Once upon a time, all plane transmissions were pretty much air to ground. As inconsequential as it may seem, the positioning of antennas above the plane are a bit metaphoric for flipping things up side down. Looking out into space instead of back to earth.
Also notable that SpaceX keeps finding these cool (revenue generating) use cases to further cheapen the cost of sending things up to space. Pretty much dogfooding their rockets via Starlink satellites.
Edited with correction that most inflight wifi is actually air to space now.
<goes and checks press-releases to remember which bits I can talk about...>
It's basically LTE in the 2.4 GHz band, with a load of extra bits for beam forming, coping with speed and distance etc. Using the 2.4 GHz band allows them to build a network covering the US without spending billions on spectrum.
Yes, it's the same 2.4GHz ISM band that wifi uses, with the same power limits. And yes, it works well enough that you can do video calls hundreds of kilometres from the base station. That's how shit wifi is, and how well this stuff works.
Seems like you know a bit about this. Could you indulge my curiosity and elaborate why wifi is shit? I assume some combo of DSP bottleneck (i.e. want to keep hw cheap) and maintaining backwards compatibility with older standards?
Wifi is improving now. Newer standards like Wifi 6 are doing that basically by taking the good ideas from LTE (4G) and applying them to Wifi. The cellular radio community has been much better about evolving standards, coming up with new technology and rolling it out. Maybe they have it easier because everyone gets a new phone every two years, but they've still had fairly good backwards compatibility support.
Multiple Access - this is the general term for 'multiple devices on the same spectrum'. Cellular divides up the spectrum into frequency bands (Frequency division multiplexing) and time slots in those bands (time division multiplexing). The base station then assigns each device a slot in a band (or potentially several), it also provides the time reference for this scheduling. This makes efficient use of your available spectrum and nothing interferes with or talks over anything else.
Wifi gets none of this. There's no base station planning so two access points can interfere with each other. There's no FDMA (access point runs on one channel of one band), and no TDMA. There's no uplink channel and downlink channel separation. Instead it's "Carrier sense with collision detection". Basically "try not to transmit at the same time as someone else, and if you do come back and try again later". This results in nodes competing, talking over each other, interfering (see "hidden node problem") etc. and makes inefficient use of the spectrum. The problem gets worse as the traffic gets busier. Wifi 6 is bringing in some actual scheduling.
Modulation schemes (the fundamental way that you transmit bits on a radio) - cellular modulation schemes are now incredibly efficient and robust. They use a variety of techniques that allow scaling based on channel conditions so that you can get as close as possible to whatever Shannon currently says you're allows. A lot of wifi uses old-school spread spectrum, and newer standards use OFDM which is a bit better. Wifi 6 is finally moving to the Quadrature Amplitude Modulation stuff that LTE uses.
Sometimes I work in a factory (full of metal everything) that's a metal plated building with no signal repeaters inside, basically a faraday cage. U can get enormous signal boost by just opening doors trough the wall. Most places inside the building report low signal with no usable internet connectivity, but some special spots provide enough signal to get few KB/s trough both ways. I was always impressed by the amount of work needed to push few KBs of data to cell tower trough such conditions, given a phone is able to establish and hold a connection. With WiFi there would be no hopes of even holding a connection between two points inside the building 30+ meters apart.
That's an unfair comparison to cellular though as cellular has its own licenced spectrum with nobody else able to interfere, high transmit power limits and potentially a friendlier frequency for the sort of waveguiding you're talking about.
That's why I find the smartsky comparison so interesting - because it's a completely level playing field.
Not as far as I'm aware. I don't know much about Wifi mesh, but I'm guessing that it has two channels - one for being "master" and one for "slave".
I.e. the master channel is used to serve wifi to the nearby devices, and to the next wifi routers in a chain, whereas the slave channel is used to get wifi from any upstream routers.
We wouldn't describe that approach as FDMA - more that it has a separate channel for backhaul.
Wifi's use case was, and still largely is, to be a wireless LAN. This means few users, no mobility, static devices, short distances, devices plugged in (not so true now). It started pretty much as exactly that: Just transmit ethernet frames over the radio and everything else is exactly as wired ethernet.
Cellular standards cater for a very different use case and, as a result, as vastly more complex and robust. To manage a lot of moving users and to support mobility is hard, also taking into account that cellular has had to deal with quality of service from the beginning because even if data rate was low voice requires a constant throughput with constrained delays.
This kind of shocks me honestly. Maybe it is because wifi is shit as you say but I wouldn't have thought hundreds of kilometers was possible, much less with one target moving.
I've been looking into a way to get a wifi link between a couple locations maybe 500ft apart and wasn't sure if even that was possible.
> That's how shit wifi is, and how well this stuff works.
That's not really fair. Their solution requires knowing the exact location of the base station and the client at all times. It's significantly more complex and expensive than Wifi.
There‘s a new hybrid system in Europe called EAN, based on a specialized LTE network and an S-band satellite to fill in gaps in coverage (mostly over the oceans).
I recently got to use it, and as expected latency is significantly better than on a pure GEO system.
Gogo is also working on an air-to-ground 4G/5G network covering the continental US.
The thing is that once Starlink has the service working, and they have, it does not require a lot of extra investment to support ships and aircrafts.
On the other hand, an air-to-ground system requires a full cellular network on the ground (at the very least with dedicated RF and antennas), although with fewer sites because cells can be massive, and that still only covers land.
> it does not require a lot of extra investment to support ships and aircrafts.
Are you sure about that? I have a friend who worked in airspace comms his whole career (including at Gogo) and he described some of the challenges of the engineering problem (these systems have to be airgapped from the critical systems on the plane, the certification processes, the antennas have to be super highly directional to talk with satelites high overhead while both the plane and the satellite are moving at tremendous speed, etc). Maybe your "not a lot of extra investment" is relative, but it seems like there's still a bunch of work to make these things work on planes.
I flew across the Pacific on Alaska Airlines last month and they specifically said they'd only have Internet until we left the continental US. Most of the trip had no Internet, just the in-flight movies that you can stream over their wifi.
Depending on the satellite provider, they may still be using satellite and still only work over the continental US. Even starlink basically bounces the signal off a satellite and down to a ground station; this doesn't work over the ocean. They just started doing satellite to satellite links to get "back to land".
> In-flight wifi (and otherwise all other transmissions) have pretty much always been air to ground
Would be curious to see a citation. My understanding was that of the major providers of in-flight Internet, only Gogo was air-to-ground, and that pretty much everybody else (Thales, ViaSat, etc.) was either Ku- or Ka-band satellite, which has been winning out because it still works over water.
One of the main reasons for air to air transmission is because engine data (and potentially blackbox) data is transmitted through inmarsat satellites.
There are two major problems here:
1. when you reach a major transit hub, such as NY airspace the bandwidth is very limited due to the sheer amount of traffic
2. Inmarsats network structure was(is?) like a honeycomb. So the further away you are from the center of each section the worse the transmission characteristics are.
One problem that is rarely looked at is atmospheric interference between satellite and base station.
Anyway, at least problem number two may be addressed by Starlinks vast array of satellites.
It's been a while since I looked at these things though.
> One of the main reasons for air to air transmission is because engine data (and potentially blackbox) data is transmitted through inmarsat satellites.
Lots of HF-DataLink still out there. Funny seeing the pings from on-lease Russian aircraft that Russian airlines seized.
That’s not been true for over 5 years, getting closer to a decade. I’d be happy to show wifi speed/GPS location pairs for United Airlines flights over the past decade, including many trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic flights.
The base stations were never free - they were subsidized by various sources.
But that $4,500 a month is insanely cheap and an absolutely incredible value for Ukraine.
The media loves to whip up a frenzy over Musk, but Ukrainian commanders on the front have said Starlink is the single biggest advantage they have, their efficacy would drop by more than half without it, and even, they’d rather have more Starlink than more guns.
Simply put no one has done more for Ukraine than Elon / SpaceX.
> that $4,500 a month is insanely cheap and an absolutely incredible value for Ukraine
"I have bought over 50 StarLinks, with official prices right from the website in EU countries - Poland, CZ, Germany - like 400-500 bucks each, then enable portability for extra IIRC 50$, then payed monthly fee of 60$ (was 120$ before). It’s the same for everyone else in EU" Dimko Zhluktenko, the head of Dzuga’s Paw charity fund, tweeted in his response to the development.
So regular joe donates them for $500 with monthly fee of $60 but $4,500 a month is insanely cheap?
Regular joe seems to be donating the typical residential units on residential plans. My understanding is that the military set up is different, especially in terms of support/priority.
I didn't say military tier. My understanding is that they are 1) business plans 2) available in areas where business isn't currently offered 3) get prioritization over other orders and 4) have a different support model.
> Like sending Ukraine "free" base stations and charging them $4,500 a month for service.
Are there any alternatives? Nope. Also, let's not talk about how SpaceX "should" sponge up the costs, because you would not ask Lockheed Martin or Raytheon Technologies to do that. Compared to regular prices of military hardware, Starlink costs nothing.
To get any credit for 'charity' we should at least look at the nominal cost to service a particular base station instead of the cost to make Starlink profitable. For the former I only really see the bandwidth costs because the base stations are part of Starlink's normal operation and all of the satellites are up there anyways.
Yeah. I mean, from SpaceX's perspective they're perfectly entitled to try to get the US government to underwrite general operational costs as well; any other supplier is going to do the same thing (albeit not on Twitter...), and Starlink could certainly use the additional funds because the whole network is pre-profit. But that doesn't mean that if the US government doesn't fund everything they ask for the Ukraine service is a philanthropic endeavour. Lots of marginal costs are being unwritten and (again, ignoring Twitter) SpaceX is getting a lot of PR benefit and stress testing from doing it.
