Starting in Q4/2022 they want to cover mid-latitudes around the globe. That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? (This is a bit surprising - on one hand, this step extends coverage towards higher and lower latitudes but on the other hand not as much as they already have inland-coverage (cf. Brazil). It also extends longitudinally around all of the globe?).
Coverage above mid-latitudes requires satellites in polar orbits to join the network. (Their non-polar orbits have an inclination of 53° which means that satellites go no further north or south than that (plus a bit whatever their range is)).
https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map....
This isn't the output of some fancy RF model figuring out exactly where you'll get coverage. Nor is it circles of a specific diameter around ground stations. Or even hexagonal cells where coverage will be allowed/denied in their backend config.
In places it seems to follow countries territorial waters (which would be expected due to regulatory issues), but in others it spills out into international waters.
Overall, the map has sufficient 'oddities' that I think there is a good chance it's a rough hand made 'guestimate' coverage map, and won't perfectly reflect where coverage will really be delivered.
Is it saying that in Q1/2023 the top of the earth (rest of Canada, etc) should be covered?
That's how I read it.
Or maybe they'll have stationary ships with "ground"-stations until the inter-satellite thing is working.
the one thing any satellite operator absolutely does not want is absurd ongoing monthly recurring costs to run their earth stations.
But its also related to groundstations, the satellites bounce the signal down to land. They're transitioning to satellites with the capability to network between themselves which will reduce the need for groundstations.
I don't know how much they really limit coverage due to borders. Like if you get one in colombia and just move it to venezuela, does it still work? They dont have permission in venezuela but they might just not region lock it until venezuela actually complains or something.
I know for a fact that other sat internet providers do work cross border in this exact situation.
for instance right now without fully operational satellite-to-satellite laser links, if you wanted to have live starlink services in afghanistan, you theoretically could, but you'd need to have a starlink earth station in somewhere like Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Or Peshawar, Pakistan. Or southeastern Uzbekistan. All politically problematic and very protective of their own domestic telecom companies.
Not the sort of place you can just drop a starlink earth station and buy a protected 100Gbps protected DWDM circuit to the nearest major city for an IX point, as starlink has done with their earth stations colocated with DWDM ILAs in the US pacific northwest.
Legally: no.
It also all costs an absolute fortune - iridium is about $1000/mo for 100Mb, and $10 for each additional Mb - and there are surcharges for use in polar regions.
Musk could probably bankroll all of starlink just by serving the scientific communities in Antarctica.
My South Pole colleagues would love to have a better network.
Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income.
In other terms, Iridium Go is still the best value around and truly global for the time being.
Iridium GO is cheap, but that's all you can really say positively about it. It is arguably not even offering "internet" in the normal sense, since loading a website would be incredibly expensive/bad and is therefore restricted to low data rate messaging and plain text weather updates.
Is $5K/month a niche product? Undeniably yes, and I hope to see more flex offerings later, but this isn't a good comparison.
Also data is not charged in minutes, it's theoretically unlimited. The voice plans are charged in minutes and I don't think worth it.
Just like the RO water-makers in the past, I believe this is the opening salvo in bringing data prices down on the high seas. A few providers have been the only players in this field (Inmarsat and Iridium) and it shows. Prices haven't budged in ages.
More like: commercial and military vessels
An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
Probably targeted more are commercial shipping vessels, cruise ships, and even militaries. I imagine that number would make the venture worth it.
350mbit can be sold ands split across 1000pax in on a cruise ship at $5/day so you’d have the fee covered on day 1.
Tankers, cruise ships, etc.
SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective, but the big question is will a LEO operator provide better coverage than a GEO operator?
a) if you've ever personally lived for months or years at a time 100% dependent upon geostationary based services costing anywhere from $165/mo to $15,000 a month or more, for internet access and links to the outside world
b) if you've personally used a starlink terminal
the actual coverage isn't there yet for things like mid ocean, because starlink satellites in the present architecture need to be simultaneously in view of a CPE and a starlink run earth station.
what they've got right now is a viable competitor for the smaller geostationary based ku and ka band maritime vsat packages sold for coastal region use, which are limited to specific ku and ka band spot beams anyways. such as you might see used in the caribbean and Mediterranean oceans.
when they have more polar orbit satellites and the satellite-to-satellite laser links are working they will have full mid ocean coverage, and I have no doubt it will beat the pants off a $200,000+, 2.4 meter C-band stabilized-in-radome maritime VSAT system with a monthly service cost of $8,500+.
anyone that's ever done the link budget calculations and seen the RF channel sizes and very simple modulations (very poor bps/Hz ratio) needed to make IP data over 2.4m size c-band terminals will know what I'm talking about. this is directly proportional to dollars in the monthly recurring costs for ongoing transponder space use.
the performance and dollar per MB cost right now for coastal region use will absolutely beat anything inmarsat or iridium based by a ridiculous margin.
I fundamentally disagree with you that it's a very competitive market, it's a market that's highly dependent upon the business model of launching 3500-6000 kg things into geostationary orbit at immense cost and trying to recoup the construction+launch cost of them before they die in 13 to 16 years. And military/government contracts. Traditional two way geostationary based satellite comms stuff is a very conservative and moribund segment of the telecom industry.
you've got other things out there that are sort of viable like o3b (now owned/controlled by SES), but anyone that's ever priced an o3b terminal and ongoing service on something like a 36 month term will know that it's not a significant improvement in cost.
i have - it was horrible. i was at least on land, and could drive with my laptop to a point where i could finally get cell service and tether my laptop whenever i needed internet service (need to download a new copy of Xcode? that's 15% of your monthly allotted bandwidth). it wasn't the speed or bandwidth so much as the latency: 900ms each way meant nothing could be close to "real time", which made things much more difficult.
I appreciate the LEO of starlink, but without essentially "free" launches, there's no way it could be financially viable.
IIRC Viasat has been especially active in trying everything they can to throw up regulatory hurdles and slow down Starlink deployment.
It was faster and cheaper to tether to my cell phone while working from their house.
Companies like Viasat, Iridium and the others will have a very, very hard time ever competing in the LEO space.
Depends on how you define marketing. I work for a very big and well known organization. We wanted to engage with them about an interesting initiative. I's almost impossible to reach out to anyone from SpaceX. Go and try to find an email address or a phone number.
Then, even when you obtain their sales email you will not get any response whatsoever.
Naively, cost+speed+coverage=value?
Interestingly it does look like people are putting starlink on sailboats with ok results: https://www.reddit.com/r/SailboatCruising/comments/vovaxs/st...
Also having packed a few offshore miles at this point... I have never had much luck being productive doing "work" while actually on passage. The ocean has a funny way of sticking to its own agenda anyway, despite our best plans.
Most of your time cruising is hanging on the anchor anyway. Depending on where you are there is pretty decent cell coverage a lot of places, or hotel wifis you can get from your anchorage.
It looks like my sailboat remote life is still on hold for the time being.
Then there's also the power requirements, which I haven't seen yet, but they'll probably be exceedingly difficult to meet for your average sailboat.
wow! Why cant you just take your normal starlink with you on your boat? Don't people do that with RVs?
- Competition is expensive, e.g. BGAN at $284/GB of data transfer or more, while offering lower speeds (700 Kbps for a $6.5K Cobham Explorer 710, Vs. 350 Mbps for this).
- Competition likely won't be able to directly compete on offering for a while.
The next step will likely be commercial aircraft over the ocean. "Because they can [charge this]" is obviously the primary reason, but if you go look at what is available in this space right now, this isn't nuts, far from it.
Internet over the ocean is an incredibly hard/expensive problem. You cannot directly compare it to over-the-land offerings where the consumers are 1:1M.
Marine starlink needs to compensate for rolling, pitching, and forward motion.
I think Starlink doesn't want to use too heavy a hand with customers using their equipment not as intended (as is the case with most companies), but it does look like they're trying to increase their average billings.
