Elon Musk: Starlink Latency Will Be Good Enough For Competitive Gaming (arstechnica.com) 113
In a conference yesterday, Elon Musk said SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband will have latency below 20 milliseconds -- low enough to support competitive online gaming. "Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Latency of less than 20ms would make Starlink comparable to wired broadband service. When SpaceX first began talking about its satellite plans in late 2016, it said latency would be 25ms to 35ms. But Musk has been predicting sub-20ms latency since at least May 2019, with the potential for sub-10ms latency sometime in the future. The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said. "The bandwidth is a very complex question. But let's just say somebody will be able to watch high-def movies, play video games, and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed," he said.
So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink. "The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said. "We'll have some small number of customers in LA. But we can't do a lot of customers in LA because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough." [...] On the ground, Starlink's future customers will rely on user terminals that "look like a UFO on a stick," Musk said. The devices will have actuators that let them point themselves in the right direction as long as they're pointed at the sky. "It's very important that you don't need a specialist to install it," Musk said. "The goal is that... there's just two instructions and they can be done in either order: point at sky, plug in." As for the cost, the company previously pointed out that many U.S. residents pay $80 per month for "crappy service," perhaps indicating that Starlink will cost less than that.
Musk also addressed concerns from astronomers who say Starlink's satellites will interfere with astronomical observations. "I am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries. Zero. That's my prediction. We'll take corrective action if it's above zero," Musk said, adding that SpaceX has worked with astronomers "to minimize the potential for reflection of the satellites."
So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink. "The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said. "We'll have some small number of customers in LA. But we can't do a lot of customers in LA because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough." [...] On the ground, Starlink's future customers will rely on user terminals that "look like a UFO on a stick," Musk said. The devices will have actuators that let them point themselves in the right direction as long as they're pointed at the sky. "It's very important that you don't need a specialist to install it," Musk said. "The goal is that... there's just two instructions and they can be done in either order: point at sky, plug in." As for the cost, the company previously pointed out that many U.S. residents pay $80 per month for "crappy service," perhaps indicating that Starlink will cost less than that.
Musk also addressed concerns from astronomers who say Starlink's satellites will interfere with astronomical observations. "I am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries. Zero. That's my prediction. We'll take corrective action if it's above zero," Musk said, adding that SpaceX has worked with astronomers "to minimize the potential for reflection of the satellites."
What about caps? Needs to be at least 1TB to be on (Score:4, Interesting)
What about caps? Needs to be at least 1TB to be on par with other home ISP's. And not the joke caps on 5G fixed home.
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Re: What about caps? Needs to be at least 1TB to b (Score:2)
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I'd like to see some degree of predictive caching occur. For instance, if there is a new episode of a TV show that say a thousand customers regularly watch in one cell, then if that was automatically stored locally the first time it was sent for those customers, significant bandwidth could be saved
You have your home network, a little satellite connection device, a satellite, and a satellite uplink. Just where are you caching that data? The uplink would have plenty of connectivity to other terrestrial sites and exchanges, so not there. The satellite probably wasn't built to cache several TB of data, so I doubt there. The satellite connection device won't include large caching as that would increase costs, so not there, and the home network is where you consume - caching there will depend entirely o
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Re: What about caps? Needs to be at least 1TB to b (Score:2)
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Presumably that's why they talk about population density. 5G cell size is why they have caps.
Not all 5G internet providers have data caps. Verizon and T-Mobile don't.
Verizon [verizonwireless.com]
10. With 5G Home Internet is there a limit to the amount of data I can use?
No. There is no data limit or data cap for 5G Home Internet service. The 5G Home Internet plan is a data-only plan, separate from other plans on your account. Any device connected to your 5G Home Internet Wi-Fi network will enjoy unlimited data usage.
T-Mobile [t-mobile.com]
Is there a data cap on the Home Internet service?
Nope! There are no data caps on our Home Internet
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Wireless is not capable of providing descent internet to a large density populous
You might be surprised if you travel in the third world. Almost 33 million people in Lima, Peru, for example, and over 90% of them are using wireless Internet.
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Wow! All of NYC is a little over 8 million people - Lima must be HUGE!
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Oops. 10 million in Lima, 33 million in all of Peru. My bad.
