13 ms·

Starlink Maritime

606 points by Yukonv 4y ago

venti 4y ago
Is anything know about the power consumption of the Starlink antenna? Does the maritime version use less power than the conventional unit? The fixed-location version of Starlink consumes around 60 to 100 W constantly which is problem if you want to e.g. use solar panels on a sail boat to supply the device.
- Johnythree 4y ago
  Most off-grid solar users simply switch it off when not in use.
- simplecto 4y ago
  You probably would not run it 24x7 on a boat.
  - brk 4y ago
    You probably would. At that price point they are targeting boats that are going to have multiple gensets, and be carrying 1,000+ gallons of fuel. The additional load of the Starlink, relative to the chillers, water makers, and other onboard systems would be nothing.
- rngname22 4y ago
  If you can afford $5000 a month for internet maybe you're more likely on a Silent 60 (17 kWp solar) than a Catalina 30.
  - dzhiurgis 4y ago
    FWIW if they ever to offer 10 Mb/s plans for ~$150/mo, the power use becomes a question again.
    - roflyear 4y ago
      Not really. You won't run it all the time on a cruising yacht. Just when you need it. You probably don't care about having internet constantly under passage just for short times to get weather and to send out updates to friends and family.
      - dzhiurgis 4y ago
        At 50-100W you might not, that's close to what your fridge uses. Make it 10-20W and it becomes no brainer to keep always on.
- scrumper 4y ago
  I think at those prices you'd have a boat big enough to have the power budget. It's clearly aimed at commercial or scientific use with a side of super yacht. I'm guessing a more affordable version more like the RV product will become available for cruising sailors in time. I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    > I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well. Sure, just like Tesla Autopilot is right around the corner, Starship will be flying this year, the Cybertruck has been released 2 years ago etc.
    - dreamcompiler 4y ago
      This is different. The problem of providing offshore satcom with LEOsats is a quantified engineering problem. IOW, the industry knows quite well what technologies will solve the problem and Starlink has those technologies in place. The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be. None of that is true for the self-driving car problem. That problem still contains a multitude of unknowns, including unknown unknowns. Cybertruck is yet another kind of problem. I don't know what the issue with that is but I'd guess it's about manufacturing capacity.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        > The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be. Those communications are still an unsolved and hugely difficult engineering problem. It will be awesome if SpaceX has actually achieved this: getting the kind of precision required to communicate over direct laser links between specks of dust hundreds of km apart traveling at thousands of km per hour is no easy feat.
- usrn 4y ago
  If you're set up for electric propulsion that's not too bad. That plus my work machine would be under half what a properly sized motor should draw at 50% throttle. It only needs to work for ~6-7 hours a day.
- joeyh 4y ago
  You can approximately half the power consumption by eliminating starlink's wifi router and using a DC POE injector to power the square terminal. I have not done it yet but have seen others report ~30 watts.
- virtuallynathan 4y ago
  Current dishy is 30-40W under normal operating conditions, i’d assume a bit less than double for the twice-as-large dish.
kordlessagain 4y ago
Only $5k a month! What a bargain.
- happytiger 4y ago
  Yea, I found the price point really disappointing. This only makes sense for large commercial users - leaves cruisers and small commercial customers high and dry.
  - mrep 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't try and at least segment commercial pricing versus personal. I cannot imagine many people with personal boats under like 60 feet would stomach 5k a month for internet and there are far far more boats under 60 feet than ones bigger than that (At least in chicago harbors where I am at).
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - RF_Savage 4y ago
    I wonder what Inmarsat or Viasat bill for comparable service and terminals.
- extheat 4y ago
  Definitely subsidizing the losses in the consumer business. Without Starship Starlink is on a path to bankruptcy like the companies that came before.
  - elif 4y ago
    Please share your math. At $15M to launch 50 v1 satellites costing $250k each to build, they are looking at $320k per satellite At $110/mo with 500k customers, they can afford to launch roughly 170 satellites per month. That is about break-even for their average launch cadence over the last 3 months.
    - 4y ago
leuty 4y ago
That's awesome!
shmerl 4y ago
That price...
holoduke 4y ago
How cool would it be to create a very small solar powered vessel sailing around the world with a live cam feed on it.
Jemm 4y ago
Went to order because it sounds great. $10,000. Nope
Maursault 4y ago
This is great, because I've always wanted to surf the Internet while using the toilet on my yacht sailing around the ocean. Now all I need's a yacht and the great blue sea.
deleted 4y ago
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adingus 4y ago
"$5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals." wow! Why cant you just take your normal starlink with you on your boat? Don't people do that with RVs?
- pigtailgirl 4y ago
  https://www.starlink.com/rv https://www.starlink.com/rv -- If I had to guess part of the reason would maybe be carrying capacity - a house that doesn't move is predictable - RVs & boats move so the per satellite bandwidth predictability of that class of object is lower - i think meaning the requirements for redundancy are higher - redundancy is expensive? - just a guess --
  - cronix 4y ago
    Starlink RV is only currently meant to be used while stationary and can't track while in motion, which is why the hardware is identical to the home unit. They're supposed to be coming out with new hardware that allows use while in motion. It was only a week ago that the FCC approved the application for "vehicles in motion."[1] It will be on airplanes as well, soon. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/fcc-approves-spacex-starlink-service-to-vehicles-boats-planes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/fcc-approves-spacex-starlink...
    - vl 4y ago
      What I really want is hardware that is mounted on RV roof and can be deployed and folded with a press of a button. While I don't care if it works in motion, I do care about setup convenience, and I'm not getting current version because setting it up is just too cumbersome. Or even better: just flat beam-forming antenna on the RV roof. Once thing there is enough on the roof is space.
      - jpgvm 4y ago
        Yeah would be possible with a larger antenna that has a wider FOV. The current dish has too narrow a FOV to simply recess it into the roof/enclosure unfortunately.
_Microft 4y ago
The maritime coverage map shows coastal coverage around countries with inland coverage right now, i.e. they are bouncing the connection via one of their satellites to a nearby groundstation. Starting in Q4/2022 they want to cover mid-latitudes around the globe. That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? (This is a bit surprising - on one hand, this step extends coverage towards higher and lower latitudes but on the other hand not as much as they already have inland-coverage (cf. Brazil). It also extends longitudinally around all of the globe?). Coverage above mid-latitudes requires satellites in polar orbits to join the network. (Their non-polar orbits have an inclination of 53° which means that satellites go no further north or south than that (plus a bit whatever their range is)). https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map....
- roflyear 4y ago
  Yeah I don't see this getting pushed back at all lol
- wumpus 4y ago
  There's a polar shell and there's a 70 degree shell, both with lasers, in addition to the 2 ~53 degree shells.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  > That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? Or maybe they'll have stationary ships with "ground"-stations until the inter-satellite thing is working.
  - dreamcompiler 4y ago
    That wouldn't solve the problem. Those ships would still need a backhaul.
    - sathackr 4y ago
      If they stationed them near the edge of current coverage, the ship could be the inter-satellite link until the actual inter-satellite links are working.
zeristor 4y ago
No Antarctica? They could show that there are no plans for Antarctica, not just ignore it.
- swarnie 4y ago
  Antarctica is maybe 4000 people and some penguin shit. Why does it matter if they are covered or not?
  - RockRobotRock 4y ago
    Pretty sure it was a joke.
    - swarnie 4y ago
      Its very hard to tell on this website.
    - zeristor 4y ago
      It’s land, isn’t it? I thought there were plans for polar orbiting Starlink satellites to cover polar bases. Even so it should be a map of the full planet
moralestapia 4y ago
The writing is on the wall. RIP Garmin, Iridium, etc... As to why it is expensive? Well, they did their homework and found out is a lucrative market (one doesn't need a lot of hindsight for that, though).
- p_j_w 4y ago
