Posted on 06/21/2020 7:02:42 AM PDT by srmanuel
I don't know how many people are interested in this, but I signed up to be a Beta Tester of Starlink. I'm not sure if I will get chosen but it would be fun to take part in, I think I would be a good Beta Tester, I have a computer engineering networking background....
Starlink, is a company started by Elon Musk that is attempting to create a space based internet service with hundreds if not thousands of LEO satellites...
This Tuesday another rocket is scheduled to be launched that will carry 60 satellites into space. By this fall upwards of 600 of these LEO satellites will in orbit...
The initial goal is to provide 1 GB internet speeds with under a 30ms latency, which compared to other space based internet services is a quantum leap ahead in performance....if they come close to this working reliably it will competition for Verizon, ATT and the other major telecom players....
How do you sign up?
Check out this video of a skytrain of satellites getting themselves into orbit.
All video taken from the ground
“Krypton propelled spacecraft”?
Ion drive. Now *this* is the 21st Century I was hoping for.
Deal with Bezos at your own risk. I have Prime and that’s as far as I’ll go with that Nazi.
I had Hugh’s satellite internet for about three weeks.
It was absolutely crappola.
Sounds like high risk and high cost for something done relatively inexpensively today.
Bezos is not involved with this, it’s Elon Musk we are talking about, it’s his company
Ion drive. Now *this* is the 21st Century I was hoping for.
************
While science is advancing our society is regressing.
So were Tesla an SpaceX and they appear to be working.
Others have tried space based internet and failed, but if Elon Musk succeeds it would be great to have competition for Verizon, ATT, etc....
“...I have a computer engineering networking background...” You may be over qualified. LOL!
Except that huge numbers of rural people do not have access to adequate Internet. He's trying to make Internet access ubiquitous. If he can keep latency down and speeds up it will be huge.
That would be great. I would have to say 30 ms would do for the vast majority of Internet users. I am getting 11ms latency with my new Internet connection with Verizon. It is substantially better than Comcrap. I trade currency (scalping) and latency is important. I do exercises to improve my hand-eye latency because it is the greatest latency involved in a trade and contributes to total latency in a trade - envision the human eye-brain-fingers extended to the OSI seven layers. That price on the screen is not the fill price no matter how fast the network and human body is when entering market orders. (My trading strategy doesn't work with limit orders.)
I’m very out of practice, but somewhere buried in there is knowledge
Not just rural.
And if you’re a Spectrum customer in Upstate NY, you know what I mean.
I signed up -- my rural location has very few even reasonable internet options. Right now I have microwave internet, which most people have not even heard of. The service provider has microwave towers on local mountains and if one has line-of-sight to a tower they will install an antenna on our roof and aim it at the tower.
Latency is 20-30 ms, which is not really bad, but they throttle the speed. We pay for 12 Mbps, but in reality only get 7 or 8, which is marginal for streaming video.
Even if I offer to buy better equipment on my own, they will not support it. They are the only game in town, with all of the customer service complacency that implies.
Even in beta, I suspect Starlink will give us a better experience. If not, the competition should light a fire under our existing provider.
His latency should be pretty good.
LEO plus light travel faster in a vacuum than on fibre.
We will see.
Ion propulsion. Typical plasma gas for "propulsion" is xenon. Krypton is also a nobel/inert element, not as heavy as xenon, but more plentiful.
Many satellites launched into (same) orbit. The satellites then need to spread out to make a constellation more useful from earth. In the long run, the satellits need to maintain some sort of orbit pattern, so "propulsion" (low force) is necessary in an ongoing fashion.
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