Starlink public beta soon.

[darwin006]

Summary

SpaceX's Starlink broadband has been available in a limited beta for the past few months, and SpaceX has now launched enough satellites for a public beta that will be available to more customers, possibly before March.

 

 

 Quotes

 

Quote

After yesterday's launch of 60 Starlink satellites, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter that "[o]nce these satellites reach their target position, we will be able to roll out a fairly wide public beta in northern US & hopefully southern Canada. Other countries to follow as soon as we receive regulatory approval."

Quote

Musk did not say when the satellites will reach their target position. SpaceX has over 700 satellites in orbit after yesterday's launch.

Quote

It could take a few months for all of the 60 new satellites to reach their target positions, according to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

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Typically, SpaceX splits each batch of 60 satellites into three groups of 20, McDowell told Ars today. "The first group would reach target height in about 45 days; the second and third after 90 and 135 days roughly," he said. That means all 60 satellites might not be in their target positions until around February 18, 2021.

My thoughts

I am super excited for Starlink, I hope the latency and general user experience is good. We need more competition for service and with the service being satellite based I think Starlink has a chance to avoid the hurdles that companies like AT&T and Comcast create. Also with COVID more people are able to work completely remotely, and some people are looking to move out of big cities and even suburbs and are struggling to find homes that have access to quality internet. Edit: Additionally Starlink has been in the news recently for helping to provide Washington State fire fighters with internet for better communications while fighting remote wild fires. Starlink also recently started providing internet to the Hoh Native American tribe which is in a remote area of western Washington State. Prior to Starlink internet the tribes internet speeds where reported to be less then 1Mbps. And the tribe says that now the children are able to participate in remote learning and that it has access to healthcare resources over the internet now.

Sources

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/10/spacex-has-launched-enough-satellites-for-starlinks-upcoming-public-beta/

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/30/business/spacex-starlink-washington-scn-trnd/index.html

https://www.pcmag.com/news/native-american-tribe-gets-early-access-to-spacexs-starlink-and-says-its

 

 

 

[Master Disaster]

3 minutes ago, darwin006 said:

I am super excited for Starlink, I hope the latency and general user experience is good. We need more competition for service and with the service being satellite based I think Starlink has a chance to avoid the hurdles that companies like AT&T and Comcast create. Also with COVID more people are able to work completely remotely, and some people are looking to move out of big cities and even suburbs and are struggling to find homes that have access to quality internet.

Satellite broadband always has terrible latency, its just a by product of the method. The issue is radio waves having to get all the way to space, be bounced around in space a few times before being sent back to a traditional DNS server to be processed in the usual way then having to do it all again on the reverse journey back to you.

 

Mobile broadband has a higher latency than fibre and that relies on masts dotted around the planets surface, just think how much further it is to get to a satellite.

[darwin006]

@Master DisasterAccording some leaked numbers in this article some people are seeing decently low latency IMO. We wont know if the latency will get better when they move to this more public beta or get to full release but I am excited to see what happens. We need more competition for ISPs and I dont think Starlink can make the ISP problem worse. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/spacex-starlink-beta-tests-show-speeds-up-to-60mbps-latency-as-low-as-31ms/ 

[Master Disaster]

4 minutes ago, darwin006 said:

@Master DisasterAccording some leaked numbers in this article some people are seeing decently low latency IMO. We wont know if the latency will get better when they move to this more public beta or get to full release but I am excited to see what happens. We need more competition for ISPs and I dont think Starlink can make the ISP problem worse. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/spacex-starlink-beta-tests-show-speeds-up-to-60mbps-latency-as-low-as-31ms/ 

Oh I 100% agree its a good thing, especially for remote areas that currently can only get limited service or even no service at all.

 

31ms is not that bad but compared to the average sub 10 you'll get on fibre you can see the difference.

[mariushm]

The latency will be small enough to make the system usable, but system at the moment can't handle a lot of users in the same "area"  ... I don't have the exact numbers but I think it was something like 100 mbps shared between people in a square mile or something like that. 

 

Great for people in remote locations, which will be happy even with 2-5 mbps, not so great if you think this will replace 4G and LTE and cable/fiber. 

[Master Disaster]

22 minutes ago, comander said:

31ms is what people are getting during a limited beta without everything in position. 

 

The speed of light is pretty fast. 

 

Right now phase 1 satellites are 550km away (phase 2 are 330km away). 

 

Doing a 1000km round trip takes around 5ms for ethernet/fiber and probably a bit better for em waves through air... There's some extra overhead but it's very conceivable that getting in the air and back will be ~3ms once critical mass is achieved and some bugs are worked out. After that it should be similar to wire speeds on the ground and a bit faster if you need to go half way across the world. 