  Garmin and Iridium will still sell well with the people who are cruising in relatively low cost sailboats. These people can't afford $5000/mo just for internet access.
- roflyear 4y ago
  People with a go or inreach aren't going to buy this lol
- 10u152 4y ago
  Garmin doesn’t operate a satellite network. They produce devices and on sell subscriptions to other satellite services. This won’t really impact them at all. They could pivot to use another network if it becomes more feasible.
yardie 4y ago
"$5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals." Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income. In other terms, Iridium Go is still the best value around and truly global for the time being.
- deleted 4y ago
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- ok_dad 4y ago
  > Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income. More like: commercial and military vessels
  - yardie 4y ago
    You can already get these speeds on Ku-band satellites, just higher latency, with real global coverage.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Commercial and military vessels have contracts with Iridium/Inmarsat etc for mission critical stuff. An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
    - baq 4y ago
      Neither iridium nor Inmarsat provides capabilities of starlink: low latency, high bandwidth, asat-resistant, jamming-resistant infrastructure, all this proven in a real world conflict. They are ‘only’ missing coverage. Military will pay top dollar for this, Musk is in the name-his-price territory here. It’s become mission critical overnight. If they manage to cover the full globe, you’ll see the DoD quietly spending billions to have access and more billions to deny any other military the option.
Cyberdog 4y ago
The second sentence in the paragraph at the top of the home page is pricing. Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction. Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you when you waste my time.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Not if you're loading from a UK IP they don't (I'm assume they geotarget pricing; the non-maritime pages display prices in GBP and the maritime just gives a max download speed) Not all products are as much of a commodity as bandwidth.
- WJW 4y ago
  This is something SpaceX does extremely well in general. Check out https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ for example: fill in your orbit, payload mass and earliest launch date and it will give you a quote. This is to me the gold standard of what I would love to have (but is remarkably difficult to get) from any industrial supplier.
  - infthi 4y ago
    Looks like they have finally caught up with ULA : ) https://www.rocketbuilder.com/start/configure https://www.rocketbuilder.com/start/configure went up in 2016
  - macintux 4y ago
    It’s amazing we’ve reached the point where that’s possible.
  - geekrax 4y ago
    Wow! A form to send a payload to space is faster to fill than sending an envelope through USPS.
- Flankk 4y ago
mytailorisrich 4y ago
Service for airplanes coming soon, too, apparently.
zanethomas 4y ago
I recently acquired Starlink RV for my camper van. Camped out at Lake Powell with zero cellphone and 85mbs of internet!
- oxplot 4y ago
  With WiFi Calling feature of recent phones, you should also be able to send and receive phone calls/SMS as usual too. Tried this on my camping trip to great effect.
hsnewman 4y ago
That's affordable!
niico 4y ago
I wonder if i can expense this as my WFH setup
xoa 4y ago
Always a treat to see the urban HN crowd comment with great confidence on anything outside of their immediate area. While hopefully eventually SpaceX will bring this down and be more disruptive, right now they simply cannot possibly meet demand, they are very rightfully anxious to get revenue going for Starlink, they're in a completely unique level of performance for maritime, and HELLO FOLKS, here is a taste of what actual maritime internet costs, quoting myself from elsewhere: A BGAN terminal like an Inmarsat 9202 is ~$3k, which gets you capability of around 450 kbps. Something like an Iridium can bring that to 700 kbps for a ~$5k. Want multimegabit? No problem, KVH will be happy to help with something like a TracPhone for a mere $18000-50000! And then you pay a mere $5/megabyte, or you can get a monthly plan and save! SD 1........ 0-20MB ............... $79.90/mo SD 2........ 21-100MB ............. $275.00/mo SD 3........ 101-250MB ............ $470.00/mo SD 4........ 251-500MB ............ $775.00/mo SD 5........ 501-1,000MB .......... $1,1150.00/mo SD 6........ 1,001-5,000MB ........ $2,295.00/mo SD 7........ 5,001-10,000MB ....... $3,000.00/mo SD 8........ 10,000-Unlimited ..... $4,300.00/mo Keeping mind this will have 500-1500+ms latency as well. This is what they are competing against. They're offering 2x terminals for this, probably based on those $2500 heavier duty much bigger business class ones, and they have to have at least some consideration for hardening vs saltwater which is the great destroyer of all things. Since I don't see any particular stabilization platform like others use my assumption is they're making use of 2x and electronic steering to maintain constant contact, though they may well have some additional sensors in there or interfacing capability with a ship's gyrocompass. But at any rate this looks extremely competitive once the full intersat mesh rolls out, and it's interesting to see hard numbers on that. While it'd have been cool if they could have launched something suitable for users right down to sailboats (officially vs unofficial use of residential ones), I doubt that'd be the right business decision until well after they have v2 flying on Starship for a while. What they're charging actually doesn't even seem to put much if any premium on the massive bandwidth advantage and flat out beating fiber optic in latency over enough distance. Plenty of businesses will be interested in this. And while sure no doubt it'll become standard on rich yachts, think more serious cargo shipping, oil/gas drilling platforms, etc. SpaceX themselves will be eager to dogfood this and have already been doing so for their drone ships, but they have plans for refurbing old platforms into Starship sea launch as well. The military will absolutely be very interested if they aren't deep into discussion already. I could see a major premium being charged there for priority in ports or other congested areas, maybe even special hardware. Also having the mesh up also means a lot of other cool stuff, from coverage to remote islands or other areas for which no close ground station is feasible to special low latency intercontinental offerings on land (HFT and enterprises may be interested in).
master-12 4y ago
Beware, their price automatically switches to local currency based on IP address, but keeps the $ sign. It's not that expensive.
dibujante 4y ago
$5000 a month? That's pretty embarrassing, isn't it? That indicates they aren't doing satellite-to-satellite and are using some kind of specialized hardware to simply send the signal to coastal satellites from farther away.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Or maybe it's the Tesla Roadster of this particular long-term plan. Some scoff, others wait for the price on the upcoming tier that's not quite 350 Mbps...
- lxgr 4y ago
  Compared to what? Inmarsat is the only viable alternative for smaller boats that offers unlimited data plans, has higher latency due to being geostationary, much lower bandwidth, and charges about $8000 for a gigabyte… I‘m not sure what Ku or Ka band GEO providers charge, but I doubt you can find anything competitive there either, and these require very large antennas.
  - dibujante 4y ago
    Compared to what their architecture should enable. Sure, it's more satellites consumed per request but there aren't _that_ many satellites between some random point in the Pacific and the nearest base station. Certainly seems like it's not scaling that well if the price jumps from ~$120 to $5000.
    - lxgr 4y ago
      It seems more of a question of supply and demand than a limitation of their technology. If the competition currently charges more than $5000, why should they charge (much) less?
  - sithadmin 4y ago
    Considering the coverage map is mostly coastal waters, private LTE and 5g are the 'budget' competition (for now). In some areas like the Gulf of Mexico, a not insignificant portion of the water is serviced by LTE that you can roam onto using a conventional TMobile, Sprint or AT&T SIM, often without an additional cost.
elif 4y ago
Wow they are now clearly selling a product that depends upon starlink 2.0 satellites which depend upon starship for launch. Starship tests haven't even attempted a static fire on their launch platform let alone a stacked launch attempt. Not to mention, their launch calculations include re-use based upon a completely invented and also untested catching apparatus. Talk about going all in...
- ianschmitz 4y ago
  Do you have a citation for them being too big for SpaceX’s current rocket lineup? Very curious about this
  - elif 4y ago
    Elon on everyday astronaut: "Falcon neither has the volume nor the mass [to] orbit capability required for Starlink 2.0," Musk said.
    - jdminhbg 4y ago
      It's not clear to me whether this means physically or economically; i.e., could the 2.0 satellites be put into orbit by Falcon but not at a cost that would make it worth it?