I don’t agree because bandwidth isn’t the only part of nominal operations in a war zone. You’re also painting a bright red target on your back for the highly sophisticated state actors (On the level that they might bribe or threaten employees, try to infiltrate the company, etc.) If I were SpaceX I wouldn’t want any part of it.
Those are all things they should already be guarding against though for the most part and definitely not a cost incurred per unit. If they're not already doing tons of work to secure against malicious employees they're a joke of an ISP to begin with.
Security isn't binary. There's a difference between normal commercial-grade security, and being actively engaged in warfare against an adversary with serious cyber and space warfare capabilities.
Space doesn't matter here, if Russia decides to mess with StarLink by shooting down satellites there's nothing SpaceX can do beyond launching replacements. So we're back to the more normal security they should already be doing because ISPs are already huge targets for state level actors even if you're not involved in a war.
Yes they gave everyone the $4,500 service even if they only took (and paid for) the $500 tier.
The $60 tier is not available on the 20,000 donated terminals - 85% of the retail price of which ($1,500 and a $2,500 model) was paid for by governments.
Finding b2b markets for Starlink is very important. Starlink has about 500K subscribers today. Their TAM inherently shrinks as terrestrial fixed wireless access (FWA) expands. That expansion will accelerate with 5G FWA driving interoperability, but FWA subscribers already vastly outnumber Starlink subscribers. Starlink needs tens of millions of b2c subscribers, or it needs to find high value specialized or b2b markets that can't be served by FWA.
Looks like a very competitive product, assuming pricing is reasonable.
It's interesting that they are rolling in the warranty cost with the monthly subscription. First time I've seen that.
It will be great for aircraft owners looking to have a full featured internet experience in flight.
Though the downside is that it will likely have priority when roaming into any cell, thus degrading service for ordinary ground based customers in busy areas.
Let's say cities have 3000 people per square kilometer. Farms have 1 person per square kilometer.
Only 1 in 3000 people need to desire starlink for cities to have more demand.
Strange situations happen. Not having good service in your neighborhood, hating the one provider available, wanting a backup, liking the idea of internet from space, lower latency over seas and thousands of other reasons I'm not crazy enough to think of.
To use Starlink you need to have a line-of-sight to the satellites, and that basically requires you'll get to install the ceiling of the whole building and even that might not be enough, right?
To do that you probably need to get the whole building (or the building manager) to go along with this.
So if you have 1/3000 of people wanting this in the city, those same people also need to be in a matching situation to have the possibility to use Starlink, which can significantly reduce the ratio.
It's still possible, but the initiative will need to come from Starlink, possibly involving plans for complete buildings.
edit: I was of course thinking city centers, but in the nearby regions the demand might be significantly higher, access to roof is easy, population density is OK, and fiber internet still not well available.
And that's how you get a satellite internet that works like satellite internet, or at best a 3Mbps cable. duh.
I think there are misunderstandings in the concept of a "city", that what kind of density it refers to, and how much space - on top of area - is allocated for a resident in such a city. To me, a city is straight up Bladerunner, luxury apartments having such privileges as shared library rooms or balcony railings with sightlines workable for some GEO satellite dishes. To GP a city might be towards houses with single-car garages. That kind of definition mismatch happens both ways, by the way, in forms of city dwellers mistakenly offending other city as rural areas and complicating discussions.
That‘s true, yet I‘m seeing a lot of TV satellite dishes even in major cities, when cable TV is arguably also readily available.
If people want it, at least some of them will find a way with their landlord, if they don‘t already own the entire building (especially in the US, single-family homes are not at all uncommon close to the center of major cities).
> That‘s true, yet I‘m seeing a lot of TV satellite dishes even in major cities, when cable TV is arguably also readily available.
Interesting. In which country do you live in? Because in France, I'd say that 90% of the people owning a TV sat dish are immigrants looking for the channels of their country of origin (the type of things you usually don't get with cable network), and the other 10% are people in very remote areas.
A friend lives in a city with a lot of startups, a lot of technology companies and a research university that's been on the internet since before the DNS. He's on the waiting list for Starlink because the fastest residential connection he can get is 3Mbps.
There's much fiber there, but also many streets where no fiber is available. AFAICT that kind of spottiness is the most common case and few cities have uniformly good coverage. I do hope 3Mbps is rare though.
You'd think there would be investors popping up left and right to improve it, because offering 500 Mbps in an area where you can only get 3 Mbps is sure to sell.
Is this where the weird dichotomy between the US being on the one side very liberal for businesses yet on the other very restrictive? (the restrictive being protectionist practices from the established companies in this case)
* there isn’t any sort of provider like Openreach where all the ISPs share some portion of the network (in Openreach’s case, the last-mile network) so every ISP has to build every last inch to the home themselves
* generally speaking, ISPs have to get permits from localities, which are often cash-strapped and thus looking to scrape as much money as they can from an unsympathetic sector
> where all the ISPs share some portion of the network (in Openreach’s case, the last-mile network) so every ISP has to build every last inch to the home themselves
There could be though if US regulators wanted too.
In my country (New Zealand) for example the government did a deal during the switch from copper to fiber that regulated the network owners. A network owner would get exclusive rights to install their cables in a particular city and in return they would be prohibited from retail sales and would have to provide wholesale access to their network to ISPs at regulated prices.
Now something like 90% of the country has access to at least gigabit fiber (up to 8 gigabit available in some areas) and a choice of a dozen or so ISPs.
This is where the US federal structure starts getting in the way. The federal government only has jurisdiction over interstate matters and things defined in the constitution; anything not explicitly declared like this is a state-level matter. The monopoly ISP situation is an issue at the local, not federal level, and generally speaking the states either do not care or actively block more amenable regulation. (States also have limited fiscal capacity in that bond investors do not give them the same blank check they do to the feds.)
I am in an apartment building in a large city where OpenReach will only supply 3mb fibre despite how many times we ask or complain.
There are other 2 or 3 year newer apartment buildings 10 meters away in 3 directions which have fiber to the premises rather then awkwardly run lengths of the cheapest aluminium cable that they could find.
I was considering using starlink but found prepaid MVNO 5G cheaper (though it is unreliable)
> There are other 2 or 3 year newer apartment buildings 10 meters away in 3 directions which have fiber to the premises
Yup.
Sounds like you've stumbled across one of OpenWretch's many failings.
Sounds like your building is one of the many unfortunate older buildings throughout the country that is connected via EO lines. EO = "Exchange Only", i.e. copper goes direct back to the exchange, not via a street cab.
Buildings served via EO lines are very much "back of the back of the back of the queue" at OR when it comes to FTTP upgrade.
OR seemingly deem it "too difficult" to pull fibre back down the same EO ducts to the exchange. Others might say "can't be arsed" or "easier to sweat the copper assets" or "waiting for another government handout" .... I couldn't possibly say.
Yeah, erm, mate ... don't get me started on Openscreech.
TL;DR: They are not the panacea, ESPECIALLY when it comes to fibre. Openreach might sound good on paper, but boy does it really not work out well in practice.
Sure to sell is one thing, sure to make a profit is quite another. ISPs have cost models along the lines of "requires x permits from y entities and z meters of digging", except more complex, and the costs have to be smaller than the expected additional sales over a fairly small number of future years.
The expected additional sales, because some/many of the customers will buy a 16/1Mbps DSL connection if the provider doesn't offer them 500/500 fiber, and the price won't be that much lower.
If your entire street is willing to pay $1000/month each on a 10 year contract with serious penalties for early cancellation there definitely would be 'investors popping up left and right'.
For normal consumer pricing laying down new lines will likely never turn a profit in the U.S. in any established neighbourhood, especially in municipalities that like to extract every dollar out of unsympathetic companies as another comment mentioned.
Not the full city, just that particular part of the street where gp's friend happens to live. Crazy to use satellites where a last mile of fiber would do the job, or terrestrial beam link, or just a well-placed cell tower, but markets can be weird in edge cases.
The city has much better options in some areas, but not in his street. It's in North Carolina, US, he lives closish to the UNC campus (if UNC has several campuses, then close to the one that was on the internet 40+ years ago).
No 5G home internet available? In most cases it’s a better alternative to StarLink if you have good coverage. Also surprised there’s no Spectrum cable, I thought they were available almost everywhere in the Triangle (assuming you mean UNC Chapel Hill).
Getting internet early is often a curse since companies priorities build outs where they have no coverage at all. That being said, 3 MB/s should get you very high on the 'to upgrade ' list...
It absolutely can be, but that depends on how congested/well managed the network is.
I‘ve seen stable latencies under 20ms on some networks, but also absurd spikes of multiple seconds on others. (The same goes for cable/DOCSIS, by the way…)
I live in a dense city near Amsterdam. My home does not yet have a fiber for high bandwidth connection. However, I found myself content with the 300 Mbps line supplied by cable. A typical 4K video stream is about 25Mbps of bandwidth. So, for households 300Mbps is plenty for now. What is nicer is reliability of the connections and the latencies. If fiber could bring any benefits there, I'd be happy to pay up.
Starlink generally has 20-40ms of latency. Speed for fixed residential connections is different depending on congestion and trees - 50Mbps to 400Mbps for download and 10-100Mbps for upload from what I have seen.
At least in Germany it's worse but generally fine, you can achieve <20ms ping for online gaming within or near Germany. Fiber is for sure better through but probably won't make a difference in day2day.
I just checked at home, and the latency I get on my Cable connection is about 70 ms on average!
If Starling does indeed provide even a lower bandwidth connection at just 20ms, that is a nett win. Cool!
I don't know if a fiber to home would achieve lower latencies than 20 ms.... Someone mentioned DOCSIS - don't know much about it. Is that not needed for a fiber connection?
When not congested, I used to get about 4 ms to servers in my city.
But on one provider, with congestion, that would go up to 15 seconds (yes, 15.000 ms) basically every evening during the pandemic…
It all depends on how well a network is managed. This is true for ever access technology; fiber just has a lot more headroom to mask bad network management, congestion etc.
