Starlink Approved in Australia by ACMA

[Bombastinator]

59 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

I won’t believe it till I see it. Just because they claim they solved it doesn’t mean it will work in the real world. Wireless standards tend to not live up to expectations. 

True

[spartaman64]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

I won’t believe it till I see it. Just because they claim they solved it doesn’t mean it will work in the real world. Wireless standards tend to not live up to expectations. 

normal internet satellites are in geostationary orbit which is like 22,236 miles high. starlink satellites are in low earth orbit and are about 340 miles high 

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

normal internet satellites are in geostationary orbit which is like 22,236 miles high. starlink satellites are in low earth orbit and are about 340 miles high 

LEO orbits aren’t always stable, especially long term, and they tend to speed by quite quickly even if they are.  I tend to support the “don’t count your chickens” and corporations frequently lie” suspicion inherent in the original statement.  It might go.  We shall see what we shall see.

[spartaman64]

3 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

LEO orbits aren’t always stable, especially long term, and they tend to speed by quite quickly even if they are.  I tend to support the “don’t count your chickens” and corporations frequently lie” suspicion inherent in the original statement.  It might go.  We shall see what we shall see.

well if theres some major problem with internet satellites in LEO then i would expect a thunderfoot debunked video as that guy seems to dislike elon musk LUL. and the satellites have thrusters and can reposition as they probably would need to do a lot to get out of the way of other satellites 

[Bombastinator]

19 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

well if theres some major problem with internet satellites in LEO then i would expect a thunderfoot debunked video as that guy seems to dislike elon musk LUL. and the satellites have thrusters and can reposition as they probably would need to do a lot to get out of the way of other satellites 

Wait... they want to use thrusters to actively weave around the orbits of OTHER satilites?!  Satilites have limited thrust capacity and fuel.  They would wear out.  This sounds janky.  Musk has a lot of haters.  I will be interested to see what this thunderfoot person has to say.

[spartaman64]

13 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Wait... they want to use thrusters to actively weave around the orbits of OTHER satilites?!  Satilites have limited thrust capacity and fuel.  They would wear out.  This sounds janky.  Musk has a lot of haters.  I will be interested to see what this thunderfoot person has to say.

lots of satellites have to do that

https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/Reentry_and_collision_avoidance

on average the ESA (european space agency) has to perform 12 collision avoidance maneuvers per year and the threshold for performing a maneuver is if there's a 1 in 10,000 chance of a collision

starlink has krypton ion thrusters and are probably very fuel efficient and the satellite will probably be decommissioned long before they run out of fuel

 

[Belgarathian]

8 hours ago, TrigrH said:

Population density and area is what makes roads power and internet soo much more expensive to rollout. Everyone lives on the edge of a giant fucking island.

Population density makes it cheaper to roll out. You also have 5-6x the taxpayers to fund it.

 

Melbourne basically has the same pop as all of New Zealand so surely you can't be saying that a city the size of Melbourne would be more expensive to roll out NBN than all of New Zealand. 

[Bombastinator]

5 minutes ago, Belgarathian said:

Population density makes it cheaper to roll out. You also have 5-6x the taxpayers to fund it.

 

Melbourne basically has the same pop as all of New Zealand so surely you can't be saying that a city the size of Melbourne would be more expensive to roll out NBN than all of New Zealand. 

Comparing Australia to New Zealand geologically isn’t that easy.  One is a terrifyingly sharp mountain range, the other is a gigantic desert island.  Both have pockets of high and low population density, which is also a problem there.

Cities are more expensive to wire in that there are fewer places to put wire and they are more expensive to use, but the per capita device per wire is MUCH MUCH higher making it effectively cheaper because less wire makes more money.

[BuckGup]

BTW 54 million American's don't have internet and the average speed is something abysmal like 10Mb/s. Starlink has the potential to bring down every ISP and cellphone company. Which are the cancer of the earth

[GOTSpectrum]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

LEO orbits aren’t always stable, 

This is the point, the satellites use krypton ion thrusters to perform station keep and maintain the orbit, if the satellite dies it will naturally de-orbit due to atmospheric drag. 

 

The newest V1.1 of the satellites are also designed to burn up 100% during reentry, the 0.9 and 1.0 were expected to have 95%+ burn up during reentry. 

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, BuckGup said:

BTW 54 million American's don't have internet and the average speed is something abysmal like 10Mb/s. Starlink has the potential to bring down every ISP and cellphone company. Which are the cancer of the earth

I doubt that. 

[Bombastinator]

41 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

I doubt that. 