I'd guess that they're trying to pick up a lot of commercial business. While it only covers coastal areas at the moment, it'll cover the North America/Europe/North Africa/Asia parts of the ocean in 6 months and substantially everywhere in 9 months. For a shipping company looking to replace their old-school satellite service, $10,000 for equipment and $5,000/mo is probably nothing. For every rich person with a yacht, that's basically nothing. It seems like a great way for Starlink to grab a lot of additional revenue in areas where there won't be a lot of congestion - and from people who are used to paying much more outrageous rates.
And they haven't said that they're going to be heavy handed with people grabbing a $600 Dishy and putting it on their boat by the coast. Maybe they will be, but we haven't seen that yet.
I'd also note that it's likely that the equipment is a lot better to withstand the motion and environment of being at sea. These are going to have to withstand a lot of salt-water air and spray while maintaining their motors in good working order. They'll probably also need to be rated for a longer lifespan given the amount of movement the motors will be doing compared to a stationary one (not just the travel of the vessel, but also the waves).
I'd guess that Starlink is assuming that small boat owners will just grab a regular Dishy and service and Starlink will ignore it as long as they're relatively near land. This will add 45x the revenue for those who can afford it - shipping companies, rich people with yachts, etc.
If the pricing is that low for commercial customers then it will sell out before you know it.
https://twitter.com/joeyscarantino/status/154516393155921510...
-- If I had to guess part of the reason would maybe be carrying capacity - a house that doesn't move is predictable - RVs & boats move so the per satellite bandwidth predictability of that class of object is lower - i think meaning the requirements for redundancy are higher - redundancy is expensive? - just a guess --
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/fcc-approves-spacex-starlink...
What a fucking joke. "coming soon" means nothing to me coming from a Musk company.
Compare to the iridum network: https://www.groundcontrol.com/us/knowledge/calculators-and-m...
Granted, iridium is much slower. But $5k a month for barely any coverage is an insult.
A BGAN terminal like an Inmarsat 9202 is ~$3k, which gets you capability of around 450 kbps. Something like an Iridium can bring that to 700 kbps for a ~$5k. Want multimegabit? No problem, KVH will be happy to help with something like a TracPhone for a mere $18000-50000! And then you pay a mere $5/megabyte, or you can get a monthly plan and save!
SD 1........ 0-20MB ............... $79.90/mo
SD 2........ 21-100MB ............. $275.00/mo
SD 3........ 101-250MB ............ $470.00/mo
SD 4........ 251-500MB ............ $775.00/mo
SD 5........ 501-1,000MB .......... $1,1150.00/mo
SD 6........ 1,001-5,000MB ........ $2,295.00/mo
SD 7........ 5,001-10,000MB ....... $3,000.00/mo
SD 8........ 10,000-Unlimited ..... $4,300.00/mo
But at any rate this looks extremely competitive once the full intersat mesh rolls out, and it's interesting to see hard numbers on that. While it'd have been cool if they could have launched something suitable for users right down to sailboats (officially vs unofficial use of residential ones), I doubt that'd be the right business decision until well after they have v2 flying on Starship for a while. What they're charging actually doesn't even seem to put much if any premium on the massive bandwidth advantage and flat out beating fiber optic in latency over enough distance. Plenty of businesses will be interested in this. And while sure no doubt it'll become standard on rich yachts, think more serious cargo shipping, oil/gas drilling platforms, etc. SpaceX themselves will be eager to dogfood this and have already been doing so for their drone ships, but they have plans for refurbing old platforms into Starship sea launch as well. The military will absolutely be very interested if they aren't deep into discussion already. I could see a major premium being charged there for priority in ports or other congested areas, maybe even special hardware.
Also having the mesh up also means a lot of other cool stuff, from coverage to remote islands or other areas for which no close ground station is feasible to special low latency intercontinental offerings on land (HFT and enterprises may be interested in).
They should definitely go price some Inmarsat I-4 or I-5 based BGAN services or gyro stabilized maritime C/Ku/Ka band VSAT terminals before thinking this is expensive.
You can easily spend $130,000 on a fairly basic geostationary VSAT terminal for something like a small cruise ship or large yacht.