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        It is always a mistake to assume his tweets mean anything specific. He means they won't be launching 2.0 birds on Falcon, full stop. Reasons are slippery things.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Musk companies have a habit of going all in, then claiming they didn't when the bill comes due. So far it has worked, but I wouldn't bet on the coverage expanding much for the next 2 years.
  - 4y ago
dboreham 4y ago
Going to need a bigger boat.
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pugworthy 4y ago
I would have killed for this back in the 80's and 90's working on oceanographic research ships...
- deleted 4y ago
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elromulous 4y ago
$5,000 a month, and $10,000 initial hardware costs? So basically a product for cruise ships and $100M+ millionaires?
- williamcotton 4y ago
  And countless commercial vessels!
obloid 4y ago
I've been looking forward to marine starlink with the thought of being able to work remotely while sailing. Then I saw the pricing! I guess they're aiming for the megayacht crowd not average shmoes on small boats. Interestingly it does look like people are putting starlink on sailboats with ok results: https://www.reddit.com/r/SailboatCruising/comments/vovaxs/starlink_in_the_med_update_2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SailboatCruising/comments/vovaxs/st...
- McAtNite 4y ago
  I’ve been doing the same, and I was personally hoping it would follow the same standard price + $30 that the RV crowd has gotten. I’m pretty disappointed with the cost, and I would fear that they’ll use geolocation to force you to maritime billing if they detect you’re on a boat. It looks like my sailboat remote life is still on hold for the time being.
- lbrindze 4y ago
  I worked remote while sailing. my personal advice.... cruising is relatively cheap once you leave the dock. turn off your computer and go sail a while and plan on taking contracts during extended periods in port. Also having packed a few offshore miles at this point... I have never had much luck being productive doing "work" while actually on passage. The ocean has a funny way of sticking to its own agenda anyway, despite our best plans. Most of your time cruising is hanging on the anchor anyway. Depending on where you are there is pretty decent cell coverage a lot of places, or hotel wifis you can get from your anchorage.
  - Stevvo 4y ago
    I'm doing it an a mono-hull right now. I have not tried to work on passage, but I think it would be totally doable on a cat where you could sit relatively stable and keep a watch while working.
- ShakataGaNai 4y ago
  Depending on the type of sailing you do, probably can get away with using the RV service. If you're sailing within their current maritime coverage map https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map.... you're just using the direct CPE-Starlink-Uplink Station connection. Provided you're still in that coverage cell, there is really no difference to the entire system if you're 10 miles from shore inland or at sea.
paulsutter 4y ago
Genius price segmentation. Of course it costs them little more to provide the service than for home users on land, but easily worth the 50x higher price for this market The Starlink IPO will provide hundreds of billions in funding for Starship and Mars
- deleted 4y ago
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SergeAx 4y ago
Starlink RV is $135/m and looks exactly the same. I wonder what happens if I put one on the boat? Will Starlink turn it off for usage violation?
- stephbu 4y ago
  Seems unlikely, more probable is that you’ll have other problems. I suspect there are other differences in the equipment and service delivery to tolerate ocean conditions.
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  Don't know, but it will definitely stop working once you get a few miles off shore in an ocean. That requires intersat communications which the RV plan doesn't provide. (Inland lakes should work fine except perhaps for the very biggest ones like Lake Superior or the Caspian Sea. If lakes don't work with the RV plan, it's not for any technical reason.)
  - oxplot 4y ago
    > That requires intersat communications which the RV plan doesn't provide. Intersat (laser links) comms is not available at the moment. Fairly sure they simply geofence non-maritime accounts. As you can see from the maritime map, it only covers water next to the shore which is a good indicator that they still use ground stations directly to provide service. EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.
tengbretson 4y ago
I find it entertaining that Jeff Bezos is the ideal customer for this service.
tigerBL00D 4y ago
$5K a month? The dream of affordable internet at sea will have to wait. Bummer. I expected a disruption from SpaceX.
sillysaurusx 4y ago
Can anyone explain how the ping is so low on starlink? I always assumed satellite internet was always going to be inferior for online gaming, but everything I find online says that starlink is great for it. I guess I don’t have a specific question. It’s just one of those engineering marvels that I never thought I’d see. No wires, but still frag people at <90ms ping.
- shmerl 4y ago
  Ping depends on physical distance and quality of the signal. Low orbit satellites are much closer to Earth than geostationary ones. So latency is lower as well. And in space itself signal travels between nodes faster than through any cable.
- joewadcan 4y ago
  The Starlink satellites orbit closer to the earth than other comms satellites (iridium, oneweb). Closer distance = faster times, in addition to laser links between sats and other spectrum differences. Downside to lower orbit means they won't last as long (a few years) before they are pulled down into earth's atmo. Which is fine since their rocket company will just send up some more cheaply.
  - oceanplexian 4y ago
    In theory, the laser links may bring Starlink below terrestrial latency for point to point communications beyond a certain distance. Light travels through fiber at 7/10ths of the speed of light, but pretty much the actual speed of light through a vacuum. Once you get past the 340km * 2 round trip on both ends, you're actually moving bits around much faster than is physically possible with fiber. Probably even faster than that considering that fiber optic backbone isn't a straight line between you and your destination.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Chances are, you, dear reader, will not get any of this sweet, sweet, low latency. Most likely these laser links only go from each satellite to the one ahead and the one behind, in the same orbit. That is good enough. For example, there is an orbit that goes right over New York, London, and Hamburg. Who wants low latency most is hedge funds. It would be surprising if Starlink did not make anyone who wants it pay through the nose to get traffic one millisecond faster than fiber, 100x that for 2ms, 100x that for 3ms, and on up for longer links. What they would really be buying is not so much getting their own packets N milliseconds ahead of the fiber crowd, which is OK, but rather for their slightly poorer competitors to get packets only N-1 milliseconds ahead, which is super-great. In fintech, they like to say a microsecond is an eon, a millisecond an eternity. When they can get a millisecond jump on the competition, that can mean millions of dollars every day. So, they will pay it. Gladly.
bexail 4y ago
I have the regular $600 hardware and $135/month on my live-aboard sailboat on Sea of Cortez. Happy to answer any questions if you are considering getting one for your boat or RV.
aml183 4y ago
I work in the space industry and follow SATCOM closely. This is a very competitive space. Companies like Viasat, Iridium and Inmarsat already work in this vertical. SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective, but the big question is will a LEO operator provide better coverage than a GEO operator?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
  I’ve done work video calls using my friend’s starlink wifi on a remote mountain, and it’s unlimited bandwidth so this didn’t cost anything beyond the flat $110 monthly fee. Are geosynchronous services even capable of doing the bandwidth and latency needed for a two-way video call? And if so, how much would it cost?
  - jonah 4y ago
    Yes, they can do it - my parents have Hughes satellite internet. I've been able to do multi-person video calls from their house. It's pretty low bandwidth though 40Mbps or so claimed I think and something like 50Gb/Month data cap. It was faster and cheaper to tether to my cell phone while working from their house.
    - lxgr 4y ago
      Out of curiosity – why don't your parents use fixed 4G or 5G internet in that case?
      - jonah 4y ago
        Good question. They may not be aware of it. Though I did talk with one of their neighbors who mentioned they had it.
        fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
        4G and 5G modems can be a really solid solution if you point an antenna at the tower.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I have a friend who used to live in the Outer Hebrides islands. I called it his "God-Forsaken Scottish Rock." Fairly bleak place, and he had crap Internet service. Looks like his [former] place is ... juuuuusssst ... out of band.
aerovistae 4y ago
$5000 a month? Who is this for? I'm a little confused. Seems like even the military would be reluctant at that price point, let alone private boat owners who aren't multimillionaires.
- Stevvo 4y ago
  It's for those vessels already paying $5000+ a month for inferior service. I'm a coastal cruiser myself; obviously I will use the RV package on my boat.
