I cant wait for starlink to be available. I’m so sick of having little to no internet access while at sea and having to deal with expensive and slow wifi while in port. I know its going to take a while still because they aren’t able to us inter-satellite lazer linking until V2.0. I’m trying to be patient but its difficult.
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Never heard of it.
Can’t wait. Looks pretty affordable too for being so new once it launches.
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Check it out here. Its a low altitude satellite constellation being launched by spacex to provide worldwide low latency internet. They’re getting ready to do the first round of beta testing for ground sites in the northern US and southern Canada.
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Starlink is not designed to work at sea or for maritime customers, your vessel would have to be within 970 miles of a base station, at a 35 degree incline to the low level satellite which is 340 mils high. Iridium had this issue and solved it, however starlink has not yet solved this issue, unless they put base station out at sea or their own vessels, which is highly unlikely.
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I’m not too optimistic about service at sea: From the site:
“Starlink is targeting service in the Northern U.S. and Canada in 2020, rapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021”.
Key term being “populated”.
Just like satellite television, they may be focusing the beam to where the money is. Let’s hope otherwise.
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Their market is all land based. Another issue to consider is how maritime satellite communications services today involve much more than airtime. Supplementary services offered by maritime satcom providers include separate accounts for crew members, e-mail, cyber security services, technical support and software.
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The version 1.0 they’re currently launching will only work satellite to ground but the next version will have links between satellites allowing worldwide transmission. They’re even talking about using 1st gen satellites and bouncing the signal from ground to space a couple times with customer antennas to extend range until v2.0 is ready. That obviously wouldn’t work unless there’s a ship to relay but could work intermittently.
The starlink constellation is entirely different from any satellite TV or other geosynchronous satellite constellation. The satellites orbit at a very low altitude so they will be spending lots of time over the oceans. I don’t see why a company as forward thinking as spacex wouldn’t try and capitalize on such an opportunity for extra customers. All the current options for satellite internet are slow and expensive so it seems like a no brainer.
Isn’t that part of the business model…?
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I would to invest JUST in this.