Anyway, almost everyone in the country with Internet access gets it across the cellular networks, and coverage is good enough that my wife can have video chats with her brother in his town of only 5,000 people.
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It's actually better in Lima, since a single tower doesn't have to cover an entire valley, the tower in Paruro will be over-committed some evenings. Ride the bus in Lima and you'll see half the people watching movies or TV shows on their phones or on tablets sharing a connection with the phone. Our niece's phone provides Internet connectivity to her entire household and their smart TV (if she's not home the kids aren't supposed to be watching TV, so that works).
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There's no data cap on the home internet service because you're permanently in the "heavy data user" prioritization tier, which mobile users get put in after they pass their soft cap: https://www.t-mobile.com/respo... [t-mobile.com]
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DON'T USE CAPS IT'S LIKE SHOUTING.
Now, how the hell do I get this through Slashdot's very sensible filters intended to stop exactly this sort of silliness.
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Caps will be interesting on a shared service like this. Yes fixed lines are shared as well to an extent but the backhaul can be upgraded relatively easily, where as with satellites you need to replace the actual satellite and transceivers.
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Caps will be interesting on a shared service like this. Yes fixed lines are shared as well to an extent but the backhaul can be upgraded relatively easily, where as with satellites you need to replace the actual satellite and transceivers.
Or add more which is the solution Starlink will most likely use.
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I will sign up just to support it (Score:5, Interesting)
I will sign up just to support it, assuming it's not too expensive. FIOS is down at least a couple of times a month for hours on end, and I need it for work. Plus it'd be nice if I can take the transceiver with me if I want to spend a month or two away from it all and still be able to work.
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Thank god we'll get low latency satellite connections. That we fuck up half the world's astronomers is a small price to pay for being able to game from the top of the Rockies.
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Land-based astronomy is pretty useless anyway, and if we decide to not fuck the astronomers all we have to do is wait for a few years until the satellites burn up in the atmosphere.
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"Land-based astronomy is pretty useless anyway"
You say as you ignore every fucking BOINC astronomy project and Zooniverse project that has existed.
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Land-based astronomy is pretty useless anyway
It's the only option I have :(
all we have to do is wait for a few years
A whole generation will be dead by then.
The night sky has been a source of wonder and inspiration to humans since homo erectus. I'd like to keep it that way.
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the sad thing is, a very small proportion of the earth's population gets to see it. Starlink is the least of the concerns there.
Live within 15 miles of a city of any size? yeah your night sky is fucked.
Have annoying neighbors who feel the only way to be 'safe' is to put spotlights everywhere? your night sky is fucked.
A few puny satellites transiting over your head is nothing in comparison.
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Good think Musk is working to lower the cost of lofting satellite observatories, too.
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Even better answer, just build a giant optical telescope on the far side of the moon. Essentially no atmosphere to speak of (so nothing to get in the way and distort the image) and you are avoiding most of the light pollution from the earth itself and all the man made light sources that it contains.
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Don't be silly. The girls will range in age from 6 to 14, to assure a continued supply at the right age.
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Why do conservatives have such a fixation on little kids? I've always liked women better than girls, even when I was a boy.
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Computerize that shit and delete the Starlink satellites programmatically. It's not like their locations are secret. What year is it?
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Despite the noise, astronomers do not seem to be too worried [bbc.com] (this is just one of the articles). Here is a quote for example:
> "For a 100-second exposure time at twilight, we would lose 0.3% of the exposures. So, that means for every 1,000 exposures we take, three of them would be ruined by a satellite. And that number goes down as the Sun goes down,"
Some observations like long exposures on wide fields of view would be affected, but there is work going on to mitigate that too.
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Your mom has nonzero penetration density though, that's for sure.
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Not sure what satellites you are having problems with but I have no problems with my satellite TV unless the cloud layer is excessively heavy (e.g. thunder shower, blizzard). It all depends on the frequency used by Starlink. As long as the frequency isn't too high there shouldn't be too much problem with clouds (of course the lower the frequency the lower the bandwidth).
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>> What is your supplier doing?
Probably just milking existing aging infrastructure and little else.
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Your fios goes out that often? In the past 4 years, I've had only a couple outages, and they were all clearly due to planned maintenance (out for 10 minutes starting at exactly 2am for example). I've had the same IP for the entire time. Mine has been rock solid.