- SkyPuncher 4y ago
  People who own $1M plus boats. This isn't for ski-boats at the local lake.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Way more than than. Think $10m+ boats.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  While I agree that the military would be unlikely to use this civilian service on warships, it's not because of the price where $5000 would be a rounding error in the operational cost of the ship. I see this more for commercial operators, like the Ferry between Seattle and Victoria BC - they could sell high speed internet for $10/trip and make a profit if they can sell it to 500 passengers/month.
  - deleted 4y ago
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dingosity 4y ago
Just curious. Does anyone know anyone who has received their terminal who is not a SpaceX employee or opted for Mobile/RV? I keep hearing about how they're being deployed, but the only people I know who have received their terminals are SpaceX employees or people who agreed to the more expensive Mobile/RV service.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  I'm using it full time and received mine in October 2021
- rythmshifter 4y ago
  Yes. I do, someone in south east Michigan.
- adra 4y ago
  I was visiting some rural family in Alberta Canada and there's a bunch of them running with starlink setups now. I feel they're prioritizing rural first because there isn't really service to compete with / target demographic?
  - jpgvm 4y ago
    Yeah, their product compares very favourably to competition in rural but I suspect the other reason is density. They don't have enough satellites with enough bandwidth to provide high speeds for a lot of people in a small area (like a city) but the more spread out their customers are the more efficiently they make use of their fast moving satellites.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I received mine in the first batch, have been using it for ~a year now. Have used it for everything from 4K Netflix to gaming to work, ama I guess. My experience has been overall good relative to the rest of the options in this space (most other companies are still offering limited 500kbps/high-latency plans for twice as much), but you can definitely still push it hard enough to reveal that it's still satellite internet underneath. It's worth it if your other options are HughesNet or a data-capped WISP.
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AtNightWeCode 4y ago
Sounds cool. Btw. The person who came up with the rebranding of linear pricing as “pay as you go” should get the Noble prize in marketing.
la64710 4y ago
All the commercial planes should be equipped with one so that we never have another case of plane lost in the sea.
andrew_ 4y ago
We still need a 12v solution for the peasants that boat offshore. The current monthly fee represents a full year of boat payments. Definitely not targeted at consumers.
- oittaa 4y ago
  I think the "rv model" supports 12V. It's not officially supported on moving vessels by SpaceX, but you can find a lot of Youtube videos where people have installed terminals on their boats.
- oxplot 4y ago
  You can easily use an inverter to go from 12v to 110V/240V and just use the stock adapter. Alternatively, you can get your hands dirty and do what I did [1]. However, I'm fairly certain that the non-maritime accounts won't be able to use the service on water (most likely geofenced) so that Starlink can sell their maritime version. [1]: https://blog.oxplot.com/powering-starlink-on-the-go-with-tesla-model-3/ https://blog.oxplot.com/powering-starlink-on-the-go-with-tes... EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Maybe....maybe not... It depends if it will work using the new sat tech if it ever comes out. As it stands you just have a different (I wouldn't even say better) version of 4g....
O__________O 4y ago
Know next to nothing about dynamics and constraints of maritime SatCom, but... Seen number of comments about the costs, but honestly wondered why the “one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals” could not be replaced with a hand mounted cheaper DIY rig using the existing Starlink terminals. Guessing, though might be wrong, that Starlink already has this happen using the existing coastal coverage. On the same note, guess most people don’t need 24/7 connections. Why not just charge 0.33 a min, which would still be a 3x over the $5000 month rate and enable Starlink to extend further into the market. Any thoughts on why this would not make sense aside from whatever Starlink’s biases & business objectives are?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mabbo 4y ago
  > Any thoughts on why this would not make sense aside from whatever Starlink’s biases & business objectives are? I suspect the market here is not individuals that want to browse YouTube and check their email. Market 1: large multi person vessels like cruise ships. At any time someone wants to use the internet, and the ship can 'sublet' out a 2Mbit subset on an time basis. Market 2: large transport vessels where the owners want a lot of data on what's going on for security reasons. $5k/month and you can have trusted security people keeping a watch over a few dozen cameras 24/7, so you know the crew is doing they job. A bit dystopian but I'd bet there's a market for it.
alariccole 4y ago
So now all the pieces are in place for the wealthy to survive on their yachts while the rest of us burn up from climate change.
atlgator 4y ago
Anyone try to get dishy through the luggage check on a cruise yet?
lettergram 4y ago
How about we stop sending starlink to Ukraine, deploying it across the worlds oceans and give it to us here in Tennessee who’ve been waiting over a year on the waiting list.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Haha. Nopes.
scubazealous 4y ago
I know some commercial fishermen in California and noticed they like to post on social media while at sea. I asked and it turns out they for the most part can get LTE coverage a good distance offshore, to the point that while dragging nets in water 10,000 ft deep they still can use their phone. The cell signals travel much further over water compared to over land. I will ask one of them for an idea of how far they get when they lose coverage and edit when I hear back. He is on the boat now.
- pdc56 4y ago
  I lived and worked full time on a boat for many years. The answer to your question is in three parts: 1 - normal cell hand held phone use, you can often get (patchy) reception up to 15 (more sometimes) nautical miles off shore if lucky. 2 - setup a wifi hotspot on your phone and pull it up the mast. Range increases, i'm not sure how much to, but at 15nm the reception is good. Can work out further too, i've been on the far side of the channel islands in CA and had (poor) reception 3 - device with directional antenna up the mast - I always intended to do this but never did. I expect probably can get genuinely good coverage at 20nm out, maybe a bit more
jcoder 4y ago
Starlink Maritime allows you to connect from the most remote waters across the world checks map, it’s literally the least-remote waters possible. Why does an actually innovative company feel the need to do this.
caymanjim 4y ago
Everyone is assuming this caters to the rich yacht owner. While I'm sure that's a component of the target market, there are also plenty of other customers. Commercial fishing boats, coastal freighters, offshore oil platforms, cruise ships, various charter vessels, etc. It'd be worth it for a lot of businesses. And once it's available in the middle of the ocean, an enormous armada of freight vessels. $5k/mo is nothing for many of those commercial customers, both for improved logistics and metrics gathering and for keeping the employees/guests happy.
- tylergetsay 4y ago
  Royal Carribean just rolled them out
- pclark 4y ago
  as most boat owners can attest, $5k is a literal drop in the bucket of owning a boat.
Pakdef 4y ago
It probably cost Starlink about the same to provide a link to a home or mobile link? seems wayyy overpriced @ $5k/month for a boat
diimdeep 4y ago
Anyone got ideas whether sattelites like Starlink can be used for military purposes or SigInt? Snowden revelations about goverment agencies and military contracts in Musk companies, one could imagine...
londons_explore 4y ago
Eventually they will enable inter-satellite links. But they could also quite easily support global coverage by bouncing data off other users dishes. The latency would be a bit higher and the service reliability a bit lower, but I would guess the result would still be far better than alternatives for maritime comms. I'm actually really surprised they haven't done this already - it seems like something they could easily support, and it means they could deploy to anywhere in the world with mere hours notice, at least for a basic level of service. Imagine the possibility of a demo sitting in the office of say the telecoms minister of venezuela... "So today, we have no infrastructure in your country. But we have something we'd like permission to deploy. Do you give us permission to transmit to your office to give it a demo? Yes. [Nods to engineer who types a few commands...]. Okay, it's enabled. Here it is working - this is the internet your citizens can get anywhere in the country tomorrow if you give us approval."
bvoq 4y ago
YES! I've been waiting for this. Current starlink systems are a) region-locked (communicate to the same ground station) and b) require a still surface. This is great :-)