The vast majority of the earth is now covered in fibre optic which also travels at the speed of light but, no matter how you cut it, is a much more direct route.

[Blademaster91]

A latency of 31ms is quite impressive for satellite, for those stuck on DSL or in areas where an ISP refuses to run fibre optic cables, Starlink would be an upgrade.

[mariushm]

28 minutes ago, comander said:

31ms is what people are getting during a limited beta without everything in position. 

 

The speed of light is pretty fast. 

 

Right now phase 1 satellites are 550km away (phase 2 are 330km away). 

 

Doing a 1000km round trip takes around 5ms for ethernet/fiber and probably a bit better for em waves through air... There's some extra overhead but it's very conceivable that getting in the air and back will be ~3ms once critical mass is achieved and some bugs are worked out. After that it should be similar to wire speeds on the ground and a bit faster if you need to go half way across the world. 

 

The thing with Starlink is that your packet of data is sent up to the satellite above your head, which then pushes it to one of the satellites around him which are physically closer to the downlink point, and from that satellite it jumps to another and so on until the packet reaches a satellite with optimal position for its antenna to beam down to one of the centers which then convert your packet of data and push it through a fiber cable to various ISPs. 

 

It's not just the latency from you to the satellite above your head, it's the latency between satellite and 1..n satellites, then from that last satellite to earth, then from that center to the actual location of the website you're trying to access and back ... and all the way back to you. 

 

As the satellites are always moving above your head, the reply is not even guaranteed to get back to you through the same satellite chain it was sent through, as within that 30-100ms it's possible some satellites moved too far to maintain the connection between those satellites. 

 

Each satellite is always connected to a few satellites around it and as some signals decrease in quality, other satellites get closer and their signal increases in quality and connections between satellites keep changing

 

So it would be also interesting to see if you're at the edge of a square mile , and have one low density cell and one high density cell and you download something and every 100-500 ms, your download fluctuates because a satellite that has its bandwidth near 100% moves from high usage cell to your unused cell and so on ..

 

Would also be interesting to see if they're gonna add some smarts to it to route packets around high bandwidth areas ... like imagine downlink center is (on the map) above new york, you're physically somewhere below new york on the map ... will your data be pushed through the satellites above new york with high utilization, and therefore you'll get low bandwidth because your packets have lower priority than data going to people under satellites? 

[Brooksie359]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

Satellite broadband always has terrible latency, its just a by product of the method. The issue is radio waves having to get all the way to space, be bounced around in space a few times before being sent back to a traditional DNS server to be processed in the usual way then having to do it all again on the reverse journey back to you.

 

Mobile broadband has a higher latency than fibre and that relies on masts dotted around the planets surface, just think how much further it is to get to a satellite.

That was mostly because the satellites were way higher than the ones that are being used for starlink. I mean the latency numbers I saw from the closed beta seemed to be pretty good and would be great for people in rural areas if they can get decent latency like that. 

[mariushm]

Just now, comander said:

Starlink in beta is 550km away (330km once the second stage gets implemented). 
Traditional geosynchronous satelites are 35,786km away. 

 

Starlink literally is 100x closer. 

Dude... not what I was saying.

 

Traditional satellites are geosync, they stay in same position... so they always have a big antenna pointed towards a location which downloads and uploads . You upload to satellite, the satellite sends data down to the center. 

 

Starlink sats move fast so they can't always be "locked" to the location which downloads and uploads data onto the starlink net ... so the data has to be passed between satellites until it reaches one "node" in the network that can make contact with one of the locations that download or upload data into the starlink net.  That's an extra latency. 

You upload, sat1 plays hot potato with sat2 giving your packet, sat2 hops it to another who may be physically in the good area to beam down your packet to a download/upload center. Could have 10-20 sat hops until it gets down to another place on earth, depending where you are. 

Imagine you're in the middle of atlantic ocean ... the closest download/upload place would most likely be on the edges of US. 

[Master Disaster]

4 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

That was mostly because the satellites were way higher than the ones that are being used for starlink. I mean the latency numbers I saw from the closed beta seemed to be pretty good and would be great for people in rural areas if they can get decent latency like that. 

Oh I agree, the effectiveness and necessity are not up for debate. Starlink has the potential to help a METRIC FUCK LOAD of people all over the Earth.

 

It's never going to replace traditional fibre though, those that can get it through a cable will continue to do so.

 

One other benefit is it might give existing ISPs the kick up the ass they need to expand capacity for areas that currently have poor service.

[mariushm]

They're moving between 7.28 and 7.70 km/s ... that's 4.52.. 4.78 miles/s  or 16272... 17208 miles per hour... but that's irrelevant. 

