I haven’t been following this at all, how does it fit with Safe, and make the network more resilient? Was also wondering if starlink changes how easy mesh networks are, if anyone has an idea?
In time the hope is these can be connected to regardless of borders. For now though we connect to a large network like this and ultimately bypass ISP’s, but in the meantime all our data is encrypted so should not be able to be censored or snooped.
[edit I meant to say, connecting those who cannot make use of the Internet etc. is a big issue and I hope these get us there]
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Speculation is that Tesla vehicles will start being equipped with mesh network technology to communicate, not only with each other, but to help facilitate faster Starlink speeds to route some traffic over local mesh networks instead of via satellite. The goal would be to eventually get all cars (not just Tesla) communicating on this mesh network to more easily facilitate self driving cars, and to make a ubiquitous mesh network.
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That was with the laser links off. With them on it increases to 10gbs. If upload increases correspondingly it would be 100mbs. And thought I read that ping drops to sub 10ms or 1ms. Also they are going after mobile. I think all this is why Amazon tried to block the drop to lower orbits as it portends lower latency, IOT, real time robots with more cloud assist- and the bandwith to spread into interior spaces in urban locals and mesh with the cars as centers of non duplicative compute power. US telcos tried trying to block as well because their complacency didn’t see the trojan horse coming.
I think its why Bezos announced he is stepping down as CEO at Amazon to focus on Blu Origin.
SpaceX has been such a black hole of momentum for competitors I think its why upstarts in astroid mining yielded to acquisitions and mothballing. Looks like Starlink not only helps fund mars and will help liquidate a bunch of corporate criminal laggard public nuissence garbage like Comcast-AT&T–Verizon but will also get SpaceX to to the golden asteroid Psyche16 first with its trillion x trillion $$ in minerals and per Musk fuel the next gift to his army of activist retail investors.
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Wouldn’t Starlink put all internet traffic in the hands of Tesla? That could be the bases of something very totalitarian…
If everyone is on it, yeah, but that won’t happen. It’s just another way to avoid any country being able to cut the wires. One more option, and it could be what it takes to enable rural people in some places to participate.
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Each geographic cell has a limited number of max connections. As @dask indicated, it is most useful for rural, underserved areas.
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I got a beta Starlink offer, with pain in my heart I won’t make use of it. My current provider gives internet + tv for the cost of Starlink’s €99. It’s painful to not be able to support this progress at the moment 
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One of the best articles I’ve read about Starlink. Goes into more depth than most write-ups.
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Today I received an email asking me to complete my order by paying the balance.
After paying I received an email detailing the next steps and the important part was
Your Starlink Kit will arrive with everything you need to get online including your Starlink, WiFi router, cables and base. You will receive a separate email when your order ships, typically within 2 weeks
This means that it will be 1 year exactly from the offer to get starlink. Exact if I receive it within the week LOL.
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Nope. This technology makes sense only for remote places where digging to connect fiber is too expensive. There will always be atmospheric disturbances that will make Starlink not 100% reliable. Also I dont believe Starlink is able to connect as many people as they say, radio spectrum they have i s not unlimited and speed will go down with rising number of users.
1 ms is impossible, that would be faster than speed of light 
Starlink satellites are in 350 km orbit I think, that is 1.2 ms from you if the satellite is ideally positioned right above you, so more likely less say 2 ms. Data from you go to satellite than to base station (ideal condition where no hops between satellites are needed), that to destination server and than all this way back. This gives us 8 ms minimum roundtrip when server is at the base station and not counting any processing time on devices along the way. 10-20 ms real-life latency is best what they can do with this technology.
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There will be 3 major obit bands. The around 350Km is the lowest. The higher ones will see further around the globe and less sats needed for the signal to traverse the globe.
For Australia for instance our undersea fibre (one of) heads off to New Zealand then dog legs via to more major islands on the way to LA. So its not direct by any means, prob about 50% longer than perfectly direct across the surface.