Sounds like there's something wrong in your neighborhood and you should get them to look into it. At least if you're referring to the fiber network, and not DSL which Verizon also refers to as fios sometimes.
Sounds promising for rural folks (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll have to see if I can get my mother off of the horrifically incompetent gang of idiots at Frontier, and onto internet/IP Phone via Starlink.
Seriously... tin cans and a string would be a serious competitor to Frontier.
Re:Sounds promising for rural folks (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm using a sprint cellphone's hotspot for my primary internet, and I can relate to this comment.
Starlink cannot come soon enough.
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Perhaps you should be complaining about your shitty DSL ISP.
I've got 75 down, 25 up on my DSL and I'm not even on the best setup.
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Problem is, they might have no other option. There's people here in the windsor-ottawa corridor in ontario in the same boat, which is the most population dense area of Canada. An example, you can get 250/50 service if you live on the north side of the 401 in Woodstock, London, or Ingersoll, Ontario. Everyone on the south side outside of a major city is on 5/1 DSL/cable or even dialup service if you're outside of a town/city greater than 15k.
Why? Because the incumbents flipped everyone off, have ignored t
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You're only getting that speed because you're practically sitting atop the central office's DSLAM.
Learn how DSL works and you'll see how your shitty comment just makes you look like a shitty person.
Can't wait (Score:4, Interesting)
I live a semi-rural area serviced by AT&T DSL.
On a perfect day (which is never) I'm supposed to get 6 Mbps down and 512Kbps up.
I've lived here for several years and my AT&T monthly charge has been increased twice, with no improvement in service.
I'd sign up right now if they had a pre-sign up option and the available plans have decent data allowances.
I've looked at Viasat and Hughes, they want way too much $$$ for what they offer in regards to data caps. Then there is the issue of the constant negative reports they both get.
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I wonder what satellite internet will do for the service requirements in rural areas. Could the companies with the legally mandated service requirements just offer vouchers for satellite internet and cellular service instead?
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USA, land of the free!!
And apparently most of you lot only have a choice of ONE ISP? Often bundled with phone service and cable tv?
I'm in Australia and have dozens of ISPs to choose from, currently on fixed wireless, signed up for 20/1 mps and 200 gb data cap, now on 25/5 and unlimited, no increase in price.
No phone, no cable tv (free to air still rules in Australia, not that I watch TV).
Freedom!!
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I'm in Australia and have dozens of ISPs to choose from
I'm glad to hear they've finally wired up the outback with NBN, good on ya! In case you didn't understand my seppo-speak, the people with one ISP are generally in the middle of nowhere, not in a major or even minor city.
when I see it (Score:3)
I'll believe it when I see it.
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This should help.
https://www.satflare.com/track... [satflare.com]
Hoping to see them this weekend, Not sure if I can from my Midwest US location.
Put research telescopes above them (our atmosphere has problems for clarity, easier to just observe from space, Hubble style), I'd love to have a bunch of visible satellites every night.
And my telescope will never have a problem with the moon, Venus, or Mars (and Saturn, but I would need a larger scope for decent vision of the rings).
There are no bad products.. (Score:3)
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All in the interpretation (Score:4, Interesting)
"As for the cost, the company previously pointed out that many U.S. residents pay $80 per month for "crappy service," perhaps indicating that Starlink will cost less than that."
That's not how I read this. To me, it seems more likely Elon is preparing people for $120-150/month for what he will say is "excellent service".
I'm on Comcast. I'm tired of paying what they charge and watching my bill creep up. But it has been reliable, the data caps are reasonable and the speeds acceptable, even though I'd welcome faster upload speeds when I'm telecommuting. If Starlink hits all these points and doesn't cost more, I'll strongly consider making the jump. If not, I won't. Simple as that.
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It will be interesting to see how robust the service is. Bandwidth and latency will be affected by all sorts of things. Distance to the nearest satellite, atmospheric effects, interference in those RF bands, and of course the big one: over-subscription.
They say that they can't support many users in big cities, but what is to stop them signing up with rural addresses and then simply moving the transceiver to the city?
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>you'd first see cable withdrawing from some rural markets where keeping up the network is less worthwhile to them, but the whole process would be extremely gradual.
