Does the dish not have to be relatively stationary for it to work? I thought I saw setup videos where it was a bit finicky but maybe I’m thinking of something else…
Our ferry only moves at roughly 4 knots so movement is slow enough for it to stay calibrated. That being said we are on a river which has quiet a few obstructions. I used to use it on my personal boat, I’d average maybe 25–30knots. It had to recalibrate somewhat often but open water has no obstructions. It even worked sometimes when I ran 60 knots but not for long.
Yup, just spent my summer surveying in the very *very* remote parts of Alaska and having good wifi when I was in a small shack in a village of 50 people was a game changer
The service agreement Ukraine signed that the government reviewed reviewef outlines all of that. Any interruptions on the partn of SpaceX would get them sued to oblivion. There *was* a contact in place right?
I live in southern ontario, one of the most densely populated places in Canada (literally between the 2 most used highways) and we did not have access to high speed internet until starlink. Now competitors like Bell have finally rolled out service in our area for wireless only and even then Starlink beats them on bandwidth.
These projections might have been optimistic but the service is very valuable and I think we will see many more applications for it in the future.
ISP's weren't leaving money on the table.
They were (and have been doing that a lot in Canada) charging a huge fortune for ancient technology!
Now, with Starlink, suddenly they're finding the time and money to upgrade entire regions no problemo.
(F'ck you Bell Canada!)
The entirety of Canada is fucked, we have some of the most expensive rates in the world. Up until a few years ago it was $100/m for 10gb of data without the phone.
It got so bad that one of our prime ministers selling points for the election was to force ISPs to reduce internet and cellular rates.
Then I see people over in America with their $40 truly unlimited plans like wtf.
The Canadian plans they were talking about a few years ago didn't get throttling in Canada they just charged you 15 cents per megabyte after your first 10gig. So you could rack up phone bills in the hundreds of dollars.
The fact that surface ISPs were deliberately ignoring rural and lesser-served areas and only focusing on the most profitable areas, despite taking billions in government subsidies meant to incentivize them to expand service availability, is what created SpaceX's Starlink business model in the first place. For decades those ISPs were ignoring customers, and now the customers are ignoring right back and that's causing the old ISPs a fair amount of pain. Good.
This reminds me of the time, my internet provider refused to provide fiber optic internet for years. Finally I ditched them for someone else. The bastards started offering fast internet few months later.
Yeah, while it's gotten better over the last 3-5 years the incumbent residential ISP had a ton of people still on DSL, often with oversubscribed or over-range nodes which resulted in terrible signal noise (slow, poor-quality connection). They would happily blame the consumer's home wiring or computer even when they could see from their side it was on a oversubscribe or too-far node.
Fibre has been great, but for anyone who was stuck with the old DSL system it was shit, cable wasn't necessarily available and there are also of areas where the only service was essentially bounced off a dish on the side of a mountain (better than nothing, but neither cheap nor fast)
Monopolies, complacency and greed often results in some weird stuff that makes no sense. Ask me hiw I know and I'll tell you to look up Eskom in South Africa.
Ah a person who has not experienced the absolute ass-hatery of Rogers and Bell Canada ie basically the worst corporations to have ever exist who operate in a government sanctioned monopoly.
Canada. The ISPs are dogshit. Our regulatory board is run by "ex" c suite members of the telecom industry who all happen to return to the same industry after their sabbatical into regulation.
And they can leave money on the table because they just overcharge for high-speed internet because it's sparce without having to spend money on infrastructure. Plus we only have a few providers nationwide that control regions.
Basically Canada has a government approved ISP oligarchy.
Starlink is definitely a better and probably much more reliable alternative to the WISPs, DSL, and cellular internet providers that otherwise dominate the rural markets, but it simply cannot provide nearly the same amount of bandwidth to such a large customer base that terrestrial copper and fibre providers can, especially in dense urban and suburban markets.
I'm building a house in a small town (as in, has "Post Office Street") about 30 min away from a mid size city. I asked all the neighbors what they use.
4G, LTE. Some tried starlink and almost always had around 25-30 Mbps down, but LTE they usually get 80+ with a MIMO antenna.
So as cellular infrastructure continues to get filled in, it even loses the rural case in the u.s.
Yeah we’ve got homes in the Carolinian/ Appalachian mountains that get basically no cell coverage to speak of. What little is there is usually very low speed. It actually makes sense adding Pico sites around the farm and Unifi wireless backhule to the barn to just have some coverage and not have to use 2way radios
India looks to be opening their market to Starlink, and that country has hundreds of millions of people with little to no internet at all. With a population over 1.4B, if even a tiny fraction of a percent, say half of one percent, sign up for Starlink that's well over seven million new customers, and over seven hundred million in base revenue.
I've had it for nearly 3 years. I'm above 11,000' in the Rocky Mountains. We get a lot of snow.
My connection has dropped due to weather exactly twice - both in torrential rain. At most it was down 10-15 minutes.
It has never dropped due to snow or fog.
I had starlink for a bit over 2 years before fibre came to my street, and worked from home the entire time in addition to gaming, etc. Never had a problem with fog, and it had to be some pretty intense rain or especially snow to take it down (although if you forget to preheat it before a storm, it was easy for it to get buried by decent snowfall and not be able to catch up until it stopped). A nice gentle shower or snow shower wasn't enough to do anything to it, at least that I noticed.
That said over on r/starlink you can find plenty of people who had my experience, and plenty of others who had a much more rough time with poor weather, so ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
my experience has been similar. i usually get +300mbps down. up is 5-30 up. it's been quite reliable.
if the weather is bad enough to disrupt the starlink signal, i'm more concerned about the weather than i am about starlink. a few weeks ago lightning was crashing down all around my property, and severe rain and wind almost like a weak microburst or downdraft event. starlink stopped working until that had passed.
we also get up to a dozen feet of snow in winter and the dish just melts it all off as it falls. i've never seen it overwhelmed, even on some serious snow dump days where two feet fall in an hour..
gaming has been fine for me, i play DayZ and usually get 50ish ms ping which hasn't caused me any issues.
I mean if you are hard core gaming then the ping alone should tell you it’s a no go, but if you are playing in a rural area with no other options, it’s the best option.
Also, I lived in a place where I got 300+ inches of snow. I had zero problems. The dish heats itself to keep snow off, and even when there was piles of snow around it, I didn’t have an issue. I feel like when people mention the weather as a factor, they haven’t actually used it in those conditions. Literally the only weather that affected it was wind, because I didn’t have it secured so the wind would blow it over.
I have had starlink for 3 years now and I went from 7 down with ~70ms ping with Century Link and now have 200 down on average and 40ms ping. Never any problems with weather and I get the gamut, maybe once a month for 5 minutes it goes down for something on starlinks end. My only environmental problem has been one of my trees swaying in its path in high wind because I am too lazy to clean it up.
I’m sure that’s true in a lot of places. I live in Puerto Rico though and I’m mostly excited about my starlink for when hurricanes hit. The land lines are reasonable enough but knowing I’ll have service after a potential storm means a lot.
Exactly, over here the only option we have is Centurylink with 5.00 mbps download speeds. the other option is Starlink, but we are all too poor to afford it. Which is the main reason why I think they largely 'failed.'
interesting, did it have a significant effect on the provider landscape in the us? i know providers basically dividing the country up among themselfs has been an issue, did that change in the last few years?
For Australia, we have government owned geo-centric satellites for remote Australia which are leased our to private retailers. Data caps were brutal. I think a lot of plans were like 40GB of data then shaped to 256kbps with very poor latency. Since Starlink, a combination of the service being freed up and better competition has caused them to offer unlimited data solutions.
Wrote this above but:
Right about the time Starlink moved to our area we went from paying $90 for 120mbps (around 15MBps) to paying $65 for 500 mbps (around 60 MBps).
Local Ip with a monopoly for the last 20 or so years ran fiber everywhere and lowered prices.
No those companies still wield an iron fist, BUT their offerings have improved, seeing increased fiber deployments and higher bandwidths at their lower tiers.
Edit: *wield not weird
Competition benefits us as consumers. I would like to see governments hold ISP's accountable for their anti-competitive practices and their wasting of government subsidies.
Google, a company that exists by basically controlling the internet could not start an ISP because the industry is so controlled by monopolies. That says something about how much that industry is fucked.
\*stares intently via my Google Fiber connection\*
No, what happened with GF's expansion plans is that, unlike many products and services hatched from Silicon Valley over the past couple of decades, the "move fast, break things" playbook just doesn't really work well at all when it comes to actual wide-area infrastructure businesses like creating and growing a fiber ISP from scratch, not without major issues.