606 points by Yukonv 4y ago

Is anything know about the power consumption of the Starlink antenna? Does the maritime version use less power than the conventional unit? The fixed-location version of Starlink consumes around 60 to 100 W constantly which is problem if you want to e.g. use solar panels on a sail boat to supply the device.

Johnythree 4y ago
Most off-grid solar users simply switch it off when not in use.
simplecto 4y ago
You probably would not run it 24x7 on a boat.
- brk 4y ago
  You probably would. At that price point they are targeting boats that are going to have multiple gensets, and be carrying 1,000+ gallons of fuel. The additional load of the Starlink, relative to the chillers, water makers, and other onboard systems would be nothing.
rngname22 4y ago
If you can afford $5000 a month for internet maybe you're more likely on a Silent 60 (17 kWp solar) than a Catalina 30.
- dzhiurgis 4y ago
  FWIW if they ever to offer 10 Mb/s plans for ~$150/mo, the power use becomes a question again.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Not really. You won't run it all the time on a cruising yacht. Just when you need it. You probably don't care about having internet constantly under passage just for short times to get weather and to send out updates to friends and family.
    - dzhiurgis 4y ago
      At 50-100W you might not, that's close to what your fridge uses. Make it 10-20W and it becomes no brainer to keep always on.
scrumper 4y ago
I think at those prices you'd have a boat big enough to have the power budget. It's clearly aimed at commercial or scientific use with a side of super yacht. I'm guessing a more affordable version more like the RV product will become available for cruising sailors in time. I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > I think the mammoth price delta over RV is because it'll be usable offshore (starting Q4 this year) and presumably that requires some more complex satellite-to-satellite data exchange (which at a guess they want to limit usage of until it works well. Sure, just like Tesla Autopilot is right around the corner, Starship will be flying this year, the Cybertruck has been released 2 years ago etc.
  - dreamcompiler 4y ago
    This is different. The problem of providing offshore satcom with LEOsats is a quantified engineering problem. IOW, the industry knows quite well what technologies will solve the problem and Starlink has those technologies in place. The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be. None of that is true for the self-driving car problem. That problem still contains a multitude of unknowns, including unknown unknowns. Cybertruck is yet another kind of problem. I don't know what the issue with that is but I'd guess it's about manufacturing capacity.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      > The only unknown is how fast, accurate, and reliable the laser-based intersat comms will be. Those communications are still an unsolved and hugely difficult engineering problem. It will be awesome if SpaceX has actually achieved this: getting the kind of precision required to communicate over direct laser links between specks of dust hundreds of km apart traveling at thousands of km per hour is no easy feat.
usrn 4y ago
If you're set up for electric propulsion that's not too bad. That plus my work machine would be under half what a properly sized motor should draw at 50% throttle. It only needs to work for ~6-7 hours a day.
joeyh 4y ago
You can approximately half the power consumption by eliminating starlink's wifi router and using a DC POE injector to power the square terminal. I have not done it yet but have seen others report ~30 watts.
virtuallynathan 4y ago
Current dishy is 30-40W under normal operating conditions, i’d assume a bit less than double for the twice-as-large dish.

kordlessagain 4y ago

Only $5k a month! What a bargain.

happytiger 4y ago
Yea, I found the price point really disappointing. This only makes sense for large commercial users - leaves cruisers and small commercial customers high and dry.
- mrep 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't try and at least segment commercial pricing versus personal. I cannot imagine many people with personal boats under like 60 feet would stomach 5k a month for internet and there are far far more boats under 60 feet than ones bigger than that (At least in chicago harbors where I am at).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  I wonder what Inmarsat or Viasat bill for comparable service and terminals.
extheat 4y ago
Definitely subsidizing the losses in the consumer business. Without Starship Starlink is on a path to bankruptcy like the companies that came before.
- elif 4y ago
  Please share your math. At $15M to launch 50 v1 satellites costing $250k each to build, they are looking at $320k per satellite At $110/mo with 500k customers, they can afford to launch roughly 170 satellites per month. That is about break-even for their average launch cadence over the last 3 months.
  - 4y ago

leuty 4y ago

That's awesome!

shmerl 4y ago

That price...

holoduke 4y ago

How cool would it be to create a very small solar powered vessel sailing around the world with a live cam feed on it.

Jemm 4y ago

Went to order because it sounds great. $10,000. Nope

Maursault 4y ago

This is great, because I've always wanted to surf the Internet while using the toilet on my yacht sailing around the ocean. Now all I need's a yacht and the great blue sea.

deleted 4y ago

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adingus 4y ago

"$5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals." wow! Why cant you just take your normal starlink with you on your boat? Don't people do that with RVs?

pigtailgirl 4y ago
https://www.starlink.com/rv https://www.starlink.com/rv -- If I had to guess part of the reason would maybe be carrying capacity - a house that doesn't move is predictable - RVs & boats move so the per satellite bandwidth predictability of that class of object is lower - i think meaning the requirements for redundancy are higher - redundancy is expensive? - just a guess --
- cronix 4y ago
  Starlink RV is only currently meant to be used while stationary and can't track while in motion, which is why the hardware is identical to the home unit. They're supposed to be coming out with new hardware that allows use while in motion. It was only a week ago that the FCC approved the application for "vehicles in motion."[1] It will be on airplanes as well, soon. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/fcc-approves-spacex-starlink-service-to-vehicles-boats-planes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/fcc-approves-spacex-starlink...
  - vl 4y ago
    What I really want is hardware that is mounted on RV roof and can be deployed and folded with a press of a button. While I don't care if it works in motion, I do care about setup convenience, and I'm not getting current version because setting it up is just too cumbersome. Or even better: just flat beam-forming antenna on the RV roof. Once thing there is enough on the roof is space.
    - jpgvm 4y ago
      Yeah would be possible with a larger antenna that has a wider FOV. The current dish has too narrow a FOV to simply recess it into the roof/enclosure unfortunately.

_Microft 4y ago

The maritime coverage map shows coastal coverage around countries with inland coverage right now, i.e. they are bouncing the connection via one of their satellites to a nearby groundstation. Starting in Q4/2022 they want to cover mid-latitudes around the globe. That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? (This is a bit surprising - on one hand, this step extends coverage towards higher and lower latitudes but on the other hand not as much as they already have inland-coverage (cf. Brazil). It also extends longitudinally around all of the globe?). Coverage above mid-latitudes requires satellites in polar orbits to join the network. (Their non-polar orbits have an inclination of 53° which means that satellites go no further north or south than that (plus a bit whatever their range is)). https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map....

roflyear 4y ago
Yeah I don't see this getting pushed back at all lol
wumpus 4y ago
There's a polar shell and there's a 70 degree shell, both with lasers, in addition to the 2 ~53 degree shells.
BurningFrog 4y ago
> That might mean that they plan to enable inter-satellite links then? Or maybe they'll have stationary ships with "ground"-stations until the inter-satellite thing is working.
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  That wouldn't solve the problem. Those ships would still need a backhaul.
  - sathackr 4y ago
    If they stationed them near the edge of current coverage, the ship could be the inter-satellite link until the actual inter-satellite links are working.

zeristor 4y ago

No Antarctica? They could show that there are no plans for Antarctica, not just ignore it.

swarnie 4y ago
Antarctica is maybe 4000 people and some penguin shit. Why does it matter if they are covered or not?
- RockRobotRock 4y ago
  Pretty sure it was a joke.
  - swarnie 4y ago
    Its very hard to tell on this website.
  - zeristor 4y ago
    It’s land, isn’t it? I thought there were plans for polar orbiting Starlink satellites to cover polar bases. Even so it should be a map of the full planet

moralestapia 4y ago

The writing is on the wall. RIP Garmin, Iridium, etc... As to why it is expensive? Well, they did their homework and found out is a lucrative market (one doesn't need a lot of hindsight for that, though).

p_j_w 4y ago
Garmin and Iridium will still sell well with the people who are cruising in relatively low cost sailboats. These people can't afford $5000/mo just for internet access.
roflyear 4y ago
People with a go or inreach aren't going to buy this lol
10u152 4y ago
Garmin doesn’t operate a satellite network. They produce devices and on sell subscriptions to other satellite services. This won’t really impact them at all. They could pivot to use another network if it becomes more feasible.

yardie 4y ago

"$5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals." Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income. In other terms, Iridium Go is still the best value around and truly global for the time being.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ok_dad 4y ago
> Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income. More like: commercial and military vessels
- yardie 4y ago
  You can already get these speeds on Ku-band satellites, just higher latency, with real global coverage.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Commercial and military vessels have contracts with Iridium/Inmarsat etc for mission critical stuff. An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
  - baq 4y ago
    Neither iridium nor Inmarsat provides capabilities of starlink: low latency, high bandwidth, asat-resistant, jamming-resistant infrastructure, all this proven in a real world conflict. They are ‘only’ missing coverage. Military will pay top dollar for this, Musk is in the name-his-price territory here. It’s become mission critical overnight. If they manage to cover the full globe, you’ll see the DoD quietly spending billions to have access and more billions to deny any other military the option.

