But it’s a hell of a thing:
The new compact DC-powered Starlink Mini is about the size of a thick laptop and integrates the Wi-Fi router right inside the dish. And despite using less power than other Starlink terminals, it can still deliver speeds over 100Mbps.
The Mini dish measures 11.75 x 10.2 x 1.45 inches (298.5 x 259 x 38.5mm) and weighs just 2.43 pounds (1.1kg), or 3.37 pounds (1.53kg) with the 49.2 foot (15m) DC power cable and kickstand.
In the US, Starlink Mini is an add-on to Residential plans — at least for now. The Mini kit costs $599 which is $100 more than the standard dish, and will cost an extra $30 per month to add the Mini Roam service to existing $120 Residential plans. That gives Starlink Mini users up to 50GB of mobile data each month,
In my adult lifetime we’ve gone from dial up 56kb to satellite broadband for the same cost (and that’s before we take the declining value of the $ into account).
That’s pretty damn hot.
Oh, also, Starlink was banned from providing rural broadband in the $40 billion subsidy program because Elon’s a Bad Guy, M’Kay?
Wonderful reduction in price.
I do wish the integrated router thing weren’t so prevalent though. Yes I know it’s great for most people, but it’s a pain for somebody technical.
56Kbps? You were lucky. I used to work German texts dites at 300 baud.
Sites, not dites. I still have fat fingers.
There’s also AST Spacemobile which is in development and allows you to connect with a 5G phone. There’s only one satellite so far, but that does work briefly as it goes over. There’s more launches planned for later in the year.
I get the feeling that’s going to be more of a premium service, aimed at professional use (e.g. emergency services) initially.
“Oh, also, Starlink was banned from providing rural broadband in the $40 billion subsidy program because Elon’s a Bad Guy, M’Kay?”
It wasn’t banned from providing rural broadband anywhere but instead it’s not eligible for subsidies which makes perfect sense if you apply the public choice lens to the problem. The objective of the subsidy program is
– NOT to solve a real connectivity problem or to use public money wisely
– but instead to buy votes by being able to claim that the politicians built something and at the same time created lots of jobs
It was a revelation when I got a newfangled blazingly fast 2400 modem!
Western Bloke:
“I get the feeling that’s going to be more of a premium service, aimed at professional use (e.g. emergency services) initially.”
All satellite services are for special use cases (as laid out in the article) – there is just not enough capacity for replacing normal mobile everywhere.
Just checked the Spain price €49/mo unlimited data. I’m giving that serious consideration.
Should have added why. There is only one cable connection coming into this town. (I’m told) Shared by all three main IP networks & then parcelled out to the subsidiary resellers. All of which advertise (&charge for) blinding speeds but actually deliver much lower. Sometimes internet drops out altogether for hours at a time although generally one loses it for a few minutes. Or we’re down to dial-up speeds. There isn’t the capacity to cope to cope with the tourist season when our population can double or heavy use periods like when the kids get out of school.
Public sector vs Private sector.
The Space Shuttle was built to service the International Space Station.
The International Space Station was created to provide somewhere for the Shuttle to go (since it couldn’t do anything but low Earth orbit, and was a stupid way to launch satellites).
The Falcon9 (reusable) rocket was developed to cheaply launch Starlink satellites by the hundred.
The Starlink satellites provided a huge manifest of launch demand, with a customer that wasn’t too distressed if the experimental launch rocket had an issue.
Yes, I know he says he wants to die on Mars (though not on impact, etc) but that doesn’t build a business case. The only way he’s been able to book vast numbers of payloads to fund the rocket business is by being his own customer in the satellite broadband business.
They went after the railroads and the oil barons for this sort of vertical integration, so no need for Al Capone’s taxes, the antitrust laws should be able to wreck his businesses without even having to buy the judge. I’m glad SpaceX is a key supplier to the military: Musk is gonna need some powerful allies.
Competence is rewarded, but not with prizes.
Tim, when you were 18 years old 1200/2400 baud modems were state of the art. 56kb didn’t turn up until the late 90s.
I used v little of the internet until I was in Russia – 1990 or so. And then that was through the office network.
bis, this is an advantage of Germany, where we still have and use copper phone networks almost everywhere. With a VDSL connection over what used to be an ISDN line, you are completely unaffected by your neighbours usage. And increasingly the DSLAMs are stuck in boxes on the pavement rather than distant exchanges, reducing the cable length substantially, so advertised speeds are available, or nearly so.
The only time we had a problem, beyond the usual occasional dropped connection, was when someone negligently interfaced a JCB with an important cable, cutting off half of BiG City from the outside world for a day. Everyone who could switched to using the cellular network that then jammed that up.
In 1982 we were using 300 baud modems, and we had to order, and wait 6 weeks, for the Post Office to turn up and wire in sockets for them. No plug&socket phones then, handsets were wired into the wall!
The excitement when we were allowed 1200/75 baud! A whole 75 bits per second upstream 🙂
I later wrote the software for a roomful of 1200/1200 baud modems in the far east, Prestel-standard rocket science at the time. Sigh. Mind you, no spam, adverts or viruses then either.
