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[jshackles]

Welcome to the NeoGAF Starlink |OT|. Here we can talk about all things Starlink - satellite launches, personal experiences, related tech news, industry implications, and more.

What is Starlink?
Starlink is a satellite internet service created by SpaceX. The goal is to use satellites that are much closer to the Earth than traditional (geosynchronous) satellites, that will provide connections at faster speed and much lower latency.

Starlink

High-speed internet. Available almost anywhere on Earth.

www.starlink.com

Satellite Tracking
There are many projects that track the current location of Starlink satellites.

Starlink satellite tracker

Live view of SpaceX starlink satellite constellation and coverage.

satellitemap.space

How fast is it?
Starlink's current ongoing beta boasts speeds from 50Mbps to 150Mbps, with some customers reporting over 200Mbps. Uplink speeds are typically slower, but still achieve between 5Mbps to 35Mbps. As more satellites are launched and as the technology improves, speeds are projected to increase. The current goal (which is likely for business clients) is a maximum of throughput of 10Gbps.

What's Included?
Beta hardware has been going out to select invitees, and includes the dish itself along with a PoE (Power over Ethernet) adapter and a Starlink branded router.



How much does it cost?
The satellite dish kit is $500 (+$50 shipping), and the service is currently $99 per month.

 

[Insane Metal]

All hail Elon Musk

 

[Kenpachii]

more pollution in the sky,

 

[jshackles]

more pollution in the sky,

Not sure if joking or not...

These satellites are put into naturally decaying orbits. If for whatever reason SpaceX goes out of business and/or these sats go unmaintained for whatever reason, they will simply burn up in the Earth's atmosphere within a matter of years. Each sat is equipped with ion thrusters for maneuvering, so they could even be manually (naturally) destroyed as well. This is a massive improvement over simply launching satellites into geosynchronous orbit thousands of miles up with no plan whatsoever to decommission them in the future.

If you're talking about light pollution, after the first launch in 2019 SpaceX started coating the underside of each satellite with non-reflective materials that eliminates reflectivity to the naked eye so that we don't have thousands of "new stars" in the sky at night.

 

[jshackles]

 

[jshackles]

My Starlink dish shipped today, and tracking it online says it'll arrive tomorrow.

I'll post my impressions and whatnot when I hook it up this weekend.

 

[Tesseract]

i'll try it out when i can, probably make the leap once things stabilize

those speeds are pretty good