Fiber may be available in a city, but not in your building. It’s moderately common for a high rise apartment to only have the option of one ISP, with mediocre internet plans (especially if the building has a special contract with the ISP)
Plenty of older cities don't have fiber all over. I'm in Western Europe and they're gradually installing fiber across the country, new developments get fiber by default.
So at home I'm on 50 Mbps VDSL. My company's office has fiber but it has a Starlink for fallback.
I noticed a starlink terminal on the side of a building in SF yesterday near the bay bridge. I really wonder why they are using it. I work at a rural farm with no good internet options and we love our starlink, but I’d really have thought there’d be better options in SF.
There are lots of geographically tiny problems in cities. One of the buildings next to where I live can get fiber but this one can't. Various apartments in this building have fine connectivity but now a critical cable duct is full and someone may be told that "you can't get faster than 16Mbps, sorry" even if both neighbours on the same floor have 100Mbps, and that answer makes sense.
Doubling as a "we're state of the art" conversation piece if the antenna is sufficiently visible. As long as they are still a somewhat rare novelty, the morale effect alone could be worth the subscription. SpaceX innovation halo effect.
I didn't think a lot of the cities can get fiber to the home. I know I can't in NYC and when I was in LA, nor in Ft Lauderdale. Is it easier in most other big cities?
Not a big city, but in Colombo, there is an ISP that exclusively provides Fibre lines to apartment buildings. It's a common interest for both building management and the ISP to provide service.
If the building signs up with the ISP, any customer from that building can sign up directly at ISP, and they can setup the connection within the same day.
Price wise, they are on par with other ISPs, but the Sri Lankan government heavily regulates the prices.
Yes, fiber is common in most Dutch cities for example. It is not at every premise yet, but being rolled out. If not FttH, then ~100Mbps DSL or Docsis up to 1000Mbit down.
> Highest demand for normal starlink is in cities.
This is literally the opposite of true.
But both of you combined make a good point: this is the best way to fully utilize bandwidth of the sats, which are not going to be serving terrestrial customers when flying over the oceans, which is a significant portion of the time.
Between boats, planes, and rural terrestrial customers the usage of any individual Starlink sat can be efficiently spread out.
You might be surprised how many outer suburbs of big cities have absolutely nothing for real broadband availability, there's a number of starlink terminals in far suburbs of Seattle where the only other option is 5Mbps long loop length adsl2+ on degraded copper.
If 50% of the people in a plane want Starlink cell with a plane want it, vs .1% of the people in NYC want Starlink, then the NYC cell is going to have far more demand.
I'm a full time RVer and carry a Starlink because while the campgrounds usually have WiFi, they often are terrible and get bogged down easily. I'm usually parked in or near a large city. I've noticed lately that Starlinks are becoming more and more popular among RVers.
Also, I routinely get 100+ Mbps on Starlink, which is better than a lot of connections available across the country.
> Why would the highest demand for Starlink be in cities?
Because even if there's very few people who don't have good service (for example some kind of technical issue where fiber can't be routed to a specific building) you quickly reach the capacity for the service. Plus the odd person who wants it for a backup.
I hate that internet is becoming more common on flights. One of my favorite things about flying is that it's a good chunk of time where you disconnect and don't worry about emails or messages.
Just sit back and watch a movie or listen to music. Or catch up on sleep.
To be fair you can always choose to disconnect for a period of time.
I understand if your job expects you to be online when possible but if you have difficulty disconnecting without an external pressure to be online you could consider talking to a therapist to help you manage your reliance, especially if it's bothering you significantly.
Yes, but now if you're not online during your flight it's because "you chose to" and you're a slacker.
Another dimension here is that it's a refuge from "the always on" society; if you were to step back and look at your life from a distance almost everyone would say "I need to disconnect more", but you often don't realize how dependent you are on that dopamine hit the connected internet provides until you're forced to disconnect. Then you see the peace and realize, "oh, I'm OK when I'm not attached to my phone".
But there are fewer and fewer opportunities to have that kind of realization these days.
could be about half of Americans could use therapy by that metric, as that's how many had unusued and thus forfeited time off in 2019[0]. Work culture is ill.
> * If you are on a short haul flight, it's going to be disconnected for takeoff/landing so you will get a solid 30m
I worked on inflight wifi for Qantas, where they share the highest trafficked route in the world - the 60 minute light between Sydney and Melbourne. It was a huge win for the project when we got clearance to enable wifi on the ground for takeoff.
I have the same flight stats and I have only had to ask for a refund once because it straight up didn’t work for most of the flight. Many airlines have very usable internet now, some even for free (jetBlue).
It depends a lot where you fly. In my experience, flying over Europe means the internet will almost certainly be spotty at best, whereas flying over the US means that it will probably work well enough to be useful.
It must have gone downhill since my last flight with them. I vividly remember getting something like 18 Mbps in a speed test and was shocked that they were giving it away.
It makes sense, if everyone streams then it'll create significant congestion once awareness rises due to people trying to use Netflix/Hulu/Disney+ etc. Better to offer people a free tier to allow folk to WhatsApp, FB, tweet, whatever and effectively manage the bulk of traffic through the paid tier.
I recently flew across country with jetblue and since I haven't flown in over 10 years I appreciated the wifi. However, I found I couldn't stream a music video on my phone without buffering. Fortunately if I turned off the video the music played fine. It was OK for reading hacker news and the like.
On the return flight it just didn't even work. Fortunately, I'd had newpipe download some content before we left.
I see this take a lot, and I don't really understand it.
I'm sure you know that you always have the option to just not use the in-flight wifi. Is it that the availability of the wifi will tempt you to use it, therefore removing the feeling of disconnect?
For me it's more the _expectation_ that you can be reached that is the difference. Even if others might not really expect this from you, the possibility being there changes the situation.
A few years ago, I didn't know how to feel about someone Internet streaming a medical podcast from their laptop speakers for hours on a long flight. Impressed at the connectivity, but annoyed.
That's a strong "I'm sorry but do you have headphones? Respectfully I don't want to listen to this". Alternatively I bring earplugs to put in under my over-the-ear headphones, haha.
Are there no aerodynamic concerns for that installation? The VHF instruments pictured on top of the fuselage make this thing look like a plow that would be better fit on top of a Sprinter van... they couldn't have gone for a dome?
Manufacturers are very good at these calculations.
One interesting example is that for the initial IFE systems that were deployed, the heat generated by the displays was significant enough that the largest cost to the installation was the required upgrade to the cabin air conditioning systems.
It will be a lot less than the percentage a radio antenna increases the fuel consumption of a car.
Modern planes like the 787 are made to a big degree from composites and the antenna can be installed inside the fuselage - leading to 0% increase in air resistance.
This is not accurate. I don't know of a single installation within a fuselage, because the composite has enough metal in or around it to cause interference.
The fuel concern is a significant one, as well as performance. Enough fuel or performance impacts and you can restrict the airports flown with these antennas. It's not as big a problem on widebodies, but it's the reason you haven't seen WiFi on small regional or the smallest narrow bodies until recently.
there are plenty of ku/ka-band geostationary VSAT systems that already exist, which mount as a bulge on the upper fuselage, which are larger and less aerodynamic than this.
in addition to antenna systems for iridium and inmarsat L/S-band stuff.
there is a lower limit to the size of aircraft that can accommodate something like this, of course.
Hate to be that guy, but this reference has "gone corpo" a long time ago and somwhat tired now. A number of companies/products have used it for "cool points" with now middle-aged men over the years.
This is a game changer. It works really, really well - better than I ever expected to see internet on a plane work. The price tag seems ridiculous, but will probably make sense for a lot of the operators of the planes on their initial STC.
Surely they'll eventually be competing with Viasat for those juicy contracts with the major airlines as well. I won't be surprised if my Delta in-flight internet service is provided by Starlink in a few years. I suspect it wouldn't make any economic sense to retrofit existing planes, but potentially on their newly built ones!
2 months before deciding to reneg due to too many fake people in Montreal. He accuses the City of Montreal of hiding the true number of thugs and criminals.
As dumb as that whole saga is, I find it amusing that people think Twitter is actually honest in their filings about the amount of fake/bot accounts. Tech companies inflating account numbers is a tale as old as the internet itself.
Slightly unrelated but makes me wonder how different would be the airline industry nowadays if Musk had launched a airline company at the same time he launched SpaceX. How different would it be to take a plane and travel across the world.
Yep. My feeling is that this story involves Elon Musk losing his completely conventional fleet of aircraft and slightly quirky service to creditors and wishing that he'd set up a space company or a 140 characters company instead...
The worst part about flying is the part before and after the plane ride, when you get stressed about what time to show up, going through security, sitting around, waiting to board, landing and waiting for the doors to open, taking a bus to the terminal, waiting for a carousel for 5 ~ 60 minutes, etc.
If someone could solve that for me affordably, I can handle the sitting on an airplane in economy class for 15 hours bit.
Although yes: having high speed, low latency internet for those 15 hours would make it much more pleasant.
I don't think "security" is going to be lessened in our lifetime, if anything it can only get worse. Disrupting the space would take an insane amount of money you don't have. People who have money, can fly private.
It's really not. You just provide some info that the government already has along with your fingerprints, they do a quick background check, and you're done. Whether you have PreCheck or not, the government knows what flights you've taken because the airlines have to submit their passenger lists. $85 for 5 years of less hassle at security is worth it for anyone who flies even once every 1-2 years.
First class has its own levels I think, just because you spend 10k for a flight you're not going with a limo directly under the plane without any wait in the airport. Some airports do have shortcuts though, that's true.
To me, the worst part about flying is landing. As soon as you land a ton of inpatient people stand up and just rush to stand and wait in the middle isle. Every single flight this happens on.
Planes need to have exits on the rear, middle, and front of the plane to make deplaning a lot easier and quicker.
