General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Mano on August 16, 2020, 10:19:43 PM
Title: Starlink explained
Post by: Mano on August 16, 2020, 10:19:43 PM
Some early testing:
:salute
Title: Re: Starlink explained
Post by: Vulcan on August 17, 2020, 04:11:21 AM
I'm sorry Mano but I started watching the first video and had to stop. There is a huge amount of fudging the truth there.
- the 25-30ms speed is between the ground station and the satellite. This is a first hop only. Not a complete journey between a host and an internet server. So you cannot compare it with fibre or xDSL latency times (where 25-30ms would be multiple hops to an internet host). In this architecture 25-30ms gets you to space. ie nowhere. It's actually going to be 25-30ms, then routing to the nearest satellite that routes back to earth, then the 25-30ms down to earth again... THEN you have to route to the target host, which at best will be 25-30ms. So right there a good looking latency for this connection is already at 100ms at best. - the 'light speed' laser communication, sure light may travel faster in a vacuum. But you have to travel further simply because of the geography of being in space (distance around a sphere increases as the sphere gets bigger). They also do not mention how many hops to a routing peer that routes to earth, is 1,2, 4 or 10? Laser is not going to be faster if you have to route to a far routing point to ground. - handoff is going to be an issue. By all accounts the coverage arc is going to be quite small as the orbit has dropped lower and lower. You have a ton of satellites whizzing around at high speed using Ka band to talk to earth. Each ground station is going to have to hand off to a new satellite every 10 seconds or something like that. And of course the stations that send your data back down to earth are going to have the same issue
Starlink will be good where there is zero internet (no 4G or 5G), and for internet browsing. But it is never going to 'good enough to game on'. So I suspect there will be a relatively small market to support such an infrastructure (it's not cheap to send 42000 satellites into orbit and keep them there). So either it will end up being expensive, or it will go bust very quick.
Sorry to be doom and gloom, but that video is being very sparse with the truth.
Title: Re: Starlink explained
Post by: Eagler on August 17, 2020, 06:23:07 AM
It will be fine for email, facebook, shopping and surfing where lag is not an issue.
My guess it will create more zig zaggy dots when tried in AH
Eagler
Title: Re: Starlink explained
Post by: Mano on August 22, 2020, 02:10:14 PM
:salute
Title: Re: Starlink explained
Post by: Shuffler on August 22, 2020, 04:42:37 PM
:rofl
Title: Re: Starlink explained
Post by: Mano on August 26, 2020, 10:31:32 PM