[txcwpalpha]

Musk himself has said that Starlink is primarily meant for rural customers, and most urbanites should not expect to use it. He even specifically addressed that Starlink will not "stick it" to Comcast+co, and may actually "help" them.

> "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers."

> Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...

[shaklee3]

Musk originally said this would compete with fiber and other terrestrial carriers. That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiber started out.

[judge2020]

I think the only claim is that it's gigabit speeds [as fast as fiber], however I can't find a specific tweet other than one talking about 1tbps capacity (they've launched more satellites since then):

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1128834111878193155?s=20

> That's where the myth about it being lower latency than fiyver started out.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1132903914586529793?s=20

[shaklee3]

I'm not sure if you're refuting what I said, but there is absolutely no way you will get 20ms end-to-end latency from this. Satellite propagation delay, yes, but for your ping to get to Google and back will be over 50ms.

[elif]

Why isn't space the biggest part of latency? can't they put a satellite link directly in google?

[shaklee3]

They have no cross-links, so up and down to space is going to happen multiple times in many cases. Second, they will not have data centers or ixps right where Google's ingress is, so it has to traverse fiber for quite a while. Someone gave some real numbers on the last SpaceX thread, but I believe that part alone will be 20-30ms added.

[ballenf]

So how long until Google puts a datacenter in space?

[aftbit]

They do have cross-links though?

[1234letshaveatw]

Would satellite on-board caching be possible? Could you cache, for instance, the most frequently requested cat photos currently on reddit? You would be able to bypass half of the round trip

[shaklee3]

Possible, yes, practical, no. In general, you want the least complexity as possible in the payload, since you can't fix it as easily as you can with ground bugs. Also, memory that's space-hardened is going to be significantly more expensive and failure-prone, so you need a lot of redundancy.

[txcwpalpha]

AFAIK Verizon is doing something similar with edge compute in their 5G towers/data centers. If Starlink gets big enough, I'd expect them to do the same. However, I think it's much more likely for Starlink to put the edge compute/cache at the Starlink ground stations, rather than in the satellites themselves. I think the tech/cost still isn't good enough to have significant compute on a satellite.

https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/verizon-partners-aws-to-br...

[Apofis]

I played CS 1.6 at 120-200 ping... people will manage.

[shaklee3]

I agree. Latency is much less of an issue than most people think. It's mostly about bandwidth.

[diroussel]

It should be lower latency for transaltantic and other long haul traffic, as the speed of light in glass is roughly half that of the vacuum of space. So the extra distance to space is offset by the faster speed of light.

[kaliszad]

That is very roughly... it is about 2/3 c and can be calculated by the refractive index of quartz glass vs air (e.g. SiO2 has refractive index between 1.55 bad and 1.4 good for the speed) e.g. 1/1.55 ~ 0.645 and 1/1.4 ~ 0.714. According to "Main Parameters" section of [0] it seems to be 1/1.44 for the silica used in actual fibers.

A good approximation would be 200 km/ 1 ms instead of 300 km/ 1 ms for speed of light in a vacuum/ microwave links.

[0] https://www.rp-photonics.com/fibers.html

[someperson]

They don't have the laser interconnects working yet, so long haul traffic won't go over Starlink for some time.

[Tepix]

Simulations have shown that it can still be faster than fiber even without laser interconnects.

[shaklee3]

That simulation only takes into account the satellite delay. Fiber delay will be another 20-30ms.

[phero_cnstrcts]

I can’t imagine the project would pay off if it was only intended for rural customers.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

All kinds of mobile users are definitely in play too. Trucks, cars, yachts, tankers - all need a connection, and in the middle of the ocean or in the Siberian plains you don't have many options.

My friend is right now swimming under sail somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and she'd definitely benefit greatly from an affordable high speed internet connection.

[state_less]

Roughly speaking, I think 1 million customers worldwide (rural or otherwise) should get them into profitable territory.

1m*$80 per month=$80m per month ~= $1b per year

If the project costs the estimated $10b, the capital cost and operations cost should be covered, or close to it, at ~ 1 million subscribers.

This looks like a milk run to me, but I guess we’ll have to see how subscriptions go.

[NullPrefix]

You assume people worldwide pay $80 for internet

[state_less]

$80 is what I think subscribers might pay (on average) for Starlink - it's a guess.

When you look at what subscribers pay worldwide for internet, it varies, but in the U.S., I currently pay $50/month for 3mbps/0.768mbps DSL (Yuck!) in the countryside. When I'm traveling, ATT is charging around $100/month for unlimited LTE at 8mbps/8mbps. If Starlink can give me 10mbps/10mbps or better at $80/month, I'll take interest. Even more so if Starlink can replace an Iridium go when out at sea.

I'm not sure how Starlink will price services around the world. It'll be interesting to see how they work out the terms/pricing globally. If they are competitive though, I think there are enough customers in the U.S. to make it a profitable project.

[olyjohn]

My dad pays something like $80 a month for his 1.5mbps DSL line from CenturyLink. It's such a scam, but he can't get anything else. $80 a month for something decent would be a no-brainer. I even signed him up for the beta, since he's in a rural area. I'm just hoping he is rural enough though, because he is only about 6 miles from the city. 6 miles though should be close enough to get decent wired internet...

[lend000]

Keep in mind that the three best selling cars in America are pickup trucks, and pickup trucks aren't cheap [0].

[0] https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/

[0xffff2]

I'm pretty sure that says more about your lack of imagination than the economics of Starlink. There are already multiple geosynchronous satellite internet providers that provide incredibly shitty (and expensive) internet service that you would only pay for if it's literally your only option. If Starlink can provide service at less than $100/month, it's going to put all of those companies out of business in a matter of just a few years.

[Tepix]

Imagine what Starlink can do for telcos in Africa. Just put a cell tower up anywhere and use Starlink as upstream.

[berbec]

Why not just a straight voip phone using starlink as network? Why do 4/5G to starlink at all?

[oakesm9]

Apparently the receiver is roughly the size of a pizza box, so only really useful for static use-cases or attached to something like a truck.

[onion2k]

At some point there'll be a Starlink connection in every Tesla, and Tesla will pay Starlink for that.

[kumarharsh]

How many tractors did Silicon Valley buy again?