Cyberdog 4y ago

The second sentence in the paragraph at the top of the home page is pricing. Bravo. All web sites selling a product should make the pricing this prominent. At the least, have a pricing page with actual prices on it and not a "Call us for pricing" call to inaction. Me spending time on your site researching a product which turns out to be out of my price range is just wasting your time and mine, and I don't like you when you waste my time.

notahacker 4y ago
Not if you're loading from a UK IP they don't (I'm assume they geotarget pricing; the non-maritime pages display prices in GBP and the maritime just gives a max download speed) Not all products are as much of a commodity as bandwidth.
WJW 4y ago
This is something SpaceX does extremely well in general. Check out https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ for example: fill in your orbit, payload mass and earliest launch date and it will give you a quote. This is to me the gold standard of what I would love to have (but is remarkably difficult to get) from any industrial supplier.
- infthi 4y ago
  Looks like they have finally caught up with ULA : ) https://www.rocketbuilder.com/start/configure https://www.rocketbuilder.com/start/configure went up in 2016
- macintux 4y ago
  It’s amazing we’ve reached the point where that’s possible.
- geekrax 4y ago
  Wow! A form to send a payload to space is faster to fill than sending an envelope through USPS.
Flankk 4y ago

mytailorisrich 4y ago

Service for airplanes coming soon, too, apparently.

zanethomas 4y ago

I recently acquired Starlink RV for my camper van. Camped out at Lake Powell with zero cellphone and 85mbs of internet!

oxplot 4y ago
With WiFi Calling feature of recent phones, you should also be able to send and receive phone calls/SMS as usual too. Tried this on my camping trip to great effect.

hsnewman 4y ago

That's affordable!

niico 4y ago

I wonder if i can expense this as my WFH setup

xoa 4y ago

Always a treat to see the urban HN crowd comment with great confidence on anything outside of their immediate area. While hopefully eventually SpaceX will bring this down and be more disruptive, right now they simply cannot possibly meet demand, they are very rightfully anxious to get revenue going for Starlink, they're in a completely unique level of performance for maritime, and HELLO FOLKS, here is a taste of what actual maritime internet costs, quoting myself from elsewhere: A BGAN terminal like an Inmarsat 9202 is ~$3k, which gets you capability of around 450 kbps. Something like an Iridium can bring that to 700 kbps for a ~$5k. Want multimegabit? No problem, KVH will be happy to help with something like a TracPhone for a mere $18000-50000! And then you pay a mere $5/megabyte, or you can get a monthly plan and save! SD 1........ 0-20MB ............... $79.90/mo SD 2........ 21-100MB ............. $275.00/mo SD 3........ 101-250MB ............ $470.00/mo SD 4........ 251-500MB ............ $775.00/mo SD 5........ 501-1,000MB .......... $1,1150.00/mo SD 6........ 1,001-5,000MB ........ $2,295.00/mo SD 7........ 5,001-10,000MB ....... $3,000.00/mo SD 8........ 10,000-Unlimited ..... $4,300.00/mo Keeping mind this will have 500-1500+ms latency as well. This is what they are competing against. They're offering 2x terminals for this, probably based on those $2500 heavier duty much bigger business class ones, and they have to have at least some consideration for hardening vs saltwater which is the great destroyer of all things. Since I don't see any particular stabilization platform like others use my assumption is they're making use of 2x and electronic steering to maintain constant contact, though they may well have some additional sensors in there or interfacing capability with a ship's gyrocompass. But at any rate this looks extremely competitive once the full intersat mesh rolls out, and it's interesting to see hard numbers on that. While it'd have been cool if they could have launched something suitable for users right down to sailboats (officially vs unofficial use of residential ones), I doubt that'd be the right business decision until well after they have v2 flying on Starship for a while. What they're charging actually doesn't even seem to put much if any premium on the massive bandwidth advantage and flat out beating fiber optic in latency over enough distance. Plenty of businesses will be interested in this. And while sure no doubt it'll become standard on rich yachts, think more serious cargo shipping, oil/gas drilling platforms, etc. SpaceX themselves will be eager to dogfood this and have already been doing so for their drone ships, but they have plans for refurbing old platforms into Starship sea launch as well. The military will absolutely be very interested if they aren't deep into discussion already. I could see a major premium being charged there for priority in ports or other congested areas, maybe even special hardware. Also having the mesh up also means a lot of other cool stuff, from coverage to remote islands or other areas for which no close ground station is feasible to special low latency intercontinental offerings on land (HFT and enterprises may be interested in).

master-12 4y ago

Beware, their price automatically switches to local currency based on IP address, but keeps the $ sign. It's not that expensive.

dibujante 4y ago

$5000 a month? That's pretty embarrassing, isn't it? That indicates they aren't doing satellite-to-satellite and are using some kind of specialized hardware to simply send the signal to coastal satellites from farther away.

themodelplumber 4y ago
Or maybe it's the Tesla Roadster of this particular long-term plan. Some scoff, others wait for the price on the upcoming tier that's not quite 350 Mbps...
lxgr 4y ago
Compared to what? Inmarsat is the only viable alternative for smaller boats that offers unlimited data plans, has higher latency due to being geostationary, much lower bandwidth, and charges about $8000 for a gigabyte… I‘m not sure what Ku or Ka band GEO providers charge, but I doubt you can find anything competitive there either, and these require very large antennas.
- dibujante 4y ago
  Compared to what their architecture should enable. Sure, it's more satellites consumed per request but there aren't _that_ many satellites between some random point in the Pacific and the nearest base station. Certainly seems like it's not scaling that well if the price jumps from ~$120 to $5000.
  - lxgr 4y ago
    It seems more of a question of supply and demand than a limitation of their technology. If the competition currently charges more than $5000, why should they charge (much) less?
- sithadmin 4y ago
  Considering the coverage map is mostly coastal waters, private LTE and 5g are the 'budget' competition (for now). In some areas like the Gulf of Mexico, a not insignificant portion of the water is serviced by LTE that you can roam onto using a conventional TMobile, Sprint or AT&T SIM, often without an additional cost.

elif 4y ago

Wow they are now clearly selling a product that depends upon starlink 2.0 satellites which depend upon starship for launch. Starship tests haven't even attempted a static fire on their launch platform let alone a stacked launch attempt. Not to mention, their launch calculations include re-use based upon a completely invented and also untested catching apparatus. Talk about going all in...

ianschmitz 4y ago
Do you have a citation for them being too big for SpaceX’s current rocket lineup? Very curious about this
- elif 4y ago
  Elon on everyday astronaut: "Falcon neither has the volume nor the mass [to] orbit capability required for Starlink 2.0," Musk said.
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    It's not clear to me whether this means physically or economically; i.e., could the 2.0 satellites be put into orbit by Falcon but not at a cost that would make it worth it?
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      It is always a mistake to assume his tweets mean anything specific. He means they won't be launching 2.0 birds on Falcon, full stop. Reasons are slippery things.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Musk companies have a habit of going all in, then claiming they didn't when the bill comes due. So far it has worked, but I wouldn't bet on the coverage expanding much for the next 2 years.
- 4y ago

dboreham 4y ago

Going to need a bigger boat.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pugworthy 4y ago

I would have killed for this back in the 80's and 90's working on oceanographic research ships...

deleted 4y ago
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elromulous 4y ago

$5,000 a month, and $10,000 initial hardware costs? So basically a product for cruise ships and $100M+ millionaires?

williamcotton 4y ago
And countless commercial vessels!

obloid 4y ago

I've been looking forward to marine starlink with the thought of being able to work remotely while sailing. Then I saw the pricing! I guess they're aiming for the megayacht crowd not average shmoes on small boats. Interestingly it does look like people are putting starlink on sailboats with ok results: https://www.reddit.com/r/SailboatCruising/comments/vovaxs/starlink_in_the_med_update_2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SailboatCruising/comments/vovaxs/st...

