very limited resource. There is an extremely limited set of bands available with current and foreseeable technology.
Now you can argue about how the spectrum licences are awarded. But that would be very political and not for this topic.
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@SpaceXStarlink
many thx! Starlink keeps our cities connected and emergency services saving lives!
With Russian attacks on our infra, we need generators to keep Starlinks & life-saving services online - ideas?
Updating software to reduce peak power consumption, so Starlink can be powered from car cigarette lighter. Mobile roaming enabled, so phased array antenna can maintain signal while on moving vehicle.
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Hahaha I can just imagine cars driving around with a dish strapped to the roof of cars. Or strapped to roof racks.
The power pack is 100 watts so a moderate solar array, battery would easily provide intermittent usage during night. Larger battery/solar would allow 24/7 usage. Not easy in a war zone unfortunately.
Well Starlink is now available for RVs. Not meant while in motion. Here is the email explaining it
Starlink is now offering Starlink for RVs at any destination where Starlink provides active coverage. At this time, there is no waitlist - all orders will be shipped shortly after the order is placed, including to “Waitlist” areas on the Starlink Availability Map.
Users can expect high speed, low latency internet in areas marked “Available”, and notably slower speeds during events with many collocated users, or during hours of peak usage in areas marked as “Waitlist”, where residential users are prioritized. Prioritizing residential makes it possible to offer Starlink for RVs immediately with minimal impact to the most loaded portions of the network.
Users can pause and un-pause service at any time. You can order directly at Starlink.com/rv.
Starlink for RVs is not meant for use while in-motion. To learn more about Starlink for RVs, please read our FAQ page or updated Terms of Service.
The Starlink team
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Intriguing that they do not say “will not work while RV is in motion” or “use of Starlink while RV is in motion is prohibited”. Wonder if it would actually work in motion.
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I spend my life using rubbish satellite connections on ships and am really looking forward to when they make a portable terminal I can take with me to work.
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As the dish is pointed to one position how it is possible on a see when it is always in move with all the waves ?
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Theoretically, it could move its target from one satellite to another while traveling? Thousands of satellites up there, and more to come.
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