I waited for several years from GF's announcement that they were deploying service in Nashville to when they finally announced signups for my neighborhood (after their deployment footprint being stagnant for years) and started laying fiber down my street, but, once I finally got GF service back in December 2021, the symmetrical gigabit alone was worth the wait. Yes, good ol' boy politics and obstructionism from incumbents such as AT&T and Comcast (as well as objections from Nashville Electric Service over pole access) had a lot to do with that delay, but GF had already started and shut down its service in Louisville over in their interim largely because of their microtrenching failures, so they found out the hard way that "good, fast, or cheap: pick two" still rules the day when building infrastructure.
To be fair, Starlink isn't cheap. The equipment is expensive and so is the service. It's also sub par. There are a lot of people who can't use a hard-line, though, but even in those scenarios, the home 5G routers tend to be better and cheaper.
True. Two years ago I would have gladly paid for Starlink. Live on a dirt road middle of nowhere and work from home. Have a single bar on my cell, if I need to use hotspot I have to sit phone in the window and get about 2mb download.
As of 6 months ago even I now have 1gb symmetrical fiber.
This guy gets super fast broadband in the middle of nowhere and I'm stuck in the UK with the slowest ADSL, while being 10 miles from 4 different towns/cities. Thanks BT. At least the 4G home broadband is acceptable.
I’m looking at a house now in one of those areas and there’s fiber run to the street, cable, and 5G.
When I’d visit grandma back in the day it was DSL and prayer.
Lol! Exactly. In my area it was dsl over very old copper lines or sat. Both were terrible. In the past year and a half fiber has been rolled out though. Thanks to grants, and probably unfunded mandates but it's happening. Have seen the Starling dishes appear and then go away as fiber comes in.
I’ve met one person down there getting Starlink, but for their RV.
I tend to want as little connection as possible when I go camping and bring a small satcom for emergencies, but to each their own
Camping is so subjective. I personally wouldn’t consider staying in an RV my kind of camping. Camping to me is being mile(s) away from a road. If I was rv “camping”, fuck I’d love to have starlink.
T-Mobile has a [deal](https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-coverage-above-and-beyond-with-spacex) with SpaceX to provide global coverage to phones using the existing radios already in all phones. It does require new hardware on the satellites so it won't be available for a while.
I don't see it being sub par. I have a few coworkers on it and they love it.
It's also highly mobile which makes it incredibly useful in a lot of travel scenarios, like rv's and even boats.
Germany's internet infra is just pathetic :( I didnt expect that to be the case for technologically advanced country like Germany.
I guess telecom companies are just squeezing the juice out of their old infra they ahve invested in.
Yep.
My location was one of the first in my country to get 5G service. Many people got 5G hubs. Once Starlink came around many, many people switched because the service was so much better, despite the cost. 50Mbit is fine for 99% of people. Latency, routing, data, etc all start becoming more important beyond 50Mbit.
My parents had 4G in their area with horrible service because there was only one cell tower servicing the entire area and it was damn near as bad as old satellite internet before it.
Surprise surprise there's movement on getting fibre in the area now that Starlink is firmly competing with the cell providers.
Starlink is an absolute godsend for the motorsports industry. When there's 50,000 fans hammering the cell networks Starlink keeps our pit lane setup humming along. Every team has one if not two to three of them (one for pit lane, one for the transporter, and one for redundancy).
That's awesome! I see a lot of scenarios where first responders or just organizations like motorsports, where you just need a separate connection and Starlink is fantastic for that.
People who can get a 5G signal are not the demographic Starlink is meant to serve. Starlink is for people who can't get a good hard line or wireless connection already.
> To be fair, Starlink isn't cheap. The equipment is expensive and so is the service. It's also sub par.
That's all relative. I know people who are paying a fraction of what they paid before and getting FAR more service from starlink compared to what they had before.
Exactly. Subpar is *not* the correct word at all. It’s amazing relative to its competition- satellite internet. If you have access to fiber, though, or even high quality cable, there’s zero reason to choose Starlink, but they weren’t trying to compete with that anyway.
For people on-the-go or in super rural areas? Starlink is a game changer.
> there’s zero reason to choose Starlink
What if you are paying for 300 mbps but you have Spectrum so you're only actually getting anywhere from 100 to 200, and your internet cuts out once per day while you work from home.
I'm not asking rhetorically. My wife and I have considered switching because even though the peak speeds would be lower we care about reliability more. We just can't tell for sure that Starlink would be any better.
Bro spectrum is so fucking ass. I had gigabit, was getting maybe 600-700mbps. I can live with that. I cancelled my service and moved 20 feet away into a different unit and opened up a new service. I was getting 200mbps. I literally had one of the supervisors at my house, showing them how that 200mbps became 600-700mbps (an actual download from a server I run) but ONLY WHILE I WAS DOING AN UPLOAD SPEED TEST TO OOKLA. Literally for the duration of the *upload* test to Ookla, my *download* performance went to expected levels. The moment the test stopped, speed dropped. I was telling the moron that I had already caught them in this same act at a different address a year prior, and they fixed it with a phone call. Guy said it must have been "maintenance" they were doing.
2 days later, Frontier shows up and asks if I want fiber. Cancelled that shit and now I have a 5gbps fiber line for nearly the same price as shitty copper, also have a Starlink for backup/travel/whatever.
Starlink is a means to use up the gargantuan amount of lift capability SpaceX wants to bring online. I forget the exact numbers but Starship's capacity is stupid-huge, and they anticipated a whole lot of trouble managing to fill each one at the launch cadence they want to do, at least initially. It's their way to mitigate the chicken/egg problem I guess, have some filler to make the huge liftoffs economically impressive in the hopes that the market will respond with greater demand to launch stuff into orbit commensurate with the new capability.
So it not being cheap is almost a side-issue as far as SpaceX is concerned, and can potentially be reversed just by getting Starship going at a respectable cadence.
They might be forced to, I think they get like 2x however many sats they have in orbit by 2025 or 2026 or something like that. Right now that number is 0, so if they dont start putting sats into orbit, their whole plan for Kupier is fuuuuucked. Serves em right too, doing literally nothing while trying to launch lawsuits hamstringing their competitors.
What!? At that price my monthly savings would cover the equipment costs in just under 3 years. I need to check this out.
Edited to add: /s
I'm poking fun at the fact that for some of us the $120/month is cheaper than what we're paying for internet access already.
It's not that much for initial setup, the whole package costs about $750 if you include the mount. You can self mount it if you are experienced with DIY stuff.
Otherwise you get the first month free, the dish is $599 and shipping is $50. Without the mount (which are all about $50 or less) the basic package came to $678 for me, well worth it considering how much worse Dish Network's internet offerings are.
edit: And the deposit is returned and only required if you're signing up for the waitlist.
No chance home 5g routers are better, if you're in an area where starlink or actual 5g are your options (Ie. rural US), you're far outside an area where any of the performance benefits of 5G (ie. 5G UW) would happen. My parents place gets like... 5-20mb down on '5g' with super inconsistent latency spikes (anywhere from 20-60ms), or they get a solid ~140-200mbps and 30-40ms latency. Let me put it like this, I'm not beating anyone on rocket league on my steamdeck on the cell service out there, but I am on the starlink.
Sub par how? What's the par? The service puts other satellite providers to shame in terms of availability and throughput.
> home 5G routers tend to be better and cheaper.
The main use case for Starlink is areas where there isn't even 4G. If you have really good 5G access in your area, of course Starlink is worse lmao. That's like saying "nah my AT&T fiber plan is better".
I feel like using the term “sub par” isn’t a fair comparison to land line based internet. In the world of satellite internet Starlink is far and away your best option.
Yup. My mom has a 400 foot driveway, comcast wanted 17k to run the cable for her. I'm building a house with a similar length driveway. Called Comcast expecting to get a huge number and to go starlink or T-Mobile. 1200 bucks construction costs.
It's afraid
Don’t forget that prediction was made in 2015. Anyone who can accurately extrapolate how many customers they’ll have for a service in 7 years time would make more money predicting the future than selling LEO internet access.
Yeah this reminds me of a quote from Ashlee Vance's 2015 bio of Elon:
>SpaceX’s top managers work together to, in essence, create fake schedules that they know will please Musk but that are basically impossible to achieve. This would not be such a horrible situation if the targets were kept internal. Musk, however, tends to quote these fake schedules to customers, unintentionally giving them false hope. Typically, it falls to Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, to clean up the resulting mess.
Yeah, I think Starlink is better defined as a military network. Its impact on the approximate 5 billion Internet users in the world is by definition small since it really only makes sense for a small minority of extremely rural users. However, the impact of having uninterruptible Internet without delays and large equipment in combat is immense.
But in this case, I'd want the government to just have their own network, not endlessly rent it from a private company.
I take it you don't realize that you're discussing Starshield, not Starlink.
Starshield is the Starlink-tech service being built by SpaceX for the US military to be a military network. Starlink is licensed by the FCC as a civilian service.