McAtNite 4y ago
I’ve been doing the same, and I was personally hoping it would follow the same standard price + $30 that the RV crowd has gotten. I’m pretty disappointed with the cost, and I would fear that they’ll use geolocation to force you to maritime billing if they detect you’re on a boat. It looks like my sailboat remote life is still on hold for the time being.
lbrindze 4y ago
I worked remote while sailing. my personal advice.... cruising is relatively cheap once you leave the dock. turn off your computer and go sail a while and plan on taking contracts during extended periods in port. Also having packed a few offshore miles at this point... I have never had much luck being productive doing "work" while actually on passage. The ocean has a funny way of sticking to its own agenda anyway, despite our best plans. Most of your time cruising is hanging on the anchor anyway. Depending on where you are there is pretty decent cell coverage a lot of places, or hotel wifis you can get from your anchorage.
- Stevvo 4y ago
  I'm doing it an a mono-hull right now. I have not tried to work on passage, but I think it would be totally doable on a cat where you could sit relatively stable and keep a watch while working.
ShakataGaNai 4y ago
Depending on the type of sailing you do, probably can get away with using the RV service. If you're sailing within their current maritime coverage map https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map.... you're just using the direct CPE-Starlink-Uplink Station connection. Provided you're still in that coverage cell, there is really no difference to the entire system if you're 10 miles from shore inland or at sea.

paulsutter 4y ago

Genius price segmentation. Of course it costs them little more to provide the service than for home users on land, but easily worth the 50x higher price for this market The Starlink IPO will provide hundreds of billions in funding for Starship and Mars

deleted 4y ago
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SergeAx 4y ago

Starlink RV is $135/m and looks exactly the same. I wonder what happens if I put one on the boat? Will Starlink turn it off for usage violation?

stephbu 4y ago
Seems unlikely, more probable is that you’ll have other problems. I suspect there are other differences in the equipment and service delivery to tolerate ocean conditions.
dreamcompiler 4y ago
Don't know, but it will definitely stop working once you get a few miles off shore in an ocean. That requires intersat communications which the RV plan doesn't provide. (Inland lakes should work fine except perhaps for the very biggest ones like Lake Superior or the Caspian Sea. If lakes don't work with the RV plan, it's not for any technical reason.)
- oxplot 4y ago
  > That requires intersat communications which the RV plan doesn't provide. Intersat (laser links) comms is not available at the moment. Fairly sure they simply geofence non-maritime accounts. As you can see from the maritime map, it only covers water next to the shore which is a good indicator that they still use ground stations directly to provide service. EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.

tengbretson 4y ago

I find it entertaining that Jeff Bezos is the ideal customer for this service.

tigerBL00D 4y ago

$5K a month? The dream of affordable internet at sea will have to wait. Bummer. I expected a disruption from SpaceX.

sillysaurusx 4y ago

Can anyone explain how the ping is so low on starlink? I always assumed satellite internet was always going to be inferior for online gaming, but everything I find online says that starlink is great for it. I guess I don’t have a specific question. It’s just one of those engineering marvels that I never thought I’d see. No wires, but still frag people at <90ms ping.

shmerl 4y ago
Ping depends on physical distance and quality of the signal. Low orbit satellites are much closer to Earth than geostationary ones. So latency is lower as well. And in space itself signal travels between nodes faster than through any cable.
joewadcan 4y ago
The Starlink satellites orbit closer to the earth than other comms satellites (iridium, oneweb). Closer distance = faster times, in addition to laser links between sats and other spectrum differences. Downside to lower orbit means they won't last as long (a few years) before they are pulled down into earth's atmo. Which is fine since their rocket company will just send up some more cheaply.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  In theory, the laser links may bring Starlink below terrestrial latency for point to point communications beyond a certain distance. Light travels through fiber at 7/10ths of the speed of light, but pretty much the actual speed of light through a vacuum. Once you get past the 340km * 2 round trip on both ends, you're actually moving bits around much faster than is physically possible with fiber. Probably even faster than that considering that fiber optic backbone isn't a straight line between you and your destination.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Chances are, you, dear reader, will not get any of this sweet, sweet, low latency. Most likely these laser links only go from each satellite to the one ahead and the one behind, in the same orbit. That is good enough. For example, there is an orbit that goes right over New York, London, and Hamburg. Who wants low latency most is hedge funds. It would be surprising if Starlink did not make anyone who wants it pay through the nose to get traffic one millisecond faster than fiber, 100x that for 2ms, 100x that for 3ms, and on up for longer links. What they would really be buying is not so much getting their own packets N milliseconds ahead of the fiber crowd, which is OK, but rather for their slightly poorer competitors to get packets only N-1 milliseconds ahead, which is super-great. In fintech, they like to say a microsecond is an eon, a millisecond an eternity. When they can get a millisecond jump on the competition, that can mean millions of dollars every day. So, they will pay it. Gladly.

bexail 4y ago

I have the regular $600 hardware and $135/month on my live-aboard sailboat on Sea of Cortez. Happy to answer any questions if you are considering getting one for your boat or RV.

aml183 4y ago

I work in the space industry and follow SATCOM closely. This is a very competitive space. Companies like Viasat, Iridium and Inmarsat already work in this vertical. SpaceX beats all these companies from a marketing perspective, but the big question is will a LEO operator provide better coverage than a GEO operator?

fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
I’ve done work video calls using my friend’s starlink wifi on a remote mountain, and it’s unlimited bandwidth so this didn’t cost anything beyond the flat $110 monthly fee. Are geosynchronous services even capable of doing the bandwidth and latency needed for a two-way video call? And if so, how much would it cost?
- jonah 4y ago
  Yes, they can do it - my parents have Hughes satellite internet. I've been able to do multi-person video calls from their house. It's pretty low bandwidth though 40Mbps or so claimed I think and something like 50Gb/Month data cap. It was faster and cheaper to tether to my cell phone while working from their house.
  - lxgr 4y ago
    Out of curiosity – why don't your parents use fixed 4G or 5G internet in that case?
    - jonah 4y ago
      Good question. They may not be aware of it. Though I did talk with one of their neighbors who mentioned they had it.
      - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
        4G and 5G modems can be a really solid solution if you point an antenna at the tower.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I have a friend who used to live in the Outer Hebrides islands. I called it his "God-Forsaken Scottish Rock." Fairly bleak place, and he had crap Internet service. Looks like his [former] place is ... juuuuusssst ... out of band.

aerovistae 4y ago

$5000 a month? Who is this for? I'm a little confused. Seems like even the military would be reluctant at that price point, let alone private boat owners who aren't multimillionaires.

