alt Hacker NewsHuh… I always thought direct satellite connection was one of the things that distinguished starlink from cellular tech like 4g or 5g, and that low earth orbit was what made it possible… what actually makes starlink different?
Edit: oh I think? I understand now, these basically relay the internet itself up to the satellites - so your individual starlink dish is still talking directly to a satellite but the satellite resolves your request for a website through these ground stations. I think?
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But the servers are not in space (yet), so the signal needs to come back down somewhere.
It is. But at some point traffic had to hit the ground to connect to other parts of the internet. That happens at these ground stations.
Their phase one was you have a dish that goes to a satellite, but then that bounces straight back down to a ground station. Phase two was to have satellite-to-satellite comms, which they're doing with lasers. I imagine either some satellites can't do this yet, so ground stations are still needed, or they are using the ground stations for something else.
the real difference is cash. they can afford literally hundred launches costing billions upfront and hundreds of millions in upkeep.
the original concept arts called for lazer beam sat2sat dynamic mesh relaying packets globally. that didn't quite happen.
what did happen was sats and terminals refreshed like tech products and not like military tanks. decades old standards are slow. all their competitors usd decades old everything.
their launch count is off by two digits. like 10x by reuse and stacked 10x by cash. that amount of cash appearing from somewhere is the difference.
All satellite based internet access works the same way… (mostly)
1) you send a signal to the satellite
2) the satellite relays the signal down to a ground station
3) from here your packets go out on the Internet like any other ISP
The answer then goes in reverse: back to the ground station, up to the satellite and down to your dish.
Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit. Older satellite internet companies operated in geosynchronous orbit. This meant they only needed one or two satellites to cover a large area. You also only needed a small number of ground stations. The satellite needs to be able to see your dish and the ground station at the same time. But this is very high up, so latency was horrible (the distance up and down before the packet even hits the internet). Bandwidth was also limited, but much less of an issue.
With low earth orbits, you have great latency. But, because you still need to be able to see the ground station and the customer’s dish, this means that you need more ground stations. This is just geometry.
Starlink adds one more feature that is relevant here - direct satellite to satellite communication. Instead of the signal going from:
Customer - satellite - ground station - internet
The signal can go from:
customer - satellite A - satellite B - ground station - internet.
This later setup might be what you were thinking about. You still want to limit the number of hops from satellite to satellite you have (latency again), but this should make the service more resilient to the loss of a single ground station.