If this issue is ever solved it will be a miracle.
Do you mean an airline (end service provider) or an airplane manufacturer? The latter would be more analogous to what Elon has done with SpaceX.
If the former, I couldn’t imagine anything more deathly boring than this, working insanely hard to run a commodity service that’s fundamentally identical to all of your competitors other than on the margins. It would be like wondering how different the car hire industry would be if Musk had launched a hire company at the same time as Tesla.
What Musk should have done is create a company that is owned 50% by Tesla, 50% by SpaceX and they should be developing a electric airplane.
If you are willing to do the necessary investment, I think there is huge potential to build an airplane that goes significantly further then planes like the Aviation Alice or what Heart Aerospace ES-30 is doing.
Tesla is already half solving this problem indirectly through their batter research, buuut the biggest issue with electric aircraft is the energy density of batteries isn't, and isn't projected, to get anywhere near what it needs to be to handle long range flying.
Many industry experts believe we're going to see an electrification but in tiers. Pure electric in the regional space, with more regional options than now on smaller planes, followed by hydrogen or alternative fuels powering the mid-range. Long range may go to hydrogen or alternatives, but the density is still such that jet fuel will rein on the longest flights for the next 10-15 years minimum.
The cool thing is that with every 50km you can unlock new locations.
The ES-30 flying from Zürich can get you to important cities in France, Germany, Italy and Austria. With they hybrid mode almost to Paris.
In Europe you have great trains but in the US this could be a game changer in all the big metro areas, North East, Florida, Texas Triangle, Southern California, Mid West/Canada.
Pushing on that whole stack you can get out more then the ES-30. There is potential for things like flying higher, using PRANTL Wing, Flying wing structure, batteries as part of the structure and so on.
A startup wouldn't risk doing any of these, but a company like SpaceX/Tesla could easily invest the capital to do this.
He does not need to start an airline company, he is going to change the airline industry if fingers crossed we will live to see Starship Earth to Earth happening - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
And what we will be even better a strong competition, so that kind of flights will be available to all.
People believing in this are the same people who believed we'd have flying cars by the year 2000. I can't believe people are falling for such blatant sci fi marketing bullshit
I bet in 30 years we'll still be arguing that "fully autonomous cars are just around the corner" and "Musk will put a colony on Mars in 5 years"
Not very I'm sure; for space tech, they tried Concorde, too expensive. for electric tech, companies are working on electric airplanes but that too is still far away - despite the huge drop in the cost of battery tech for example that in part Tesla was responsible for.
Producing one tonne of lithium requires digging out 500 tonnes of earth. We don't mine lithium with solar panels and horses, it's an extremely energy intensive and polluting industry, and that's only a tiny part of the equation, building the car already is already extremely polluting
Is it better than straight up burning dino juice ? Sure, is it sustainable and eco friendly as it is presented today ? not at all
And that's not even talking about the fact that a big part of car pollution is due to tires, heavier/faster accelerating cars = eat through tires more quickly than lighter/slower vehicles
There is no shame in buying a tesla but don't feel like you're saving/helping the planet, this is environmentally friendly the same way having 1 terminal cancer is healthier than having 2 terminal cancers, you might die in 6 months instead of 5 but you're still utterly fucked
The system doesn't go from bad to good overnight. Every piece needs to be updated, vehicles that don't put out fumes is just one piece of that system.
You're argument reads, 'well the entire system isn't perfect yet, so that negates all improvements to the components' Give me a break. Electric cars are a huge step forward. One of many steps that need to be taken.
The world will move forward while you sit on the sidelines and complain.
It isn't and most likely won't be until upgrading the whole production is cheaper than burning fossil fuel and god knows how long it'll take given how advanced and specific mining equipment is. And even if it was 100% electric, it's still an absolute nasty thing: https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/01/south-america-s-li...
> Electric cars are a huge step forward.
Only if you believe personal vehicles are a good thing in the first place, which is already something you can argue against, but I guess most of us have been brain washed by decades of auto industry marketing. Teslas aren't a step in the right direction, e mustangs either, the new f150 either, we're just making the same mistake all over again "but it's electric so you're saving the planet", no it's just a 3 tonnes pile of e waste moving a 80kg meat bag, putting candy sprinkles on top of a big turd doesn't change its fundamental nature.
> The world will move forward while you sit on the sidelines and complain.
I'm fine on my legs powered bicycle thank you
Spraying kids with DDT was progress, lead in paint and gas was progress, freon in fridges was progress, asbestos was the best thing after sliced bread. Everything is progress if your definition of progress is "the hot new thing that generates money". It's always the same thing, the people pushing for these things are making big bucks while selling you a dream that's going to last xx years until it falls apart and be replaced by the next
The entire world uses vehicles of all shapes and sizes. If they’re all built and powered with sunlight, what does it matter if it’s a passenger car or not.
It’s been solved by companies like Gogo and Vianet using Ku, Ka and L band antennas on planes. StarLink will package their antenna in a line replaceable unit (LRU).
I know it's done this way to be consistent with the other use-case pages, but it seems really interesting to show a proposition for which only very few people could actually seriously consider, yet anyone can register their interest; pretty neat.
Edit: a fatal assumption that it's the airlines providing the service underpins my original post below, whereas instead it's the providers charging passengers directly. That's an entirely different model from below, so disregard my original comment aside maybe my last line. Preserving the comment for context though.
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At 25,000/mo, assuming a jet makes 60 trans-con segments in the US per month and a price of $20 per passenger for access on a given segment, you'd need an average of at least 20 people to pay for a full flight's worth of internet access on each segment just to clear the monthly cost, not even counting the up front investment.
And that's for a standard narrow-body passenger jet, not the G650 etc. business jets that they're targeting.
I assume airlines looking to outfit whole fleets aren't finding out about pricing through the website, and probably aren't paying sticker price for either the equipment or the service. I guess the Gulfstream set probably isn't price sensitive, so may as well charge a boatload for these kinds of one-off installs for rich people?
I think the $25,000/mo is just an opening gambit. For comparison, the list price for Starline Marine is $5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000, and even that seems padded to extract maximum value from yacht owners, cargo ships, etc.
Also, while I imagine the logistics of bouncing 350 MBps from satellite to satellite at 1000 km/h will impose significant overhead, a lot of the places where people will want this service the most (trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, Kansas cornfields etc) will have very few if any other users.
I think the economics would probably work out for longer international flights. I fly economy with my family and I'd probably be willing to dump out $20/passenger for flights from Seattle to Japan/Europe, considering you're stuck in a seat for like 10 hours. That seems like it'd make long flights quite a bit nicer at a reasonable cost.
Alternatively being able to work more means I don't have to burn as many vacation days just on the transiting parts of travel.
I started boycotting Korean Air. Supposedly the reason why they don’t have wifi is that Koreans are used to great internet service, so it’s better not to have any wifi on their planes than to have slow internet.
I didn’t realize how addicted to the internet I was until I did a 15 hour flight from Boston to Incheon in the spring. Never again. I’ll gladly fly Delta instead.
I wouldn't say I'm addicted, I can manage okay on flights as it is with TV shows/movies/video games/books that I download ahead of time onto various devices. Especially the Switch is very nice, and of course the Steam Deck is probably great for this.
Alas, the market has repeatedly shown that people will choose the cheapest ticket above all other considerations. Unless somebody else is paying the bill, and those business travelers are also the ones most likely to fork out $20/flight for Internet connectivity.
This is anecdotal of course, but I have no qualms about paying a premium out of my own pocket to fly a preferred airline. Anything up 15% and I wouldn't even think twice - and I'd be willing to pay far more than that to avoid certain carriers.
Fast internet is something I would be willing to pay for on certain flights - either as part of the ticket price or as an add-on. Although most of the time I'm content to zone out to a movie or sleep.
See also: somebody else paying the bill. I've flown plenty of business class, but never paid anything close to full fare for it: it's either the company footing the bill, miles/points, or (rarely) some crazy routing/fare that gets me within 2x of regular economy.
You're assuming its a fixed increase in price here.
When planes come to be refitted:
- You take out the IFE server rack - weight saving.
- Replace the seatback tv's with essentially an all in one smart tv system with apps for major streaming services
- Take out the underseat IFE box as its no longer needed
- The airline no longer has to pay for tv/movie/music licensing
Let’s not forget that this could be a value add, they can easily increase flight ticket prices by $20 and offer the service for free. They can also remove inflight monitors from the planes, reducing the weight of the overall plane, increase plane tickets by $10 and offer it Free.
There’s many ways to play with the numbers
Not sure they'd need to go as far as removing the IFE completely, but a vastly more simple and cheap system could be used instead.
Airlines still rely on those massive clunky boxes under each seat, plus a server rack which adds a fair bit of weight.
Swapping to an all-in-one system - essentially a smart tv built into each monitor that just provides a browser and basic apps for major streaming services would reduce the overall weight of the plane, fix the annoyance of that big box where your legs are supposed to go, and provide entertainment on board.
There's also the costs that airlines normally have for licensing content - those would go away completely if everyone can just log into their own netflix or prime account.
They could add around $3 per ticket and pay for it.
But removing seat-back would be bold - 100 people using a shared 350 connection would probably not work well. 200-odd using it would kill it. Leaving your passengers with a very unhappy experience.
Plenty of flights in the US are BYOD already. You connect to the WiFi and have access to a website (on a laptop) or it's in their app on mobile. And it has video on demand served locally from the plane. It's airline edits with watermarks but a good enough selection I wouldn't expect most people to pay for Internet for streaming.
And on top of that all the major streaming services allow for download for offline viewing. I'm just going to download a bunch of stuff ahead of time to make sure I can watch what I want.
This just serves the folks who want to pay to access the rest of the Internet. And I don't see incentive for anyone to pay and try to use a streaming service. More useful for someone traveling on business needing to join a call or something.