Also lots of amusing comments from people who've never been 100% dependent for months or years at a time on 1:1 SCPC or oversusbcribed, contended geostationary based access at latency anywhere from 492ms to 1250ms and $ per Mbps cost of $2000 per dedicated Mbps as a floor figure.
"[A]imed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd" really? :(. And Starlink is an amazing experience, it's been life changing for a few clients even just in rural New England. The only "high speed" improvement they'd gotten over 20 years was the offer of a 10 Mbps connection for $300/month. People dump on even regular Starlink pricing anyway. Having to live constantly on dial up or regular MEO/HEO satellite then moving to Starlink is eye opening already and gave me at least a tiny taste of what it might be like for people on ships or platforms way out there (I've done multiweek zero connected expeditions too but that's not doing "regular business" or work it's a different mental space). And at least in this case it's possible to drive an hour and then have a solid net connection somewhere, so like for big software downloads one could work around it a little. No such luck at sea.
Absolutely everyone can (and does) have an opinion on how to run the entire economy. At least you guys can say a bunch of stuff specific stuff and 99% of everyone will have to take you at your word and pretty much shuts up, lol.
I totally get it though, has to be frustrating. I was really shocked at the price but when its put into perspective _if_ it works it's clearly going to be a significant improvement.
nobody is debating that a under-provisioned service can be great during the honeymoon phase. but this won't last. they're strapped for cash and these enterprise plays are purely to keep afloat while the consumer business is burning cash
At the moment it's a competitor for specialist yacht 4G packages, and whilst they're also eyewateringly expensive to anyone benchmarking them against mobile phone contracts, Starlink certainly isn't undercutting them.
----
0: https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
your post only has "what ifs", but none of that is working yet, and coastal coverage isn't going to win contracts with cruise ships and real customers.
I'm of course guessing that if you moved onto your boat you wouldn't spend the majority of the time far out at sea.
I guess I don’t have a specific question. It’s just one of those engineering marvels that I never thought I’d see. No wires, but still frag people at <90ms ping.
Downside to lower orbit means they won't last as long (a few years) before they are pulled down into earth's atmo. Which is fine since their rocket company will just send up some more cheaply.
Really fascinating stuff.
Starlink latency is still quite good and a completely different category of service than any geosync satellite ISP. But they've got a ways to go to improve it. A lot of gamers seem unhappy with it right now, FWIW.
i think the record low was 14.8 ms
(Although having run the calculations, that implies that conventional satellites should only be adding 200ms in the best case, which shouldn't be so bad?)
[1]: https://blog.oxplot.com/powering-starlink-on-the-go-with-tes...
EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.
Fairly bleak place, and he had crap Internet service.
Looks like his [former] place is ... juuuuusssst ... out of band.
RIP Garmin, Iridium, etc...
As to why it is expensive? Well, they did their homework and found out is a lucrative market (one doesn't need a lot of hindsight for that, though).
But they could also quite easily support global coverage by bouncing data off other users dishes. The latency would be a bit higher and the service reliability a bit lower, but I would guess the result would still be far better than alternatives for maritime comms.
I'm actually really surprised they haven't done this already - it seems like something they could easily support, and it means they could deploy to anywhere in the world with mere hours notice, at least for a basic level of service.
Imagine the possibility of a demo sitting in the office of say the telecoms minister of venezuela... "So today, we have no infrastructure in your country. But we have something we'd like permission to deploy. Do you give us permission to transmit to your office to give it a demo? Yes. [Nods to engineer who types a few commands...]. Okay, it's enabled. Here it is working - this is the internet your citizens can get anywhere in the country tomorrow if you give us approval."
Less anecdotally, Starlink passed 400,000 customers as of a month and a half or so ago [0]. I wouldn't be surprised if it was pushing towards the half million mark now or fairly soon. They're limited now in terms of terrestrial cell density primarily, and that cannot be solved without more and more powerful sats which can actually shrink the physical cell size and improve beam count and bandwidth. Mobile/RV is therefore useful for them because it's lower priority with no guarantees, but that's ok for that usage model. The times where it will tend to be very important are in remote areas where cells are not full, and the times where cells are full there is also more likelihood of LTE, and RV can by definition move around if necessary. Maritime (or aircraft for that matter) obviously also fits those current limits, the oceans are near empty of Starlink right now and it's high revenue per user given the competition.
