Elon Says Starlink Private Beta in 3 Months and Public in 6 Months

Elon Musk says Starlink will offer a private beta for a global internet service in about three months and start offering a public beta service in 6 months.

The SpaceX Starlink system will not have any competition for low altitude and low latency satellite service for many years. The nearest competitor, OneWeb, went bankrupt a few weeks ago.

The Starlink system is about 80 times closer to the Earth. Lasers travel faster in a vacuum than through fiber. This means for low latency service Starlink will be superior to any communication system for distances greater than 2000 miles.

Elon Musk described the looks of the Starlink Satellite receiver terminal. It will have motors.

The satellite receiver will need to be able track the low earth orbit satellites and shift to a different satellite. The satellites will be about 30 times farther than the altitude of a commercial passenger jet and they will be moving about 30 times faster. The apparent motion of the satellites relative to people on the ground will be like watching an airplane track across the sky.

There was a patent from SpaceX discussing the phased array shifters that will be needed.

SOURCES- Elon Musk Twitter, SpaceX
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

9 thoughts on “Elon Says Starlink Private Beta in 3 Months and Public in 6 Months”

  1. Their allotments aren’t really valuable though, not to a company with 10,000 satellites in low orbit. That’s part of why they are bankrupt.

    EDIT: that’s why OneWeb is auctioning the spectrum off – it is now a depreciating asset https://advanced-television.com/2020/04/01/oneweb-prospective-buyers-limited/asset

    Some more info on the allotment priorities https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/satellites/spacex-oneweb-or-kepler-communications-who-really-launched-the-first-kuband-satellite.amp.html

  2. If they pull it off, we will have Mars base quite soon in some way or another. Musk only needs enough money.

    I would pay more for starlink internet, because I would support space exporation with that and not just some pork for few guys.

    in my opinion is it quit good reason, to pay for Starlink and support space exploration with that.

  3. I’m guessing having 80 satellites in your sky 80 times closer than GEO will help, combined with a parallel phased array. I’m guessing the satellites will be able to spike their transmission power by 10x but it will cause battery cycling wear.

  4. I’m very curious to see what the service quality looks like. At the frequencies they are using cloud cover could severely degrade the performance. Rain could knock it out.

  5. I know SpaceX was planning on using lasers but as of now satellite comms are still Ku band. Also Oneweb has filed for bankruptcy but that doesn’t mean they are out of the game. They have valuable spectrum allotments and could be attractive to a lot of companies.

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