I do and I don’t.  I would believe that the numbers themselves are technically true if perhaps derived oddly, and when used with each other numbers can be derived to say whatever.   In particular I think that “no internet at all” number is probably close.  That low data rate number is probably derived geographically via assumption.  In particular rural areas often have no internet at all and must subsist in landline dialup (yes, still). THOSE areas stand to gain the benefits described.  They comprise the vast majority of land area in the US, but have very low and shrinking population levels per area.  They are the only ones that still breed though so how long that remains in effect I do not know.

 It’s a very old trick.  Columbus used it to con the Portuguese royalty into funding him.  The trick in his case was people didn’t know how big the earth was so he used different numbers from different projections based on different opinions on how big the world was to make Europe and China seem much closer to each other than they actually were.  They were actually much farther away from each other than he projected BUT there was this OTHER continent no one had heard of in the middle only a bit farther away than he thought China was, so he won by sheer luck.

 

This could actually happen again in this case.  Satilites Internet would be near useless in cities, barring infrastructure breakdown, but a gigantic boon in rural areas and could change everything there.  Also the vast majority of the US has monopoly internet.  All those monopolies would suddenly break.  Satilites Internet could be competitive across the entire United States.

[BuckGup]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

I doubt that. 

To which part? If you could have fast and reliable internet on the whole earth why would you additionally pay for shitty home internet with then with an additional cell plan that has terrible coverage. You only need starlink and now you can drop your data plan and home internet. It's brilliant. This is assuming latency is usable and there aren't tiny data caps.

[TechyBen]

10 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Satellite broadband is very fast but it has a pretty major issue, latency is horrible, like really really bad. 100ms between the client and the ISPs DNS is not uncommon which makes gaming next to impossible. It makes sense considering the data is travelling all the way to space then back again twice.

IIRC the latency is better with starlink due to the orbital height (they are not geostationary) and a few other tweaks. So it's sometimes worse than copper/wired, but not as much as it use to be.

[mariushm]

6 hours ago, Donut417 said:

The problem already exists. We have a wave of garbage that orbits the planet. Sometimes we get lucky and some burns up in the atmosphere. Who knows how many dead satellites we have in orbit. 

We have a lot of crap : http://stuffin.space/

luckily space is really big so chances of collision are rare (but not impossible, they move satellites up and down often to keep them safe from debris)

all the blue stuff is debris (crap) ...some red stuff on the outsides are dead satellites parked in dead trajectories

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, BuckGup said:

To which part? If you could have fast and reliable internet on the whole earth why would you additionally pay for shitty home internet with then with an additional cell plan that has terrible coverage. You only need starlink and now you can drop your data plan and home internet. It's brilliant. This is assuming latency is usable and there aren't tiny data caps.

Satellite internet has always been shit. Until they can prove this is better I’ll just toss this in the shit category. It won’t compete with Coax or Fiber and I doubt it will be better than 4G/5G. 

[mr moose]

5 hours ago, Belgarathian said:

Population density makes it cheaper to roll out. You also have 5-6x the taxpayers to fund it.

 

Melbourne basically has the same pop as all of New Zealand so surely you can't be saying that a city the size of Melbourne would be more expensive to roll out NBN than all of New Zealand. 

There are a few geographical differences between NZ and Australia, and unlike Australia the NZ government carried out a proper feasibility study and made sure they could do it before committing to it.

 

 

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Comparing Australia to New Zealand geologically isn’t that easy.  One is a terrifyingly sharp mountain range, the other is a gigantic desert island.  Both have pockets of high and low population density, which is also a problem there.

Cities are more expensive to wire in that there are fewer places to put wire and they are more expensive to use, but the per capita device per wire is MUCH MUCH higher making it effectively cheaper because less wire makes more money.

That really makes little difference to the point, if just Melborne was done alone it would have been much cheaper than the cost of all of NZ.

 

Also we're talking GPON FTTH/FTTP so the cabling isn't that expensive because it's passive fibre runs with passive optical splitters close to houses so largely the cabling required is around 30th of that for active connections (existing phone lines, active fibre, coax etc).

 

The majority of streets have telecommunications ducts so it's a simple matter of running the fibre down those. The real cost and it makes zero difference what technology or deployment type you choose (FTTH vs FTTN) is the cabling from the curb/splitter/node through to the house, if you have to do that (which you may not with FTTN) then 99% of the cost is the same no matter what you're doing. Problem is with FTTN is many have very old copper phone cabling not up to the standards of VDSL2.

