Today, I watched a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket leave Cape Canaveral and deliver 60 small Starlink satellites to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) on the Starlink L3 mission.
For those not with us last week, SpaceX has a subsidiary, known as Starlink, which is presently endeavoring to blanket the majority of the inhabited latitudes of Earth with orbiting satellites to provide wireless internet access and private-line communications services. This is a Big Deal, the consequences of which I will explain momentarily. But first, some background.
Out of all of Elon Musk’s crazy projects, this is the only one that interests me. This project can have huge consequences.
It is also a big interest here in Australia where the Government stuffed up the National Broadband Network (NBN) with slow speeds and high prices. Hopefully Starlink will give us a viable alternative.
It’s an awful white-elephant that along with Boeing and Airbus projects will destroy the nights skies for everybody, be they lovers on a nightly stroll or professional astronomers.
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franko
Those investing billions in remote Western Australia and Sth Africa for the construction of the SKA might not agree!
Also thinking about space junk, just the handful of Starlink units launched have already become a hazard on more than one occasion, and Musk’s crew refused to alter the orbits!
Humans are not fungible units, so no. The more useful half of humanity is already online.
This actually UNDER estimates Starlink. Full coverage of Alaska (and thus Siberia, Canada, northern Scandinavia, Greenland, and Svalbard) was an FCC requirement for approving the launches.
Humans are not fungible, but its a very dangerous game to say that some of humanity is more useful than other. That simply is not true.
It’s manifestly true. Many people would most benefit the world by dying, and there are gradations of value above that.
Wow, that’s racist. That may not be your intention, but that’s how it reads.
I’m not sure that was Tidux intent, and it’s not a new view in regard to the utilitarian nature of humanity. Of course what can be inferred from commentary is all based on averages not exceptions, and I don’t think Tidux was writing about extremes like Nazism. The next Einstein could rise from slum or royalty with equal chance.
That doesn’t mean the planet should or can tolerate humanity presenting those equal opportunities at it’s expense!
“The more useful half of humanity is already online.”
… and yet, here you are.
Feh. Just what the world really needs. More Space Junk in orbit around the planet. I really hope the goverments of the world really begin to charge clowns like Musk and the rest some serious fees to track and monitor the crap they’re putting into orbit and legally be held responsible for it falling out of orbit and for any damages it may cause on the ground.
Falling out of orbit is what they WANT. Nearly all low-orbit satellites are required to keep enough fuel to de-orbit once their useful life is over. Other satellites further out are required to keep enough fuel to be boosted into “parking” orbit once their useful life is over. And debris from satellites is rarely a problem – especially planned de-orbits. Debris from satellites IN orbit is the big problem they wish to avoid. All Starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere if they go bad or reach the end of their lifespan.
What a waste of resources…
And all the data will be screened by the NSA and CIA.
I quickly read the article, and I got the impression the author has never lived outside a city. I got the feeling that for him WIFI is the cornerstone for the development of civilisation, ignoring many other factors that allow you (or not at all) to live in the middle of nowhere (like Siberia, as he suggests).
Do not get me wrong, providing humanity with more connectivity it is a good thing, it gives access to so much knowledge and resources .. but it does not mean that magically people will learn to make the best out of it.
If you believe the Flat Earthers, Space isn’t real and therefore satellites don’t exist. So they are probably okay with this. Or will think it is a conspiracy for something or other.
For me, whether it is Amazon or Musk, just having a second choice for a Broadband would be wonderful. I don’t love in a remote area. In fact, I live in a town of about 40,000 near a large city (in the U.S.), but I have 2 options for Broadband (not counting the current wonky Satellite options like Hughes) – 200Mb from Spectrum and … wait for it … 768Kb from AT&T. That;s not really much of a choice, and the price for Spectrum (after the first year) keeps rising. A little competition would be nice.
Did they solve the latency and bandwidth problems of satellite Internet access? If not, then they just launch a bunch of crap into space in a hacky attempt to side step a hard problem.
Flatland_Spider,
These are low earth orbit rather than geostationary orbits.
Geostationary altitude = 35,786km (22,236 mi)
Start link altitude = 340 km (210 mi) up to 1,150 km (710 mi)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starlink
That’s significantly closer, so one-direction latency will probably be in the 10s of milliseconds rather than 100s. My guesstimate is that pings would start at 20-25ms and increase as you go further around the planet. Quite acceptable for most internet applications.
