Starlink Makes Maiden Asia Foray With Japan Launch

Starlink has debuted in Japan, making it the first Asian nation to receive SpaceX's satellite internet service. From a report: Much of the country's north, including Tokyo, can now receive Starlink's signals, according to a map the startup shared on Twitter. Other areas including southern Japan and Hokkaido are expected to receive the service by the fourth quarter, before neighboring South Korea early next year.

Re: Japan launch

[saloomy]

A word in English is used as a metaphor. News at 11.

Assuming the frequencies are not in use in a particular country, I wonder why SpaceX is cowtowing to governments all around the world. If you order a dish and receive it or take it with you, it should just work if it sees the constellation, like GPS or a satellite phone.

Competition with fibre

[AmiMoJo]

It will be interesting to see take-up because Japan has near universal fibre service. The most recent stat I could find was for March 2020, which says 99.1% of households have access to fibre optic broadband.

https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_s... [soumu.go.jp]

That's apparently 530k households that are stuck on DSL, dial-up, or nothing (they don't really have cable). The government has stated that it wants 99.9% coverage by 2028.

So probably a decent market right now, although due to many of those households being close together Starlink might not work very well for them. There is also the issue of coverage, since Japan has a lot of mountains and living in a valley limits your view of the sky, i.e. the number of satellites you can see overhead. Japan launched additional GPS supplementing navigation satellites to help with that.

Re:

[timeOday]

Yeah, I don't get it at all. Japan seems like the last nation that would need Starlink. The Phillipines makes a lot more sense [theregister.com]. (7100 Islands!)

Re:

[nospam007]

"Japan seems like the last nation that would need Starlink. The Phillipines makes a lot more sense [theregister.com]. (7100 Islands!)"

Indeed. The measly 6,852 islands that Japan has, according to the Japan Statistical Yearbook,is nothing in comparison

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Maybe they figure that people in the Philippines can't afford it.

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

The Philippines is a good deal further south than Japan. TFS even has a link to a map where service is available, and you'll notice that there aren't a lot of places at equatorial latitudes being serviced yet.

Ping time

[FeelGood314]

This will be a game changer for gamers in South Korea. Almost everyone in South Korea has high speed internet that makes what we have in North America look like dialup. However ping times in Sough Korea to the rest of the world put you at a huge handicap. You will often have jitter pushing ping times to 100ms plus at the wrong time in a fight. If Starling came up with a low bandwidth and low ping time option I'm sure millions of hardcore gamers would take it. I could also see games in the future being optimized to use Starlink for time sensitive messages and using the high latency high bandwidth terrestrial links for all other data.

Of coarse the very first adopters will be the high frequency crypto and financial traders.

Re:

[TokyoJimu]

Most people in Korea live in high-rise apartment blocks. Nowhere to put a dish. And going up to a satellite and back down will not provide better ping times. Starlink is designed for rural areas. If all of Seoul got on Starlink, the speed would be like 1200 bps dialup.

Invest in a better sea cable then

[thesjaakspoiler]

Surrounding countries invested millions in many sea cables connecting the world but the Korean chaebol assume that 640 fibre cables are enough for every Korean.

Good as a backup for when Godzilla walks by

[thesjaakspoiler]

the Japanese coast and unintentionally wrecks some of the internet cables on the seabed.
That has happened now several times in the past decade.