 

Councils and planners aren't fools either, if a street doesn't have service ducts and trenching is required at the same time other things will get serviced like water, gas, waste water etc. Typically though underground thrust borers are used as trenching is costly and time consuming and only done if you actually need direct access or to sight what you are digging for.

 

So the long and short of it is Aus started off with a project to modernize their telecommunications and internet services to the population but in backing away from FTTH for FTTN instead they actually gave that up to stick with status quo, inferior old technology delivered on cabling not fit for purpose. Yes upgrading costs a shit ton of money but anything other than FTTH is wasted money when you consider the original end goal. At least the back-haul got upgraded, localized state monopolies of ISPs got dissolved and the ability to report on internet access speeds and quality greatly improved.

[Unixsystem]

16 hours ago, VegetableStu said:

man i hope the next big idea plan for spacex is orbital trash cleanup ,_,

 

16 hours ago, VegetableStu said:

LOL but seriously i don't think anything can survive orbit once kessler syndrome starts ,_,

 

9 hours ago, Donut417 said:

The problem already exists. We have a wave of garbage that orbits the planet. Sometimes we get lucky and some burns up in the atmosphere. Who knows how many dead satellites we have in orbit. 

The Starlink satellites are being put into a much lower orbit than traditional internet satellites are are deliberately intended to deteriorate and reenter within ~5 years. Even if they launched 100,000 sats and then went out of business, it would clean itself up within a few years. 

 

Obviously there is still some residual particles from the launches themselves, but the people seriously complaining about Kessler syndrome are largely the same people who argue that we shouldn't go to Mars because "we haven't fixed our Earth problems yet". 

 

13 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Satellite broadband is very fast but it has a pretty major issue, latency is horrible, like really really bad. 100ms between the client and the ISPs DNS is not uncommon which makes gaming next to impossible. It makes sense considering the data is travelling all the way to space then back again twice.

 

8 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Don’t forget the high latency as well. 

My understanding is that SpaceX is claiming a theoretical decrease in latency over traditional satellite or even lower end ground based internet. Even though the signal is covering a longer physical distance, the low orbit combined with the ability to bounce signals directly between satellites means that you get to circumvent a lot of congestion points and non-optimal routes that you may get with traditional internet. 

 

Obviously its SpaceX PR so take it with a grain of salt, and even if it's true it probably won't actually occur until they have a massive constellation and numerous ground dishes to actually receive the signals near their intended endpoints. That said Starlink does seem to be massively different from previous satellite internet attempts so I don't know that we can definitely say that the weaknesses of other services can be applied here. 

 

Honestly the bigger worry to me is still weather. They can have great speeds and low latency, but if the internet gets spotty every time it gets overcast then it's still a pretty shit option. Hopefully the dramatic increase in sats can help alleviate that. 

[Bombastinator]

27 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

To which part? If you could have fast and reliable internet on the whole earth why would you additionally pay for shitty home internet with then with an additional cell plan that has terrible coverage. You only need starlink and now you can drop your data plan and home internet. It's brilliant. This is assuming latency is usable and there aren't tiny data caps.

I suspect that costs will be more than short distance cable.  Perhaps not more than long distance cable.  Prices of course are different.  A lot of monopoly cable companies charge huge fees for both short and long distance cable in the US.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

That really makes little difference to the point, if just Melborne was done alone it would have been much cheaper than the cost of all of NZ.

 

Also we're talking GPON FTTH/FTTP so the cabling isn't that expensive because it's passive fibre runs with passive optical splitters close to houses so largely the cabling required is around 30th of that for active connections (existing phone lines, active fibre, coax etc).

 

The majority of streets have telecommunications ducts so it's a simple matter of running the fibre down those. The real cost and it makes zero difference what technology or deployment type you choose (FTTH vs FTTN) is the cabling from the curb/splitter/node through to the house, if you have to do that (which you may not with FTTN) then 99% of the cost is the same no matter what you're doing. Problem is with FTTN is many have very old copper phone cabling not up to the standards of VDSL2.

 

Councils and planners aren't fools either, if a street doesn't have service ducts and trenching is required at the same time other things will get serviced like water, gas, waste water etc. Typically though underground thrust borers are used as trenching is costly and time consuming and only done if you actually need direct access or to sight what you are digging for.

 

So the long and short of it is Aus started off with a project to modernize their telecommunications and internet services to the population but in backing away from FTTH for FTTN instead they actually gave that up to stick with status quo, inferior old technology delivered on cabling not fit for purpose. Yes upgrading costs a shit ton of money but anything other than FTTH is wasted money when you consider the original end goal. At least the back-haul got upgraded, localized state monopolies of ISPs got dissolved and the ability to report on internet access speeds and quality greatly improved.