For comparison I can ping google at 14ms on my residential cable service, but the truth is that my ISP is not competitive and our cable infrastructure is dated. I tested pings from verizon FIOS just now (which was installed in the past 5 years) and it’s only 3.5ms. In fact fios seems to shave 10ms off just about everything compared to what I’m getting here.
The bigger question I have for these satellites is bandwidth. While starlink has been allotted a lot of bandwidth, I have a feeling it’s going to get divided very quickly as the user base in a region grows. While underground/undersea cable are expensive, they are arbitrarily scalable. Need X times more bandwidth? Run X times more cables! It’s much more difficult to scale radio.
Ultimately, the biggest potential benefit is getting internet at all since many around the world don’t have any broadband (including my parents since ATT pulled it’s DSL).
Dang! You got great latency. I’ve got Spectrum cable internet, and the lowest latency I’ve seen is 35 ms, and it’s rarely lower than 55 or 60 ms. Often, it’s over 100 ms.
JLF65,
Wow, those numbers seem bad to me especially if you are in NYC area. I would think something must be saturated. Have you done trace routes(during peak hours)? That can probably tell you where the bottleneck is.
If there’s congestion upstream, then there’s not much you can do 🙁 But if it’s your own router, or if traffic behind your router is saturating available bandwidth, then you do have remedies that are under your control! Assuming the problem is on your end (it might not be), then there’s a very good chance that you can fix it by applying your own rate limiting ~5% beneath the ISP rates. This works because your packets will never exceed your allotted bandwidth (that’s when queues start to back up and increase latency).
Try this speed test, which measures bandwidth, but more importantly buffer bloat…
https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest
What grade do you get for buffer bloat? Most connections, even DSL, can get an A grade if you take steps to prevent packet buffers from filling up.
I use a custom linux router to do this, but obviously most people use off the shelf routers, which may or may not have the necessary features.
I’m near Charlotte, NC, not NYC. 🙂
Spectrum pretty much has a monopoly in NC, so they feel no need to improve things. I should be happy I got broadband at all, given my other option is <10Mbps DSL.
Is this a 1st World problem?
After Franko’s opening post I went and looked at some data for Australia’s NBN, they average about 23ms for pinging local google servers. Yet that NBN system is overloaded with complaints, it looks to me like the problem isn’t the network itself but provisioning issues!
So if people are not happy with FTTP performance, how can you ever make them happy with Satellite, I’m not an expert but there will probably be more than 23ms in the satellite handshakes and negotiations?
So I doubt Starlink is a viable alternative to FTTP or other similar fibre optic based broadband.
Regarding my latency estimate, I was assuming that the traffic would travel from the consumer’s end to one or more satellites and then return to a satellite ground station facility near the desired IP destination. I don’t know how many ground stations starlink will have around the planet, but it will affect latency. Consider what happens when the packets finish their trip through space only to have to travel several more hops for hundreds/thousands of kilometers on the ground before reaching the final destination. The full latency will be the sum of latencies.
This could happen, say if you want to VPN from home into your office’s landline internet, but starlink doesn’t have any ground stations in your country. Your VPN traffic would have to travel through the satellite network to another country only to travel back to your offices’s regular internet connection on the ground. And repeat this in reverse for the return packet.
There’s a different problem faced by all growing ISPs: the lack of IPv4 addresses. Obviously IPv6 is supposed to solve this problem, but huge swaths of the internet, especially in the west, remain dependent upon IPv4*. It would seem that starlink has no choice but to buy a limited number of shared IPv4 addresses and apply network translation for all/most of starlink’s subscribers. This often breaks not only P2P connectivity but also server initiated events. On my cell phone for instance, tmobile uses stateful nat translation and UDP nat records timeout after a mere 30s, which is a huge issue for keeping VOIP sessions alive. It means my VOIP application has to continuously send keepalives in the background or else it will cease to receive calls. This is bad for both bandwidth consumption and battery life.
* It’s 2020, and our cable company STILL lacks IPv6! We’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place. If only they weren’t a monopoly…
Based on some of the idiotic comments here (tidus) I can fully understand why Elon Musk wants to get off of planet earth and let all the idiots that live here destroy themselves.
Unfortunately there will very smart idiots that will make their way to Mars along with Elon and pretty soon Mars will be in the same mess that Earth is.
Tom is writing for a technology page yet he isn’t interested in other technology. Interesting.