And with 2.3M customers, that's an average 1.7 Mbit/s per customer, or 550 GB per customer per month, which is kinda high. The average American internet user probably consumes less than 100 GB/month. (HN readers are probably outliers; I consume about 1 TB/month).
But that’s me.
I'm kinda pissed their is no local ISP competition in my area....and iv tried reaching out to companies with little success...or they say were expanding to your area soon but will not say when.
10GB symmetric fiber isn't hard. Hell I'd use more bandwidth if I could but I'm stuck with no fiber atm
I don't think that breaks net neutrality either, which the FCC seems to be reimplementing
Edit: see https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
300+ minutes a day for TV + vMOD (streaming services). Since no one actually watches TV anymore, at least not through traditional TV, I summed them.
Dead internet theory (alive and well!)
I think a few hundred GB for a typical cord-cut household is about right.
It should. At some point you are beyond any difference a human eye can detect on a tv or monitor you’re sitting less than 10ft away from.
It probably won’t though because capitalism means there has to be a reason to sell you a new widget and 3D was an utter failure.
The way Starlink satellites are in orbit, the same satellites will remain "ahead" and "behind" you in the orbital plane. Those laser links (specifically!) will remain relatively persistent. This arrangement is similar to Iridium FYI.
FTA: "in some cases, the links can also be maintained for weeks at a time"
not for awhile. apple vision / oculus will stream (4k/8k) 3d movies.
There's of course a limit. The "native" bitrate equivalent of your retina isn't infinite.
Next step though is going to be lightfield displays (each "pixel" is actually a tiny display with a lens that produces "real" 3D images) and I assume that will be a thing, we shall see if it does better than the last generation of 3D TVs/movies/etc. That's a big bump in bitrate.
There's also bitrate for things like game/general computing screen streaming where you need lots of overhead to make the latency work, you can't buffer several seconds of that.
The next gen sci-fi of more integrated sensory experiences is certainly going to be a thing eventually too. Who knows how much information that will need.
When more bandwidth becomes available, new things become possible, sometimes that are hard to imagine before somebody gets bored and tries to figure it out.
When I'm futzing around with ML models, I'm loading tens of gigabytes from disk into memory. Eventually something like that and things orders of magnitude larger will probably be streamed over the network like nothing. PCIe 4.0 x16 is, what 32 GBps? Why not that over a network link for every device in the house in 10 years?
I think there is a lot of variance. The article also states about 266,141 “laser acquisitions” per day, which, if every laser link stayed up for the exact same amount of time, with 9000 lasers, means the average link remains established for a little less than an hour: 9000 (lasers) / 266141 (daily acquisitions) * 24 * 60 = 49 minutes
So some links may stay established for weeks, but some only for a few minutes?
I'd be interested in what the sustained power/thermal budget of the satellites is.
T-Mobile absolutely counts all data used over the network, my voice lines go QCI 9 (they are normally QCI 6) when over 50GB of any kind of data usage each month, the home internet lines are always QCI 9. I don't have congestion in my area so it does not affect my speeds. This is QoS prioritization that happens at physical sector level on the tower(s).
Don't forget that every communication protocol has fixed and variable overhead.
The first is a function of the packet structure. It can be calculated by simply dividing the payload capacity of a packet by the total number of bits transmitted for that same packet.
Variable overhead is more complex. It has to do with transactions, negotiations, retries, etc.
For example, while the theoretical overhead of TCP/IP is in the order of 5%, actual overhead could be as high as 20% under certain circumstances. In other words, 20% of the bits transmitted are not data payload but rather the cost of doing business.
I believe Starlink (like Iridium) doesn't even try to establish connections "across the seam," ie the one place the satellites in the adjacent plane are coming head on at orbital speed.
This make side-linking easier because the relative velocity is comparatively low, but in general you unavoidably still need to switch side-link satellites (on one side) twice per orbit. Hence 49 minutes: this average must be calculated per connection not per second, so the front/back links (plus random noise) count less, so it only drags the average from 45 minutes up to 49 minutes.
Resolution is always determined by angular resolution at viewing distance, even for analog TVs(they were smaller and further away), and also,
Videos on Internet is always heavily compressed - the "resolution" is just the output size passed to the decoder and inverse of minimal pattern size recorded within, technically not related to data size. Raw video is h * v * bpp and have always been like low to dozen Gbps.