Stevvo 4y ago
It's for those vessels already paying $5000+ a month for inferior service. I'm a coastal cruiser myself; obviously I will use the RV package on my boat.
SkyPuncher 4y ago
People who own $1M plus boats. This isn't for ski-boats at the local lake.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Way more than than. Think $10m+ boats.
Johnny555 4y ago
While I agree that the military would be unlikely to use this civilian service on warships, it's not because of the price where $5000 would be a rounding error in the operational cost of the ship. I see this more for commercial operators, like the Ferry between Seattle and Victoria BC - they could sell high speed internet for $10/trip and make a profit if they can sell it to 500 passengers/month.
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dingosity 4y ago

Just curious. Does anyone know anyone who has received their terminal who is not a SpaceX employee or opted for Mobile/RV? I keep hearing about how they're being deployed, but the only people I know who have received their terminals are SpaceX employees or people who agreed to the more expensive Mobile/RV service.

oceanplexian 4y ago
I'm using it full time and received mine in October 2021
rythmshifter 4y ago
Yes. I do, someone in south east Michigan.
adra 4y ago
I was visiting some rural family in Alberta Canada and there's a bunch of them running with starlink setups now. I feel they're prioritizing rural first because there isn't really service to compete with / target demographic?
- jpgvm 4y ago
  Yeah, their product compares very favourably to competition in rural but I suspect the other reason is density. They don't have enough satellites with enough bandwidth to provide high speeds for a lot of people in a small area (like a city) but the more spread out their customers are the more efficiently they make use of their fast moving satellites.
smoldesu 4y ago
I received mine in the first batch, have been using it for ~a year now. Have used it for everything from 4K Netflix to gaming to work, ama I guess. My experience has been overall good relative to the rest of the options in this space (most other companies are still offering limited 500kbps/high-latency plans for twice as much), but you can definitely still push it hard enough to reveal that it's still satellite internet underneath. It's worth it if your other options are HughesNet or a data-capped WISP.

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AtNightWeCode 4y ago

Sounds cool. Btw. The person who came up with the rebranding of linear pricing as “pay as you go” should get the Noble prize in marketing.

la64710 4y ago

All the commercial planes should be equipped with one so that we never have another case of plane lost in the sea.

andrew_ 4y ago

We still need a 12v solution for the peasants that boat offshore. The current monthly fee represents a full year of boat payments. Definitely not targeted at consumers.

oittaa 4y ago
I think the "rv model" supports 12V. It's not officially supported on moving vessels by SpaceX, but you can find a lot of Youtube videos where people have installed terminals on their boats.
oxplot 4y ago
You can easily use an inverter to go from 12v to 110V/240V and just use the stock adapter. Alternatively, you can get your hands dirty and do what I did [1]. However, I'm fairly certain that the non-maritime accounts won't be able to use the service on water (most likely geofenced) so that Starlink can sell their maritime version. [1]: https://blog.oxplot.com/powering-starlink-on-the-go-with-tesla-model-3/ https://blog.oxplot.com/powering-starlink-on-the-go-with-tes... EDIT: looks like it's not geofenced based on some other people's comments who've been using the standard terminal on boats.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Maybe....maybe not... It depends if it will work using the new sat tech if it ever comes out. As it stands you just have a different (I wouldn't even say better) version of 4g....

O__________O 4y ago

Know next to nothing about dynamics and constraints of maritime SatCom, but... Seen number of comments about the costs, but honestly wondered why the “one-time hardware cost of $10,000 for two high performance terminals” could not be replaced with a hand mounted cheaper DIY rig using the existing Starlink terminals. Guessing, though might be wrong, that Starlink already has this happen using the existing coastal coverage. On the same note, guess most people don’t need 24/7 connections. Why not just charge 0.33 a min, which would still be a 3x over the $5000 month rate and enable Starlink to extend further into the market. Any thoughts on why this would not make sense aside from whatever Starlink’s biases & business objectives are?

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mabbo 4y ago
> Any thoughts on why this would not make sense aside from whatever Starlink’s biases & business objectives are? I suspect the market here is not individuals that want to browse YouTube and check their email. Market 1: large multi person vessels like cruise ships. At any time someone wants to use the internet, and the ship can 'sublet' out a 2Mbit subset on an time basis. Market 2: large transport vessels where the owners want a lot of data on what's going on for security reasons. $5k/month and you can have trusted security people keeping a watch over a few dozen cameras 24/7, so you know the crew is doing they job. A bit dystopian but I'd bet there's a market for it.

alariccole 4y ago

So now all the pieces are in place for the wealthy to survive on their yachts while the rest of us burn up from climate change.

atlgator 4y ago

Anyone try to get dishy through the luggage check on a cruise yet?

lettergram 4y ago

How about we stop sending starlink to Ukraine, deploying it across the worlds oceans and give it to us here in Tennessee who’ve been waiting over a year on the waiting list.

ncmncm 4y ago
Haha. Nopes.

scubazealous 4y ago

I know some commercial fishermen in California and noticed they like to post on social media while at sea. I asked and it turns out they for the most part can get LTE coverage a good distance offshore, to the point that while dragging nets in water 10,000 ft deep they still can use their phone. The cell signals travel much further over water compared to over land. I will ask one of them for an idea of how far they get when they lose coverage and edit when I hear back. He is on the boat now.

pdc56 4y ago
I lived and worked full time on a boat for many years. The answer to your question is in three parts: 1 - normal cell hand held phone use, you can often get (patchy) reception up to 15 (more sometimes) nautical miles off shore if lucky. 2 - setup a wifi hotspot on your phone and pull it up the mast. Range increases, i'm not sure how much to, but at 15nm the reception is good. Can work out further too, i've been on the far side of the channel islands in CA and had (poor) reception 3 - device with directional antenna up the mast - I always intended to do this but never did. I expect probably can get genuinely good coverage at 20nm out, maybe a bit more

jcoder 4y ago

Starlink Maritime allows you to connect from the most remote waters across the world checks map, it’s literally the least-remote waters possible. Why does an actually innovative company feel the need to do this.

caymanjim 4y ago

Everyone is assuming this caters to the rich yacht owner. While I'm sure that's a component of the target market, there are also plenty of other customers. Commercial fishing boats, coastal freighters, offshore oil platforms, cruise ships, various charter vessels, etc. It'd be worth it for a lot of businesses. And once it's available in the middle of the ocean, an enormous armada of freight vessels. $5k/mo is nothing for many of those commercial customers, both for improved logistics and metrics gathering and for keeping the employees/guests happy.

tylergetsay 4y ago
Royal Carribean just rolled them out
pclark 4y ago
as most boat owners can attest, $5k is a literal drop in the bucket of owning a boat.

Pakdef 4y ago

It probably cost Starlink about the same to provide a link to a home or mobile link? seems wayyy overpriced @ $5k/month for a boat

diimdeep 4y ago

Anyone got ideas whether sattelites like Starlink can be used for military purposes or SigInt? Snowden revelations about goverment agencies and military contracts in Musk companies, one could imagine...

londons_explore 4y ago

Eventually they will enable inter-satellite links. But they could also quite easily support global coverage by bouncing data off other users dishes. The latency would be a bit higher and the service reliability a bit lower, but I would guess the result would still be far better than alternatives for maritime comms. I'm actually really surprised they haven't done this already - it seems like something they could easily support, and it means they could deploy to anywhere in the world with mere hours notice, at least for a basic level of service. Imagine the possibility of a demo sitting in the office of say the telecoms minister of venezuela... "So today, we have no infrastructure in your country. But we have something we'd like permission to deploy. Do you give us permission to transmit to your office to give it a demo? Yes. [Nods to engineer who types a few commands...]. Okay, it's enabled. Here it is working - this is the internet your citizens can get anywhere in the country tomorrow if you give us approval."

bvoq 4y ago

YES! I've been waiting for this. Current starlink systems are a) region-locked (communicate to the same ground station) and b) require a still surface. This is great :-)