350 Mbps for the entire flight. You're looking at speeds in the 5 Mbps territory optimistically per person. No way can you remove a NAS serving video content with that.
Assuming a plane has about 100 passenger per flight in average, that's $4/passenger.
I can see airlines like Southwest making wifi free just like how they provide checked bags for free.
Also, to me free wifi sounds better than those laggy entertainment systems I never use.
To be fair, this doesn’t consider the fuel costs of the extra 46 kg or so of baggage allowance that passengers have, the additional check-in desks that need to be “kiosked” and/or staffed, etc.
I’m sure it still works out for them, but it’s far from obvious and probably depends on many passengers not maximizing their allowance.
Starlink may provide other value to airlines besides fees from passengers. Streaming high resolution telemetry, or spying on their employees with webcams, or something like that.
And, knowing Musk, a way to play loose with the books. I can imagine a bunch of these reservations "financially delivered" to prop up SpaceX's numbers, which aren't looking hugely healthy.
In which world is SpaceX not healthy? I mean, _seriously_. Investors are trampling over each other for the opportunity to get into their private stock buybacks. They've had a record number of launches this year and Starlink is coming out of "unproven" territory and into "let's sell this" territory. Plus they just successfully tested inter-satellite links.
You best anchor yourself to the ground... lest you drift away.
Won't this require spectrum licensed from every country the plane fly's over?
Easy in North America... But all other regions of the world a typical flight might go over 20 countries. If you can't secure a license for just one, you're gonna have a 5 hour flight with 20 minutes of no internet... Not great.
And I don't think they're getting a license for Russia, Iran, China, half of Africa, etc any time soon.
As long as the airplane is in international flight it is governed mostly by the rules of the country it's registered to, not the rules of the country its flying over. So I suspect you could use this on an international flight flying over China or any other country that is party to the Tokyo convention. The Tokyo convention does have a lot of exceptions like national security but its not obvious they apply here.
Just out of curiosity I have played CS:GO and other competitive FPSs on planes before. I can’t imagine actually playing well on good ping, even briefly on a plane. I didn’t think something like that would ever even be possible in my lifetime.
I'm sorry - but the mental image of someone playing T-side on dust2 while on a plane and the sound "bomb has been planted" on max volume just echoes throughout the cabin is too hilarious!
It says 350 Mbps per plane. How much does it translate to per seat? Say if all passengers start a video call or a S̶t̶a̶d̶i̶a̶ Nvidia GE force game, then?
Wrong way to think about it...never will "all passengers" be doing something.
Same as any network (ISP, IDF closet, cell network, stadium, department store, etc.), you plan for oversubscription. Think 10:1 oversubscription for a starting point. So 180 passengers > 18 active users > 20mbps per active user. An airplane may have more active users if the service is free...
A network that is not oversubscribed and provides full non-blocking throughput to downstream devices is by far the exception: high-end datacenter spine/leaf systems come to mind as an example.
Using the current fleet of Delta Air Lines as an example[0], they average ~180 seats per plane. If everyone on the plane was using the internet then that would be 1.9 Mbps per passenger. GeForce Now requires 15 Mbps for 720p 60fps[1]. If there was no other internet usage then 350 Mbps could support 23 15 Mbps streams.
Personally I feel that plane WiFi doesn't need to be that fast. If they can make it more reliable (especially over water) and with lower latency I'd be more than happy with it. I don't need to stream YouTube.
Presumably it could be useful in that context. I don't know what the alternative is; probably direct radio links to other planes and/or ground stations.
It might be a problem for SpaceX if their satellite network were to be deemed a military asset -- a foreign government might consider them a legitimate military target and destroy the satellites if they have the means to do so.
This would be excellent as part of a hybrid solution. Dynamically switching between standard ground to air and satellite to accommodate availability and bandwidth constraints.
I have always enjoyed the time where there was no internet on an aircraft. It has been the only time when I could really be offline without having a slight guilty conscience.
I wonder if this also means future astronauts will have wifi when launching to moon/mars. Imagine watching watching a movie while taking off to somewhere distant
Like large planes on long distance routes (at least) have shown films for decades, and we watched films from discs or cassettes at home before broadband internet.
Starlink antennas only aim downward so no it can't even be used to talk to other satellites/spacecraft, let alone the moon. Though there are planned tests to try to link to the network via the laser connections, but that would require being relatively nearby, at least with the current design.
Also even if it was facing upwards, the entire reason why they're using LEO satellites is to get low latency to get network performance similar to what you get with terrestrial service. If you're far away from the Earth then none of that is true.
Shhh. Local storage is a secret. The modern internet economy is based on profiting from "on demand" content delivered over a connection that can be monitized... and cut off for non-payment. Privately-hosted content like CDs or hard drives will soon be outlawed. Buy a NAS now while ypu still can.
to give an idea of the lower bound size of aircraft this is possible on:
Which aircraft types are supported for Starlink Aviation?
Supplemental type certificate (STCs) are in development for the following aircraft: ERJ-135, ERJ-145, G650, G550, Falcon 2000, G450, Challenger 300, Challenger 350, Global Express, Global 5000, Global 6000, and Global 7500. The Starlink engineering team will update this list as development begins on additional aircraft.
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Presumably if you have something with a large flat upper surface that flies at fairly low speeds it would not be impossible to install physically, though possibly without a STC to make it legal/legit for the FAA...
You are unlikely to get one of these officially working on a hondajet or any of the small to mid size Cessna for instance.
Something in the size range of a twin otter could almost certainly mount one without serious problems, though might only be okay legally in a non faa jurisdiction.
Sure, airplanes are neat, but can we get good internet also on trains? Regular 4G/LTE doesn't work that great inside a metal box going 250km/h through countryside packed with hundreds of bored people wanting to use internet, nevermind all the EMI that the train might generate.
Anecdotally, in China, 4G and 5G work quite decently on high-speed rail up to 300 km/h, and Shanghai maglev at 400 km/h. For publicity Huawei demonstrated sustained 40 Mbit/s on the maglev back in 2010 and they did similar stunts in 2019 for 5G.
Pretty realistic someone with no argument or useful information to add to the discussion would just throw out there, ‘this sounds unrealistic’ and nothing else.
Edit: When this post was written, the majority of the popular posts were unrelated complaints and general criticisms of Musk and/or his companies. Most of them now appear to have no been deleted/flagged/significantly downvoted.
What a thread, full of people complaining about unrelated things rather than what the actual link talks about.
I think it'll be interesting as this rolls out to more airline customers even though this specific product is more aimed at corporate jets and similiar aircraft.
From the FAQ:
Which aircraft types are supported for Starlink Aviation?
Supplemental type certificate (STCs) are in development for the following aircraft: ERJ-135, ERJ-145, G650, G550, Falcon 2000, G450, Challenger 300, Challenger 350, Global Express, Global 5000, Global 6000, and Global 7500. The Starlink engineering team will update this list as development begins on additional aircraft.
You can buy a beatdown Cessna for $20,000 and get this one installed for $150,000. Although you'd still probably use cell towers for your phone but this is a good flex.
> High-speed, low-latency, in-flight internet with connectivity across the globe. $12,500/mo-$25,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $150,000. Reserve now with deliveries starting in 2023.
The link doesn't cover their question. They asked about installation costs, the link only talks about monthly costs ($12.5-25K) and hardware cost (150K). Modification to an aircraft, expertise, and being FAA cleared is always expensive.
Sure, great on private charter jets where it’s you or a couple of people who know each other.
Also, generally in favour of the march of technology, so I love this.
Do Not Ever want on a flight where I’m sitting beside some random ass stranger who will chat or video chat to whoever at the top of their voice while I’m trying to relax.
This is already theoretically an issue. I'm going to link to Alaska Air's FAQ[0] simply because it's the most available online who note that streaming services are OK, but they don't "allow guests to make voice or video calls". I imagine the latency would make it a poor experience _too_, but the point is that airlines know you don't want people making calls next to you.
Is it the same Alaska Air which just 20 years ago tried to sell in-flight voice calls on their in-plane phones for few bucks a minute, as any other airline did? Remember handsets in the backrest of the seat in front of you with the credit card slot on the side?
Yes, they and others in fact have changed their mind as the accessibility of this service has grown and can be expected to be used by someone easily for longer durations than before
Probably. Allowing people to stay connected on a plane is likely important, but now that "connected" can be "able to send WhatsApp messages" then the need for a phone is much reduced.
Do note the latency issues don't apply to Starlink. That's only a problem with geostationary satellites that are used by all other providers. Starlink has roughly equivalent latency to a terrestrial commercial wifi/cell service.
I've been on international flights booked by my comoany, where I cannot change or upgrade anything - except my meal selection to say I need a special meal.
I think technology itself is enabler here.
Airlines have to figure how to price the convenience of video calls vs privacy/solitude/disturbances to the co-passengers. i think having dedicated video call booths priced per 5 min chunks can address the issue.
Given high value placed on every square inch of the passenger cabin if that booth isn't being used as much as they'd earn from the extra seat they could sell instead, it's never happening.
> Sure, great on private charter jets where it’s you or a couple of people who know each other.
Well that's the target for this service. They don't even support larger commercial jets yet.
Which aircraft types are supported for Starlink Aviation?
Supplemental type certificate (STCs) are in development for the following aircraft: ERJ-135, ERJ-145, G650, G550, Falcon 2000, G450, Challenger 300, Challenger 350, Global Express, Global 5000, Global 6000, and Global 7500. The Starlink engineering team will update this list as development begins on additional aircraft.
I get this angle, but I just bring good headphones and random-ass strangers aren't the most uncomfortable part of flying. At least not the noise they make.
How is this so much more annoying to you than two people who know each other sitting next to you and talking or possibly as weird as this is gonna sound like maybe they were not completely anti-social people and just met and started talking?