 

Yeah, there will pretty much always be at least one satellite (in reality they will most likely have multiple antennas oriented in different directions hitting loads of sats from one location) above one of those downlink places, but nevertheless they're gonna be  choke points and your data will hop from sat to sat to get close to those downlink points which add latency, and that was all what I was saying. 

 

 

 

[LWM723]

Starlinks are in stationary orbit. They're not flying around Earth at 20000kmh, thats the same speed the Earth rotates.

[Fasterthannothing]

I would love 31ms ping times. I'm on DSL and get worse than that. The speed bump is the biggest thing to me as long as it's unlimited and they keep ping under 100 - 80ms 31ms would be amazing. I live in the middle nowhere and DSL sucks. 

 

[Totallycasual]

As someone that lives fulltime on the road and relies exclusively on 4G net, i look forward to having more options when going deeper into the outback. 

[StDragon]

2 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Oh I agree, the effectiveness and necessity are not up for debate. Starlink has the potential to help a METRIC FUCK LOAD of people all over the Earth.

Yes, because the entire planet needs more access to social media, twerk videos, and memes. But hey, now they can do it in the middle of BFE!

 

Keep your solar chargers handy. 

[Doobeedoo]

Cool for middle of nowhere places coverage

[Intergalacticbits]

I'm so excited about this and I can't wait until it is fully online for everyone to be able to give the final verdict on it.

If it turns out to be good to game on it could change everything for people like me who live in rural areas in the US. 

 

Will I be able to game on it good and what will it cost me a month?

I can't wait to find out for sure.  

 

 

[wanderingfool2]

5 hours ago, LWM723 said:

Starlinks are in stationary orbit. They're not flying around Earth at 20000kmh, thats the same speed the Earth rotates.

You are talking about geostationary orbits...and no they not in a geostationary orbit.  They are in a non-geostationary orbit (NGSO)

 

 

It's cool that this is happening, but there is still quite a concern regarding the light pollution to observatories and also the added satellites will just add to the space debris

 

[cj09beira]

5 hours ago, StDragon said:

Yes, because the entire planet needs more access to social media, twerk videos, and memes. But hey, now they can do it in the middle of BFE!

 

Keep your solar chargers handy. 

hey there are actual usecases, i would benefit quite a lot from it, i have issues when trying to make video calls with my father that lives in africa because internet there sucks, good satellite internet would be quite useful 

[cj09beira]

1 hour ago, Intergalacticbits said:

I'm so excited about this and I can't wait until it is fully online for everyone to be able to give the final verdict on it.

If it turns out to be good to game on it could change everything for people like me who live in rural areas in the US. 

 

Will I be able to game on it good and what will it cost me a month?

I can't wait to find out for sure.  

 

 

people really need to get together and remove the legal monopolies on isps 

[Bombastinator]

13 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

The vast majority of the earth is now covered in fibre optic which also travels at the speed of light but, no matter how you cut it, is a much more direct route.

I’m not sure I agree with vast majority of the earth.  Vast majority of some nations perhaps.  The USA isn’t one of those. 

[tim0901]

13 hours ago, Shorty88jr said:

I would love 31ms ping times. I'm on DSL and get worse than that. The speed bump is the biggest thing to me as long as it's unlimited and they keep ping under 100 - 80ms 31ms would be amazing. I live in the middle nowhere and DSL sucks. 

 

Worth bearing in mind that that 31ms isn’t the overall latency, its not the number you’ll get when pinging a server, instead it’s the latency added by the Starlink segment of the network backbone. A lot of latency will be added to this amount due to the placement of the ground interconnect stations - where your data is transferred from the satellites to the fibre network.
 

Afaik there are only 5 confirmed to have permission for construction across the entire US so far, with 32 total planned. That’s not even one per state, and at launch it’ll likely be worse than that. And I couldn’t find anything about building any in Canada. With so few interconnects, it’s very possible that the data would end up travelling further going from the interconnect to the server than it would if it were to travel like that directly from my house! The server with the best ping will change from “which server is closest to me” to “which server is closest to a ground station”. 

 

Given time it will improve, but at the start it will be very rough for anything not hosted through a CDN like cloudflare. Especially for latency sensitive tasks like gaming, which generally have their servers in centralised locations for each region, I wouldn’t be surprised if it reached 80-100ms at first launch, especially if the nearest interconnect is a couple of states away. 

[Bombastinator]

I am really hoping for the sake of the USA that starlink works and works well.  There was an earlier mention of a couple of cable companies simply ceasing the extension of broadband into rural areas even after they had been paid to perform it.  Effectively abandoning work they were paid to do.  This is very very bad.

[Eaglerino]

can't wait for this to rock 10mbps DSL companies in small towns, and hughes net for charging out the wazoo for 25mbps