Comment by culi
5 days ago
I didn't realize that in addition to the 11,127 satellites in our orbit it also takes over 1,500 ground antenna in the US alone to run this network? It seems likely that there is much more ground infrastructure than space infrastructure to make Starlink work
How else do you expect the satellites to connect to AWS or Google? It obviously has to come down at some point otherwise your packets wouldn’t be able to go anywhere…
The satellites are glorified repeaters.
There was some talk about having the satellites form a laser mesh but I don't think they've gone live with anything like that, so it almost always just comes back down at the nearest site.
Most of the satellites now have three 200GBps inter-satellite links. The starlink V3 that will be launched on the big rocket reportedly have six ISLs.
Yes, it turns out I'm wrong about them not doing inter-satellite links.
Yes, they had these plans from the get-go so launching the necessary hardware is not surprising. The question was whether anything like that went live
Once it does go live, anyone could see the lower ping between two users of this network. If they say it got enabled, that wouldn't be hard to independently verify
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Do you have a source for this claim?
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Since when? Last I heard this was just vaporware.
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Laser link has been operational since 2021:
https://www.trackstarlink.com/guides/starlink-laser-links-ex...
They’ve had it since at least 2022, here is a more recent document explaining access in the middle of the ocean for Royal Caribbean cruise ships:
https://www.royalcaribbean.com/guides/wifi-cruise-packages
My starlinks in Central Asia emerge from Bulgaria, 2,500 miles away.
Well, if they are just glorified repeaters, perhaps european union can hurry the fuck up and build their own network, because at the pace of events we are seeing in about 1 year from now, the USA and Russia will tell us how Ukraine and EU are responsible for starting the war and they need to learn a lesson.
Oh wait, we are already here as if few days ago. Never mind.
Wait. They're not doing the orbital mesh?!
I thought that was fundamental to the whole network?
Not another Elon bullshit?
They are doing orbital mesh, still need downlinks though, and having them close to the earthbound endpoint is key for low latency.
[0]https://www.trackstarlink.com/guides/starlink-laser-links-ex... [1]https://starlink.com/technology
Don’t jump on the ignorance bandwagon.
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