"one-sided conversations still impacted participants’ self-reported distractibility and memory, thus showing people are more attentive to cell phone conversations than two-sided conversations"
Not really, since casually joining someone else's speaker call is almost as rude as taking one in the first place.
The objective when designing any environment where people are forced together is to limit interpersonal friction and, where possible, encourage civility and cooperation. From that perspective, all verbalizations to or from people not interacting with the environment are detrimental.
This seems so backwards to me, why would you want other people to behave the way you want them to when you can just put in earplugs, noise cancelling headphones, have self control and not get annoyed, etc etc. It seems crazy to me that people consider something so minor to be uncouth or whatever. I think in general the onus to take care of something should be on the person getting annoyed and only until you've exhausted your easy options should it shift to compromise.
Like I get why we have cultural norms and stuff for the most part, but if it's something that you can easily solve for yourself imposing on other people seems very selfish.
Just let people live their lives and don't be mad.
Talking about economy class flights - you aren't paying enough to avoid what is often extremely inconsiderate behaviour, you're stuck very close together, there's literally zero prospect of getting off it early if any bad behaviour occurs, and you often can't even change seats if there's bad behaviour.
>"This seems so backwards to me, why would you want other people to behave the way you want them to when you can just put in earplugs, noise cancelling headphones, have self control and not get annoyed, etc etc."
Because you are in a captive environment at increasingly close quarters on increasingly fuller flights. "Live and let live" is a great philosophy but flying coach today is not the same level of "shared public space" as say walking on a city sidewalk or sitting in a park.
I really don't think these are at all the same class of thing. One is like, a basic human need? I think for most people? The other is a harmful vice that has a lot of documented negative effects.
decent, working anc is still out of financial reach for many people flying in economy. there's no way not to be classist when talking about what flying economy is like today, but the average hn participator probably has more disposal income than the average american.
> I think in general the onus to take care of something should be on the person getting annoyed
i'd agree, except it takes one person to be magnificently annoying to 5 or 6 people at once. sometimes less, often more.
While I generally agree with a live and let live attitude, someone who would listen to music out loud, or have a phone call in anything other than the most hushed tones in an airplane are inconsiderate sociopaths
Human ears have much better dynamic range than whatever crappy microphones are built into phones. Thus, when people are sitting next to each other in a public space, they can typically whisper, or talk just above the noise floor. This is as opposed to phones, which posses an uncanny ability to cause people to yell at the top of their lungs.
While that may be true about dynamic range, I don't think that's the reason.
There is no feedback whether they are talking too quietly or too loudly.
My phone will pick up my voice if I whisper as well as if I yell, and the person on the other end will be able to hear either just fine. People just have a hunk of metal that they hold up to the side of their face (not really in front of their mouth), so they think they need to compensate.
If the TV ads for phones showed people whispering into their phone and advertising how good the microphones and noise canceling is, then we might not have this problem, but they don't.
I think it’s well documented how annoying hearing just one side of a conversation is.
Beyond this, yes it’s rude to talk at length on a plane to other people on a long haul flight, for example. I mean I get it but flying is by default a stressful experience as is.
Overhearing half a conversation is much worse worse than overhearing a full conversation. Overhearing conversations doesn't bother me but overhearing half of a telephone conversation drives me up a wall and makes me want to get out of wherever I am, which on a plane, isn't possible.
I feel like people have the good sense not to have loud conversations on flights. But if the option _is there_ and folks are expected to now join video calls from the sky, etiquette and sense might take a back seat.
It would be nice if Starlink could honour their existing obligations as a priority first. I have reserved Starlink here in Canada nearly two years ago and received an email advising it's now been pushed to summer 2023. That's three years of waiting. I was also emailed last year advising the monthly cost has increased and so has the dish itself. Shouldn't providing down payment legally guarantee to buy a service at original said price? I'm already frustrated and not even a customer yet....
It's a refundable deposit, not a down payment. There is no obligation on either side. There is too much demand and the service is oversubscribed in populated areas. Planes spend a lot of time in areas that aren't populated, so it makes perfect sense that they can offer service to planes before people in oversubscribed regions.
They are working as hard as they possibly can to get Starship working, which will enable Starlink V2, to dramatically increase capacity and get you service. And the revenue from serving planes is going to help them get there without going bankrupt first.
Yet again, we hit the "that depends entirely on where you live". On Vancouver Island, planes spend most of their time nowhere near populated areas, but between populated areas. Not that you'd need internet on those flights, but let's also not pretend there's only one type of plane flying one type of route with one type of customer in one type of setting (or even only one of those restrictions).
You've done route planning for internet service, or route planning for US/Canada domestic in-flight internet service? Because there's a lot of nothing in between successive towns in rural Canada and the US.
I've done route planning for satellite internet for domestic flights. airplanes tend to take the exact same paths over heavily concentrated areas, and the hubs have a tremendous amount of demand around them. you can verify this by paying for flightaware data and looking at historical data by airline. even without ground traffic consider 3 planes in the same beam need to serve ~500 people.
airlines bank on you not using it or charging a lot to keep the numbers down. JetBlue does it for free by subsidizing through the ticket price since people pay a premium for the name.
same thing applies since they share the same airports. they'll give these planes higher priority because of the cost, but it's not enough to make an entire business from. they need the residential service to be profitable.
> > Planes spend a lot of time in areas that aren't populated
> no, planes spend most of their time in populated areas
These statements are not mutually exclusive. Even if planes aren't spending an absolute majority of their time in unpopulated areas, it's still a lot of time compared to the 0% that a fixed terminal in a suburb would spend. Starlink needs paying customers in those unpopulated areas, even if they are only there some of the time. And the customers need Starlink too, even more than rural customers, many of whom could in theory be served by fixed wireless or something; that's not a possibility for planes over the poles or what have you.
> no, planes spend most of their time in populated areas. specifically near major airports, and the WiFi needs to work on the ground as well.
Except most of a passenger's time in an aircraft isn't spent sitting on the ground (if it is, something's gone wrong) and they can use cell phones and wifi hotspots in such locations anyway.
Further, major airports aren't _populated_. People don't live there and airports are large enough they fill up a significant fraction of a starlink cell.
I'm not going to argue about this. go look up flight aware data. when a given airline has a dozen or so planes in the same beam because of a hub, it creates massive congestion. people use the internet whether they're on the ground or not. it certainly uses up a giant portion of a starlink cell if they were ever to land an airline.
the wifi does not need to work on the ground. if an airline says they have onboard wifi and you’re using base station data on the ground 95% of people won’t have a problem
You bought the FSD feature as well? Still haven't been invited to beta but my bigger problem is the backup camera doesn't work due to a frayed cable and the cable has been back ordered for 11 months now. Musk never prioritizes his current customers. Need those cables for new cars.
> the backup camera doesn't work due to a frayed cable and the cable has been back ordered for 11 months now.
I would have assumed that this issue would be quickly addressed by aftermarket suppliers just like it would with any other car manufacturer. Are Tesla like Apple? (i.e abuse laws and technology to lock customers in)
I haven't tried. It's a recall and don't really want to pay for their defect. It will be interesting to see if I can get my tabs next year because california requires recalls to be fixed in a certain amount of time.
I’m not making excuses for Tesla’s many misgivings, but they did honor the pre-order price for my model Y, even though new orders were more than 10% higher.
They also own 2/3 of the US EV market (with all remaining automakers combined making the remaining third), but people love to shit on them all the time. Tesla is driving the EV revolution while the rest of the auto industry drags its feet.
I owned one for like 8-9 years. I love to shit on the cars because they were awful to own. I eventually sold it when Tesla just stopped responding to safety recall notices or repairs, to say nothing of the "weird, the thing is stuck on a reboot loop" or "FSD IS HERE!" (FSD not available)
What models are you referring to? Having driven a loaded Taycan, which I think is probably most often cited as being superior, I’d take even a basic Tesla over it any day. AFAICT, none of the competitors have the full system UX dialed in like Tesla.
BMW ix, Ford Mach e, Ford lightning, Mercedes EQS, Hyundai Kona, VW id4, Rivian r1t. Both established brands and new players are coming after the market hard. It's not hard to imagine that Tesla will have serious competition basically now.
Many make decent cars, even good cars (Hyundai) but they don't make better EVs than Tesla. Hyundai might be there in terms of value IFF the non-Tesla charging network wasn't so abysmal. I drove multiple manufacturers and currently own a Tesla and a Hyundai EV.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. Besides, you definitely can't claim it's "objectively" better unless you're really cherry picking the stats/features you're comparing.
Just on features alone. What can I get on a Tesla that I cannot get somewhere else? Anything? What can I get on a non-Tesla that I cannot get on a Tesla? Rain sensing wipers. CarPlay. HUD. Dashboard screen (in front of the driver). Physical buttons for things that matter. 360 camera. Blindspot and cross traffic warning. Can a Model 3 hit 350kW DC charging yet?
What if I want a pickup? I can buy a Rivian. I can buy a Ford. I will be able to buy a Chevy before the Cybertruck is available. What if I want an SUV but don't want to pay Model X prices?
Tesla is sitting back on their early success, riding a wave of popularity. Good for them. But real competition arrived in the last couple years, and it looks really good. I enjoyed my Model 3 and when I bought it there was no competition, but I'm in the market again and I cannot find a compelling reason to choose a Tesla again. Even if there were feature parity, Tesla's consumer-hostile behavior has me worried about committing to another relationship with them.
In general I found the experience of buying a Tesla extremely pleasant, and the first couple years of ownership quite nice. The longer I owned the car, the worse it got.
Absolutely. I mean, your post is glib to the point of reductiveness, but Musk has habitually lied about Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, the Hyperloop, Neural Link and just about every venture he's been in.
It's not hard to find a half dozen lies about each of those companies, to say nothing of his social media presence.
I'd happily float an innovator an occasional overreach. But it's dozens and dozens of times now and people still buy it.