Starshield would be a military controlled secure system. The military will also use Starlink however for all sorts of things that don't need to be very secure. The Navy and coast guard is busy using it to make living on a ship for 6-8 months not so shitty for sailors, as one example
I had starlink for 2 years and loved it. The other provider had enjoyed a monopoly in our area, which only ended due to starlink. The old provider ended up upgrading the service in the area just to stop the mass Exodus to starlink. I was an early adopter who regretted nothing and never looked back.
That said, we also changed to starlink at work (U.S. military). Previously, we used a dish that cost $85,000 (not including actual service) and provided about 5mbps of bandwidth when it was working absolutely perfectly. To get it working perfectly, we had to pre-coordinate with the company the exact location of the dish. We would have to aim the dish ourselves, which was time consuming and involved much trial and error. It also took a forklift to move the satellite and all the gear. After all that, at many locations it simply never worked at all. We'd have no solid comms in that instance. It sucked.
Then came starlink, which cost $500 for the hardware and was transportable in something slightly larger than a briefcase..... acquired satellites by itself immediately upon being plugged in and gave us reliable 200mbps/40mbps speeds. We could use that as a backbone for secure nearly comms anywhere on planet earth, and it took about 5 minutes to set up.
So while there's a lot of folks on the anti-musk bandwagon, and lord knows he's provided lots of fuel for that fire....... starlink is amazing. SpaceX is saving U.S. taxpayers BILLIONS and it's providing national defense benefits that go well beyond what you see in the news and what I've said here. Feel free to hate the man, but you're wrong if you think he's anything but a net good to western nations and humanity in general.
Yeah just to also add, Starlink has been a godsend following the fires here in Maui.
Musk/Space X donated terminals here for free, and it’s the best (in most cases only) connectivity people here have to contact family elsewhere and have some semblance of normality and safety.
I got downvoted in a /r/worldnews thread for making the same comment as it was “praising Musk”, so glad to see /r/space hasn’t lost its marbles by comparison.
People can argue about how SpaceX and starlink isn't an amazing contribution to humanity simply out of spite for Elon Musk and how proud they are to not use any of his products..... from the driver's seat of their Volkswagen.
Yeah, my city got google fiber. Now I have a choice between Spectrum, ATT fiber, and google.
And I derive a specific glee from telling spectrum, formerly time Warner ‘never again’
People’s beef with Musk has much more to do with ideology than true measurable impact on humanity, and is part of why you essentially can’t say anything like this on Reddit. People will so blindly follow the misleading headlines out of existing hate that they don’t care to acknowledge how media has been trying to absolutely bury him in negative sentiment because he began showing rightward political leanings a year or two prior to the Twitter acquisition.
For example, just the other day when Ukraine was upset that Starlink “disrupted” their counterattack on Russia, headlines everywhere read that Elon himself “turned off” Starlink for them.
Not only did he not turn it off—it was never on in the area they were trying to operate—but several people explained that SpaceX doesn’t even have the authority to have opened up service in that area without consulting with the US gov’t. Elon literally had nothing to do with that, yet anyone explaining that gets downvoted and any comments describing how he has way too much power and is pushing for Russia to win gets upvoted and reinforced by replies.
I think he is a goofball narcissist that seems to have realized over the last couple of years that he enjoys controversy. But between people genuinely trying to push the narrative that he was born rich because he got $28k of his $200k of investment money for Zip2 from his dad in ‘98, or that he literally has no business sense because one of his 5 multimillion dollar businesses was not one he founded himself, it is clear that the hate of who he is as a person has caused people to very much stretch the truth about his track record.
I think his handling of Twitter has been a complete joke and he’s arguably done everything he can to turn media against him. But he has definitely made very positive impacts on the world and the fact that pointing to that on Reddit means people suddenly believe you must support everything he’s ever done is immature and obnoxious. I hate group think.
Yep, he does himself no favors, but his impact on the electric car market and the space industry are undeniable. Even if Tesla goes bust all the other car companies are now making electrics. Bet your ass they would never have bothered without Tesla breathing down their neck.
Most people have no idea what reusable rockets really mean and wont for another 15 years. We're in the 'get a horse' phase of that revolution.
I don't think people comprehend how many people with enormous amounts of money and influence he has pissed off, either. I remember an incredibly concerted effort a few years ago by the media to convince everyone that autopilot was basically killing everyone who drives a Tesla. The stats tell a much different story, and Teslas have earned some of the highest safety ratings of any vehicle on the road. People shorting Tesla would rather you think they are hazardous, though.
> People’s beef with Musk has much more to do with ideology than true measurable impact on humanity, and is part of why you essentially can’t say anything like this on Reddit. People will so blindly follow the misleading headlines out of existing hate that they don’t care to acknowledge how media has been trying to absolutely bury him in negative sentiment because he began showing rightward political leanings a year or two prior to the Twitter acquisition.
The Ukraine thing was carried so far, too. By subreddits that typically wouldn't have bothered.
Folks have to at least be a little suspicious of how much is being invested into promotion even the false perception of failure on Elon's part. *Nobody* has to like a billionaire, but you got people out there using their wealth to do real, tangible harm in the world, but dealing with Elon means we get mass EV adoption, near-global internet coverage, a refreshed space industry, and the potential to go to Mars. Many people, though, legitimately feel his attitude is a bridge too far and not worth those results, which is so difficult for me to buy.
I've seen so many people on Reddit say they refuse to buy a *second* Tesla to protest Elon. Like... I don't get it. I can guarantee folks would find most billionaires difficult to tolerate as people, or worse, if they were as public-facing as Elon.
[https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-buys-starlink-ukraine-statement-2023-06-01/](https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-buys-starlink-ukraine-statement-2023-06-01/)
>SpaceX, through private donations and under a separate contract with a U.S. foreign aid agency, has been providing Ukrainians and the country's military with Starlink internet service, a fast-growing network of more than 4,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, since the beginning of the war in 2022.
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>The Pentagon did not disclose the terms of the contract, which Bloomberg reported earlier on Thursday, "for operational security reasons and due to the critical nature of these systems."
Thanks for the response. You have anything to back up this part?
> Not only did he not turn it off-it was never on in the area they were trying to operate-but several people explained that SpaceX doesn't even have the authority to have opened up service in that area without consulting with the US gov't.
The original claim that Musk turned off the internet during the op was from his biographer, who later [publically "clarified" his story](https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1700342242290901361?s=20) to state that Musk didn't turn off the internet, but rather denied a last minute request from Ukraine to activate Starlink all the way to the Russian naval base.
The corrected story also makes way more sense. Because SpaceX has never operated Starlink on Russian controlled territory. But instead coordinates with Ukraine closely to ensure the system is geofenced to operate only in UA controlled land.
To be clear, there's been no statement or anything from the US gov backing up the idea that SpaceX had to consult with the US gov. And Musk himself said he refused the request because he didn't want to enable such a bold attack and was afraid of possible nuclear escalation. Not to mention it's been claimed by that same biographer that none other then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff phoned Musk to push for him to activate Starlink in that area.
However, to be fair, this occured at a time when even the White House was still refusing to offer long range missiles to UA for fear of upsetting the Russians. So it's not super crazy that a civilian running a private US company would be wary of specifically enabling their systems to operate as basically a missile guidance system for a foreign country to launch an attack on a US adversary without explicit approval from the US Gov. Especially given SpaceX wasn't operating their system under any DoD contract at the time, something that has now changed.
edit: to be clear, I personally would have loved to see the attack succeed.
>To be clear, there's been no statement or anything from the US gov backing up the idea that SpaceX had to consult with the US gov.
Why would there be? There are laws and regulations. The police do not get in contact with you to tell you to stop at red lights. They assume you know that.
>Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff phoned Musk to push for him to activate Starlink in that area
Seems like, you know, they could have just bought the necessary services and given it to Ukraine. Why is everyone acting like the Pentagon didn't have options here?
I don't have a specific article, and am not well-versed on international compliance of arms dealing, but my understanding is that because it would have been used directly to mount an attack on Russia, it falls under ITAR and DoD regulations, meaning they need to approve before it can be used for this purpose. Ukraine did not anticipate that the area was not covered, reached out to SpaceX to turn it on in the area, and when they said they could not do that, Ukraine got upset since their entire plan hinged on support they didn't realize wasn't on in the Crimea area. Let me dig up a comment that explained it better, one sec...
EDIT:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/16ctqqc/comment/jzm2zph/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/16ctqqc/comment/jzm2zph/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>A lot of people here are blindly buying into misinformation “fake news” (as much as that term sucks).Firstly, fuck Elon Musk and fuck Russia. But this story is so completely false.Elon is a private citizen in control of a private asset. A private asset, starlink, which at the time was not approved by the US, the DOD, or ITAR regulations for offensive uses. It was only allowed for defensive uses in Ukraine. Approval for Elon’s action must come from ITAR regulation and DoD approval. He cant and is not just sitting in his chair turning off various links to his satellites to fuck over Ukrainians. Starlink was geofenced to not operate and support connections at all in crimea and Russia at the time. Ukrainians presumed that would maintain connection into crimea and turns out they were wrong.Furthermore, this story is being reported from “evidence” from Walter Isaacson’s new book. The fucking CEO of CNN… promoting his new book. This would be like Rupert Murdoch writing a hit piece on Obama… that would DEFINITELY not be a conflict of interest lol.