Just my bets, the bandiwth may peak or see a plateau, but resolution could continue to grow as needed for e.g. digital signage video walls that wraps around buildings.
So it's hard to sustain the theoretical 100GPS connection for hours let alone days across 2 end points which are in constant motion.
Maybe I just grew up in a quiet place.
I think I agree that each laser is grossly underused on average, but if you read the article, there's quotes about the uptime of these links. They're definitely not just "used in bursts [of] a few tens of seconds or minutes".
Even back to 1950, for per household data, it was above 4 hours.
[1] https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2009/average-tv-viewing-for...
We're outnumbered.
Imagine they put 10TB of flash memory on the satellites and run virtual machines for the big CDN companies (cloudflare, Google, Netflix etc).
I reckon that 10TB is still big enough to service a good little chunk of internet traffic.
For some it is just the illusion of having more people around them, though.
I would kill for some decent high res wide fov AR glasses.
kids these days mostly use youtube or twitch for background noise i think
You have to share that 10 TB with everything on that satellite's orbit.
They didn't have per person for the 1950 to 1990 data, only household (pdf in the link).
Most ISPs have CND appliances in their racks to save on uplink bandwidth. And from a satellite perspective the uplink (in this scenario: the downlink from the satellite to the gateway) definitely is the expensive bottleneck.
You want to avoid congestion and every bit of caching could be helpful.
Then it comes down to the mass and power budget (and the reliability of flash drives in space) - but that doesn't seem too terrible.
You can't freely blast radio waves into a country without falling subject to its varying regulations, but the regulations for "pre Starlink" satellite broadband/phones/etc are fairly well established.
I should probably see if my router can bandwidth limit their mac addresses...
Personally I need almost complete silence in order to get anything done, his abilities in this regard always fascinated me.
The slide showing the multiple possible paths traffic can take seems to disagree with this statement?
It's useful for some people to have recognisable sounds going on while they work, so they have something to latch their focus if they lose it for a second. Whether that be music, or every seinfeld episode on a shuffled loop on the TV.
I have found it useful in the past to listen through every song I have on shuffle while I read, which was nice when I took a few-seconds break every couple of pages and came across a song I wouldn't have picked out otherwise. Alt-tabbing out of a podcast or something completely wrecks my focus on both for some reason though.
Men spent 3 hours a day watching TV, and women 2.5 hours. But TV time is lower (around 2 hrs/day) from ages 20-44, then increases again after 45 and peaks at 75 years old at nearly 5 hours a day.
Households without kids watch more TV, which surprised me.
I'm not sure that's saying household time. For example, when they survey a household it wasn't clear to me if they survey everyone in the household or just one person. If it's one person then it sounds like they collect how that one person (age 15+) spent their own time and if there were kids in their household.
So then it'd be accurate to say that individuals in households without kids watch more TV as a singular activity (the survey doesn't allow simultaneous activities).
In comparison Nielsen used TV viewing diaries and automated data collection meters. You could have the TV on in the background while doing chores and it would still count.
It's interesting that the 2009 ATUS survey [3] had a 2.82 hour/person average because that's fairly different from the Nielsen data (4 hours 49 minutes/person).
I wonder if this difference is people underreporting in ATUS or Nielsen overreporting or a factor of differences in limitations in ATUS (no simultaneous activities allowed, 15+ age limitation) or Nielsen.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/atus/data.htm
[2] https://www.bls.gov/tus/questionnaires/tuquestionnaire.pdf
[3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06222010.pdf
However looking at other sources, it seems Starlink (having more satellites) actually wraps the orbital planes 360° around the Earth (vs Iridium's minimalist 180° configuration), overlapping both North-moving and South-moving satellites in the same sky simultaneously. This means the Iridium seam disappears entirely. Neat! TIL.
Another problem that vanishes simply by being "hardware rich."
So in addition to households add foreign bases and possibly drone command networks to possible sources of traffic going fast enough to warrant sat-to-sat connection.
1tb feels reasonable to push that much video.
If it's dead quiet, I become hyper-alert to noises, to the point I can't concentrate on working.
I don't believe the AF spent anything more than 100m for whatever R&D program. And the money was post development.
Was it a black budget thing?
So actually this Iridium-type "seam" disappears, meaning that every satellite should always have co-orbiting "neighbors" on both sides. Cool!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_ascension_of_the_ascendi...