This is fun. I now have to calculate the angle from the orbital height & inclination to my terrace to know whether the dish can see past neighbouring buildings. Problem being this building’s quite low compared with the surrounding ones.
Just been looking at the Starlink page on Wiki. The amount there about the problem of “light pollution” to astronomy. Let’s be honest. Astronomy is no more than a glorified hobby, albeit professionally paid for by taxation. A source of revenue for university professors.
I do follow with some interest the search for life on extra-solar planets. But quite honestly it’s a waste of time & money. The only planets they can detect with the current state-of-the art is hot Jupiters in close orbits around stars the size of our own, or smaller planets orbiting red dwarfs with orbital periods in days. That are going to be tidally locked. What they can’t do is detect an earth sized planet in an earth type orbit. Which is where one might expect to find life. Same applies to many other fields. What they should do is just it a rest until they can decent sized telescopes either orbital or maybe better, on the moon. It’s just an appalling waste of time & money. Where communications satellites produce real benefits for us, now.
@BiS,
Doesn’t it more or less demonstrate that Von Daniken is a pratt, and so are UFOlogists? Pity, though, as I like SciFi
“The only time we had a problem, beyond the usual occasional dropped connection, was when someone negligently interfaced a JCB with an important cable, cutting off half of BiG City from the outside world for a day.”
Backhoe Joe strikes again!
It’s obviously a lot easier to deliver FTTH sewer le continong, where many people live in sizeable blocks of flats rather than the individual dwellings preferred by Brits. But I do wonder how much bandwidth you actually get when all your neighbours are streaming.
@Witchie
Not really. The limits of observation are confined to what can be observed. So you’re biasing your view of the universe to what you can see of it. So the whole field of study is totally meaningless.
BiG
” With a VDSL connection over what used to be an ISDN line, you are completely unaffected by your neighbours usage. And increasingly the DSLAMs are stuck in boxes on the pavement rather than distant exchanges, reducing the cable length substantially, so advertised speeds are available, or nearly so.”
This statement is almost entirely incorrect – there is nothing technologically superior about using VDSL over FTTH
1) VDSL lines still share the same backhaul and core network exactly the same way as FTTH does. And this is what BiS complained about “cable connection coming into this town”. It’s also what was cut off in your outage case…
2) Copper is also much more prone to deterioration than what FTTH is and have more things that can go wrong (blatantly due to being older)
3) ISDN doesn’t have anything to do with VDSL beyond being two technologies that you can use over copper
Chris Miller:
in the access network the amount of minimum bandwidth is very easy to calculate. Typical GPON networks provide 2.5Gbit/s (being upgraded to 10 or so) which is shared between up to 64 users. So the minimum bandwidth is 40Mbit/s or so per user. HD content is about 5Mbit/s so no problem in the access network. The backhaul / core is different and is typically dimensioned for much much less capacity (which still works most of the time due to statistics)
Pretty sure that the available capacity of FTTH is vastly higher than VDSL. The only question is whether sharing it with your neighbours ever gets near maximum capacity.
I paid £500 for a 12v 4G router, 4/5G external antenna system and installation and am currently paying £25/month for 100GB with roaming in the old west European countries.
I’ll have to keep an eye on his offering, although I do like being able to use the router on the move when we’re in really remote areas.
Starlink seems very expensive to me. I live in a rural location but have had fiber for several years and a few other providers have now run their own network. I can see people in very remote locations needing Starlink but the 3 to 1 price difference must mean there is margin to spare for fiber providers to eat deeper and deeper into the wilds. Starlink would be doomed to become a very niche ISP were it not to be for its value to the US military.
Depends where you live Andy. My “high speed” broadband sets me back €45/m. And in a “high rise” country like this it’s common to find yourself in a patch with no 4G/5G reception & having data services run in either impossible or prohibitively expensive.
Even the UK rural’s not immune on the mobile front
He was banned because they were actually afraid he’d accomplish it.
Someone actually said that people would be better off ‘owning’ the infrastructure rather than being at the mercy of Musk.
But –
1. There is no infrastructure, it’s not being built.
2. They won’t own it anyway – it’s ‘public’ which means only a politically powerful minority will have control.
Andy – Yarp
Starlink is a great technical achievement and I hope it’s a commercial success, but most of us are better off with fibre broadband. Especially if you live in a built up area, where landlines will always outperform LEO sats. And in Britain, most rural areas have decent broadband anyway.
An udder thing that occurs to me is the telcos only have to build their network once, then they can sell connectivity to it for decades. But Starlink seems like it’ll require a regular schedule of expensive space launches to maintain network performance, because their satellites have an expected lifespan of 5 years.
Also 5G broadband is going to shake up the market, I reckon. Seems like the terrestrial internet service providers have a huge inbuilt cost advantage over Elon Musk.
And since internet access is a commodity product…
OT, so I guess that’s it for Reform as a political force then. Nige as well. What’s left of the UK can look forward to another century of alternate Torylabour and Labourtory governments, WEFfing their way to green Zil lanes, WHO lockdowns for 11.5 months every winter, and the Friday call to prayer being ululated from village minarets as Brits choke down their cold bugprotein rations while the clock strikes 13. I wonder how much that self-immolation cost.