I was supporting the point that wiring a large city would be cheaper than wiring an entire island rather than refuting it.  I was mentioning cost differences.

 

It doesn’t so much matter the type of cable per se.  There is some effect in that less volume of cable is needed, and that does matter for speed, but there is pole space (assuming they’re even use them), digging space, etc.  things are just more expensive to do in cities because the land is worth more, and space to put cable costs more.  That cost is generally completely overwhelmed by the number of people is serves tough.  Wiring a square mile of a city may cost 20 times as much but it serves a thousand times as many people.  Melbourne May have as many people as all of New Zealand, but it covers a much smaller area.  Even if the individual cables are more expensive to place, they will be much more efficient per user.

[leadeater]

52 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

There is some effect in that less volume of cable is needed, and that does matter for speed, but there is pole space (assuming they’re even use them), digging space, etc.  things are just more expensive to do in cities because the land is worth more, and space to put cable costs more.

I know but I was addressing this point, those things already exist, civil works isn't really as required as you might be thinking. Almost all of that is only required at the property boundary where they have to dig a termination pit where they blow feed the fibre through to the ONT location in the house. Very old houses have direct buried copper cable in to them but on anything even semi modern (late 80's to 90's) copper phone cable is delivered to the house through a PVC duct so they pull that out and draw in a blow tube at the same time through that existing duct.

 

Spoiler

https://www.a1directionaldrilling.co.nz/

 

Above ground is a rarity here, that includes power. We have really good building regulations and local by laws that have been in place a long time and the people that got them in place were forward thinking and knew the benefits of doing it, that is why the cost to get fibre to every house in NZ was not as expensive as in other places who lacked that forethought or willingness years ago.

 

Also land cost has no effect on the cost to dig, the land this is done on is not privately owned.

 

Here and what I have seen in Aus we generally do not do above ground service delivery so underground service ducts have existed for years, decades. Older streets with little change over the years are typically the ones without suitable telecommunications ducts so they bring in the thrust borers/direct drill and put the ducting in, takes about a day after the prep work is done to actually do the thrusting down a longish street then all you do is push the PVC pipe down the hole sections and then do the final joining/clipping together.

 

So really it is the other way around, outside of city centers and established suburbs the cost is much higher because those ducts don't exist and the distances are much longer and the passive split ratios are much lower requiring more cable runs, more ports on the GPON switches etc. It's all round bad outside of a city, cost per meter to put ducting in might be cheaper due to less regulations and planning/notifications required compared to a city but that is immediately negated and more by the sheer distance increases.

 

Just remember NZ and Aus are not the US, we don't have much of what is done over there, like poles and private ownership of them and all the crap that comes with it, it's just not a thing.

[mr moose]

And don't forget, Places like Melbourne and Sydney have had cable, coax, fibre long before the NBN came along, it was run by foxtell/telstra and Optus (I think even TPG started running their own cables). But they never serviced passed the leafy green suburbs.  The reason was that any upgrades simply did not have an ROI that warranted the outlay to upgrade the infrastructure that far out.  As someone who lives on the rural border I understand that frustration as I have always been 5 years behind my city friends on everything from internet options to online delivery options. 

[Maticks]

This is big news for those on NBN Sat services, not for the fact its 10x faster because its actually fixed lined services that run at 100Mbps on NBN.

NBN Sat customers have 25M/5M speed maximum. The biggest news will be SpaceX doing unlimited data, the biggest plans on NBN Sat is 200GB for the month.

 

Recently introduction of 200GB Peak and 200GB Off Peak plans, but still.. thats not great for streaming.

 

If SpaceX can offer Unlimited Data Plans even with 50M/10M that would be a massive improvement and game changing for anyone on Skymuster right now.

[Dabombinable]

9 hours ago, BuckGup said:

BTW 54 million American's don't have internet and the average speed is something abysmal like 10Mb/s. Starlink has the potential to bring down every ISP and cellphone company. Which are the cancer of the earth

That's the kind of service my Mum was dealing with before she got then NBN (and that was at double the rated speed - being urban rural helped a lot), even 38Mb/s was a huge upgrade for her and my siblings.

I've been a bit spoiled with the internet in my apartment though, that has the full NBN, so ping and speeds are surreal, after years of shitty mobile internet (also went from dialup in 2009) and very late (1-2 years before NBN arrived) and slow ADSL.