Minimal Global Service for SpaceX Starlink With 420 Production Satellites

SpaceX keeps winning with a successful of another 60 Starlink satellites. This means they have 420 production satellites in orbit which is enough for minimum global service.

40 thoughts on “Minimal Global Service for SpaceX Starlink With 420 Production Satellites”

  1. Yes I worked from home regularly and now I work from home six days a week. Why not work from home in LEO?

    Not Joking.

  2. 5G has 4x the spectrum efficiency. Thatโ€™s the big reason companies deploying it love it. Wait 5 years and watch your cost per GB drop by 4x and enjoy. Yeah peak speeds in the real world may not change all that much.

  3. wouldnt land lines be fast enough ? 5G was just launched and there wasnt anything wrong with 4G why push consumer so hard to things they can live perfectly without ???
    Its like we must consume or else…. whats the point of it, i mean the problems are more likely food healthcare education in this world, not 6G satelite phones.

  4. Yup, they’re mostly based on TCP tunnels. I was never well-versed on all of the security issues, but IPsec is kind of the gold standard. The problem is that you’re using the VPN because your employer said you had to, and chose one for you. Those guys like IPsec, and they often tunnel it through an MPLS core. That’s about as satellite-hostile as it comes.

  5. There are some VPN services that take satellite into account and have solutions to greatly reduce the delay. I won’t link to specific commercial service providers here, but you can search to find them.

  6. Latency (round trip time) is much more important for virtual desktop applications. 10 Mbps @ 20 ms RTT beats 100 Mbps @ 100 ms RTT every time. The same usually goes for file sharing, unless you’re the BitTorrent weirdo who has all your neighbors complaining to their cable company about how slow their upload times are.

  7. Yeah, I’ll wait until I can get at least 100 Mbps with ground-Internet like latencies.

    If I can get more Mbps, sure, but for me 100 Mbps seems to be the minimum for reasonable file sharing and remote desktop/vnc access.

  8. The Expanse is a set of books–really good ones, IMO. The TV show has been pretty faithful to them, but they’re only up through book #4 of 9 books (the last one isn’t published yet).

    To be fair, the O’Neill-style colony plays a fairly modest role in the whole thing.

  9. I worked from up in the woods for a lot of summers, and it’s extremely painful if you have to use a GEO satellite and a VPN in combination.

    Most GEO satellite systems have fairly elaborate tunneling schemes built into their modems to avoid the almost one-second delay that’s required to set up a TCP connection with the end-to-end SYN-SYN-ACK handshake. Instead, when they see a SYN packet, they multiplex it onto a single TCP tunnel between the modem and the ground station, which then proxies all the connection setup stuff on its side.

    When you use an IPSEC-based VPN, the modem can’t see the SYN packets, because they’re encrypted. As a result, TCP setup really does take a second per connection. With modern web services, there are sometimes 20-30 TCP connection setups, and things slow to a crawl.

    Starlink won’t have this problem, because its round-trip times are about the same as the rest of the internet. But until it’s deployed, don’t work from the boonies if you can’t do it on the public net.

  10. I’d live in the open fields if I had very good Internet.

    Currently I’m working from home; and for my role and company WFH has shown to be very viable to do in the long term.

  11. The Exordium series by Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge. 5 book series. It is grand space opera not rock hard science fiction, but O’Neill type habitats figure very prominently in the story. More like Iain Banks Culture stories than early AC Clarke as far as the hardness level.

    In the story-verse habitats collectively are one of the primary cultural and political blocks of the very large polity that is the stage for the stories. One of the main story lines takes place on an O’Neill type habitat. An excellent series that I’d recommend to anyone, though tastes vary of course.

  12. That was a really fun launch to watch. I eant this to work. Also, I want in early on the IPO ((if that ever happens).

  13. Starlink was kinda cool in an academic way for me, but I was just notified that the terrestrial microwave ISP we use in Maine is dropping service to our area. Now I’m really hoping that they have non-beta service next year.

  14. There are very high-inclination orbital planes planned for Starlink, but they haven’t been launched yet. There’s now a plan for a 97.6ยบ plane at an altitude of 560 km. This is a modification from the original application.

  15. By the way, the fact that I don’t have to create and account and jump through hoops makes this site awesome. Just sayin’

  16. nbfdmd, the US military seems super excited about being a customer, and I thought that I saw an article where they were asking Spacex to increase access to satellite services in the arctic. You know, the whole Russia rivalry thing? Anyway, I could see them adding a track or two in polar orbit, but since Starlink v1.0 doesn’t have the laser link, there would need to be a ground station somewhere.

  17. For TV shows you have Babylon 5, Mobile Suit Gundam, and The Expanse.

  18. Around the edges? Possibly, as long as there’s one (I’d think at least one) satellite above the horizon. Interior? I’m dubious…

  19. I’d like to see them launch the same rocket twice in one day. That would be a wake up call.

  20. They aren’t ready for public beta yet. They *are* listed now at a Seattle peering site, meaning they are listed as an ISP and connected to the rest of the Internet. I expect there will be some months yet of fiend testing the home dishes in various situations before they invite people to beta testing. They also need to build out their ground station network. They will need at least 12 to cover the US, and right now they only have one in Seattle.

    Note that with 420 satellites, there will be significant gaps in coverage, even in northerly locations where they are denser. They need to get to about 1200 before they have solid coverage at all latitudes.

  21. Impressive night landing shot when the landing burn started well before you could see the F9 on the ASDS camera but it lit up the entire night sky so you could see the clouds and the ocean looked blue instead of black

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