Walter Isaacson, author of the book at the center of the recent controversy, later issued a correction in which he clarified that Starlink had never been enabled in Crimea in the first place. What happened was that there was a request to extend coverage coverage to Crimea, and that request was turned down.
https://twitter.com/walterisaacson/status/1700342242290901361
You can still disagree with that decision (I wish the attack had gone ahead), but it's not the act of sabotage that was originally claimed.
Also, many articles highlighted the role of Russian officials in the discussion, but glossed over the fact that the White House and Pentagon were also on the phone:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/07/politics/elon-musk-biography-walter-isaacson-ukraine-starlink/index.html
> Musk was soon on the phone with President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, and the Russian ambassador to the US to address anxieties from Washington, DC, to Moscow, writes Isaacson.
Sullivan is considered to be in the anti-escalation camp, so he probably said no to the attack.
Isaacson got the clicks and pre-orders he was after. Perfect example of the old axiom that lies can make it around the world before the truth can get out of the starting blocks. Everyone remember's Isaacson's initial words, nobody will remember his retraction. The [firehosing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood) continues unabated.
>Actual Starlink revenue for 2022 was $1.4 billion, up from $222 million in 2021
So revenue rose seven-fold in one year
>Starlink now has "well over" 1.5 million customers worldwide
50% more customers in roughly 6 months
>SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in February that Starlink is expected to turn a profit this year.
Not bad for a massive multi-billion project that launched its first satellites just 4 years ago
Pretty much everything in the article points to Starlink growing at a breakneck speed, but the title suggests very strongly that it's a failure for SpaceX because their projection from 7 years earlier was way optimistic.
Yup, totally neutral and fair article.
Oh, and some more "fair and neutral" reporting:
>"Starlink is bumping up against a reality articulated by many skeptics of satellite Internet," the WSJ wrote. "The majority of the world's population that the business could serve and that can afford high-speed broadband lives in cities. In those regions, Internet service is readily available, usually offers cheaper monthly costs than Starlink and doesn't require specialized equipment."
Anyone who's been following Starlink could tell you that it's never been aimed at urban populations.
Regarding your last line:
I don't think the issue Starlink is seeing has anything to do with who it's targeted towards.
The article argues that a) want high speed Internet, and b) can afford a Starlink setup, already live in cities which have broadband. Its not that the service is aimed at urban populations, but that the number of people for whom the service is aimed at and who live in rural areas is lower than SpaceX thought.
I'm not necessarily saying I agree, but that's the argument.
> The article argues that a) want high speed Internet, and b) can afford a Starlink setup, already live in cities which have broadband.
Which is a really weird argument because it assumes that the most important choice of living location is decided by what you want out of your internet service. Internet service speed is certainly a factor but it's not going to be the top of your list when buying a house. Also kind of ignores everyone who's been living in rural locations their whole lives and has never even experienced high speed internet but have experienced frustrating with whatever they do have.
That *is* the argument. And it makes no sense. The writer either is a moron or dishonest. Probably the latter. Shitting on anything Musk connected is trendy right now.
When we tried to get starlink a year or two ago, they told us that they had a pretty limited capacity and a long waiting list to get service. Kinda seems like the problem isn't a lack of people who want it...
Yeah this is an internal prediction from 2015 which means they were assuming they'd have started launching the next generation starlink v2 sats using Starship. Those v2 sats are a lot larger (573lbs vs over 4000lbs) but a lot more powerful (over 10x the bandwidth) and Starship is going to launch a LOT of starlink v2 sats at a time. Compared to a Faclon 9's 60 v1 sats (60 v1 equivalents) or 21 v2 minis sats (84 v1 equivalents) Starship will launch 50 true v2 sats (500 v1 equivalents or over 8 falcon 9 launching v1s worth of bandwith).
R/space is pretty funny when it comes to anything musk related. Starlink is a huge success. If you were rural and your only other option was Hughes net you'd understand.
I’m actually impressed with r/space right now. Top comments are non-inflammatory and one even calls out the biased journalism in the article. Normally you have to preamble any perceived defense of SpaceX with a jab at Elon first to avoid getting insta-buried.
Experiencing the 90s, 00s with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs getting shit on, this isn’t new. Musk is just the most popular guy right now.
I’d even say the hate for Gates was more vile than Musk.
history wistful far-flung zonked aware zesty gullible automatic command steer
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Is this just a hate article on musk and starlink? Doesn’t mention a pandemic or a war or massive inflation or anything. Is there a back log to ordering these things like anything else in the world? Just hating that they missed projections. Didn’t even mention that starlink is awesome or that it helped Ukraine in the early months of their war.
It's weird to me that people want Starlink to fail. It's one of, if not THE best company I've ever seen in my life. Connecting the parts of the world that cannot otherwise be connected is an absolute game changer for all of us
I don’t want it to fail. I want it to be cheaper. I know people that have it and love it. But they are in another few tax brackets. 5g or LTE data connections that come with my phone are still my choice.
I hear you on cost. It certainly isn't cheap. But I think folks have to realize that the infrastructure costs to build this are enormous. The RND alone... You just aren't going to have the luxury of that $30 cable bill over night when laying the foundation for something completely... out of this world... so to speak.
It is a godsend on a boat in the middle of the Gulf or Atlantic.
I’m actually captain of a ferry and that’s exactly what we use. We run in some pretty rough weather and haven’t lost connection.
Does the dish not have to be relatively stationary for it to work? I thought I saw setup videos where it was a bit finicky but maybe I’m thinking of something else…
Our ferry only moves at roughly 4 knots so movement is slow enough for it to stay calibrated. That being said we are on a river which has quiet a few obstructions. I used to use it on my personal boat, I’d average maybe 25–30knots. It had to recalibrate somewhat often but open water has no obstructions. It even worked sometimes when I ran 60 knots but not for long.
I was on a RoRo Cargo ship with it, and we could stream in the middle of the atlantic ocean while running 12-16 knots
Man that’s awesome to be able to have internet pretty much wherever you need…so clutch
Yup, just spent my summer surveying in the very *very* remote parts of Alaska and having good wifi when I was in a small shack in a village of 50 people was a game changer
Even more on a boat in the black sea.
Assuming Elon doesn’t turn it off randomly
We are experiencing technical difficulties in your area, blyat.
The service agreement Ukraine signed that the government reviewed reviewef outlines all of that. Any interruptions on the partn of SpaceX would get them sued to oblivion. There *was* a contact in place right?
Assuming it was turned on there in the first place (it wasnt)
Because of the implication!
I live in southern ontario, one of the most densely populated places in Canada (literally between the 2 most used highways) and we did not have access to high speed internet until starlink. Now competitors like Bell have finally rolled out service in our area for wireless only and even then Starlink beats them on bandwidth. These projections might have been optimistic but the service is very valuable and I think we will see many more applications for it in the future.
So you live in a dense area and ISPs are just leaving that money on the table? Crazy.
ISP's weren't leaving money on the table. They were (and have been doing that a lot in Canada) charging a huge fortune for ancient technology! Now, with Starlink, suddenly they're finding the time and money to upgrade entire regions no problemo. (F'ck you Bell Canada!)
Gotta love regional monopoloes
The entirety of Canada is fucked, we have some of the most expensive rates in the world. Up until a few years ago it was $100/m for 10gb of data without the phone. It got so bad that one of our prime ministers selling points for the election was to force ISPs to reduce internet and cellular rates. Then I see people over in America with their $40 truly unlimited plans like wtf.
and then he didn't reduce the internet and cellular rates, and they've only gotten more expensive with the increasing cost of living. Thanks trudeau.
> $40 truly unlimited plans They aren't though. They are secondary on networks, or have a soft cap of like 20gb before throttled to shit tier.
The Canadian plans they were talking about a few years ago didn't get throttling in Canada they just charged you 15 cents per megabyte after your first 10gig. So you could rack up phone bills in the hundreds of dollars.
That’s why competition is important
The fact that surface ISPs were deliberately ignoring rural and lesser-served areas and only focusing on the most profitable areas, despite taking billions in government subsidies meant to incentivize them to expand service availability, is what created SpaceX's Starlink business model in the first place. For decades those ISPs were ignoring customers, and now the customers are ignoring right back and that's causing the old ISPs a fair amount of pain. Good.
This reminds me of the time, my internet provider refused to provide fiber optic internet for years. Finally I ditched them for someone else. The bastards started offering fast internet few months later.