Which could actually work out great. Wireless service has a major bandwidth problem in urban areas (only so many bytes/s/acre, so the more people per acre the slower the speed), while wired infrastructure can be built out as needed.
Meanwhile, building wired infrastructure in rural areas is generally a huge cost sink since there's so few cust
Ya but... (Score:3)
Only for farmers? (Score:2)
If it's not good enough to compete with the telecoms then why the hell is he polluting the night sky?
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Ok, city dweller.
It's going to revolutionize internet access for those of us who don't live in dense urban areas, where you can't see the stars for shit anyway.
I'll sign up ASAP (Score:2)
My mom lives in a rural area and I've been using a cellular hotspot to provide her internet service.
However, the cellular reception is rather poor there, so the device sometimes drops internet for hours at a time, and even though it's technically on LTE is often somewhat slow.
Whatever Starlink offers is bound to be a large improvement over the cellular solution, and it probably will be cheaper to boot. The cell companies should mull over how that could be...
Cell size nearly 200km across. (Score:2)
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"The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said.
This isn't for people in Downtown, USA. It's for people with Inmarsat phones who've heard about Netflix and want in.
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They will probably limit polar orbits and equatorial orbits that are 80+ % water. And likely a lot of other well thought out strategies to get the best coverage for the least amount of satellites.
Standard Deviation is Bad Too (Score:2)
From my experience playing Netrek with high ping times, having a high standard deviation of ping times is just as bad. I imagine that Starlink will have substantial variation in latency as the satellites move around, with jumps as links are handed off between satellites.
What he's saying is... (Score:2)
...if you actually use too much bandwidth, he'll kick you off the network.
Tell us how Mr. Musk? (Score:4, Interesting)
How can ground stations who can't hear each other, using what is basically an extraterrestrial repeater obtain that type of latency?
"satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas"
That seems like it may be quite an understatement. I have no doubt that if anyone could do it, you could. So how about publishing the specification of how (in a perfect world) 20 ms
latency on shared frequencies are obtainable.
Re:Tell us how Mr. Musk? (Score:4, Informative)
Altitude: 550 km.
Speed of light: 300 000 km/s.
Distance signal traveled: 550*2*2 = 2200 km. (Up & down, ping & pong)
Time spent in transit: 7.3 ms.
Re:Tell us how Mr. Musk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember it's shared bandwidth though. The ground station can't just transmit a packet whenever it wants to, it has to wait for a slot so it doesn't talk over other ground stations or the satellite.
For that reason even 20ms is very ambitious. There is overhead to coordinating all nodes on the network, and then the delay each one experiences waiting to transmit.
I'd take it with a cup of salt. Musk tends to make wild and unrealistic predictions about his company's technology, e.g. that he would have a fully self driving car by 2017.
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And that's just the round-trip air latency. For any real-world connection that isn't just "ping the satellite's home base," you'll have the latency of a round trip through an actual physical network connection on top of that.
20 ms sounds like a wildly exaggerated promise, as is entirely typical of Elon.
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yup. I can believe 20ms, I don't know if I can believe 20ms with close to zero packetloss, which is what you really need for gaming.
For casual (non-competitive) gaming, I'd rather have 100ms and no packetloss.
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Remember it's shared bandwidth though. The ground station can't just transmit a packet whenever it wants to, it has to wait for a slot so it doesn't talk over other ground stations or the satellite.
Both OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) and CDMA (code division multiple access) can allow multiple ground stations to simultaneously transmit to the same satellite and a single satellite to simultaneously transmit to multiple ground stations if the uplink and downlink frequencies are in different bands.
When? (Score:2)
Like many of you, I have one remote location where there is only one option for internet access, and it sucks.
My home is gigabit fiber (choice of two companies with fiber pedestals in my yard or in the next yard over). My office is 40 gigabit fiber (expandable to only-God-knows-how-fast if we actually populated the OADM and started filling channels). My remote locations are 10 gig or 1 gig (some with CWDM multiplexed up to 2x10+4x1). And, of course, I also have one location with 25 megabits down and 6 up
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I like that you think you're hard-done-by.