Steve, on the other hand, has a new idiot to admire. Someone clearly also as much for sale to the highest bidder as the rest of them.
We had racks ‘n’ racks of modems at my place in HK, so many lines I seem to remember HK Telecom put an exchange in the building. On top of that we had customers who wanted a direct connection direct to our servers.
I still regret not taking any photos when I worked there. 🙁
I read your “So, That’s the End of Bitcoin Then” from 2011 earlier today when you said Bitcoin wasn’t a store of value. I enjoyed the laugh.
BiG – Steve, on the other hand, has a new idiot to admire. Someone clearly also as much for sale to the highest bidder as the rest of them
Wossat then?
Bitcoin – when you said Bitcoin wasn’t a store of value
Is it?
Too early to tell, no? Most of us have children older than Bitcoin.
BiS: The Starlink sats are all over the sky rather than in a specific direction like geostationary ones. So you do need to see a bit more than a silver of sky but the direction isn’t particularly critical. Something I read recently was some measurements on the behaviour of Starlink links. It appears that the antenna switches to a new satellite every 15 seconds or so!
One can tell Bitcoin’s not yet a store of value by the price curve. It’s continually showing more buyers than sellers, hence the price rise. If it was being widely used in commerce you’d expect it to trading around a plateau. Which is what most commercial currencies do. And that shows that most holders (although stupid cvnts would be a better word) are treating as an “investment”. Sitting on it. It’s a long term Dutch Tulip. If there’s any wide move to liquidate the “investment” it’ll drop like a stone. And there’s nothing to catch it before zero.
It isn’t a currency. It isn’t readily, widely & confidently exchangeable for goods or services. Hardly any of the Bitcoins created are being used for that. And it’s being exchangeable for goods & services gives a currency its value. Not the exchange rate with other currencies. It has no independent value. It’s holding itself up by its own bootlaces.
Shame really. It’s a good idea. But idiot “investors” have ferked it.
To add: One often thinks there is no limit to the numbers of the stupid. One being born every minute. But you run out of them eventually.
For the sake of those reading the comments, can they assume I know what the hell they are talking about?
Also, does this mean I can get rid of my Sinclair ZX Spectrum?
It occurred. The heading to the post is ““Change the world” is a bit much”. But you really don’t know, do you? Because you don’t know what applications someone might find for it.
I can remember having what was the precursor to the smartphone. I bought it off someone couldn’t find a use for it. It had an internet connection via the SIM, a small display screen in colour & a fold out alphanumeric keyboard. I could just about log in & read e-mails & even send them. Theoretically you could browse web pages if they were optimised for the format. But basically it got used for making phonecalls & sending SMS without having to do that multi-push thing on the number keys. It was an expensive toy. But that toy lead to Whatsapp & the rest of mobile social media. Which seems to have utterly changed the world.
Penseivat – if your Speccy still works, you could get £100 or more for it.
Not a bad store of value for something that cost £129 in 1983.
BiS – Bitcoin isn’t even useful for buying drugs.
@Steve
Yes, throwing away all those satellites every 5 years doesn’t seem to be good business compared with the fiber model unless it’s just a sneaky way of growing the launch services market.
The other odd thing about their business is that the satellites are very busy and bandwidth constrained over the US but not so over the rest of the word. Given that the users buy their own terminals and also that user billing/admin, satellite downlinks, back haul and internet peering are relatively low costs in the scheme of things, increasing the number of users in the underutilized non US world will cost them very little. It makes sense for Starlink to cut the user price massively outside the US to increase the number of users and push the bandwidth up to what the satellites are capable of. There is a risk that US users would get unhappy about paying so much more than people outside of the US pay for the same service, but US users historically seem OK with paying through the nose for phone and internet service.
Bitcoin isn’t even useful for buying drugs.
That’s not strictly true, Steve. I’m told it can be used as a laundry. But that would a very short duration set of transfers to minimise exposure to market movements. Getting that wrong could have terminal consequences. But it’ll be restricted to the wholesale & not available for retail.
I’d imagine one of the problems is that buying/selling crypto will automatically put a flag on your bank account. Same as gambling does. If nothing else, it’s a marker for stupidity. You”ll be under the eye of compliance. So if one wanted to do that one would need to build up a pattern of short term market speculation to obscure it. So you’d have to carry that risk Possibly handle that by carrying compensating positions. In other words, you’d need quite a lot of money to start with.
Dealers only accept cash, BiS.
I wouldn’t know, Steve.
Just spent 4 days driving from the Yukon down to Vancouver and noticed for a lot of the construction work there was usually a van with a Starlink antenna attached.
U.K. is small enough to have broadband everywhere, not so true elsewhere.
There is nowhere remote in England and Wales. The emptiest bits of mid Wales, Cumbria and Northumberland are:
(1) absolutely heaving compared to most of the rest of the world
(2) only a few tens of miles from a major population centre
So not a long distance to string fibre up, and plenty of people to use it when you do. There is nowhere in England where you can drive* for more than about half an hour during the daytime and not see anybody else.
*for clarity: on the public road. I know the standard of pedantry on here.