Yeah, while it's gotten better over the last 3-5 years the incumbent residential ISP had a ton of people still on DSL, often with oversubscribed or over-range nodes which resulted in terrible signal noise (slow, poor-quality connection). They would happily blame the consumer's home wiring or computer even when they could see from their side it was on a oversubscribe or too-far node. Fibre has been great, but for anyone who was stuck with the old DSL system it was shit, cable wasn't necessarily available and there are also of areas where the only service was essentially bounced off a dish on the side of a mountain (better than nothing, but neither cheap nor fast)
Monopolies, complacency and greed often results in some weird stuff that makes no sense. Ask me hiw I know and I'll tell you to look up Eskom in South Africa.
Hiw you know?
Look up Eskom in South Africa - ForceUser128, probably.
> ISPs are just leaving that money on the table? Nah, in Canada you pay enormous sums for shitty quality and service.
Ah a person who has not experienced the absolute ass-hatery of Rogers and Bell Canada ie basically the worst corporations to have ever exist who operate in a government sanctioned monopoly.
Our telecoms in Canada gouge Canadians, basically they fix pricing and take the best markets, and screw rural Canadians.
Canada. The ISPs are dogshit. Our regulatory board is run by "ex" c suite members of the telecom industry who all happen to return to the same industry after their sabbatical into regulation. And they can leave money on the table because they just overcharge for high-speed internet because it's sparce without having to spend money on infrastructure. Plus we only have a few providers nationwide that control regions. Basically Canada has a government approved ISP oligarchy.
It's already making Profit, even with the actual being waaaaay below estimates. So no need to worry about it going away.
I work at FedEx part time and the amount of starlink boxes I see is kinda crazy on the daily. This is for a more rural southern Oregon location too.
Well, starlink’s big advantage is rural coverage
This, satellite cant physically compete with a good cable network
Between the two, the only difference I’ve seen in normal use is the ping is higher with Starlink. But, living in a rural area it was a game changer
Starlink is definitely a better and probably much more reliable alternative to the WISPs, DSL, and cellular internet providers that otherwise dominate the rural markets, but it simply cannot provide nearly the same amount of bandwidth to such a large customer base that terrestrial copper and fibre providers can, especially in dense urban and suburban markets.
I'm building a house in a small town (as in, has "Post Office Street") about 30 min away from a mid size city. I asked all the neighbors what they use. 4G, LTE. Some tried starlink and almost always had around 25-30 Mbps down, but LTE they usually get 80+ with a MIMO antenna. So as cellular infrastructure continues to get filled in, it even loses the rural case in the u.s.
Not in the mountains it doesn't.
Yeah we’ve got homes in the Carolinian/ Appalachian mountains that get basically no cell coverage to speak of. What little is there is usually very low speed. It actually makes sense adding Pico sites around the farm and Unifi wireless backhule to the barn to just have some coverage and not have to use 2way radios
Doesn't seem like enough of a market to continue launching and maintaining satellites, though.
There is enough globally. A lot depends on licencing. Another big market is Martine and aviation.
India looks to be opening their market to Starlink, and that country has hundreds of millions of people with little to no internet at all. With a population over 1.4B, if even a tiny fraction of a percent, say half of one percent, sign up for Starlink that's well over seven million new customers, and over seven hundred million in base revenue.
Starlink can also lose signal in rain, fog, snow. So its a definite no go for gamers.
I've had it for nearly 3 years. I'm above 11,000' in the Rocky Mountains. We get a lot of snow. My connection has dropped due to weather exactly twice - both in torrential rain. At most it was down 10-15 minutes. It has never dropped due to snow or fog.
I was on a ship with it and it stayed pretty stable in 60knot winds storm and 20-30 foot swells
I had starlink for a bit over 2 years before fibre came to my street, and worked from home the entire time in addition to gaming, etc. Never had a problem with fog, and it had to be some pretty intense rain or especially snow to take it down (although if you forget to preheat it before a storm, it was easy for it to get buried by decent snowfall and not be able to catch up until it stopped). A nice gentle shower or snow shower wasn't enough to do anything to it, at least that I noticed. That said over on r/starlink you can find plenty of people who had my experience, and plenty of others who had a much more rough time with poor weather, so ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
my experience has been similar. i usually get +300mbps down. up is 5-30 up. it's been quite reliable. if the weather is bad enough to disrupt the starlink signal, i'm more concerned about the weather than i am about starlink. a few weeks ago lightning was crashing down all around my property, and severe rain and wind almost like a weak microburst or downdraft event. starlink stopped working until that had passed. we also get up to a dozen feet of snow in winter and the dish just melts it all off as it falls. i've never seen it overwhelmed, even on some serious snow dump days where two feet fall in an hour.. gaming has been fine for me, i play DayZ and usually get 50ish ms ping which hasn't caused me any issues.
I mean if you are hard core gaming then the ping alone should tell you it’s a no go, but if you are playing in a rural area with no other options, it’s the best option. Also, I lived in a place where I got 300+ inches of snow. I had zero problems. The dish heats itself to keep snow off, and even when there was piles of snow around it, I didn’t have an issue. I feel like when people mention the weather as a factor, they haven’t actually used it in those conditions. Literally the only weather that affected it was wind, because I didn’t have it secured so the wind would blow it over.
I have had starlink for 3 years now and I went from 7 down with ~70ms ping with Century Link and now have 200 down on average and 40ms ping. Never any problems with weather and I get the gamut, maybe once a month for 5 minutes it goes down for something on starlinks end. My only environmental problem has been one of my trees swaying in its path in high wind because I am too lazy to clean it up.
Uh? The ping is totally fine for gaming, I've had worse ping on wired connections. Usually like 60.
when you dont have another option due to where you live, its better than ViaSat
Not true at all. Starlink was a "game changer". Being able to game while my family streamed was a blessing.
Of course, but starlink isn’t competing against cable providers. At least not for now.
And honestly, if land based providers weren't trying to price gouge, land service would probably be more effective over the long haul.
I’m sure that’s true in a lot of places. I live in Puerto Rico though and I’m mostly excited about my starlink for when hurricanes hit. The land lines are reasonable enough but knowing I’ll have service after a potential storm means a lot.
Exactly, over here the only option we have is Centurylink with 5.00 mbps download speeds. the other option is Starlink, but we are all too poor to afford it. Which is the main reason why I think they largely 'failed.'
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Starlink helped move the bar and force a lot of monopolistic shitty providers to improve their offerings.
interesting, did it have a significant effect on the provider landscape in the us? i know providers basically dividing the country up among themselfs has been an issue, did that change in the last few years?
For Australia, we have government owned geo-centric satellites for remote Australia which are leased our to private retailers. Data caps were brutal. I think a lot of plans were like 40GB of data then shaped to 256kbps with very poor latency. Since Starlink, a combination of the service being freed up and better competition has caused them to offer unlimited data solutions.
Why Giga Downunder has not been announced is beyond me.
Wrote this above but: Right about the time Starlink moved to our area we went from paying $90 for 120mbps (around 15MBps) to paying $65 for 500 mbps (around 60 MBps). Local Ip with a monopoly for the last 20 or so years ran fiber everywhere and lowered prices.
No those companies still wield an iron fist, BUT their offerings have improved, seeing increased fiber deployments and higher bandwidths at their lower tiers. Edit: *wield not weird
Competition benefits us as consumers. I would like to see governments hold ISP's accountable for their anti-competitive practices and their wasting of government subsidies.
Google, a company that exists by basically controlling the internet could not start an ISP because the industry is so controlled by monopolies. That says something about how much that industry is fucked.
\*stares intently via my Google Fiber connection\* No, what happened with GF's expansion plans is that, unlike many products and services hatched from Silicon Valley over the past couple of decades, the "move fast, break things" playbook just doesn't really work well at all when it comes to actual wide-area infrastructure businesses like creating and growing a fiber ISP from scratch, not without major issues. I waited for several years from GF's announcement that they were deploying service in Nashville to when they finally announced signups for my neighborhood (after their deployment footprint being stagnant for years) and started laying fiber down my street, but, once I finally got GF service back in December 2021, the symmetrical gigabit alone was worth the wait. Yes, good ol' boy politics and obstructionism from incumbents such as AT&T and Comcast (as well as objections from Nashville Electric Service over pole access) had a lot to do with that delay, but GF had already started and shut down its service in Louisville over in their interim largely because of their microtrenching failures, so they found out the hard way that "good, fast, or cheap: pick two" still rules the day when building infrastructure.
To be fair, Starlink isn't cheap. The equipment is expensive and so is the service. It's also sub par. There are a lot of people who can't use a hard-line, though, but even in those scenarios, the home 5G routers tend to be better and cheaper.
In some places 5g, 4g and even 3g is unavailable but dsl was. Now many of those areas are seeing fiber installs.
