Starlink (SpeceX)

Hi All,
What everyone's opinions on Starlink satellites and a possible option to purchase broadband from them down the line? I have heard rumours that because these Sats sit in a lower orbit that the latency will/may even be good enough for gaming (probably not serious gamers) but still, way better than the current crop of satellite providers.

Is anyone interested or excited by the project, could it be a viable alternative to wired lines?

It's been years since I took a look at sat providers but the upload speeds and latency didn't really make it a viable option last I time I checked, have they come on much? will Starlink revolutionise the industry or is it not worth the hype?

Discuss

I did search the forum surprised I didn't find another thread.

Edited by Scoot (Wed 08-Jan-20 22:07:27)

From what i've read

ping should be about 60-80ms which is much better than traditional sats which are usually 300+

Starlink in theory has huge potential but very little about pricing has been released. Mark Handley on YouTube has some superb insight into how the network could perform, well worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-k1j7M2-hBfXeECd9Y...

It should be much lower than that. More like 20ms and under.

They are much, much lower than geostationary satellites, at around 550km instead of 42,000km.

Even if you say the round trip distance is 3,000km (which it could possibly be if you get bounced *via a couple of satellites) the light delay is around 10ms.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132903914586529...

* for those who don't know, the satellites route traffic to each other directly, so if the one you can see can't see the regional ground station your traffic gets beamed to a satellite that can

Although it sounds like the first few thousand satellites won't have the inter satellite beaming hardware and will just rely on being able to see the user's ground station and the local Starlink ground station (as so will only operate in areas with relatively high population density).

Well lets see what happens i don't even get 20ms to london with pure fibre lol.

In reply to a post by Scoot:

Is anyone interested or excited by the project, could it be a viable alternative to wired lines?

If everyone in the UK where to switch to it, then it would be overwhelmed, in much the same way that 5G would be.

The gold standard is and will remain FTTP, and we should not allow ourselves to be distracted from achieving this long term goal. We wired the UK with copper, we can wire it with fibre. The difference is the fibre is forever unless you are into quack science and believe in superluminal communication.

I spotted this very interesting YouTube video theorising on how things might work without the laser links between satellites (none of the currently launched satellites have ways of talking to other satellites in the system).

https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY

I'm not particularly a fan of the whole concept to be honest, far too much space junk and impact on future/current utilisation of space.

Still thats 'progress'

In reply to a post by epyon:

Well lets see what happens i don't even get 20ms to london with pure fibre lol.

Your speed tests say 11ms to Manchester. If it doubles to get to London then there is something seriously wrong with their network.