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greatjack613 | 2 years ago

While the bandwidth numbers seem terrible given this is from an entire beam at it's peak and beams are wide, this is super useful for things like sms where bandwidth is not a concern. At 17 Mb/s you can have thousands of simultaneous sms sends without issue

discuss

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blackoil|2 years ago

Yeah, it could be god sent for natural disasters and truly remote locations. But it is not replacement for regular mobile service.

usrusr|2 years ago

For emergencies in truly remote locations. In a natural disaster, you have everybody at once refreshing news and checking in on friends and family that even undamaged networks could struggle.

When the network has broken down you'd better be prepared to have teams fixing what is fixable, and the ability to deploy pop-up cells on the ground. If you have skimped on that preparation betting on satellite cells to save the day the contribution of Starlink to disaster preparedness might end up being a net negative.

That being said, pop-up cells on a startlink as their backhaul could become huge in disaster preparedness. Some contract scheme for standby basestations might actually become a big component of the Starlink business model. The good news is that all talk to regular phones can't overlap with regular starlink frequencies, so unless it blocks some other bottlenecks like SDR DSP capacity it won't compete with regular connections (certainly won't have a meaningful impact on orbital backbone load)

Scoundreller|2 years ago

I hope there's some broadcast stuff planned (does cellular support multicast like that?). So I can just point my phone at the sky and get some news/weather/traffic updates "off-line". Maybe a radio station or two? It's pretty impressive what can fit into 32kbps (or less!) these days.

gonesilent|2 years ago

Viasats service supported this via USB plug in drive on the modem to load some content. Don't think it was released out of beta.

BlueTemplar|2 years ago

Hmm, but SMS rely on the cellular tower protocol, basically being carried on the status messages that cellphones already constantly send/receive anyway - they don't use the IP (at least until the tower).

So I'm not even sure they can be sent/received by satellite ??

lights0123|2 years ago

Starlink is using 5G, a cellular tower protocol. The only other option would be WiFi which can not do long distance, at least without both ends being designed for it (which a cellphone is not).