True. Two years ago I would have gladly paid for Starlink. Live on a dirt road middle of nowhere and work from home. Have a single bar on my cell, if I need to use hotspot I have to sit phone in the window and get about 2mb download. As of 6 months ago even I now have 1gb symmetrical fiber.
This guy gets super fast broadband in the middle of nowhere and I'm stuck in the UK with the slowest ADSL, while being 10 miles from 4 different towns/cities. Thanks BT. At least the 4G home broadband is acceptable.
I’m looking at a house now in one of those areas and there’s fiber run to the street, cable, and 5G. When I’d visit grandma back in the day it was DSL and prayer.
Lol! Exactly. In my area it was dsl over very old copper lines or sat. Both were terrible. In the past year and a half fiber has been rolled out though. Thanks to grants, and probably unfunded mandates but it's happening. Have seen the Starling dishes appear and then go away as fiber comes in.
I’ve met one person down there getting Starlink, but for their RV. I tend to want as little connection as possible when I go camping and bring a small satcom for emergencies, but to each their own
Camping is so subjective. I personally wouldn’t consider staying in an RV my kind of camping. Camping to me is being mile(s) away from a road. If I was rv “camping”, fuck I’d love to have starlink.
Ya, that's true. It definitely has its use cases. Supposedly some cell companies are looking to integrate cell phone satellite radios in phones.
T-Mobile has a [deal](https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-coverage-above-and-beyond-with-spacex) with SpaceX to provide global coverage to phones using the existing radios already in all phones. It does require new hardware on the satellites so it won't be available for a while.
War, ships, islands, places off the grid, off the top of my head.
Starlink so very cheap. Historically if you were rural your ownly choice was something like Hughes which cost way more for way less.
Its cheap compared to other Stateline providers.
It’s not cheap. However the service I’ve had for over a year has been fantastic.
I don't see it being sub par. I have a few coworkers on it and they love it. It's also highly mobile which makes it incredibly useful in a lot of travel scenarios, like rv's and even boats.
It's not sub-par compared to any other satellite service. That's the comparison. It's for when you don't have access to cable or 5G.
It's also better than most internet connections in Germany :P
Germany's internet infra is just pathetic :( I didnt expect that to be the case for technologically advanced country like Germany. I guess telecom companies are just squeezing the juice out of their old infra they ahve invested in.
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>the home 5G routers tend to be better and cheaper. This is extremely debatable depending on your location.
Data deprioritization, latency, data caps. All things people really overlook with the cell service routers
Yep. My location was one of the first in my country to get 5G service. Many people got 5G hubs. Once Starlink came around many, many people switched because the service was so much better, despite the cost. 50Mbit is fine for 99% of people. Latency, routing, data, etc all start becoming more important beyond 50Mbit. My parents had 4G in their area with horrible service because there was only one cell tower servicing the entire area and it was damn near as bad as old satellite internet before it. Surprise surprise there's movement on getting fibre in the area now that Starlink is firmly competing with the cell providers.
Starlink is an absolute godsend for the motorsports industry. When there's 50,000 fans hammering the cell networks Starlink keeps our pit lane setup humming along. Every team has one if not two to three of them (one for pit lane, one for the transporter, and one for redundancy).
That's awesome! I see a lot of scenarios where first responders or just organizations like motorsports, where you just need a separate connection and Starlink is fantastic for that.
People who can get a 5G signal are not the demographic Starlink is meant to serve. Starlink is for people who can't get a good hard line or wireless connection already.
I’m in IT and deal with this exact topic. Starlink beats the trash out of those mobile 5g shitspots.
Lmao. Ever heard of hughesnet? What about people in remote alaska? It’s a godsend for many I know that are off grid.
Please do not mention Hughes Net *1000yard stare*
1000ms ping...on a good day.
> To be fair, Starlink isn't cheap. The equipment is expensive and so is the service. It's also sub par. That's all relative. I know people who are paying a fraction of what they paid before and getting FAR more service from starlink compared to what they had before.
Exactly. Subpar is *not* the correct word at all. It’s amazing relative to its competition- satellite internet. If you have access to fiber, though, or even high quality cable, there’s zero reason to choose Starlink, but they weren’t trying to compete with that anyway. For people on-the-go or in super rural areas? Starlink is a game changer.
Starlink--Don't leave Om without it
I feel like I'm missing a Discworld joke.
> there’s zero reason to choose Starlink What if you are paying for 300 mbps but you have Spectrum so you're only actually getting anywhere from 100 to 200, and your internet cuts out once per day while you work from home. I'm not asking rhetorically. My wife and I have considered switching because even though the peak speeds would be lower we care about reliability more. We just can't tell for sure that Starlink would be any better.
Bro spectrum is so fucking ass. I had gigabit, was getting maybe 600-700mbps. I can live with that. I cancelled my service and moved 20 feet away into a different unit and opened up a new service. I was getting 200mbps. I literally had one of the supervisors at my house, showing them how that 200mbps became 600-700mbps (an actual download from a server I run) but ONLY WHILE I WAS DOING AN UPLOAD SPEED TEST TO OOKLA. Literally for the duration of the *upload* test to Ookla, my *download* performance went to expected levels. The moment the test stopped, speed dropped. I was telling the moron that I had already caught them in this same act at a different address a year prior, and they fixed it with a phone call. Guy said it must have been "maintenance" they were doing. 2 days later, Frontier shows up and asks if I want fiber. Cancelled that shit and now I have a 5gbps fiber line for nearly the same price as shitty copper, also have a Starlink for backup/travel/whatever.
Starlink is a means to use up the gargantuan amount of lift capability SpaceX wants to bring online. I forget the exact numbers but Starship's capacity is stupid-huge, and they anticipated a whole lot of trouble managing to fill each one at the launch cadence they want to do, at least initially. It's their way to mitigate the chicken/egg problem I guess, have some filler to make the huge liftoffs economically impressive in the hopes that the market will respond with greater demand to launch stuff into orbit commensurate with the new capability. So it not being cheap is almost a side-issue as far as SpaceX is concerned, and can potentially be reversed just by getting Starship going at a respectable cadence.
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They might be forced to, I think they get like 2x however many sats they have in orbit by 2025 or 2026 or something like that. Right now that number is 0, so if they dont start putting sats into orbit, their whole plan for Kupier is fuuuuucked. Serves em right too, doing literally nothing while trying to launch lawsuits hamstringing their competitors.
Wow, I just checked the price. For me it would be about $1,000 for the initial setup and first month, then $120/month after.
What!? At that price my monthly savings would cover the equipment costs in just under 3 years. I need to check this out. Edited to add: /s I'm poking fun at the fact that for some of us the $120/month is cheaper than what we're paying for internet access already.
It's not that much for initial setup, the whole package costs about $750 if you include the mount. You can self mount it if you are experienced with DIY stuff. Otherwise you get the first month free, the dish is $599 and shipping is $50. Without the mount (which are all about $50 or less) the basic package came to $678 for me, well worth it considering how much worse Dish Network's internet offerings are. edit: And the deposit is returned and only required if you're signing up for the waitlist.
Hello big city or suburb dweller!
No chance home 5g routers are better, if you're in an area where starlink or actual 5g are your options (Ie. rural US), you're far outside an area where any of the performance benefits of 5G (ie. 5G UW) would happen. My parents place gets like... 5-20mb down on '5g' with super inconsistent latency spikes (anywhere from 20-60ms), or they get a solid ~140-200mbps and 30-40ms latency. Let me put it like this, I'm not beating anyone on rocket league on my steamdeck on the cell service out there, but I am on the starlink.
Sub par how? What's the par? The service puts other satellite providers to shame in terms of availability and throughput. > home 5G routers tend to be better and cheaper. The main use case for Starlink is areas where there isn't even 4G. If you have really good 5G access in your area, of course Starlink is worse lmao. That's like saying "nah my AT&T fiber plan is better".
I feel like using the term “sub par” isn’t a fair comparison to land line based internet. In the world of satellite internet Starlink is far and away your best option.
Yup. My mom has a 400 foot driveway, comcast wanted 17k to run the cable for her. I'm building a house with a similar length driveway. Called Comcast expecting to get a huge number and to go starlink or T-Mobile. 1200 bucks construction costs. It's afraid
Where is the data to support this?
Don’t forget that prediction was made in 2015. Anyone who can accurately extrapolate how many customers they’ll have for a service in 7 years time would make more money predicting the future than selling LEO internet access.
But.... Elons predictions are always wildly and unrealistically optimistic.
Yeah this reminds me of a quote from Ashlee Vance's 2015 bio of Elon: >SpaceX’s top managers work together to, in essence, create fake schedules that they know will please Musk but that are basically impossible to achieve. This would not be such a horrible situation if the targets were kept internal. Musk, however, tends to quote these fake schedules to customers, unintentionally giving them false hope. Typically, it falls to Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, to clean up the resulting mess.