I live and work in London (Greater London, which is like saying "New York metropolitan area"). I was quoted 4 down, 1 up for a recent install in an very urban area, literally minutes walking from the city centre. In a stone's throw I can literally hit 50+ residences, and from there they could stone's throw to 50 more each... and so on probably right into the centre of London. We are far from "rural"... even suburbs makes it sound like there are sparse areas... th
Reflection of satellites (Score:1)
Where has the phased array gone? (Score:2)
When Starlink was first announced, they were planning to use a phased array antenna (basically an electronically steerable antenna) in the user nodes. Now Musk is saying it will use a servo driven dish. This is a massive change and has pretty serious implications for their system, as it means they will only be able to track a single satellite at a time, and the satellites are moving across the sky pretty quickly. What happens when the current satellite falls out of view, and it has to acquire a new satellit
Re:Where has the phased array gone? (Score:4, Interesting)
When Starlink was first announced, they were planning to use a phased array antenna (basically an electronically steerable antenna) in the user nodes. Now Musk is saying it will use a servo driven dish. This is a massive change and has pretty serious implications for their system, as it means they will only be able to track a single satellite at a time, and the satellites are moving across the sky pretty quickly.
I didn't see the word dish in the summary or linked story.
FYI, every phased array antenna I have experience with has been a plate and has been mechanically actuated. Phased array is typically much more efficient in one plane than the other, and the efficiency rolls off the closer you get to 90 degrees off of perpendicular.
Typically there are also two elements, so you can track two satellites (coming on station and leaving) that are likely to be >90 degrees apart. Each element will be on a separate blade that can tilt to maximize gain.
Given the pizza box description, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a dozen small blades half facing one direction and half facing opposite, and when installed it needs to be oriented to the assigned orbit (or steers on it's base to match orbit)
Streaming game services are bad (Score:2)
The industry doesn't need more power.
Impressed Once Again (Score:2)
Sounds like he knows how to make satellite usable. This is super cool, I never thought it was possible to have below 20 ms pings ... I mean yeah, you can game on that!
Yep no effect at all (Score:2)
20ms to where? (Score:2)
Its pointless to say 20ms. Latency is a factor of distance. I can get 1-2ms to my first isp PoP because its in my city and I have fiber. Except the hop to the US is 220ms because of the distance involved.
So is it 20ms roundtrip to the closest sat? Is it 20ms round trip to the sat exactly half the world away? Details please.
Re: 20ms to where? (Score:2)
Presumably to the sat. The hop from you to the USA should be shorter than your current 220ms anyway. Shooting a signal between satellites is faster than tunneling around via optical cable.
I would sign up even if it (Score:2)
I would sign up even if speed and cost was exactly the same as I am getting now through comcast.
My ping to www.google.com is from 35-50 range and speed is about 15 down, 2 up. But my price is just under $50.
So here's hoping!
Re:yo beauhd (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even though he explicitly "argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos"?
In rural and low-density areas it might easily out-compete local options, but that's not where the big players get their money anyway. In fact many would probably prefer to save the expense of supporting those areas at all. The real returns are in high-density urban areas, where Starlink won't have the bandwidth density to take more than a few crumbs from the telco pie, at least not until their constellation scales up a lot m
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One things for sure. If this works as advertised it will put a serious dent in the bottom line of the big players.
No, it's designed to cover the areas the major IPS's won't, or can't. Did you not read the part where it won't provide good bandwidth in heavily populated areas? The "big players" get most of their customers from the areas this can't effectively service.
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I think maybe you got the wrong takeaway from that.
It absolutely will cover those areas just as densely or moreso than rural areas, however the number of concurrent people using a single spot beam will not be anywhere near enough to serve everyone in densely populated areas.
So if they are in a rural area they may have 1k-10k people per beam or less (guestimate 1/3 the area of a MEO spot-beam, so call it 30k square kilometers), but in a big city that could be millions.
They likely have the capacity to serve a
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A goal would be "we plan to have a Tesla drive completely by itself..." or "our target is 1,000,000 robotaxis..." There is verbiage used to indicate a goal, rather than a statement of fact.
Musk's failure to realize that is what cost him his CEO role and earned him tens of millions of dollars in fines from the SEC.
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If you take any statement about the future as fact, you're already beyond hope...
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If you don't understand goals, I can only assume you are a fail or at best an incredibly mediocre person.