> Shouldn't providing down payment legally guarantee to buy a service at original said price?
Why would it? What does your contract say? It sounds like you just gave a company your money and got nothing legally binding in exchange. Don't do that.
Preorders and reservations of unreleased products are for people who like to get screwed, or for people with so much money they don't care if they get screwed. I know people who preorder AAA games, the game turns out to be crap and they complain about it. "Ugh, I can't believe I preordered this crap." Then a year later they're doing it again...
"Doctor, it hurts when I poke my eye!" Uh, then stop doing that.
Preorders seem entirely reasonable to me for things that are likely to be in short supply after launch. I recently pre-ordered an iPhone and was happy to receive one promptly after they started shipping. Games seem to be a fairly meaningless thing to pre-order in a world of digital downloads - but I could see the reason behind pre-ordering some limited edition release, for example.
Obviously you need to be careful, know what your options are to cancel, and make sure you trust the company - especially if they require a deposit. But for me getting something a couple of weeks or months earlier than I would otherwise be able to is a benefit that I am often willing to assume some amount of risk for.
Seems like offering a $25,000/mo aviation service (which could be at almost any latitude) might be pretty risky, in that case. For $25,000/mo, customers are going to expect connectivity.
$25,000/mo for 350 Mbps and no download limits is extremely cheap compared to Viasat. In the short term Airlines could probably save money setting this up alongside existing services. Though Viasat isn’t going to be able to survive this kind of competition for long.
According to this Viasat brochure [1], their top global (not regional) plan is $14k/mo with speeds ranging 20-40Mbps, or approx. $466 per 1Mbps. Comparatively, $25k/mo for 350Mbps would average $71 per 1Mbps, or ~6x cheaper for the speed.
We'll see how the actual speed (and reliability) shake out in practice, though.
Inmarsat will launch two satellites in HEO next year to provide coverage for the arctic. Should improve coverage in higher latitudes for the merged company.
It seems inevitable Starlink will prioritize profitable commercial ventures first. Industry is going to find more data intensive applications and squeeze out residential use.
The way Starlink works SpaceX has no means to prioritize airplanes over residential.
If you wait for service in residential area it's because it's oversubscribed and SpaceX has to put more satellites in orbit or build more ground station.
Those satellites are the same that support airplanes so they benefit all use cases.
The issue is coverage i.e. bandwidth per area. The way Starlink works is that bandwidth (satellites) is more or less uniformly distributed over area. They can't just add one satellite over a city in Canada to provide more service there. To double available bandwidth in Canada they have to double the number of Satellites.
Airplanes (and boats) don't compete for bandwidth with residential because most of the time they are over areas without other Starlink users.
The antennas are not the same so it's not like an airplane antenna fights with residential antenna.
If anything, making more money boats and airplanes helps SpaceX build satellites and antennas faster so this service is a win for residential as well.
They already prioritize business service over residential service and residential service over RV/residential+roaming service. This just adds another priority above business service.
They have no existing obligations, and a business model that doesn't seem to work for consumer-level products. They are in the process of trying to upscale quickly: they entered the defense market (Starlinks in Ukraine), they started providing service for luxury yachts, and now aircraft. It's clear what is happening here: they have been told that they can't get subsidies for consumer broadband, so they are pivoting.
I understand the frustration, but I don't think that ignoring aviation would help Starlink serve you faster. I know, anytime a company launches something new while you're waiting for something else, it feels like they're prioritizing that over you. That's often not really how things work. Going with aviation could give them cash flow to be able to move faster while not really using up capacity in your area.
Personally, I think that Starlink should pursue deprioritization of heavy users. Note, that's not a bandwidth cap or limit. If there's excess network capacity, there's no reason to prevent a user from using it. However, when there's congestion, I think it makes sense to give priority to lower-usage users. I think it would be reasonable to do this in stages. The average US household uses about 350GB/mo (according to data made available by T-Mobile US and Comcast/Xfinity).
Given that Starlink has capacity constraints and given that they are serving as a bit of an internet lifeline to people without other options, it seems reasonable that they could have staged deprioritization maybe like this: first 250GB/mo is full-speed; next 250GB at 80% speed when there is congestion such that their usage would be reducing speeds for others; next 500GB at 60% speed when congested; next 1TB at 40% speed; next 2TB at 20% speed...
I know, many people's reaction would be that they shouldn't slow you down, they're advertising unlimited service, etc. At the same time, it's a shared link and a user using 10TB of data means that Starlink can't provide service to around 30 people. Do you prioritize one person using a lot over the needs of dozens? And this is only at times of congestion and realistically 40Mbps or even 20Mbps is still quite usable - especially when the alternative is 3Mbps DSL. 20Mbps will even allow 4K streaming and many full-HD streams.
To make it even better, one could only count data usage during congested times, but that's a lot harder to reason about because we don't always know congested times in advance and while I have data on average monthly usage, I don't have information on usage during congested times. The different thresholds would need to be adjusted accordingly.
Still, given a shared link with demand way exceeding capacity, I think it makes sense to offer the service to more users with the knowledge that there will be some traffic shaping around usage. I worked in IT at a university and one of the big things was that the top 50 users on the network usually consumed more than half of the available bandwidth. The university liked supporting students, but thought it reasonable to give their traffic lower priority than the thousands of other users on the network. The techie students liked it because they could do what they wanted without impacting other users.
Starlink is more capacity constrained, but I think almost no one would notice being deprioritized to 80% during congestion. I think most usage wouldn't notice further deprioritization.
I think net neutrality is very important, but I do think with a shared link like Starlink there can be some opt-in traffic shaping that can work in concert with deprioritization. For example, let's say you want do download CoD Modern Warfare at over 200GB. Should that be given equal priority to someone trying to video chat with their family? Well, that might depend on your personal views - maybe you're really looking forward to the game. However, I do think that Starlink could build in an opt-in feature that would move bulk data transfers (like game downloads) from congested times to non-congested times. Even during peak times, there are lulls in congestion and I think many people would say, "yes, please save network bandwidth for 'important' or real-time needs compared to my non-time-sensitive transfer and in exchange that transfer doesn't count toward deprioritization limits." But you might also decide that you want CoD Modern Warfare as fast as possible - and that would be your choice. I'd also point out that there are lots of transfers that aren't "fun" like a new game. For example, you need to download OS updates for your smartphone or laptop, but you generally aren't champing at the bit to update and restart immediately - we've all played the "not today" game with updates. There's no reason for those downloads to happen during congestion while that Netflix show you're watching has packets that need to be delivered.
I think Starlink has been trying to offer an unlimited connection without caveats like deprioritization and I think it's putting them in a tough spot. I'm guessing many of their users got Starlink and had minimal usage the first few months. They weren't the types to spend a lot of time online because their connectivity was terrible - but as they became accustomed to Starlink's level of service, that changed. If Starlink was averaging 50-100GB per user, that might have gone up to 300GB per user or even more as people cancel things like satellite TV for streaming services and get accustomed to having a good internet connection. People without good internet wouldn't be in the habit of using it, but that would certainly change over the months and years.
> Shouldn't providing down payment legally guarantee to buy a service at original said price?
I can't comment on legally. Morally? Maybe the dish itself and maybe the service for a limited time like 1 year, but internet service prices usually only offer a 1 or 2 year price guarantee (yes, there are exceptions, but this is shouldn't be about holding Starlink to a higher standard than the industry in general).
Yes, it's frustrating that the price has gone up for both the service and the dish itself, but it can be hard to price new services. You don't quite know how much data people are going to use, you don't totally know how the network will perform, etc. As I noted, it seems likely that they're getting greater than expected usage as users get accustomed to using it more and more. Fuel prices, supply chain disruption, and general inflation don't help Starlink continue offering service or the dish at the original price.
Again, I really understand the frustration. However, I think Starlink's premium products (aviation, maritime) will only help the company serve home users better.
> With latency as low as 20 ms, passengers can engage in activities previously not functional in flight, including video calls,
I knew this was coming, but I am still not ready for it. Can you imagine being on a 5+ hour flight next to someone on a call the entire time? You know there will be people who will take their entire work day from the plane.
Is this extortion? I thought StarLink is a business, not a charity. As I understand it, Musk is asking for someone to pay for the Ukraine service… although I admit I may not know the whole story.
The US government is paying for services, so is the Ukrainian. As is USAID.
Ukraine wants a $500/month service. Musk/Starlink wants them to be on the $4,500/month service and is complaining that they're "losing money" because they're not.
Oh, and they want to continue being paid for services for terminals that have been destroyed (because, y'know, war).
Starlink Premium service is $500/month but SpaceX is asking $4,500/month in Ukraine. There may be some justification for this but it looks like a bait-and-switch.
And the service of the post you're responding to is $15,000-$24,000/month.
Given that the service operating in areas where there are no or limited groundstations available, this is actually more equivalent to the maritime service, which runs at $5,000/month.
Starlink Premium is still for fixed service, not mobile. Even Starlink RV is not for use while in motion. Starlink's mobile offerings are Starlink Maritime for $5k/mo and Starlink Aviation for $12-25k/mo. $4500/mo seems totally justifiable given the military use. By the normal standards of military contracting, it's a veritable bargain. SpaceX is continuously defending against Russian hackers now that Ukraine is relying on them so heavily, and also developing methods to resist jamming. Probably a significant fraction of all people working on Starlink are dealing with this stuff in one way or another.
Only if you consider the weapons Western governments purchased to either supply to Ukraine or to replace stocks donated to Ukraine to also be extortion on behalf of the MIC.
It's reasonable for SpaceX to want to be paid for providing an essential service for a conflict that seems likely to be a lot more prolonged than initially expected. All this "extortion" thing has done is ensure that the next time someone asks for emergency aid from SpaceX or Tesla, they'll be a lot more conservative in their aid lest they get burned again. No good deed goes unpunished after all.