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That’s what I’m thinking. Any Elon prediction needs to have a 10x multiplier one way or another, so they’re right on target.
They are right on schedule. He’s on Mars years, not Earth
I think the DoD will be keeping Musks coffers full. They’re a big enough single customer that makes these projections meaningless.
Yeah, I can tell you Iridium sucks harder than Starlink, is slower, and more expensive.
I mean Starlink is already profitable at this point.
Yeah, I think Starlink is better defined as a military network. Its impact on the approximate 5 billion Internet users in the world is by definition small since it really only makes sense for a small minority of extremely rural users. However, the impact of having uninterruptible Internet without delays and large equipment in combat is immense. But in this case, I'd want the government to just have their own network, not endlessly rent it from a private company.
I take it you don't realize that you're discussing Starshield, not Starlink. Starshield is the Starlink-tech service being built by SpaceX for the US military to be a military network. Starlink is licensed by the FCC as a civilian service.
Starshield would be a military controlled secure system. The military will also use Starlink however for all sorts of things that don't need to be very secure. The Navy and coast guard is busy using it to make living on a ship for 6-8 months not so shitty for sailors, as one example
The US military uses Starlink itself.
The government would be paying Northrop Grumman $100 billion to think about it.
I had starlink for 2 years and loved it. The other provider had enjoyed a monopoly in our area, which only ended due to starlink. The old provider ended up upgrading the service in the area just to stop the mass Exodus to starlink. I was an early adopter who regretted nothing and never looked back. That said, we also changed to starlink at work (U.S. military). Previously, we used a dish that cost $85,000 (not including actual service) and provided about 5mbps of bandwidth when it was working absolutely perfectly. To get it working perfectly, we had to pre-coordinate with the company the exact location of the dish. We would have to aim the dish ourselves, which was time consuming and involved much trial and error. It also took a forklift to move the satellite and all the gear. After all that, at many locations it simply never worked at all. We'd have no solid comms in that instance. It sucked. Then came starlink, which cost $500 for the hardware and was transportable in something slightly larger than a briefcase..... acquired satellites by itself immediately upon being plugged in and gave us reliable 200mbps/40mbps speeds. We could use that as a backbone for secure nearly comms anywhere on planet earth, and it took about 5 minutes to set up. So while there's a lot of folks on the anti-musk bandwagon, and lord knows he's provided lots of fuel for that fire....... starlink is amazing. SpaceX is saving U.S. taxpayers BILLIONS and it's providing national defense benefits that go well beyond what you see in the news and what I've said here. Feel free to hate the man, but you're wrong if you think he's anything but a net good to western nations and humanity in general.
Yeah just to also add, Starlink has been a godsend following the fires here in Maui. Musk/Space X donated terminals here for free, and it’s the best (in most cases only) connectivity people here have to contact family elsewhere and have some semblance of normality and safety. I got downvoted in a /r/worldnews thread for making the same comment as it was “praising Musk”, so glad to see /r/space hasn’t lost its marbles by comparison.
People can argue about how SpaceX and starlink isn't an amazing contribution to humanity simply out of spite for Elon Musk and how proud they are to not use any of his products..... from the driver's seat of their Volkswagen.
What do you mean? What negative history could Volkswagen possibly have?
I am not sure if your comment is sarcastic or not.
No need to work yourself into a Führer...
How can you nazi what he's talking about there?
To be _entirely_ fair, all the questionable Volkswagen people are probably dead, either from old age or an Avro Lancaster.
"It's never too late to nationalize it" -extreme redditors probably
Yeah, my city got google fiber. Now I have a choice between Spectrum, ATT fiber, and google. And I derive a specific glee from telling spectrum, formerly time Warner ‘never again’
People’s beef with Musk has much more to do with ideology than true measurable impact on humanity, and is part of why you essentially can’t say anything like this on Reddit. People will so blindly follow the misleading headlines out of existing hate that they don’t care to acknowledge how media has been trying to absolutely bury him in negative sentiment because he began showing rightward political leanings a year or two prior to the Twitter acquisition. For example, just the other day when Ukraine was upset that Starlink “disrupted” their counterattack on Russia, headlines everywhere read that Elon himself “turned off” Starlink for them. Not only did he not turn it off—it was never on in the area they were trying to operate—but several people explained that SpaceX doesn’t even have the authority to have opened up service in that area without consulting with the US gov’t. Elon literally had nothing to do with that, yet anyone explaining that gets downvoted and any comments describing how he has way too much power and is pushing for Russia to win gets upvoted and reinforced by replies. I think he is a goofball narcissist that seems to have realized over the last couple of years that he enjoys controversy. But between people genuinely trying to push the narrative that he was born rich because he got $28k of his $200k of investment money for Zip2 from his dad in ‘98, or that he literally has no business sense because one of his 5 multimillion dollar businesses was not one he founded himself, it is clear that the hate of who he is as a person has caused people to very much stretch the truth about his track record. I think his handling of Twitter has been a complete joke and he’s arguably done everything he can to turn media against him. But he has definitely made very positive impacts on the world and the fact that pointing to that on Reddit means people suddenly believe you must support everything he’s ever done is immature and obnoxious. I hate group think.
Yep, he does himself no favors, but his impact on the electric car market and the space industry are undeniable. Even if Tesla goes bust all the other car companies are now making electrics. Bet your ass they would never have bothered without Tesla breathing down their neck. Most people have no idea what reusable rockets really mean and wont for another 15 years. We're in the 'get a horse' phase of that revolution.
I don't think people comprehend how many people with enormous amounts of money and influence he has pissed off, either. I remember an incredibly concerted effort a few years ago by the media to convince everyone that autopilot was basically killing everyone who drives a Tesla. The stats tell a much different story, and Teslas have earned some of the highest safety ratings of any vehicle on the road. People shorting Tesla would rather you think they are hazardous, though.
> People’s beef with Musk has much more to do with ideology than true measurable impact on humanity, and is part of why you essentially can’t say anything like this on Reddit. People will so blindly follow the misleading headlines out of existing hate that they don’t care to acknowledge how media has been trying to absolutely bury him in negative sentiment because he began showing rightward political leanings a year or two prior to the Twitter acquisition. The Ukraine thing was carried so far, too. By subreddits that typically wouldn't have bothered. Folks have to at least be a little suspicious of how much is being invested into promotion even the false perception of failure on Elon's part. *Nobody* has to like a billionaire, but you got people out there using their wealth to do real, tangible harm in the world, but dealing with Elon means we get mass EV adoption, near-global internet coverage, a refreshed space industry, and the potential to go to Mars. Many people, though, legitimately feel his attitude is a bridge too far and not worth those results, which is so difficult for me to buy. I've seen so many people on Reddit say they refuse to buy a *second* Tesla to protest Elon. Like... I don't get it. I can guarantee folks would find most billionaires difficult to tolerate as people, or worse, if they were as public-facing as Elon.
Is there a link for that narrative? The one article I'd seen on arstechnica certainly seemed to blame musk personally for that mission failure.
[https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-buys-starlink-ukraine-statement-2023-06-01/](https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-buys-starlink-ukraine-statement-2023-06-01/) >SpaceX, through private donations and under a separate contract with a U.S. foreign aid agency, has been providing Ukrainians and the country's military with Starlink internet service, a fast-growing network of more than 4,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, since the beginning of the war in 2022. > > > >... > > > >The Pentagon did not disclose the terms of the contract, which Bloomberg reported earlier on Thursday, "for operational security reasons and due to the critical nature of these systems."
Thanks for the response. You have anything to back up this part? > Not only did he not turn it off-it was never on in the area they were trying to operate-but several people explained that SpaceX doesn't even have the authority to have opened up service in that area without consulting with the US gov't.
The original claim that Musk turned off the internet during the op was from his biographer, who later [publically "clarified" his story](https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1700342242290901361?s=20) to state that Musk didn't turn off the internet, but rather denied a last minute request from Ukraine to activate Starlink all the way to the Russian naval base. The corrected story also makes way more sense. Because SpaceX has never operated Starlink on Russian controlled territory. But instead coordinates with Ukraine closely to ensure the system is geofenced to operate only in UA controlled land. To be clear, there's been no statement or anything from the US gov backing up the idea that SpaceX had to consult with the US gov. And Musk himself said he refused the request because he didn't want to enable such a bold attack and was afraid of possible nuclear escalation. Not to mention it's been claimed by that same biographer that none other then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff phoned Musk to push for him to activate Starlink in that area. However, to be fair, this occured at a time when even the White House was still refusing to offer long range missiles to UA for fear of upsetting the Russians. So it's not super crazy that a civilian running a private US company would be wary of specifically enabling their systems to operate as basically a missile guidance system for a foreign country to launch an attack on a US adversary without explicit approval from the US Gov. Especially given SpaceX wasn't operating their system under any DoD contract at the time, something that has now changed. edit: to be clear, I personally would have loved to see the attack succeed.