Then the speed of light through the fibre is much slower than in a vacuum. Faster than electricity in copper (approx 2nS per foot) but slower than light in vacuum (1.02nS/foot)
Then there is the repeaters under the sea and the major routers in all the stop off points. I end up with 200+mS ping time to the US West coast. Its 70mS to the next capitol city which is the exit point to the undersea cable.
Starlink should reduce this dramatically because not only do I get reduced repeaters & routing, the signals travel at approx the speed of light in a vacuum. For my son to connect to a USA server for games the 70mS to the exit point (which is opposite direction to the USA) will pretty much disappear then its almost direct to USA (via a couple/few sats). Reduction in distance travelled, increased speed of transmission, less routing, less repeaters (sats now). The 1000 to 1500KM up/down is a very small distance compared to the around 10,000 KM “line of sight”. Not to mention the 50% further due to layout of cable etc. I expect the 200mS ping will reduce to around 100mS or less.
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Yes i know, this s interesting aspect. On the other hand fiber has almost unlimited capacity, multiple cables in parallel + WDM, and I doubt Starling will have enough capacity to act as a backbone.
The part about higher orbits is interesting and in space they may be able to achieve impressive speeds. Where I see weak link is ground to satellite communication, I have lot of experience working with 10+ Ghz high speed wireless links and higher speed means higher sensitivity to weather and everything. Maybe I am too pessimistic because I spent year fighting these problems 
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As you say it will be an interesting experiment. Will be a lot better than geosync satellites with their large delays and sensitivity to weather.
This summer has seen a lot of rain in my region which is not good for transmissions. Although there have been many sources (heresay since I have not researched it) that say certain frequencies are not so affected by rain. I know back in the 70’s the airforce would have to change radar frequencies during rain so they could “see” through the rain.
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There are two things that do most of the atmospheric attenuation - water and oxygen.
Oxygen is worst for frequencies around 60 GHz and doesnt change much. Short range 60Ghz communication is fine.
Water is different because fluid/wapor/ice acts different and another factor is particle size of fog/rain/snowing. Water droplets act different according to their size and can cause problems on different frequencies - thats why they have to finetune that radar for every rain.
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@peca one other thing in the starlink info they give is that your connection is location specific because the setup is like cells (as in mobile phones terms) and the satellites move from cell to cell. Instead of mobile phones where its the phone that moves from one cell to another, the end points make up the cell and the satellites move.
This would mean they are using time division multiplexing (I assume mobiles still do) and freq hopping.
Uplink is limited to like 30Mbps and down is limited to 150Mbps. These limits were set when they announced their premium of up to 500Mbps down and not sure of the up. Maybe 50 or 60Mbps.
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This is only temporary limitation, Musk himself said they plan to allow changing location and connecting from moving vehicles this year.
Details of this are dark magic for me, but with OFDM, Multi-user MIMO and large processing power it is possible to communicate with more than one client at the same time on same frequency. Not sure how Starlink does it, but for I have worked with this and it is able communicate with 7 different clients at the same time/frequency (one TDMA timeslot).
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Local mesh wi-fi networks/cells with Starlink ground stations for non-local access?
I for one am desperate to get away from the telco/ISP model but am wary of replacing the ISP with Musk.
A simple answer is for the government of any state to take under its control any and all trunk data comms within its territory. Submarine cables should be subject to agreed UN conventions and funded by suitable agreements.
Digital access, like power, water, education, health provision and transport should be owned and controlled by the citizens of the relevant state and no foreign/multinational parasites.
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It took Starlink a while to negotiate with the government in order to get a licence for the frequency slots to transmit on. The ground to satellite licence.
In order to get it they had to implement the data collection and storage of every packet to/from an Australian person. Starlink is the ISP.
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In relation to that I implemented the government recommendation of using measures to protect my identity. Obviously different departments don’t talk to each other LOL. Those measures include things like VPNs not using you real name etc. VPNs for instance make the data collection rather moot for the most part.
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