Telecoms sans frontiers is operating within Ukraine and neighboring countries providing Internet access and telephone services to civilians. SpaceX shouldn’t have been allowed to insert themselves in the conflict. They should use existing structures if they want to provide humanitarian telecom and if they wanted to provide their offerings to the military they should go through normal channels. Just throwing their offering into the conflict with unclear strings attached inevitably led to drama.
Operating like a normal company might give less PR, but probably wouldn’t have ended with Elon parroting Russian talking points …
> SpaceX shouldn’t have been allowed to insert themselves in the conflict.
Except Starlink has become critical for the military in Ukraine. It's used extensively to live stream drone footage from the frontlines to command locations over things like google hangouts. There's videos of this which is why we know. It also works without any infrastructure when it's all been destroyed has has been critical in getting cell service up and running quickly in destroyed areas.
I’m sorry if I was unclear. I do not mean spaceX should stay away, but that they should operate through normal routes. It might take a bit longer, but should make this ongoing drama less likely to happen.
Also time is of the essence during war. Viasat which had been the primary satellite communication method of the Ukrainian military was completely knocked out with many viasat terminals across Europe irreparably destroyed by Russian cyberattack when the war broke out.
This will solve the "spotify didn't actually download my offline playlist" problem, but unfortunately there is rarely room to use a laptop on the plane unless you're flying business.
It certainly does. However, if you're even moderately tall, it's impossible to use the trackpad without elbowing the person next to you in the ribs, since the front of the laptop is basically touching your stomach once you open the laptop at enough of an angle to be able to see its display. (This is on a 13" MBA.)
If all you're doing is watching video then it's fine. But trying to get real work done is incredibly awkward. The only way I'm able to do anything is to use a separate Bluetooth keyboard I hold underneath the tray over my knees. But that means exclusively writing or other things I can do solely with the keyboard, without a mouse/trackpad.
Also, forget it if the person in front of you reclines. It's game over.
My experience with largely with 14" laptops. I am moderately tall, IMO.
I will admit to using a Thinkpad.
For other laptops I've had, I use my thumbs + tap-to-click. Also a healthy dose of KB. I am buried in the console, so I will admit that a more graphically driven user may not appreciate thumbing the touchpad and navigating by KB.
Sometimes, the options for edge-inertial-scrolling, tap then hold to drag (i.e. click dragging with a mouse), etc seem to mostly be limited to synaptics touchpads and sometimes features disappear with OS or driver updates. Really annoying, when those features are what make marginal touchpad usage shine, IMO.
I can only speak for United Economy and a 13" MacBook Pro, but while it will "fit" on the tray, the screen must be completely vertical for there to be enough room, and if the person in front of you reclines their seat even slightly, it becomes unusable.
I think we're well past the point of debating whether WiFi on planes is useful for people. Just because some folks don't feel like they have room to use a laptop hardly means the airline industry doesn't pull millions in revenue selling abysmal connections for $15-20 a pop. Some of us just want to watch YouTube on our phones or scroll Instagram or message friends on Telegram. If this is a competitive price for airlines and the service is good, you can bet it will sell.
Listen, if I'm paying you a 1 time fee of $150K you better be contractually obligated to provide my expensive ass internet each and every month I want it.
Not sure who this is aimed at, the existing inflight wifi solutions powered by two satellites (viasat) are sufficient for tasks that don't require low latency.
Compare to what’s currently available to jet charter. StarLink’s product is currently priced (monthly) around an hour or two of flight time, depending on airframe class.
> Wi-Fi is currently available in the Phenom 300, Citation Latitude, Challenger 350 and Global 6000.
> The first three models have a satellite-based connectivity with a shared bandwidth going up to max speeds of up to 0.43Mb per second (depending on the aircraft type) while the Global 6000 is equipped with a new satellite solution called Ka-Band. Ka-Band allows for internet speeds that are ten times faster than the previous solution, going up to 4Mbp/s. It allows good internet browsing, including streaming or file download, and provides better coverage than SwiftBroadBand, specifically over Greenland. This is a very positive development as this area is mainly flown over during international flights on long range cabins. Due to the size and weight of the equipment, this solution is only available on large cabin aircraft like the G6000.
> I'm sure Starlink will be better in some way, but it's almost double...
The most important difference is that Viasat uses a couple of GEO satellites where Starlink uses a massive swarm of LEO satellites.
Viasat's satellites are flying just short of 35,800 kilometers over the equator, which means that your absolute best case scenario user standing right next to a gateway, both directly under the satellite, bare minimum latency connecting to an internet server is almost a full 500 milliseconds. Users not close to the equator can add a fair bit more.
Starlink's satellites are flying around 550 kilometers over basically everywhere with 53 degrees of the equator, so anyone who has a gateway close enough to not need to use the inter-satellite link can get 20-40 millisecond latency to the internet in real world usage.
They only recently enabled end user access to inter-satellite links so I haven't seen any real world tests on that but it could be a lot worse than single-hop while still beating GEO.
As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities. It can suck a bit for voice and video calls (but not as bad as you might think). Online fast paced gaming is of course out of the question.
> As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities.
As someone who recently spent a week at a vacation house that had HughesNet, you have no idea how wrong this is.
Every single individual request your browser makes has an extra half second attached to it even starting. Every TLS handshake takes a full second and a half, multiplied by every different host you're connecting to while loading content. Every packet lost (and there will be a few) has an extra half second to be resent. Downloading files over satellite internet isn't the worst thing in the world, but browsing the web over it is not an enjoyable experience. It feels like back when I was still on dialup while most of the internet had started to assume broadband.
The main reason QUIC exists as a protocol, aside from working around decades worth of horrible middleboxes that prevent new protocols from working on top of IP directly, is to reduce the number of back-and-forths required to establish secure communication which most significantly benefits high latency and mildly lossy connections like satellite and older cellular networks.
I've done paid work on an airplane WiFi connection through Viasat and really did not find the latency to be an issue at all, including working in the terminal.
No doubt everyone has different experiences and tolerance levels for latency, but, really, I think the latency issue is vastly overblown.
There is something beautiful in humanity's advancement to the point that we're debating the feasibility of playing multi-person video games over satellite internet while hurtling through the air at 500mph in a pressurized tube.
I got maybe half a megabit on my last cross-USA flight. Latency isn't the only problem for a plane full of a couple hundred people; 350 megabit would go a long way here.
Being able to do real remote work, including real time video calls, while on a plane is actually game changing. I'm sure this will eventually become standard on most airlines, especially for Business Class.
I can't wait to fly business class on a Friday morning out of SFO and be surrounded by a dozen corporate salarymen simultaneously addressing their standups via their AirPods.
Normal airlines are promptly going to need some no-phone-calls rules. (TBH I think they already have them.)
Joking aside, the OpEx of a private jet is huge, and if you can use it 2x as often because you can take your Friday meetings while traveling somewhere for the weekend, this easily pays for itself in the saving on cost-per-trip.
I have about a thirty percent success rate with in-flight WiFi. I'm not sure what you're using, but just being able to transfer more than a few megabytes uninterrupted (let alone quickly) would be a world of difference.
a flying geostationary VSAT terminal in some set of geographically restricted ku and ka-band spot beams for regional broadband connectivity are a very different thing than true global coverage.
this is trying to compete with the very high $ per MB and slow speed products that already exist from iridium and inmarsat.
"High-speed, low-latency, in-flight internet with connectivity across the globe. $12,500/mo-$25,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $150,000. Reserve now with deliveries starting in 2023."
"Available in 2023". We'll see. I mean FSD has been "coming this year" since 2016. And I regularly see people here complaining that they're still waitlisted for their terrestrial Starlink service.
Who knows what ViaSat will have by whenever Starlink actually makes this happen (you know, with the mobile RV service that's "coming soon", and the maritime service, also "coming soon", and now this...).
Yeah, but latency will be suboptimal as viasat's satellites are in geosynchronous orbit. Many laws a optional, but I'm afraid they can't get around the speed of light...
this is a common thing SpaceX people say, but in reality, it doesn't matter that much. streaming media isn't affected by latency at all, and web browsing/app usage is good enough. what really suffers is real time games or VPN, but that's not as common.
250ms minimum latency (just for the speed of light), once you add switching that's going to be over 400ms. You have to be pretty apologetic to accept this.
I live in Australia (118ms round trip), and whenever I'm in SF, I'm amazed at the quality of life increase brought about by decreased latency. It feels like the whole net is on localhost.
Starlink promises 350 Mb/s, not MB/s, although given their current promises vs actual speeds, I think customers may adjust their expectations a bit.
Not sure where you pulled 30 Mb/s for Viasat service but it regularly tests more than 2x as fast as that (on the current-gen satellites, the newest of which is 5 years-old by now. Viasat-3 Americas has actually over 5x the capacity of Viasat-2 along with a big bag of other goodies that will enable a class of service heretofore unseen.)
Viasat latency is also typical for geostationary service, which is to say bad to the point of being limiting. For things like videoconferencing, Starlink will be much more viable, even at the same bandwidth.
I regularly videoconference with team members who are on geostationary Viasat..., it's just not an issue. They say they had to learn how to adapt a little bit by giving people time to finish their thoughts, that's about it.
Plus I'm not certain if the batteries you'd need to run it are small enough to count as carry-on. I wonder if they include some suction cups to keep the transciever flat against the window.
but how else can billionaires watch life porn shows in their private jets when they are flying the 10th time a week between continents?
Okay maybe that was too snarky.
It's for more low latency solution's and/or more bandwidth. It also competes with existing solutions because why shouldn't they compete in a field where they can compete and make money.
Also notable that SpaceX keeps finding these cool (revenue generating) use cases to further cheapen the cost of sending things up to space. Pretty much dogfooding their rockets via Starlink satellites.
Edited with correction that most inflight wifi is actually air to space now.