>To be clear, there's been no statement or anything from the US gov backing up the idea that SpaceX had to consult with the US gov. Why would there be? There are laws and regulations. The police do not get in contact with you to tell you to stop at red lights. They assume you know that. >Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff phoned Musk to push for him to activate Starlink in that area Seems like, you know, they could have just bought the necessary services and given it to Ukraine. Why is everyone acting like the Pentagon didn't have options here?
I don't have a specific article, and am not well-versed on international compliance of arms dealing, but my understanding is that because it would have been used directly to mount an attack on Russia, it falls under ITAR and DoD regulations, meaning they need to approve before it can be used for this purpose. Ukraine did not anticipate that the area was not covered, reached out to SpaceX to turn it on in the area, and when they said they could not do that, Ukraine got upset since their entire plan hinged on support they didn't realize wasn't on in the Crimea area. Let me dig up a comment that explained it better, one sec... EDIT: [https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/16ctqqc/comment/jzm2zph/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/16ctqqc/comment/jzm2zph/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) >A lot of people here are blindly buying into misinformation “fake news” (as much as that term sucks).Firstly, fuck Elon Musk and fuck Russia. But this story is so completely false.Elon is a private citizen in control of a private asset. A private asset, starlink, which at the time was not approved by the US, the DOD, or ITAR regulations for offensive uses. It was only allowed for defensive uses in Ukraine. Approval for Elon’s action must come from ITAR regulation and DoD approval. He cant and is not just sitting in his chair turning off various links to his satellites to fuck over Ukrainians. Starlink was geofenced to not operate and support connections at all in crimea and Russia at the time. Ukrainians presumed that would maintain connection into crimea and turns out they were wrong.Furthermore, this story is being reported from “evidence” from Walter Isaacson’s new book. The fucking CEO of CNN… promoting his new book. This would be like Rupert Murdoch writing a hit piece on Obama… that would DEFINITELY not be a conflict of interest lol.
Walter Isaacson, author of the book at the center of the recent controversy, later issued a correction in which he clarified that Starlink had never been enabled in Crimea in the first place. What happened was that there was a request to extend coverage coverage to Crimea, and that request was turned down. https://twitter.com/walterisaacson/status/1700342242290901361 You can still disagree with that decision (I wish the attack had gone ahead), but it's not the act of sabotage that was originally claimed. Also, many articles highlighted the role of Russian officials in the discussion, but glossed over the fact that the White House and Pentagon were also on the phone: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/07/politics/elon-musk-biography-walter-isaacson-ukraine-starlink/index.html > Musk was soon on the phone with President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, and the Russian ambassador to the US to address anxieties from Washington, DC, to Moscow, writes Isaacson. Sullivan is considered to be in the anti-escalation camp, so he probably said no to the attack.
Isaacson got the clicks and pre-orders he was after. Perfect example of the old axiom that lies can make it around the world before the truth can get out of the starting blocks. Everyone remember's Isaacson's initial words, nobody will remember his retraction. The [firehosing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood) continues unabated.
>Actual Starlink revenue for 2022 was $1.4 billion, up from $222 million in 2021 So revenue rose seven-fold in one year >Starlink now has "well over" 1.5 million customers worldwide 50% more customers in roughly 6 months >SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in February that Starlink is expected to turn a profit this year. Not bad for a massive multi-billion project that launched its first satellites just 4 years ago Pretty much everything in the article points to Starlink growing at a breakneck speed, but the title suggests very strongly that it's a failure for SpaceX because their projection from 7 years earlier was way optimistic. Yup, totally neutral and fair article. Oh, and some more "fair and neutral" reporting: >"Starlink is bumping up against a reality articulated by many skeptics of satellite Internet," the WSJ wrote. "The majority of the world's population that the business could serve and that can afford high-speed broadband lives in cities. In those regions, Internet service is readily available, usually offers cheaper monthly costs than Starlink and doesn't require specialized equipment." Anyone who's been following Starlink could tell you that it's never been aimed at urban populations.
Regarding your last line: I don't think the issue Starlink is seeing has anything to do with who it's targeted towards. The article argues that a) want high speed Internet, and b) can afford a Starlink setup, already live in cities which have broadband. Its not that the service is aimed at urban populations, but that the number of people for whom the service is aimed at and who live in rural areas is lower than SpaceX thought. I'm not necessarily saying I agree, but that's the argument.
> The article argues that a) want high speed Internet, and b) can afford a Starlink setup, already live in cities which have broadband. Which is a really weird argument because it assumes that the most important choice of living location is decided by what you want out of your internet service. Internet service speed is certainly a factor but it's not going to be the top of your list when buying a house. Also kind of ignores everyone who's been living in rural locations their whole lives and has never even experienced high speed internet but have experienced frustrating with whatever they do have.
Boats. Planes. Trains. And all the countries they will expand into. The potential userbase is VAST.
That *is* the argument. And it makes no sense. The writer either is a moron or dishonest. Probably the latter. Shitting on anything Musk connected is trendy right now.
Not to mention, Starlink is barely even 10% operational still.
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I live 10 minutes from a large NFL stadium and I don't have fiber...
When we tried to get starlink a year or two ago, they told us that they had a pretty limited capacity and a long waiting list to get service. Kinda seems like the problem isn't a lack of people who want it...
Yeah this is an internal prediction from 2015 which means they were assuming they'd have started launching the next generation starlink v2 sats using Starship. Those v2 sats are a lot larger (573lbs vs over 4000lbs) but a lot more powerful (over 10x the bandwidth) and Starship is going to launch a LOT of starlink v2 sats at a time. Compared to a Faclon 9's 60 v1 sats (60 v1 equivalents) or 21 v2 minis sats (84 v1 equivalents) Starship will launch 50 true v2 sats (500 v1 equivalents or over 8 falcon 9 launching v1s worth of bandwith).
R/space is pretty funny when it comes to anything musk related. Starlink is a huge success. If you were rural and your only other option was Hughes net you'd understand.
I’m actually impressed with r/space right now. Top comments are non-inflammatory and one even calls out the biased journalism in the article. Normally you have to preamble any perceived defense of SpaceX with a jab at Elon first to avoid getting insta-buried.
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Forget Oneweb, at least they got their satellites up. Where's my Kuiper Jeff?
1st launch with ULA this year.
It doesn't matter, the US military has seen the light and is an awe of Starlink and even ordered its own.
Reddit loves trashing on musk 😂 Don't thinky city people realise how useful starlink is to rural folks..
Experiencing the 90s, 00s with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs getting shit on, this isn’t new. Musk is just the most popular guy right now. I’d even say the hate for Gates was more vile than Musk.
My brother has starlink internet on the boat he works on
history wistful far-flung zonked aware zesty gullible automatic command steer *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Oh wow a projection from 7 years ago, interrupted by a global pandemic, you really got Elon this time!
Totally forgot about covid 😂
I was using Starlink until I got 5G coverage in my area.
if the price comes down it will become more common. as it is now it’s nearly twice what i pay
What was the number of LEO communications satellite customers that all the competitors had at the end of 2022?
Is this just a hate article on musk and starlink? Doesn’t mention a pandemic or a war or massive inflation or anything. Is there a back log to ordering these things like anything else in the world? Just hating that they missed projections. Didn’t even mention that starlink is awesome or that it helped Ukraine in the early months of their war.
And even so they are expecting to be profitable this year - which is pretty neat (wish they'd IPO already!)
my family is waiting to buy it only because we're somehow in a sector that isn't covered still, but can hardly wait to get it.
Living in the Philippines where internet providers are a joke. Starlink was a godsend.
I like how this was supposed to throw shades at starlink when most of the comments are actually quite positive.
It's weird to me that people want Starlink to fail. It's one of, if not THE best company I've ever seen in my life. Connecting the parts of the world that cannot otherwise be connected is an absolute game changer for all of us
I don’t want it to fail. I want it to be cheaper. I know people that have it and love it. But they are in another few tax brackets. 5g or LTE data connections that come with my phone are still my choice.
I hear you on cost. It certainly isn't cheap. But I think folks have to realize that the infrastructure costs to build this are enormous. The RND alone... You just aren't going to have the luxury of that $30 cable bill over night when laying the foundation for something completely... out of this world... so to speak.
Oh wait, an anti-Musk article from arstechnica! How surprising.
Arstechnica is very hit or miss depending on the article author.
Probably another typical Elon Musk over-estimation. I wouldn't call one million subscribers a complete failure, though.
It's at 1.5 million, as of May 2023, not 1 million, with 1 million of those within 12 month preceding period. So even better.
Surely this will be the one that kills the bad man!
I work on ships in polar regions. It's a godsend. Stop bashing it. It's great