----
0: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/25/spacexs-starlink-surpasses-4...
The fixed-location version of Starlink consumes around 60 to 100 W constantly which is problem if you want to e.g. use solar panels on a sail boat to supply the device.
I'm guessing a more affordable version more like the RV product will become available for cruising sailors in time. I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.
Sure, just like Tesla Autopilot is right around the corner, Starship will be flying this year, the Cybertruck has been released 2 years ago etc.
The additional load of the Starlink, relative to the chillers, water makers, and other onboard systems would be nothing.
Seen number of comments about the costs, but honestly wondered why the “one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals” could not be replaced with a hand mounted cheaper DIY rig using the existing Starlink terminals. Guessing, though might be wrong, that Starlink already has this happen using the existing coastal coverage.
On the same note, guess most people don’t need 24/7 connections. Why not just charge 0.33 a min, which would still be a 3x over the $5000 month rate and enable Starlink to extend further into the market.
Any thoughts on why this would not make sense aside from whatever Starlink’s biases & business objectives are?
I suspect the market here is not individuals that want to browse YouTube and check their email.
Market 1: large multi person vessels like cruise ships. At any time someone wants to use the internet, and the ship can 'sublet' out a 2Mbit subset on an time basis.
Market 2: large transport vessels where the owners want a lot of data on what's going on for security reasons. $5k/month and you can have trusted security people keeping a watch over a few dozen cameras 24/7, so you know the crew is doing they job. A bit dystopian but I'd bet there's a market for it.
The Starlink IPO will provide hundreds of billions in funding for Starship and Mars
I will ask one of them for an idea of how far they get when they lose coverage and edit when I hear back. He is on the boat now.
1 - normal cell hand held phone use, you can often get (patchy) reception up to 15 (more sometimes) nautical miles off shore if lucky.
2 - setup a wifi hotspot on your phone and pull it up the mast. Range increases, i'm not sure how much to, but at 15nm the reception is good. Can work out further too, i've been on the far side of the channel islands in CA and had (poor) reception
3 - device with directional antenna up the mast - I always intended to do this but never did. I expect probably can get genuinely good coverage at 20nm out, maybe a bit more
(Inland lakes should work fine except perhaps for the very biggest ones like Lake Superior or the Caspian Sea. If lakes don't work with the RV plan, it's not for any technical reason.)
Intersat (laser links) comms is not available at the moment. Fairly sure they simply geofence non-maritime accounts. As you can see from the maritime map, it only covers water next to the shore which is a good indicator that they still use ground stations directly to provide service.
EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.
At $110/mo with 500k customers, they can afford to launch roughly 170 satellites per month. That is about break-even for their average launch cadence over the last 3 months.
Starlink Maritime allows you to connect from the most remote waters across the world
Not to mention, their launch calculations include re-use based upon a completely invented and also untested catching apparatus.
Talk about going all in...
Are the new satellites too big for the current rockets?
Why does it matter if they are covered or not?
I see this more for commercial operators, like the Ferry between Seattle and Victoria BC - they could sell high speed internet for $10/trip and make a profit if they can sell it to 500 passengers/month.
This isn't for ski-boats at the local lake.
Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction.
Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you when you waste my time.
EDIT: used VPN.
Canada version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea.
US Version: High-speed, low-latency internet with up to 350 Mbps download while at sea. $5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals.
Not all products are as much of a commodity as bandwidth.
Inmarsat is the only viable alternative for smaller boats that offers unlimited data plans, has higher latency due to being geostationary, much lower bandwidth, and charges about $8000 for a gigabyte…
I‘m not sure what Ku or Ka band GEO providers charge, but I doubt you can find anything competitive there either, and these require very large antennas.
350mbps is _insane_ for this